25 The Book of Thel, 1789. Title-page CHAPTER THREE A New Mode of Printing ical Sketches, Blake's first collection of poems (including me written in his boyhood), was published in 1783 through We patronage of a Mrs Mathew, a clergyman’s wife who had ken up’ Flaxman, and, on Flaxman’s introduction, for a time extended her patronage to Blake. Mrs Mathew and her busband half the cost of printing Blake’s poems, Flaxman ap- ly paying the rest. Gilchrist records that Mrs Mathew wed to read Homer to Flaxman; but when it became apparent at Blake came not to learn but to teach, his welcome in Mathew’s circle of admirers became less warm. Blake did {fer patrons gladly, and the comedy of Mrs Mathew was repeated fifteen years later (with Flaxman again the neaning intermediary) in the episode of his three years’ ment by the poet and country squire Hayley. Blake er an easy man soci argumentative, and violently opposed to current fashion, art and his philosophic and religious ideas alike. His only lc role in his world was that of the venerated teacher he c, in his old age, to the group of young painters known ‘Shoreham Ancients’. ists who work for quick success must rise on a tide of or possess social graces and tact, or private means. ‘who was ready to speak his mind to Moser on the demons’, was ‘a priest and ith no interest whatever money, Blake was clearly destined for worldly was a man of tireless industry; he carried out his ons as an engraver laboriously and conscientiously. ghts were elsewhereFrom whatever combination of causes and circumstances, it came about that he was without a publisher for his subsequent books of verse. True, The French Revolution, an unreadable verse narrative and commentary whose turgid style recalls Carlyle’s later prose work of the same name, was actually set up in type by Blake’s friend and employer Johnson the radical bookseller; but it was then considered too dangerous to publish, The political and moral subversiveness of his early works provides one possible explanation of how Blake came to be his own publisher; but were there deeper reasons? Did he wish to produce books of an entirely new kind? Books as beautiful as. somic medieval psalter, the words enhanced by decoration of design and colour? Geoffrey Keynes points out that the germinal idea of such books was already in Blake's mind when in about 1784 he wrote his dramatic farce, An Island in the Moon. ‘The first partis missing from the manuscript of a passage which begins abruptly: ““. chus Tluminating the Manuscript.” ‘Ay,” said she, “that would be excellent.” “Then,” said he, “I would have all the writing Engraved instead of Printed, and at every other leaf a high-finish’d print ~ all in three Volumes folio ~ & sell them a hundred pounds apiece. They would print off two thousand.” Far from being a child of necessity, the idea was to make a great deal of money. Keynes thinks that this idea may have been suggested to Blake by George Cumberland, who early in 1784 wrote to his brother Richard with ‘the enclosed specimen of my new mode of Printing ~ itis the amusement of an evening and is capable of printing 2000iff wanted them — you see here one page which is executed as easily as writing and the cost is trifling.” Cum- berland’s letter goes on to point out that you need print no more than are needed at one time, and that the copper plates can be used again ~ the only difficulty being that work of this kind can only be read with the aid of a looking-glass, as the Tetters are reversed. ‘However we have a remedy for this 42 nna Therefre so \ eR Dien tk God becomes as % Mee ane, that we “ may be as he (aie LOPE | 16 Feom There is no Nat Religion, c. 1788-04 1 also,’ he adds. Can this ‘we’ conceivably have included or may Blake have been the real originator of the idea? berland concludes: ‘the expense of this page is 1/6 without jing time, wh. was never yet worth much to authors, and Copper is worth 1/— again when cut up. In my next I will | you more and make you also an engraver of this sort, till 1 keep it to yourself. Iblake first used the method of ‘illuminated printing’ in about 188, Three small tractates entitled There is no Natural Religion to have been his first experiments in this art. They are ly executed in comparison with his later work, very small per was expensive), and simple in design. The title-page of S of Innocence bears the date 1789, and it is likely that, ied with his new method, Blake in a hopeful mood began on the title-page of his next book of poems. \ contemporary account (by J.T. Smith) tells of visionary When Blake's brother Robert had died in 1787, Blake had his spirit rising ‘through the matter-of-fact ceiling, “clap- is hands for joy”’. His brother's spisit continued to be sent to him. After Blake ‘had deeply perplexed himself as ¢ mode of accomplishing the publication of his illustrated . without their being subject to the expense of letter-press, 43 26his brother Robert stood before him in ima, an impervious liquid, and away with aqua fortis yy writing in Paper on to Process. sheet of paper, then reversing the fe copper-plate, under pressure: a very d 27. Songs of Innocence, 1789) Tidle-page cd something to supernatural inspiration. Accord Ichrist, ‘He ground and mixed his watercolours ce of statuary marble, after a method of his own, with jon carpenter's glue diluted, which he had found out, as \e early Italians had before him, to be a good binder. Joseph, w sacred carpenter, had appeared in vision and revealed ret to him.’ Ruthven Todd thinks that ‘carpenter’s glue’ would have been too coarse and that some more refined ibstance was used. “The colours he used were few and simple,” 4510, 20, 27-30 Gilchrist continues, ‘indigo, cobalt, gamboge, vermilion, Frankfort-black freely, ultramarine rarely, chrome not at all, ‘These he applied with a camel’s hair brush, not with a sable which he disliked.” Blake never printed off his two thousand copies, or made his fortune, but for the rest, Cumberland’s letter foretold some of the advantages of the method. He could print copies as he needed them: he continued to print Songs of Innocence, and later Songs of Innocence and Experience, from time to time to the end of his life, as he did his later books, whenever he found a purchaser. The inks he used were various: blue, green, bluish green, golden brown or black. Occasionally inks of two colours are combined in the same plate. But the unique character of each copy is created by the watercolour ‘illumination’. There are great variations: each copy has its own colour-range and is a unique creation. Early copies of Songs of Innocence often have the transparency and delicacy of a rainbow, while some later copies are richly sombre, glowing with gold paint, like those medicval psalters which were doubtless Blake's inspiration, Songs of Innocence comprises thirty-one plates in all, but their number and order varies in the twenty-three known copies of the book. ‘The Little Girl Lost’ and “The Little Girl Found’ were later transferred to Songs of Experience. As with others of his books ~ including Milton and Jerusalem — a final order was never absolutely determined, The writing, engraving, printing and colouring — even the mixing of the pigments— was all Blake's work; the binding was done by Mrs Blake, who also learned to take off impressions from the plates. Some of the copies which have survived are also thought to be coloured with a rather heavy hand by Mrs Blake. Songs of Innocence may have been planned as a book for children, but once he was involved in its making, Blake soon lost sight of any purpose but the creation of beauty. However, Phe Gates of Paradise, 2 book of emblems engraved in 1793, is entitled For Children. At the end of the cightcenth century 48 books for children were much in evidence, most of them, like Anna Letitia Barbauld’s Hymns in Prose for Children and Isaac ‘Watts’ Divine and Moral Songs for Children, having a moral and religious character. Mary Wollstonecraft translated from the German Salzmann’s Elements of Morality for the Use of Parents and Children, a book of simple incidents from real life, with a great number of illustrations, some of which were engraved by Blake, No doubt Mary's own Original Stories from Real Life (for which Blake drew ten and engraved five illustrations) was suggested by Salzmann’s book. Mary Wollstonecraft (who worked as French editor for Blake’s friend Johnson the radical bookseller) was under the influence of Rousseau, whose view of childhood as a law unto itself contrasted strongly with the pedagogic habit of mind in the Age of Reason. It must have been during his association with Mary that Blake formed the idea of making books for children, and about childhood, which should reflect the belief he shared with Rousseau that the unfolding of the imagination of every creature, in freedom, is the only true education. In Tiriel,a poem illustrated with drawings but not published, Blake had already denounced the current view of childhood — deriving in great measure from Locke, that early forerunner of behaviourism and brain-washing — as a passive state to be ‘formed’ by ‘instruction’. The poem describes with scathing indignation the consequences of ‘forming’ a child according to the laws of mechanistic rationalism, imposed all from outside and regardless of the mysterious formative laws of life itself. Tiriel, the blind parental tysant, is himself the product of such an education, and dies cursing those who, by compelling him into conformity, had denied him life. For Rousseau, every child was unique; and Blake’s aphorism ~ illustrated, in ‘The ‘Marriage of Heaven and Hell, by Nebuchadnezzar compelled to cat grass ~ ‘One Law for the Lion and Ox is Oppression’, might summarize Rousseau's and Mary Wollstonecrait’s views ‘on education as well as his own. For ‘Infancy’, Rousseau wrote, “has a manner of perceiving, thinking and feeling peculiar to a7‘ure instruction is ‘without regard to the pe us of each. For, besides the species, each child at its birth possesses a peculiar tempe: which deter Alll the vices the effect of the nd bring ic 10 perfe -d to malignity of disposition are onl bad form it has received whose natural propensity, wel productive of great virtues. So also thought Blake, who many years later said that he had never known a bad man who had not something very good Blake’s realization, ‘Every man’s genius is pec is one he shared with Rousseau and to his individual The echo) his first precisely for inate ideas, i¢; and again, in his old age, wrote in the margin of his copy of Berkeley's Siris: “the itual Body or Angel as little Children f the Heavenly Father’ of course, goes beyond Rousseau — beyond Plato, ed. For the essence of Blake’s Christianity was his vision 49of the ‘God within’, ‘Jesus the Imagination’, Childhood, for Blake, is the purest essence of the spirit of life; the thing itself. The instructions of education can add nothing to Being ‘Everything that lives is holy’, not by virtue of any added qualities, but in its essence “Thave no name, “Tam but two days old.’ What shalt I call thee? ‘Thappy am, Joy is my name.’ Blake in these seemingly naive lines is desctibing the nature of life as he conceived it. Joy — delight — is the essence of life, and all life seeks joy as its natural state. For him, the mechanistic view of the universe — the popular mentality of the Enlightment under the guise of Deism (‘natural religion’), the philosophy of Bacon, Newton and Locke — was the enemy of life; life which is immeasurable, not to be captured or contained within the quantitative ‘laws of nature’ ~a view which Bergson was later to develop in more strictly philosophic terms. “The hours of folly are measured by the clock; but the hours of wisdom no clock can measure.’ As against the Newtonian universe, overwhelming man’s sense of his own value by awe- inspiring vistas of space and time, Blake affirmed the holiness of life, omnipresent, no less in the tiny than in the vast: To see a World in a Grain of Sand, And heaven in a Wild Flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an kour All Blake's most characteristic and beautiful images are of the minute: the wild thyme and the meadowswect ~ ‘And none can tell how from so small a centre comes such sweets.’ ‘The litele winged Ay’, the worm, the ant, the grasshopper and spider; the little bird — lark or nightingale or robin redbreast; the ‘moment in each day that Satan cannot find’ in which the $0 's work is done; and, above all, the supreme symbol of the in parvule, the Divine Child. Life is neither great nor and the dignity of every living essence is not relative but lute, Childhood — innocence ~ was for him not a state of wexperience and ignorance, but the state of pure being. Songs of Innocence the energy and spontaneity of life runs igh every line of Blake's leaping, running, flying figures, 1gs, which is, in the world of Innocence, not a theory but ace of being. Simple as these poems may be in form, they a great wisdom and rest upon the firm ground of losophy. They embody essential knowledge more enduring the imposing structures of conceptual thought elaborated the philosophers of the Enlightenment and their French nterparts, Voltaire, Diderot and the Encyclopedists. This is less a miracle of imaginative insight for the fact that Blake was deeply and widely read, not only in the works of those whom he attacked, but also in the writings of Plato and vtinus, Berkeley and the Hermetica, Paracelsus and Fludd, and mystical theology of Bochme and Swedenborg. hhe apparent weightlessness of Blake’s figures, the case with which they fy without the use of those cumbrous wings oque, and still more, Victorian angels required, arises from realization that life, as Blake understood it, is not subject » the forces of nature. Life ~ consciousness — moves freely sre it wills. To leap in thought along the line of a hill, or on cloud, is to be there in imagination Already in Songs of Innocence Blake’s figures have attained icedom from the gravitational forces which constrain material jects: the characteristic, thereafter, of all his depictions of the rman form, a quality essentially Blakean, and shared by none his contemporaries. Again, he may have been influenced in is by Early Christian art, and those angels and heavenly wrsonages who are essentially, and not merely’ in name, beings occupying mental and not physical space. ater su324 In the five years between Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience Blake produced two illuminated books of out= standing beauty: The Book of Thel (1789) and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790-3). Thel is close in spirit to the paradis. world of Songs of Innocence. It consists of seven engraved plates, about six inches by four and a quarter; the larger size suggests that Blake was now more confident about his technique. The designs express, even more than those of Songs of Innocence, the easy grace, freedom and expressive sweetness characteristic of Blake's vision of ‘Innocence’. The ‘fair luminous mist’ of the colour-washes Blake now began to use over the whole page seems to illuminate words and designs alike with the light of Paradise. The theme of the poem is Neoplatonic, and draws much upon Thomas Taylor's recently published paraphrased translation of Plotinus’ On the Be iJ, and on the idea of the ‘descent’ of the soul into generation as described in this and other works of Taylor which appeared about this time. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, engraved about a year later, reflects in its fiery forms and colours the ideas of “Hell, of Energy’, no less characteristic of Blake's thought. Before the ‘Terror and the ensuing slaughter of so many of the carly liberal supporters of the French Revolution — members of the Gironde, friends of Mary Wollstonecraft and of Paine — Blake had worn the bonnet rouge in the streets of London. He was a Republican, and had hailed revolution first in America, then in France, as an expression of freedom, and of that spirit of life which was, for him, in whatever guise, holy. When in France the reality proved to be otherwise, Blake changed his mind about the value of political solutions. ‘I am really sorry to see my Countrymen trouble themselves about Politics,” he wrote in about 1809, having seen twenty years of ‘glorious revolution’ and its ensuing wars. ‘If Men were Wise, the Most arbitrary Princes could not hurt them; if they are not wise, the Freest Government is compell'd to be a Tyranny.’ Politics seemed to him ‘to be something Else besides Human Life’. He at al times hated war, believing that the arts could only flourish in peaceful $2 v Boat of 19789. Matron Clayhe greatest power of word and of design longer lyric, obeys the law fe is mild and loving; imped.No doubt this book is an expression of Blake’s mood of sympathy with the forces of revolution, seen as an expression of the irrepressible energy of life. But it is, at the same tin e fruit of his profound studies of the mystical theology of Boehme, the alchemical writings of Paracelsus, Fludd Agrippa, and his knowledge of the Western Esoteric tradition both orthodox and heterodox, Chri in its popular forms at all events, has never sufficiently understood what Jung has called the ambivalence of the archetypes. No psychic energy, or mood of the soul, is merely good or merely evil; the face turned depends upon circumstances. Thisis a truth well understood in Mahay: Buddhism, whose deities have their peaceful and angry aspects; and also in Hinduism, where Kali and Shiva have their mild and their terrible faces; or in the ancient Greek religion; or in the Jewish mystical tradition of the Cabbalistic Tree of the Sephiroth, Bochme, perhaps more profoundly than any other Christian mystic, had understood this truth, and Blake followed him. Far beyond merely ‘religious’ thought, the Marriage is a work of prophetic vision 34, The Marriage of Hea prison Prontispiece into the nature of vital causes; ‘inspired? in the sense in whi we use the word of the Hebrew prophets, as Blake himself ‘med. It is the “Poetic Genius’, Blake declared, that spoke through the prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel, of whom all the ‘gods’ of the Gentiles are tributaries; ‘it was this that our great poct, King David, desired so fervently & invokes so pathetic'ly, saying by this he conquers enemies & governs kingdoms’, And here Blake's ‘Jesus, the Imagination’ appears for the first time in opposition to Milton’s ‘Messiah, or Reas he Book of Job, Milton's Messiah is eall’d Satan’. Jesus, Blake conclud virtue, and acted from impulse, not from rules’, The the same as that of Songs of Innocence, but more bold in its extension 3736 The Gates of Paradise, 793. “Aged Ignorance rceptive Organs closed, their Objects close Because Blake wrote in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell that ‘Without Contraries is no progression’, it has often been assumed that the states of Innocence and Experience represent 4 pair of contraries like his Reason and Energy, ot the peace of Heaven and the ‘fires of genius’. This is not so, for ‘a negation is not a contrary’, he says. The state of Innocence was not, for Blake, one of ignorance, as compared with che wisdom of ‘experience’ so highly valued by Voltaire’s Candide or Dr Johnson’s Rasselas, types of the F Innocence is that of unclouded, unhindered life; and as Blake’s symbol of that state is the child, so ‘aged ignorance’, clipping the wings of youth, is his symbol of Experience. The title-page of Experience shows two weepers by a ‘gothic’ tomb, where the ‘dead’ — the spiritually dead ~ lie like effigies on their own tombs. Blake's ‘Hell, or Energy’ is one of the modes of life; ‘the roaring of lions, the howling of wolves, the raging of the sea, and the destructive sword, are portions of eternity, too great for the cye of man’. Experience is the antithesis of life. Life may be impeded and denied: by unrequited love as in “The Angel’ or ‘Ah! Sunflower’; by childhood oppressed, as in ‘Nurse's Song’ and “The Chimney Sweeper’; by moral oppression asin ‘The Garden of Love’ and ‘A Little Girl Lost’; or 38 sto byy social injustice, asin ‘London’. The ‘net of religion’ spread by ed ignorance’ runs through 1d the dark face of the nan city evoked in ‘London’ is but the sum of inhumanity of the perversion and restraint of life for which every vidual is in some measure responsible: In every cry of every Man, In every Infant's cry of fear, In every voice, in every ban, The mind-forg’d manacles I hear. is these ‘mind-forg’d manacles’ (sometimes depicted as shack- the feet of Urizen, the false god) which make thorns where 37) Songs of Experience, 789-94. Ticle-page 39there should be roses, furtive ‘whisperings’ laughter, ‘tombstones where flowers shi y entangled, as in a ind hypocrisy. Many of the poems and the absence of world surrounded by Henry James’ Tum of the Screw. The ‘Holy Thursday’ of Itis Chimney Sw avenly country society against Nor is it o1 3 rience is an indictment of cold charity he poverty of the iernal winter there. seoper’ of Inmocence can escape in dreams into -y; but Experience reminds us that t the children of the poor are none the less for nly the poor who are oppressed, but the 19. Sones of Experience, 1789-4. London40 & SMe" Expeence, Aone eam 30-98 The Tyger [dha shld Gout ih bese iy bear? | tases he ves deadly terres esp? Wher the stars down their spout Hef pest hee he ete schoolboy, forced to the joyless routine of learning; or ‘A Little Boy Lost’ oppressed by the Calvinist morality which immolates souls if no longer bodies. figures of Experience are entangled, burdened, listless or jewel in that sombre setting is “The Tyger’. In this great poem, as in ‘To Tirzah’ (added about 180 again find Blake secking to rend the vei ng to lig! the meaning and the mystery of evil. In ‘To Tirzah’ we fi as in Thel, the Neoplatonie view of ‘mortal birth’ as itself the greatest of evils, In ‘The Tyger’ there are traces of the Hermetica, f the mystical theology of Boehme, of the esoteric philosophy of alchemy. But the poem ends with the question unanswered: “Did he who made the Lamb, make thee? 62 CHAPTER FOUR ely Lambeth’ had left Poland Street in 1790, soon after the death of other, from which we may surmise that it was his affection + that had kept him in the neighbourhood of his family. is said to have spoken little of his parents later in life of his brother Robert. Blake and Catherine now moved to cules Buildings, Lambeth, on the south bank of the s. Gilchrist describes the house as a humble one-storeyed ling; but Frederick Tatham, a friend of Blake's later years, bers it as ‘a pretty, clean house of eight or ten rooms, jpical London terrace house of the eighteenth century, with sual strip of garden behind. In this garden grew a ‘wander vine’, unpruned, to form the arbour where, according to 1. of those legends which no official denial can kill, Mr and friend in the dress of Eden, 1 the addition only of helmets (a detail which comes through vainter George Richmond), occupied in the reading aloud ise Lost. heseven years at Lambeth were both productive and happy; ambeth Books include all Blake’s finest illuminated books fhe exception of Milton and Jerusalem. In Jerusalem, most which was written in South Molton Street, the poct recalls Lovely Lambeth’ «There the secret furniture of Jerusalem's chamber ith her & knowest not of Self in Thy su ilders in hope, tho’ Jerusalens wanders far au f Sand in Lambeth that Satan cannot, is Watch Fiends find it; "tis translucent & he