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LOS HOWLING

Colour-printed plate from “Urizen.” 1794

A human figure, snake-encircled, falls headlong into raging flames, recalling a somewhat similar idea in “America.” Los is next seen, howling in fire, because of his painful separation from Urizen.

Poor solitary thinker! what shuddering emotions must have rent Blake as his relentless hand drew and coloured the visionary appearances of these monsters of imagination!

To the hot and lurid impression of Plate 6 succeeds one, in which a pallid skeleton, bowed head between knees, sits grisly on the ground. Urizen assumes bones. In much the same attitude, but now turned to the spectator, the next plate shows us an arresting figure. An old man, nude, with white hair, and patriarchal beard sweeping the ground, shows an upturned despairing blind face. Suggestions of indescribable suffering are incarnate in this design. I shall take the liberty of calling the type the “Blake old man.” We come across it again and again, and it instances his tendency to concentrate all varieties into a type, to make his artistic language as bare and simple and elemental as possible.

The story can be traced through all the plates. Urizen visiting his new world forms a series of six wonderful plates, of which one is very Gothic, representing as it does an amphibious-looking old man very like a gargoyle sinking slowly through a world of water. It is a true grotesque.

The most poetic of all the pictures is, I think, the one which represents the Birth of Enitharmon or Pity. Rising from a cloudy abyss with that bubble-like buoyancy which Blake knew so well how to breathe into his figures, a nude woman with body bowed in anguish floats upward. The face, with its strange dim, tortured eyes, speaks of the suffering which only the complex and self-conscious soul born of the mingled forces that produced the French Revolution and the New Age is capable of experiencing. The body is of wonderful beauty and purity. On the brink of the abyss from which she rises like the smoke of a hidden fire, Los kneels with head bowed in arms. His deep musings have brought forth this strange sorrow-laden beauty.

Another picture, Humanity chained by the wrists and ankles in slavery, its blind eyes raining tears, but with the light of Eternity like an aureole behind its head, is seen waiting, waiting, with an endless and most painful patience, for some final deliverance. Like Michael Angelo’s “Il Penseroso,” “it fascinates and is intolerable.” No more piteous or significant symbol of humanity has ever been conceived, in the full compass of its sorrow, its slavery, and its hope. Blake utters a Promethean cry in “Urizen.” He calls out on the creator for having imprisoned and tormented us. A wild ineffectual cry enough, and one not consistent with brighter and saner views, which he held as passionately, but then,—it is Blake! And Blake was never able “to build a house large enough for his ideas.” The Print Room does not contain a copy of the “Book of Ahania” which is a continuation of the theme of “Urizen,” but short and unillustrated.

The small Book of Designs should be looked at in conjunction with “Thel,” “Urizen,” the “Daughters of Albion” and the “Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” for the plates are repetitions from these books often far more rich in colour and delicate in execution than those in the complete works.