Looking through the pages of “Jerusalem,” vague memories of Norse sagas, of dim carved stalls in old Gothic cathedrals, of the cold cellar-like air that sighs through their aisles and chapels, come to one and cause a delightful and yet fearful shudder. But the designs savour only in a fleeting irrational way of these things, having a wholly unique character of their own.
The “Prophetic Books” reproduced by Messrs. Ellis and Yeats are not taken from the British Museum copies it may be as well to remark here, and the variation in the disposition of the light and shade is great in the various copies, though the outlines are always the same, being printed off the same plate, of course. The finest known copy of “Jerusalem” was sold at Messrs. Sotheby’s among other Blake treasures belonging to Lord Crewe for the sum of £83.
“Milton,” the last of the published “Books of Prophecy,” produced in 1804, is a small quarto of forty-five printed pages, coloured by hand in the old radiant manner. The preface, beautiful but sibylline, is an appeal to all men to worship and exalt Imagination, which in ancient times in the Christ-form, says Blake, “walked upon England’s mountains green.” “Would to God that all the Lord’s people were prophets”—that is “seers”—he quotes with profound earnestness at the end.
The “poem” itself opens more intelligibly than most of the later books with a mythic story concerning one Palamabron and the horses of the plough; of Satan, who persuaded him to be allowed to drive the horses for one day, and of the dire confusion, strife, and tragedy resulting from Palamabron’s consent.
The story bears a distant analogy to the Phaethon myth, for Palamabron represents, according to Messrs. Ellis and Yeats, the “imaginative impulse,” while Satan is the dark angel who erects the barriers of reason limited by moral laws and senses around humanity. It was impossible for one to do the work of the other.
The definite incidents with which “Milton” so hopefully opens are soon lost sight of, and the loosely-fitted framework, ill-adjusted and weak, contains a tangled woof of mysticism, from which the end of the thread is so difficult of extraction, that I for one must plead that the trouble of “winding a golden ball” seems hardly worth while, though it is no doubt possible and profitable to the student of mysticism. Milton’s part in the book is perhaps the hardest to decipher. But we find him undertaking a journey from heaven, through earth and hell. “Milton” seems specially dear to Blake because he made Satan the supreme study of his greatest poem. Blake, as we know, had very original thoughts concerning Satan, and regarded him as the world’s angel of light, a most respectable person indeed, for he is the enforcer of the moral law as evolved by divided generative humanity.
Milton like Blake recognized this highly respectable aspect of Satan, whereas the world, says our poet in “The Everlasting Gospel,” frequently mistakes Satan for Christ:
The vision of Christ that thou dost see,
Is my vision’s greatest enemy,
and it creates an abortive kind of hell-bat to take the rôle of Satan,—a very confused state of affairs, which leads to no little deception and opacity in men’s minds. The old themes of free-love for the sake of the spirit, and the denunciation of “Nature’s cruel holiness,” occupy much of the book, in which the mythic personages, Leutha, Rintrah, Ololon, and Enitharmon move up and down in dream-like procession. The ease with which these shadowy beings enter each other’s personalities, divide, and separate again into manifold emanations and spectres, suggest the multitudinous globes into which a drop of quicksilver may be divided, uniting again on contact into several large ones, and finally forming the unit from which they were first divided. Fascinating as is the experiment with mercury, it becomes confusing and even tiresome when the appearing and vanishing parties are persons with names and presumably characters.
One passage full of the old poetical loveliness of which Blake had been past master must be quoted. It shows that the beauty of nature at Felpham, with its distracting fascination, entered the soul of the poet, despite all theories and philosophizings.