Blake would seem to have got fairly drunk with the excitement of wild words and musical phrases. There is little or no sequence of ideas, and the prophecy which follows the prelude comes storming forth, full of sonorous sound, but “without form and void.”

All that can be made out from the din of frenetic words is that Enitharmon calls upon her son Orc, “the horrent demon,” to arise and bring with him his brothers and sisters. But in the middle of her speech she falls into a primaeval doze of some eighteen hundred years. Patient and painstaking as the reader may be, an incident of this kind taxes his temper somewhat too severely, more especially as it seems a gratuitously irritating freak on Blake’s part, without any apparent sense or reason to justify it. Persevering, we find that while she is asleep all kinds of dire affliction come upon the race of man, and the wild pelter of words and ideas hither and thither continues to increase in fury. It is like the dancing of the Dervishes—faster and faster, furious and more furious, higher and higher, so quick at last that the eye cannot follow the movements,—and then comes the breaking out of the wild demoniac cries, and the convulsive excitement, which is finally satisfied with nothing but the letting of blood.

After all this incoherent clash of words, full of “flames of Orc, howlings and hissings, shrieks and groans, and voices of despair,” Enitharmon calmly awakes, “nor knew that she had slept, and eighteen hundred years had fled,” and proceeds with the roll call of her sons and daughters as if nothing had happened.

Rintrah, Palamabron, Elynittria Albion’s Angel, Ethinthus, Manatha-Varcyon, Leutha, Antamon, Sotha, Thiralatha and Urizen are the names of some of the spectral shadows which pass before the spectator.

It is a dream of Walpurgis Nacht, obscure and vague; its warrings being no more than the dissolving shadows of fighting men partially discerned on a dark wall.

But if Blake can no longer take us with him into the infinite on the wings of his poetry, he can with his pencil create on a sheet of paper a world of imagination, which in relation to this actual world is evanescent and to some impalpable. But Blake’s magic has caught and held it, as Peleus caught and held the silver-footed Thetis, though she changed from one form to another hoping to frighten him into letting her go, till tired of his persistence she revealed herself to him in her own wondrous form. Even so, Blake caught and held that which his imagination discriminated, undismayed by conditions which cause some men’s heads to reel, until he succeeded in committing it to outline and colour.

The first plate represents “The Ancient of Days setting a compass upon the face of the earth.” (See Proverbs, viii. 27.) The Museum copy has a passage from “Paradise Lost” written, or rather scrawled, in black ink underneath the picture. One wonders whose could have been the irreverent pen to deface in this way a page of the Master’s work. The design itself is one of the finest that ever came from Blake’s hand. The thing is tremendous! Involuntarily the mind seeks for its like only on the roof of the Sistine. Blake’s art owns no master, links itself to no predecessor, save Michael Angelo.

[Larger Image]

THE ANCIENT OF DAYS SETTING A COMPASS
UPON THE FACE OF THE EARTH.
(See Proverbs, viii. 27)