Blake wrote an enthusiastic account of his mystic experience to Hayley, of all men—Hayley who had so exasperated him, and made him sore, and, in his soreness, say biting things. Now he was thoroughly at peace with himself, and could regard Hayley with the kindness and tolerance that before had been impossible. For a while he continued to correspond with him while he was occupied with his Life of Romney. Blake engraved a portrait of the artist for the frontispiece which never appeared, and a fine engraving of Romney’s Shipwreck, which appeared along with the other engravings by Caroline Watson. The Life of Romney was a dreary performance. Like the Life of Cowper, it revealed its subject only when it gave his letters. For the rest, it abounds in a welter of elegant eighteenth-century words and phrases which assure us that “the poet” never saw even Romney and Cowper as they really were, and therefore it is not surprising that he saw in Blake merely a mild and harmless visionary who might do paying work if only he would listen to the wise counsel that he was always ready to give.
Peace be with Hayley! Among those that appear before Peter’s Gate, we cannot help thinking that he will be more readily admitted than the vast crowd of eighteenth-century squires who will knock at the gate, and stamp and fume if it is not opened to them on the instant.
CHAPTER IX
THE BIG PROPHETIC BOOKS
Blake’s “three years’ slumber,” as he called it, hypnotized, I presume, by Hayley’s lulling kindness, were amongst the most important in his life. If he slumbered, yet his dreams were unusually active; and, since feelings are more intense in dreams than when wide-awake, it is not surprising that Blake’s inner life was in a violent commotion. Any stirring of his feeling immediately set his supersensual faculty vigorously to work. Visible persons and things were tracked back to invisible principalities and powers, his cosmic consciousness quickened, the need to create possessed him, and he found relief only in giving rhythmic expression to his spiritual reading of mundane things.
This was the mental process that we saw at work in his French Revolution and America. Now it was moving among the persons and things connected with his own life; but it is not less important, for the same mighty agencies govern individuals and nations alike, and link them up together, so that they are interchangeable manifestations of eternal laws and states.
The practical outcome was Milton, Jerusalem, and a revision of The Four Zoas, begun some time about 1795. These claim our close attention, for they contain, for those who have patience to probe their forbidding exterior, the treasure of one who had run the road of excess, not of profligacy but rebellion, and now reached the palace of wisdom.
On April 25th, 1803, Blake wrote to Thomas Butts: “I have written this poem (Milton) from immediate dictation.” Later in the same year (July 6th), he writes: “I can praise it, since I dare not pretend to be any other than the secretary; the authors are in Eternity. I consider it 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.” In the Preface to Milton Blake asserts, in effect, that Shakespeare and Milton were shackled by the Daughters of Memory, who must become the Daughters of Inspiration before work of the highest creative order can be produced. Here he regards Memory as a hindrance, and comparing the Preface with the above quotations, we learn that he strove to put Memory aside while the authors in Eternity were dictating to him.