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The death of Robert was followed by a disagreement with Parker, and when the partnership was dissolved Blake gave up the house and business in Broad Street and moved to 28 Poland Street, where he remained for five years. It was from here, two years after the death of his brother, that in 1789 Blake issued the Songs of Innocence, his first example of illuminated printing. Like all of Blake’s books except the earlier Poetical Sketches, this work can best be appreciated in all its beauty when read in the original form in which it came from his own hand and press. Since this is not possible except for those who visit museum libraries, the method must be faithfully described. In the words of Mr. John Sampson:

The text and the surrounding design were written in reverse [a painfully laborious method], in a medium impervious to acid upon small copper plates about 5” by 3” which were then etched in a bath of aqua-fortis until the work stood in relief as in a stereotype. From these plates, which to economise copper were, in many cases, engraved upon both sides, impressions were printed in the ordinary manner, in tints made to harmonise with the colour scheme afterwards applied by the artist.

The text and the illustration are thus interwoven into a harmonious whole, and the colour can be varied so that no two copies are exactly alike. Little but the use of a press distinguishes the books made from illuminated manuscripts; the etching in reverse, together with the press, makes the new method even more laborious than the old. The consequence has been that Blake has had no successors in this art form which he invented, nor can his originals be copied without great difficulty and expense. Only those who have compared his originals with the printed pages in which his poems are ordinarily read are fully aware of the loss now suffered by his writings, which require to be read as much by the eye as by the mind on pages suffused with life and colour. Blake evidently adopted the method by preference and artistic choice, and because his hand could not write so much as a word without the impulse to trace designs upon the paper. He wished to indulge both his gifts at the same time. The printed sheets of the Poetical Sketches no doubt seemed the death of form to him, and though he would use texts and phrases to decorate his later designs, it is significant that he would hardly ever write without engraving. He was always indifferent to a strictly intellectual appeal, and his writings invite artistic rather than intellectual criticism.

Henry Fuseli, Prometheus, 1770–1771.

Pencil, quill, ink and ink wash, 15 × 22 cm.

Öffentliche Kunstsammlung, Kupferstichkabinett, Basel.

A necessary effect of Blake’s illuminated printing was to decrease his number of readers, in the manner of an artist who displays not books but pictures. Blake often painted in words, and should be judged rather as an artist than an author. Mr. Sampson does not think it probable that the whole impression of the Songs issued by Blake exceeded the twenty-two that he describes. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that Blake’s writings were little known. Absorbed in his invention, Blake eventually issued from Lambeth a prospectus defending his method and advertising the Songs of Innocence and the Songs of Experience at five shillings each. In 1793, he wrote: “If a method which combines the Painter and the Poet is a phenomenon worthy of public attention, provided it exceeds in elegance all former methods, the author is sure of his reward.” As Mr. Symons has said,

Had it not been for [Blake’s] lack of a technical knowledge of music, had he been able to write down his inventions in that art also, he would have left us the creation of something like a universal art. That universal art he did, during his lifetime, create; for he sang his songs to his own music; and thus, while he lived, he was the complete realisation of the poet in all his faculties, and the only complete realisation that has ever been known.

What can be said of the Songs of Innocence that has not been said by other poets? Until rather recently, only men of genius busied themselves with Blake; theirs is the prerogative of praising, and there is now presumably no reader of poetry who does not know the most exquisite section of his verse. The boy who had written the Poetical Sketches was already a precocious artist. The imagination of the man who wrote the Songs of Innocence had not outgrown the simplicity of the child. Blake might have been an inspired child writing for children, and these songs are nursery rhymes of pure poetry which children and their elders can equally love. Such sources as have been suggested for them, for example the Divine and Moral Songs for Children by Dr. Watts,[24] only emphasise the transforming power of Blake’s touch. The real excuse for looking for sources is that Blake had an extraordinary temptation to surpass any influence that came his way. Later in life, and much against the grain, he surpassed even Hayley in the art of complimentary letters. It would, then, be a curious paradox if songs that seem the very stream of poetry issuing from the mouth of the Muse herself should have had an accidental origin. It is just possible that the title may have been inspired by a casual memory, but with the verse of the Poetical Sketches before us it would be absurd and uncritical to derive them from anywhere but the author of the earliest poems. He had shown that he could rival the Elizabethan lyrists, and that he could transmute nature into the spirit of the earth; no matter what, imagination was always his principal and characteristic theme. In these songs Blake sings neither of love, nature, religion, nor sorrow, but of the imagination which to be communicable sees itself reflected, especially on the faces of children, in experiences such as these. The lamb, the shepherd, the infant, the cradle, the laughter of childish voices at play, are pretexts for a music that is as fresh, tender, awkward, soothing, and merry as those from whom it originates. For the first time in nursery poetry we feel that the grown-ups are listening, and that it is the child who is telling its mother about the lamb and God. The way in which the simplicities of feeling are conveyed and false sentiment avoided is miraculous. There is nothing quite to equal “Infant Joy” anywhere:

William Blake, Illustration from America, a Prophecy, plate 8, 1793.

Relief etching, with some wash, 23.2 × 16.6 cm.

The British Museum, London.

Henry Fuseli, The Oath of Rütli, 1779.

Pencil, ink and ink wash, 41.4 × 34.5 cm.

Kunsthaus, Zurich.

William Blake, Satan Arousing the Rebel Angels, 1808.

Watercolour, 51.8 × 31.2 cm.

Victoria & Albert Museum, London.

William Blake, Illustration from The First Book of Urizen, plate 1, frontispiece, 1794.

Colour relief etching, with added hand colouring, 14.7 × 10.2 cm.

The British Museum, London.

“The Lamb,” the “Laughing Song,” the almost monosyllabic lines to Spring, which seem as if they issued from a cradle, the lovely “Nurse’s Song,” in which the nurse becomes the eldest of her charges for a moment, and the voice of play seems naturally to sing, are absolutely childlike. There are others, however, in which the poet allows a glimpse of his hand to appear, as in “The Divine Image” and the haunting stanzas of “Night,” which Swinburne declared to be of the “loftiest loveliness.” There are poems which tell stories and poems which speak of religion, making simple lessons to explain a child’s feelings about sorrow and pain. So finely are these verses adjusted to their end that we hardly know whether the mother or her infant is reflecting. Indeed the second childhood of humanity is the blessing of those who have children of their own and are deeply connected to them.

Perhaps only a poet such as Blake, who had read no fine literature except through childlike eyes, could have written such things. There is in them an innocence of heart that is not to be found in Shakespeare. A few have the quality of children’s hymns, in which God appears as a loving Father, and mercy, pity, peace, and love, the virtues of childhood at its rare best, become the lineaments of His “divine image.” The occasional moral, as at the end of The Chimney Sweeper, is transformed by the poetry into an exquisite platitude of the world, as it can be represented to children in the school-room. This completes the nursery atmosphere. Note, too, that the shepherd, the sheep, the cradle, and the rest are nursery symbols, thus enabling Blake to pass from the lamb to “Him who bore its name” without any change of tone. The emotions aroused by this poetry are instinctive and almost as characteristic of animals as of men. Indeed, it celebrates the life, motions, and feelings of all young things, with the apparent artlessness of a lamb’s bleat or the cry of a bird, or a baby’s shout of astonishment or pleasure. By returning to these elements, poetry seems to return to its own infancy, and the language is almost as free from meaning, apart from emotion, as a child’s prattle.

Both meaning and observation, even of social life, appear in Songs of Experience, the companion volume of 1794. These darker songs, along with the group often called Ideas of Good and Evil, or the Rossetti MS., are a convenient bridge between the simple lyric poetry with which Blake began and the complex prophecies that were to follow. The scene tends to shift from the nursery to the school-room, from the green to the church, from the open country to the city. We pass from feeling to observation, and the poems that touch on love reveal its pitfalls. Jealousy and prohibitions, whether personal or ecclesiastical, are illustrated in their lines. Mr. Ellis has reconstructed a situation that would explain the references to those who are curious of Blake’s erotic life. The famous “Tiger” is of course here, and with Mr. Sampson’s aid we can trace every variant in its gradual composition. The number of revisions reminds us of the care that Blake would spend upon his form, and which he claimed to have spent later on his prophecies, where the ending of his lines can, in fact, be shown to depend upon the decoration surrounding them. In his own work, poetry was to yield to decoration, and there can be no doubt that design was the principal preoccupation of his mind. The first ecstasy of conscious life is complicated with a growing knowledge of good and evil, and the music of the verse will bear the burden of this trouble without caring to assign a cause. Such lines as: “Ah, sun-flower! weary of time, / Who countest the steps of the sun” are the music of heaviness of heart, as the lines to the infant had been the music of gladness. When he observes his fellow-men fallen into the bonds of cold reason and dull experience, he wonders “How can the bird that is born for joy / Sit in a cage and sing?” And he finds the explanation not in their circumstances but in themselves: “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.”

William Blake, Illustration from The First Book of Urizen, plate 6, 1794.

Colour relief etching, with added hand colouring, 14.8 × 10.4 cm.

The British Museum, London.

All forms of external control were to Blake the enemy of imagination, and he was right in so far as the dictates of wisdom have little use until justified by personal experience. All the rest is morality, which, so long as it remains repressive and external, is always accompanied by secret satisfactions and deceit. In the age of experience, as Swinburne finely puts it, “inspiration shall do the work of innocence,” and the “Introduction” to the Songs of Experience tells us that it is by listening to the Voice of the Bard that innocence can be renewed. It is, in fact, the inspiration to be derived from Blake, and not the particular instructions in which he sometimes phrased the call, that we should take from him. The loved disciple is not he who slavishly mimics any master, but one who by embracing his master’s example is inspired to make the most of his own gifts and to follow the way of his own understanding.

The best of the second group of songs present us with rudiments of thoughts dissolved in music, and it is the strange magic of this music, by leading us to think for ourselves, that we should carry away from them. Their intellectual fascination consists in suggesting rather than in defining their meaning. They make the intellect a thing of beauty by lending it an air of darkness, and the readers, like bats awakened by falling shadows, find in the darkness the opportunity for the most crooked of their flights. Blake loved to put his feelings into intellectual forms, but he achieved greatness when he let his imagination run free with lines like, “When the stars threw down their spears / And water’d Heaven with their tears”, “The lost traveller’s dream under the hill”, “Nor is it possible to thought / A greater than itself to know”, or the splendid:

William Blake, Illustration from The First Book of Urizen, plate 5, 1794.

Colour relief etching, with added hand colouring, 14.1 × 11.8 cm.

The British Museum, London.

William Blake, Illustration from The First Book of Urizen, Preludium, plate 2, 1794.

Colour relief etching, with added hand colouring, 16.9 × 10.4 cm.

The British Museum, London.

All Blake’s emotions, and many of his images, were “intellectual things” to him, but for the reader who would do the poet justice, it is the poetry and not the cloudy forms in which it is often presented that is the truth of Blake’s writing. Here is the vital energy that was the foundation of Blake’s creed, and for this essence to be separated and praised in poetry it was indispensable that it should not be limited to the very bonds and definitions that are more coherent than itself. Blake’s way of attempting to defend intellectually a vitality that is its own defence has misled his less lyrical readers, who forget his relation to his age and the fact that he was protesting against an over-intellectual tradition. Law was his particular enemy, and to apply anything like logic to his lyrics, or to the lyrical prose that was soon to overflow from them, is to confuse his tactics with his genius. Blake was to stand or fall by his own inspiration, and there are very blank lines here and there. The reader should not shut his eyes to them, though quotation would be ungracious, for they will lead him to study the almost verbal revisions of “Tiger,” the only example we have of Blake’s tireless revision of verse. That this was abundantly rewarded, and that Blake remained to the end impatient even of self-criticism, shows how much his mind and work suffered from being continuously in revolt. His storehouse of ideas was the cosmogony of Swedenborg and the sculptured figures of the Abbey from which he had shaped his ideas on the fathers and heroes of human history. We respect this for the courage in regard to worldly things that accompanied it, which makes the home of Blake a sanctuary for those whose gifts are unwanted by the world. The following lines might have been written on any day of his long life, and since cheerfulness is the best evidence of courage, the courage of Blake is unusually moving in them:

Here again Blake shows himself to be an artist in thought, delighting to tack an intellectual inference to a state of mind, or rather of heart, that does not need it. The other-worldliness of his mind is not only the privilege of a poet and a mystic but the legacy of a boyhood spent among the unearthly and sepulchral corners of an ancient Gothic church. Just as his writings are too much considered apart from the beautiful pages, which was a principal part of their beauty to himself, so his works and his intelligence are too much studied as if no peculiar influences went into his making, as if all impressionable boys were brought up alone in the companionship of Gothic tombs. It becomes necessary to apply some of his aphorisms to himself. A favourite quotation from his Gnomic Verses:

William Blake, Illustration from The First Book of Urizen, plate 10, 1794.

Colour relief etching, with added hand colouring, 15.1 × 10.9 cm.

The British Museum, London.

William Blake, Illustration from The First Book of Urizen, plate 16, 1794.

Colour relief etching, with added hand colouring, 14.9 × 10.8 cm.

The British Museum, London.

These lines should not only cause the reader to rejoice, but also remind us of the many things from which Blake abstained: abstentions, both forced or part proudly assumed, which choked even his lyrical intelligence again and again. In the second half of the eighteenth century, liberty seemed an end in itself, but its most ardent disciples were the first to learn, though they did not always admit, that it is another name for responsibility and that it depends upon as many voluntary checks as the external bonds that it overthrows. Blake was above his age, but the voice of his age can be heard distinctly in his challenging verses.

The note of compassion is no less remarkable in both of them. The songs on the sadder sights of London may have been occasioned in part by the talk that Blake heard at the Mathews’, but there is no verse more poignant, even in Blake, than this:

It seems to come from the heart of Christian charity; the gaiety of goodness, the spontaneity of joy, is expressed in a perfect motto:

All happy people live completely for the moment, and who does not remember with sacred delight the days of youth? Blake was later to give a divine blessing to this spontaneousness by declaring that “Jesus acted from impulse, not from rules.” The art of keeping young is here; if this is not cultivated so as to become a habit then we are preparing for ourselves no memories beyond regrets. Unfortunately there are bad impulses, but their indulgence brings satisfaction, not joy, and Blake, like the rest of us, saw the world as his own reflection, and believed others to have been born as good as he. In lyrics like this last he appeals to an active instinct as profound as our receptivity to beauty. These lovely lines to “Morning,” for instance, are simply painting a picture of the joy of being outdoors:

What a landscape of light and mist and cloud is hidden in the intellectual image of the sun freed from fears! Could there be a more characteristic example of Blake’s intellectual alchemy? I have contented myself with such perfect things as these, for a long study of the interpretations of the admittedly difficult lyrics has left me convinced that no intellectual interpretation is satisfactory and that all attempts are much duller than the poems themselves. You cannot, I believe, recast the thought of a poet which is more than usually lyrical, which, indeed, is more truly a lyrical gift than an intellectual one. Everything that Blake said he said with equal vividness, and the continually growing mass of commentary is threatening to overlay the lyric beauty which remains his final claim to a high rank in English culture.

William Blake, Illustration from The First Book of Urizen, plate 7, 1794.

Colour relief etching, with added hand colouring, 15.1 × 10 cm.

The British Museum, London.

William Blake, Illustration from The First Book of Urizen, plate 11, 1794.

Colour relief etching, with added hand colouring, 15.4 × 10.2 cm.

The British Museum, London.

It is with the “Everlasting Gospel,” written much later, probably about 1810, that Blake’s mystical philosophy is most nearly married to his verse, and in taking it after the early poems, we must guard ourselves against overlooking the influences to which he had committed himself completely in the interval. There seems to be an increasing tendency to consider his writings separately from his life, as if he had devoted himself to mystical philosophy – without a doubt, a few extremists will be found to assert that he did. The golden rule of criticism, that a man’s life must be remembered when we would interpret his work, that his work will illumine the obscure corners of his character, is essential to the understanding of Blake. Criticism devoted exclusively to his books, or even to his designs, is barren, for his complex gifts were further complicated by his peculiar circumstances, his strange upbringing, his natural recoil from his age, and the limited influences, which were all that his active imagination had to feed on. No one seems more original. No original mind was, in fact, so much at the mercy of its fate. To allow, even for a moment, his mental background and personal circumstances to slip out of our consciousness is to sacrifice the very foundation on which his peculiarities were nursed. The “Everlasting Gospel,” then, is the poem of a peculiar mind which had experienced nothing to check and everything to encourage its singularity. Blake’s only religious teachers were heresiarchs, and it became natural to him to identify good sense with idiosyncrasy, and to value his interpretation of familiar truths and figures in proportion as it was peculiar to himself. The life which Blake lived and recommended to men is that cultivation of personality that is instinctive in most artists, even in the articulate souls of poets. No one had thought before of incorporating this into a pseudo-theological system or of identifying it with the teaching of Christ. We must look in the “Everlasting Gospel” for what Blake found, not for the gospel which everyone but he had overlooked. This poem’s true subject is the mind of the author, and in it we can learn of his interpretation of the Bible. Like all Blake’s challenging utterances, the couplets that compose the “Everlasting Gospel” contain a series of epigrams which defy systematic analysis, since their object is to excite the reader by creating lively images in his mind. Their virtue is to imbue their subject with life and to recreate Christ in Blake’s own image. The emotion invoked by the verse, which is always vivid and often beautiful, wears an intellectual guise, but intellect was Blake’s word for the imagination, and he awakens emotions rather than satisfies understanding. His purpose was to define Christianity as he had come to understand it after his study of Swedenborg and Milton.