Plate 10 is a study of the sea. A water-colour in washes of Indian ink of very similar composition is in existence, and was on exhibition at Ryder Street in 1904. The water-colour evidently suggested by this plate is the finer work, but it is a marvellous evidence of Blake’s power, that the tiny plate of the “Gates of Paradise” (1⅝ in. by 2 in. only in size) should be capable of representing so infinite a waste of stormy waters. One frantic arm reaches up to Heaven from out the foamy crest of the waves, a minute later to be submerged,—“In Time’s ocean falling, drowned.” That is its significance! No cries of “Help!” will be heard; Man must be overwhelmed by Time.

In the eleventh plate an old man in spectacles ruthlessly clips the wings of a bright boy who wrestles and struggles under the cruel hands. Thus does Age, full of worldly experience and material philosophy, clip the wings of the aspiring soul of Youth.

Walled in by the divisions and materialisms into which Man has fallen through the creation of the generative nature, we see human souls despairing, and full of lassitude, enclosed in depths of icy dungeons, in the twelfth plate. This plate was afterwards taken as the basis of the design Blake made of Count Ugolino and his sons in the tower at Pisa in his Dante series.

In Plate 13 comes the promise of life. A man stretched on his bed with his family watching beside him, suddenly has a vision of “The Immortal Man that cannot die.” After that all is different, and in Plate 14 “the traveller hasteth in the evening” of life to his journey’s end, serenely cheerful, even anxious to shake off mortality, that he may realize his glorious vision the sooner.

But the way to Immortality is through the Gate of the Grave. So in Plate 15 we have the picture of Death’s Door, to which our traveller has arrived at last. This early design embodying Blake’s favourite conception was destined to be enlarged and sublimed into one of the most magnificent inventions of Christian Art. This is the first hint of the perfect final work, and on that account, as well as for its own intrinsic significance here, of the greatest interest.

Death’s Door being opened, the Worm is seen at work in Plate 16. Who shall say how Blake has contrived to make the pale, hooded woman under the tree-roots so symbolic an image of the Worm? There is that about her at which the recoiling flesh shudders and sickens.

[Larger Image]

THE DELUGE

From W. B. Scott’s Etching of Blake’s
undated Indian Ink Drawing, by kind
permission of Messrs. Chatto and Windus