In the same “Memorable Fancy” from which I have already quoted, Blake continues, “Does a firm persuasion that a thing is so, make it so? He (Isaiah) replied, All poets believe that it does, and in ages of imagination this firm persuasion moved mountains: but many are not capable of a firm persuasion of anything.”
Blake, however, was. He had a fine contempt for argument and proof. Nothing mattered to him but the inner witness, the lively intuition of internal evidence. Convinced as he was of the cruelty of the fate that had chained eternal man into the bondage of the life of the senses and the division of the sexes; safe-guarding each self-hood from merging in the universal, by laws of restraint and prohibition, Blake took upon himself to proclaim a gospel of deliverance, to awaken man to the perception of the Infinite which lay without the clogged-up chinks of his senses.
He passionately advocated—Blake, the peaceful citizen, the faithful husband—the freedom of the senses, that all natural impulses should be enjoyed to the utmost limit and with the frankest delight. The body is but the accident of this life, and its free natural impulses may be trusted, for everything that tends to freedom belongs to eternal life, he thought.
Christ was the supreme Saviour, but to his eyes the Christ of orthodox religion was the God of this world, and therefore Christ needed to be held up again before men and exhibited as He really is, before He could be worshipped in truth.
And Jehovah was no other than Urizen, the cruel creator. In storm and excitement, in wrapt ecstasy and complete carelessness of consequence, Blake plunged into the sea of subjective mysticism, holding up from time to time out of the swaying waters lipped with raging foam, some treasure of thought, some broken image of speculative opinion for the world to gaze at. The pity is, that Blake who, in the “Songs of Innocence and Experience” and in his early poems, had so just, though instinctive and irrational, a sense of the relation of poetic form to matter, as to weave his lyrics into “a unity of effect, like that of a single strain of music,” should, in the “Prophetic Books” have suddenly lost, as it would seem, all perception of the claims of his subject-matter to any body of poetic form at all. The absence of almost all orderly sequence of thought, and this total disregard of the paramount artistic obligations of form, are the distinguishing characteristics of the mystic writings.
It must, however, be recorded in extenuation, that they were composed for the intrinsic benefit which Blake himself derived from their creation. Hints, symbols, rags of ideas set fluttering on the wind of his ever-inventive imagination, suggested so complete a sequence of thought and action to him, that he failed, in his passionate excitement and hot pursuit of them, to reflect that he had forgotten to state for our enlightenment that sequence which seemed to him so obvious. He was not concerned to make his ideas or visions intelligible to the world (the world must learn to decipher them for itself), for were they not fearfully intelligible to himself, absorbing all his life and consciousness?
Like a man intent and fixed before a vast and ever-moving pageant, he throws out a quick word of explanation, an occasional exclamation of enthusiasm, to the blindfolded world at his side. So present is the reality to his senses, that he feels only impatient with the dull creature which requires so much explanation and description. “I have told you, and you did not listen,” he seems to say. But listen as we may, to the point of an anguished intensity, the marvellous Vision, Representation, mystic Something, which is being enacted before Blake, can, with the help of his jerky and disjointed speech, be but vaguely and painfully guessed at by us. Whatever virtue may reside in these dream-like books for the mystic and the occultist, their poetry is not a winged and triumphant spirit any more, but a poor, wan, and halting creature, creeping painfully upon the earth on all fours. Swinburne writes on the subject with poetic eloquence: “To pluck out the heart of Blake’s mystery is a task which every man must be left to attempt for himself, for this prophet is certainly not ‘easier to be played on than a pipe.’... The land lying before us bright with fiery blossom and fruit, musical with blowing branches and falling waters, is not to be seen or travelled in, save by help of such light as lies upon dissolving dreams, and dividing clouds. By moonrise, to the sound of wind at sunset, one may tread upon the limit of this land, and gather as with muffled apprehension, some soft remote sense of the singing of its birds, and flowering of its fields.”
Let these gentle and appropriate words smooth the literary path of the “Prophetic Books” for all who intend to read them. It will be a difficult one for those who would study them seriously, even with the light shed by Mr. Swinburne’s and Messrs. Ellis and Yeats’ pioneer lanterns, for the road is rough and rock-bound, and shrouded, for the most part, in mist.
If we are forced to admit that in the prophecies Blake’s power in the art of poetry was declining, we shall have, on the other hand, the satisfaction of seeing his art as draughtsman and colourist waxing in grandeur, freedom and nobility. More than ever in Blake’s strangely sensitive pictorial temperament we find—to quote Pater’s subtle phrase—that “all things whatever, all poetry, all ideas, however abstract or obscure, float up as visible scene or image.” To many of his lovers, the “Prophetic Books” are among his most precious gifts to us, not for their intrinsic poetic value (which will be estimated in divers manners by divers persons), but as being the vehicle of his finest art. The first one we take up is the “Vision of the Daughters of Albion.” (The daughters of Albion, by the way, have little enough to do with the poem, their office being merely like that of a Greek chorus, to hear the woes of the heroine Oothoon and echo back her cries.) I am here referring to the one in the Print Room, though the Library possesses an almost equally beautiful copy. The book consists of eleven quarto pages, and appeared in 1793, just five years later than “Thel,” to whose mysterious and delicate beauty it has a shadowy relationship. The thread of poetic suggestion running through it like a streak of sunlight is not so easy of following as the broad golden ray of “Thel.” We are met at the very entrance by dim, unreal forms, with strange names—Oothoon, the shadowy female around whom the story centres, Theotormon, her jealous lover, and Bromion, a looming phantasmal personage, not definite enough to be terrible, though he is the evil genius of the piece. So now we are at last introduced to some of the personages of Blake’s curious mythology. The argument—a page of the most delicate and energetic design, representing a radiant young woman “plucking Leutha’s flower,” which, in the form of a man, leaps from the blossom to her lips—contains in its two initial verses the clue to all the ensuing legend. Oothoon is, according to Mr. Swinburne, the spirit of the great western world, “born for freedom and rebellion, but half a slave and half a harlot.” Leutha is the spirit of sensual impulse and indulgence.
Theotormon, to whom Oothoon wings her way across the seas, is the strong, enslaved, convention-bound spirit of Europe. On her way, Oothoon is ravished by Bromion, who appears to be merely brute strength personified, and the jealous and revengeful Theotormon binds them back to back in a cave by the sea, and sits down in utter wretchedness near by. All the rest of the piece is occupied by the mournful wailing of Oothoon, who desires to justify herself, and the sad answers of Theotormon, which make a disquieting music like the wind among pine-trees.