Hayley was his good “corporeal friend,” to whom he was grateful for “corporeal acts” of kindness, and as such he treated him.
In one of the letters alone there bursts forth a great full-throated shout of joy, as it were, because he has suddenly achieved a great advance in his art. As the passage gives valuable insight into his mind at the time, I shall take liberty to quote it:
“O glory! O delight! I have entirely reduced that spectrous Fiend to his station, whose annoyance has been the ruin of my labours for the last passed twenty years of my life. He is the enemy of conjugal love, and is the Jupiter of the Greeks, an iron-hearted tyrant, the ruiner of ancient Greece. I speak with perfect confidence and certainty of the fact which has passed upon me. Nebuchadnezzar had seven times passed over him, I have had twenty; thank God, I was not altogether a beast as he was; but I was a slave bound in a mill among beasts and devils; these beasts and these devils are now, together with myself, become children of light and liberty, and my feet and my wife’s feet are free from fetters....
“Suddenly on the day after visiting the Truchsessian Gallery of Pictures, I was again enlightened with the light I enjoyed in my youth, and which has for exactly twenty years been closed from me as by a door and by window shutters. Consequently I can, with confidence, promise you ocular demonstration of my altered state on the plates I am engraving after Romney, whose spiritual aid has not a little conduced to my restoration to the light of Art. O, the distress I have undergone, and my poor wife with me; incessantly labouring and incessantly spoiling what I had done well. Every one of my friends was astonished at my faults, and could not assign a reason; they knew my industry and abstinence from every pleasure for the sake of study, and yet—and yet—and yet there wanted proofs of industry in my works. I thank God with entire confidence that it shall be so no longer: he is become my servant who domineered over me, he is even as a brother who was my enemy. Dear Sir, excuse my enthusiasm, or rather madness, for I am really drunk with intellectual vision whenever I take a pencil or graver into my hand, even as I used to be in my youth, and as I have not been for twenty dark but very profitable years. I thank God that I courageously pursued my course through darkness.”
All of which tense and highly-figurative language means that Blake had suddenly received enlightenment on various technical methods from the silent witness of Raphael’s and Michael Angelo’s and other masters’ achievement. He could never learn by verbal advice, precept or criticism, but when shown great work, the artist in him dwelt on every line, absorbing and assimilating its principles. The spectrous fiend to whom he refers is, according to Messrs. Ellis and Yeats, his own “selfhood.” He held that every man contained in himself a devil and an angel, the devil being the natural man, the angel the God in man. Of this idea of his more hereafter.
Blake’s work, when done in the heat of his spirit, is always noble, characteristic, and largely, often wholly, right (I am speaking of the execution, not the ideas expressed), but when “incessant labour” was expended without the incessant reference to nature which an elaborate technique demands, it is not wonderful that “incessant spoiling” should have been the result.
Now, indeed, he seems to have seen how it was with himself, and to have gained a new mastery of material through studying the manner of other men’s work.
In 1804 Blake brought out his “Jerusalem; the Emanation of the Giant Albion,” a poem which he told Mr. Butts was descriptive of the “spiritual acts of his three years’ slumber on the banks of Ocean.”
“Milton” was also produced in the same year.
In 1805 Robert Hartley Cromek, whilom engraver, but now publisher and printseller, “discovered” Blake in his self-chosen retirement, and proposed giving him employment. The story of his treacherous dealings is an evil one.