He quarreled with many of his friends, with those whom he had cared for most, like Stothard and Flaxman; but the cause was always some moral indignation, which, just or unjust, was believed, and which, being believed, could not have been acted upon. With Blake belief and action were simultaneous. 'Thought is Act,' as he wrote on the margin of Bacon's essays.
I am inclined to attribute to this period the writing down of a mysterious manuscript in the possession of Mr. Buxton Forman, which has never been printed, but which, by his kind permission, I have been allowed to read. This manuscript is headed in large lettering: 'The Seven Days of the Created World,' above which is written, as if by an afterthought, in smaller lettering: 'Genesis.' It is written at the beginning of a blue-covered copy-book, of which the paper is water-marked 1797. It consists of some two hundred lines of blank verse, numbered by tens in the margin up to one hundred and fifty, then follow over fifty more lines without numberings, ending without a full stop or any apparent reason for coming to an end. The handwriting is unmistakably Blake's; on the first page or two it is large and careful; gradually it gets smaller and seems more hurried or fatigued, as if it had all been written at a single sitting. The earlier part goes on without a break, but in the later part there are corrections; single words are altered, sometimes as much as a line and a half is crossed out and rewritten, the lines are sometimes corrected in the course of writing. If it were not for these signs of correction I should find it difficult to believe that Blake had actually composed anything so tamely regular in metre or so destitute of imagination or symbol. It is an argument or statement, written in the formal eighteenth-century manner, with pious invocations, God being addressed as 'Sire,' and 'Wisdom Supreme' as his daughter, epithets are inverted that they may fit the better into a line, and geographical names heaped up in a scarcely Miltonic manner, while Ixion strangely neighbors the 'press'd African.' Nowhere is there any characteristic felicity, or any recognizable sign of Blake.
When I saw first the manuscript it occurred to me that it might have been a fragment of translation from Klopstock, done at Felpham under the immediate dictation of Hayley. 'Read Klopstock into English to Blake' we have seen Hayley noting down. But I can find no original for it in Klopstock. That Blake could have written it out of his own head at any date after 1797 is incredible, even as an experiment in that 'monotonous cadence like that used by Milton and Shakespeare and all writers of English blank verse, derived from the modern bondage of rhyming,' which he tells us in the preface to Jerusalem he considered 'to be a necessary and indispensable part of verse,' at the time 'when this verse was first dictated to me.' The only resemblance which we find to it in Blake's published work is in an occasional early fragment like that known as 'The Passions,' and where it is so different from this or any of the early attempts at blank verse is in the absolute regularity of the metre. All I can suggest is that Blake may have written it at a very early age, and preserved a rough draft, which Hayley may have induced him to make a clean copy of, and that in the process of copying he may have touched up the metre without altering the main substance. If this is so, I think he stopped so abruptly because he would not, even to oblige Hayley, go on any longer with so uncongenial a task.
Blake's three years at Felpham (September 1800 to September 1803) were described by him as 'my three years' slumber on the banks of ocean,' and there is no doubt that, in spite of the neighborhood and kindly antagonism of Hayley, that 'slumber' was, for Blake, in a sense an awakening. It was the only period of his life lived out of London, and with Felpham, as he said in a letter to Flaxman, 'begins a new life, because another covering of earth is shaken off.' The cottage at Felpham is only a little way in from a seashore which is one of the loveliest and most changing shores of the English coast. Whistler has painted it, and it is always as full of faint and wandering color as a Whistler. It was on this coast that Rossetti first learned to care for the sea. To Blake it must have been the realization of much that he had already divined in his imagination. There, as he wrote to Flaxman, 'heaven opens on all sides her golden gates; her windows are not obstructed by vapors; voices of celestial inhabitants are more distinctly heard and their forms more distinctly seen; and my cottage is also a shadow of their houses.' He drew the cottage on one of the pages of Milton, with a naked image of himself walking in the garden, and the image of an angel about to alight on a tree. The cottage is still, as he found it, 'a perfect model for cottages, and I think for palaces of magnificence, only enlarging, not altering its proportions, and adding ornaments and not principles'; and no man of imagination could live there, under that thatched roof and with that marvelous sea before him, and not find himself spiritually naked and within arm's reach of the angels.
The sea has the properties of sleep and of awakening, and there can be no doubt that the sea had both those influences on Blake, surrounding him for once with an atmosphere like that of his own dreams. 'O lovely Felpham,' he writes, after he had left it, 'to thee I am eternally indebted for my three years' rest from perturbation and the strength I now enjoy.' Felpham represents a vivid pause, in which he had leisure to return upon himself; and in one of his letters he says: 'One thing of real consequence I have accomplished by coming into the country, which is to me consolation enough, namely, I have recollected all my scattered thoughts on art, and resumed my primitive and original ways of execution in both painting and engraving, which in the confusion of London I had very much obliterated from my mind.' It is to this period, no doubt (a period mentally overcome in the quiet of Felpham, but awaiting, as we shall see, the electric spark of that visit to the Truchsessian Gallery in London), that Blake refers in the Descriptive Catalogue, when he speaks of the 'experiment pictures' which 'were the result of temptations and perturbations, laboring to destroy imaginative power, by means of that infernal machine, called Chiaro Oscuro, in the hands of Venetian and Flemish demons,' such as the 'outrageous demon,' Rubens, the 'soft and effeminate and cruel demon,' Correggio, and, above all, Titian. 'The spirit of Titian,' we are told, in what is really a confession of Blake's consciousness of the power of those painters whose influence he dreaded, 'was particularly active in raising doubts concerning the possibility of executing without a model; and, when once he had raised the doubt, it became easy for him to snatch away the vision time after time; for when the artist took his pencil, to execute his ideas, his power of imagination weakened so much, and darkened, that memory of nature and of pictures of the various schools possessed his mind, instead of appropriate execution, resulting from the inventions.' It was thus at Felpham that he returned to himself in art, and it was at Felpham also that he had what seems to have been the culminating outburst of 'prophetic' inspiration, writing from immediate dictation, he said, 'and even against my will.' Visions came readily to him out of the sea, and he saw them walk on the shore, 'majestic shadows, grey but luminous, and superior to the common height of men.'
It was at Felpham that Blake wrote the two last of the Prophetic Books which remain to us, Milton and Jerusalem. Both bear the date of 1804 on the title-page, and this, no doubt, indicates that the engraving was begun in that year. Yet it is not certain that the engraved text of Jerusalem, at any rate, was formally published till after 1809. Pages were certainly inserted between those two dates. On p. 38 Blake says:
'I heard in Lambeth's shades:
In Felpham I heard and saw the Visions of Albion:
I write in South Molton Street, what I both see and
hear,
In regions of Humanity, in London's opening streets.'
That the main part was written in Felpham is evident from more than one letter to Butts. In a letter dated April 25, 1803, Blake says: 'But none can know the spiritual acts of my three years' slumber on the banks of ocean, unless he has seen them in the spirit, or unless he should read my long poem descriptive of those acts; for I have in these years composed an immense number of verses on one grand theme, similar to Homer's Iliad or Milton's Paradise Lost; the persons and machinery entirely new to the inhabitants of earth (some of the persons excepted). I have written the poems from immediate dictation, twelve or sometimes twenty or thirty lines at a time, without premeditation, and even against my will. The time it has taken in writing was thus rendered non-existent, and an immense poem exists which seems to be the labour of a long life, all produced without labour or study. I mention this to show you what I think the grand reason of my being brought down here.' The poem is evidently Jerusalem, for the address 'To the Public' on the first page begins: 'After my three years' slumber on the banks of the Ocean, I again display my Giant forms to the Public.' In the next letter, dated July 6, Blake again refers to the poem: 'Thus I hope that all our three years' trouble ends in good-luck at last, and shall be forgot by my affections, and only remembered by my understanding, to be a memento in time to come, and to speak to future generations by a sublime allegory, which is now perfectly completed into a grand poem. I may praise it, since I dare not pretend to be any other than the secretary; the authors are in eternity. I consider it as the grandest poem that this world contains. Allegory addressed to the intellectual powers, while it is altogether hidden from the corporeal understanding, is my definition of the most sublime poetry. It is somewhat in the same manner defined by Plato. This poem shall, by divine assistance, be progressively printed and ornamented with prints, and given to the public.'
This I take to mean that before Blake's return to London in 1803 the letterpress of Jerusalem was, as he imagined, completely finished, but that the printing and illustration were not yet begun. The fact of this delay, and the fact that pages written after 1803 were inserted here and there, must not lead us to think, as many writers on Blake have thought, that there could be any allusion in Jerusalem to the attacks of the Examiner of 1808 and 1809, or that 'Hand,' one of the wicked sons of Albion, could possibly be, as Rossetti desperately conjectured, 'a hieroglyph for Leigh Hunt.' The sons of Albion are referred to on quite a third of the pages of Jerusalem, from the earliest to the latest, and must have been part of the whole texture of the poem from the beginning. In a passage of the 'Public Address,' contained in the Rossetti MS., Blake says: 'The manner in which my character has been blasted these thirty years, both as an artist and as a man, may be seen particularly in a Sunday paper called the Examiner, published in Beaufort's Buildings; the manner in which I have rooted out the nest of villains will be seen in a poem concerning my three years' Herculean labours at Felpham, which I shall soon publish.' Even if this is meant for Jerusalem, as it may well be, Blake is far from saying that he has referred in the poem to these particular attacks: 'the nest of villains' has undoubtedly a much broader meaning, and groups together all the attacks of thirty years, public or private, of which the Examiner is but quoted as a recent example.
The chief reason for supposing that Jerusalem may not have been published till after the exhibition of 1809, is to be found in a passage in the Descriptive Catalogue which seems to summarize the main subject of the poem, though it is quite possible that it may refer to some MS. now lost. The picture of the Ancient Britons, says Blake, represents three men who 'were originally one man who was fourfold. He was self-divided, and his real humanity slain on the stems of generation, and the form of the fourth was like the Son of God. How he became divided is a subject of great sublimity and pathos. The Artist has written it, under inspiration, and will, if God please, publish it. It is voluminous, and contains the ancient history of Britain, and the world of Satan and Adam.' 'All these things,' he has just said, 'are written in Eden.' And he says further: 'The British Antiquities are now in the Artist's hands; all his visionary contemplations relating to his own country and its ancient glory, when it was, as it again shall be, the source of learning and inspiration.' 'Adam was a Druid, and Noah.' In the description of his picture of the 'Last Judgment' Blake indicates 'Albion, our ancestor, patriarch of the Atlantic Continent, whose history preceded that of the Hebrews, and in whose sleep, or chaos, creation began. The good woman is Britannia, the wife of Albion. Jerusalem is their daughter.'