Part One

Mr. and Mrs. Blake

I Catherine Blake and the Spectre

Margaret Rudd

‘And my sweet Shadow of Delight stood trembling by my side.’

Middleton Murry was the first critic to point out that the troubled relationship of Albion and his bride, Jerusalem, in Blake’s prophetic books, may well have been based on the marital difficulties of William and Catherine Blake. This is a brilliant intuition, and, one would feel, a right one thus far. But Mr. Murry, instead of attempting to establish the point with sufficient evidence, rushes off into what seems to me unfounded conjecture about the exact nature of Blake’s conjugal troubles.

Murry’s position is this. Basing his interpretation on two poems from Songs of Experience and a poem from Blake’s notebook—and poems are always a shaky foundation on which to build theories about a poet’s life if not supplemented with more concrete data—Murry writes as follows: ‘There cannot be much doubt about the story these three poems tell, or conceal. Blake had loved someone not his wife, and had straightway told his wife of his love, and the result had been disaster.’¹ This is, of course, pure guesswork on Mr. Murry’s part.

¹ William Blake, Middleton Murry, London, 1933, pp. 45–6.

There is no evidence at all that Blake after his marriage fell in love with someone other than his wife, giving Catherine cause for jealousy, and Catherine knew all about his unfortunate experience with ‘Polly’ before he met his wife. Indeed, if we can credit the legend about the Blakes’ courtship, it was the telling of this unhappy experience which led directly to their marriage. And in spite of Blake’s theories about free love, or rather, his theories about loving in freedom, and despite the threatened, and altogether theoretical, concubine, to outside eyes Blake and his wife were an ideal couple. The existence of another woman and her identity would not easily have gone unobserved, especially with Blake’s own outspokenness. Had he believed in taking such a step, he would have been the first to tell us of its accomplishment, in the same spirit in which he walked the streets of London flaunting the red cap of freedom, although he was the only person with sense enough to see that Tom Paine left the country.

Secondly, assuming at the outset that the three poems Murry cites are dealing with Blake’s relation to his wife and not with an imaginary situation, it is still obvious from the wording of the key poem that there is something wrong with Murry’s guess:

Never seek to tell thy love

Love that never told can be;

For the gentle wind does move

Silently, invisibly.

I told my love, I told my love,

I told her all my heart,

Trembling, cold, in ghastly fears—

Ah, she doth depart.

As soon as she was gone from me

A traveller came by

Silently, invisibly—

O was no deny.¹

² Bronowski brackets together these poems, but in a different context.

Murry assumes that this is Blake speaking to his wife about his love for another woman, and that her withdrawal is out of jealousy. There is nothing at all in the poem to indicate this. In fact such an assumption makes the poem much more complicated than it really is, and much less coherent, assuming three or even four people and two ‘loves’ which Blake does not differentiate at all! The only possible paraphrase of this poem is to repeat what is quite clear: the poet is saying simply that it is a mistake for a lover to try to tell his beloved of the extent of his love for her, that he had done so, and his beloved had retreated in fear of his declared passion. If this is about Catherine, the most we can assume is that at some point Blake frightened his wife pretty thoroughly by focussing on her some of the almost diabolically impersonal energy we feel, for example, in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and that he called this ‘love’. The poem says nothing at all about her jealousy, or about any woman except the beloved herself, although it does seem to indicate that she turned to the ‘traveller’.

This severs immediately the arbitrary connection that Murry makes, based on this faulty interpretation, between the poem above and the one called ‘My Pretty Rose-Tree’, a poem that is about feminine jealousy, but not at all in the same context. This poem tells of another situation, one that might well have arisen after Catherine’s (or the abstract beloved’s) initial withdrawal from the poet, because she was then afraid that he might turn to someone more responsive. But it does not at all suggest that he did, as Mr. Murry contends, at any point turn to another woman. Quite the contrary—he could have turned to an exotic creature, someone who was in love with him and offered herself to him, but instead he turns away from her in loyalty to his true love, the pretty rose-tree, even though she is now jealous and puts out her thorns to hurt him.

A flower was offered to me,

Such a flower as May never bore;

But I said ‘I’ve a Pretty Rose-tree’

And I passed the sweet flower o’er.

Then I went to my Pretty Rose-tree,

To tend her by day and by night;

But my Rose turned away with jealousy,

And her thorns were my only delight.

The third poem on which Mr. Murry bases his erroneous hypothesis is ‘The Clod and the Pebble’, too universal a statement of love become its opposite to bear such a particular interpretation without further evidence.

It is interesting to note in passing that, from the wording of ‘Never seek to tell thy love’, it would appear that it was the woman and not the poet who actually turned towards someone else in her distress, thereby giving her lover cause for complaint. The figure of the ‘traveller’ in this poem, which Mr. Murry disregards entirely, is probably the same as that of the ‘angel’ in the ironic little poem written about the same time. The poet speaks of his love, but the ‘angel’ and ‘traveller’ simply take what they want, silently:

I asked a thief to steal me a peach:

He turned up his eyes.

I asked a lithe lady to lie her down:

Holy and meek she cries.

As soon as I went an angel came:

He winked at the thief

And smiled at the dame,

And without one word said (spoke)

Had a peach from the tree,

And still as a maid (And twixt earnest and joke)

Enjoy’d the lady.

The facts may be nothing more than that Catherine took refuge in the idea of a husband who loved with less articulate energy and violence, and that this ideal husband in her imagination seemed to Blake like a treacherous angel who enjoyed her without physical passion. Or, it could be that she, a simple woman of a naïvely religious and puritan cast, took her trouble to some sympathetic cleric who sided with her attitude that her lover’s excessive demands spelled lust rather than love. This would have seemed to Blake a betrayal, the basest treachery, spiritual fornication in fact.

It still remains for us to determine, if we can, the validity of Murry’s initial assumption that there were some difficulties that William and Catherine Blake had to overcome in their marriage and that the story of Jerusalem and Albion is, by and large, the story of how this was accomplished. Is there any evidence outside of the prophetic books themselves to suggest this, for Middleton Murry never bothers to give us any?

I think there is, although from the outset I would like to suggest that the trouble was of a psychological nature and took place only on the stage of Blake’s imagination rather than, as Middleton Murry would have us believe, in actual fact and with the protagonists of Blake, Catherine, and a concrete ‘other woman’. ‘I have indeed fought thro’ a Hell of terrors and horrors (which none could know but myself) in a divided existence,’ writes Blake on December 4, 1804; ‘now no longer divided nor at war with myself, I shall travel on in the strength of the Lord God, as Poor Pilgrim says.’

On October 23 of the same year Blake wrote a letter to Hayley. It is remarkable not only for its content which does indicate the reality of a long-endured domestic crisis (since, in fact, immediately after their marriage), but also for its language which is that of the prophetic books, making this letter almost the single exception in Blake’s correspondence which otherwise deals almost wholly with ordinary practical matters of the artistic life in a style that is always clear, spare, and objective even when he speaks of depression and of his visions. But this letter tells of an experience, actual and personal, which, by the time Blake wrote to Hayley, was already clothed in the language and symbolism of mythology. This is, of course, not the only experience of Blake’s which passed into the prophetic writings. Events such as his encounter with the abusive soldier, Scofield, and his stay in the cottage at Felpham, were woven into the tapestry of the prophetic books. Yet none of these comparatively minor happenings as they are related in Blake’s letters are so clearly in the process of being translated into myth as is the following major experience. The letter opens with the practical matters more usual to Blake’s correspondence—the receipt of cash, the progress of engravings, his wife’s rheumatism, the health of friends—but suddenly breaks into something quite different:

‘O Glory! and O Delight! I have entirely reduced that spectrous fiend to his station, whose annoyance has been the ruin of my labours for the last passed twenty years of my life. He is the enemy of conjugal love, and is the Jupiter of the Greeks, an iron-hearted tyrant,¹ the ruiner of ancient Greece. I speak with perfect confidence and certainty of the fact which has passed upon me. Nebuchadnezzar had seven times passed over him; I have had twenty. Thank God I was not altogether a beast as he was; but I was a slave bound in a mill among beasts and devils. These beasts and these devils are now, together with myself, become children of light and liberty, and my feet and my wife’s feet are free from fetters.’

³ Reason was the tyrant of the Greeks too.

It is abundantly clear from this that there were difficulties that William and Catherine had to overcome in their marriage, and that these difficulties were precisely the same as those of Albion and Jerusalem whose whole struggle was to rid themselves of the fetters of the rational Spectre in order to overcome their ‘divided existence’ and achieve togetherness and wholeness in Christ.

However, to outside eyes these fetters were not visible. I quote from a letter of Hayley’s which I will discuss at greater length shortly, which tells of Blake’s great happiness in his ‘Wife, for Heaven has bestowed on this extraordinary mortal perhaps the only female on Earth who could have suited Him exactly—[She] … is so truly the Half of her good man that they seem animated by one soul, and that a soul of indefatigable Industry and Benevolence.’ The ‘divided existence’ was indeed far from visible.

Thus far my evidence for the theory that Albion and Jerusalem grew out of the experiences of William and Catherine Blake is contained in the letters quoted above. Half-way between these letters and the prophetic books lies an obscure and apparently personal poem from Blake’s private notebook that seems to me to constitute further evidence. It was written some time between 1800 and 1803, the same time that Hayley was writing of the Blakes’ ideal marriage, and at least a year before, according to Blake himself, he had freed his marriage from fetters! Blake ought to be the one who knew best, but it seems to me at least conceivable that they were both right—that to all practical purposes it was an extremely good partnership, even though in Blake’s analytical soul a dire battle was going on to make perfect what was yet imperfect and appeared to him to threaten the whole structure. In the poem that I speak of, it is clear that Blake has not yet ‘reduced that spectrous fiend to his station’, and that his and his wife’s feet are still in ‘fetters’. On the one hand, this poem bears out the description of the letter—notice particularly Blake’s emphasis on the bestial nature of the Spectre—and on the other hand, it points to the situation in Blake’s first prophetic book, Vala, or, The Four Zoas, and is similar even down to the wording of one or two lines. This poem, linking the wholly personal letters to the situation of the prophetic books, seems to me to establish without a doubt the close connection between Mr. and Mrs. Blake and Albion and Jerusalem, but not at all in the way Middleton Murry suspects

& Throughout all Eternity

I forgive you, you forgive me.

As our dear Redeemer said:

‘This the Wine & this the Bread.’

Let us agree to give up Love,

And root up the infernal grove;

Then shall we return & see

The worlds of happy Eternity.

And, to end thy cruel mocks,

Annihilate thee on the rocks,

And another form create

To be subservient to my Fate.

Till I turn from Female Love,

And root up the Infernal Grove,

I shall never worthy be

To Step into Eternity.

‘Thro’ the Heaven & Earth & Hell

Thou shalt never never quell:

I will fly & thou pursue,

Night & Morn the flight renew.’

‘Never, Never, I return:

Still for Victory I burn.

Living, thee alone I’ll have

And when dead I’ll be thy Grave.

When wilt thou return & view

My loves, & them to life renew?

When wilt thou return & live?

When wilt thou pity as I forgive?

And seven more Loves in my bed

Crown with wine my mournful head,

Pitying & forgiving all

Thy transgressions, great & small.

Seven more loves weep night & day

Round the tombs where my loves lay,

And seven more loves attend each night

Around my couch with torches bright.

Seven of my sweet loves thy knife

Has bereaved of their life.

Their marble tombs I built with tears

And with cold & shuddering fears.

Dost thou not in Pride & scorn

Fill with tempests all my morn,

And with jealousies & fears

Fill my pleasant nights with tears?

He scents thy footsteps in the snow,

Wheresoever thou dost go

Thro’ the wintry hail & rain.

When wilt thou return again?

A Fathomless & boundless deep,

There we wander, there we weep;

On the hungry craving wind

My Spectre follows thee behind.

My Spectre around me night & day

Like a Wild beast guards my way.

My Emanation, far within,

Weeps incessantly for my Sin.

And the additional stanzas:

Poor pale pitiable form

That I follow in a Storm,

Iron tears & groans of lead

Bind around my aking head.

What Transgressions I commit

Are for thy Transgressions fit.

They thy Harlots, thou their slave,

And my Bed becomes their Grave.

O’er my Sins thou sit & moan:

Hast thou no sins of thy own?

O’er my Sins thou sit & weep,

And lull thy own Sins fast asleep.

This is a long poem and an incoherent one, and yet we cannot say it is really a bad poem, although Blake was right not to publish it. It is intermediate between a private document and a public poem; and it is moving because of this. It has passages that affect us in precisely the way great poetry affects us. It is as irrational in its mixture of the sublime and petty, the disappointing and the transcendent, as are the moods of ordinary life.

It points, as can readily be seen, not only to the letters I have quoted about the bestial Spectre who ruins love and about the ‘divided existence’, but also to The Four Zoas. Not only is the situation similar, but lines as ‘When wilt thou return’ and ‘There we wander’ are caught up into the prophetic books as ‘O when will you return, Vala the wanderer?’

The poem tells the story which I have tried to indicate is the story of the three lyrics Murry cites. That is, the poet is being accused by his beloved of the sin of loving too passionately. The Spectre of puritan guilt keeps them apart like a wild beast, yet pathetically dogs her footsteps in the snow as she wanders through the wintry night of love. The beloved is full of conflicting pride, scorn, tears, and unreasonable jealousy, and she murders his loves with these moods. For surely Blake uses ‘seven loves’, in opposition to Magdalene’s seven devils, to indicate his moments of love for her which she rejects each time they arise. They are not, as Mr. Murry might guess, a harem of other women!

The poet asks her to return and live again, pitying him as he forgives her. But still she flees crying that she will never return, still burning for the victory of making him give up his lustful way of loving. And he, suddenly, childishly almost, gives in, saying wearily and patiently—yes, let us then give up this difficult thing called human love and try to return to the mood of happy innocence which was our first glimpse of paradise before passion made its ugly presence felt. And without irony we reach the climax:

And Throughout all Eternity

I forgive you, you forgive me …

It is a healthy anger we glimpse when the poet suddenly leaves this exalted mood, and, turning to her, asks her if she has no sins of her own that she must always be bewailing his, and adds, quite reasonably, that his own merely complement hers. It is all the more wonderful to find as if inevitable, the cosmic pity and love returning in the last stanza in which the poet sees and forgives and loves, albeit wearily.

It is interesting to see that here, as so often in Blake, the mood of love is suggested by the weather. Just as in ‘Never seek to tell thy love’ the passage of love was indicated by the shift from a ‘gentle wind’ that moved ‘silently, invisibly’ to a cold wind that made the beloved tremble, so in this poem the ‘hungry craving wind’ sets the note of love’s despair. In the previous poems the beloved turned away from the poet towards the ‘traveller’ or the ‘angel’. In this poem she turns simply towards an ideal of love that is sinless and pure. There is an irony as well as submission in the poet’s agreement ‘to root up the infernal grove’ of love, for it postulates an asceticism that is anathema to Blake.

This points to what is the most significant paradox of Blake’s work, and there are many. Blake’s highest vision of human life cries out against the cruel and false chastity that is based on guilt and jealousy and fear, and sings praises to its opposite, incarnate love. But none the less it is apparent that when Blake slips from this height of vision, he himself is hopelessly caught in Urizen’s web of guilt. The more so because he has rebelled. What if Urizen is right after all? What if he is God? With the doubt and loss of faith in his own vision comes this suffocating web of rational guilt feelings, and the consequent paradox in his work. This is the work of the Spectre who is the puritan conscience born of the ‘Holy Reasoning Power’. It ruins, as he said in his letter, both his poetry and his marriage relationship. It accounts, too, for the feeling of ambiguity, almost dualism, we so often feel in Blake’s work, often when he is saying most loudly that there is no dualism. This feeling that his message was somehow guilty may have been one reason why Blake neglected his audience and wrote for himself alone in the prophetic books. But it arose partly, too, just because he had no audience and this bred doubts. Whichever way round it was, and it was probably both, a vicious circle, this feeling of doubt, ambivalence, whatever you wish to call it, towards his work and his marriage, is certainly what the prophetic books are about, and they were written in a titanic struggle to overcome it and return to love and faith and imaginative certainty.

The only possible way out of this dilemma is found in this poem, too, at least in terms of marriage. The only way to live at the point of highest vision and to achieve incarnate love without guilt or doubt or ambiguity, is freely to admit one’s guilt and forgive it over and over in oneself as well as in the marriage partner. Perfectionism, guilt, and self-righteousness are distortions of the rational spectre and only forgiveness can overcome their disastrous effects in a relationship. In all of life, but especially in the relationship of love, one must tide over the negative and flat moments which cannot help but come, by faith in the blazing meaningful moments which have been and will return in other forms.

And throughout all Eternity

I forgive you, you forgive me.

As our dear Redeemer said:

This the Wine and this the Bread.

The very probable connection between the experiences of William and Catherine Blake that are revealed in the letters I have quoted and are echoed in this poem, and the myth of Albion and Jerusalem in the prophetic books, will perhaps emerge more clearly if I end this section with a schematic summary of what happens to Albion and his bride in The Four Zoas, Milton, and Jerusalem.

The drama of the prophetic books takes place within Albion who is universal man. To a lesser extent it takes place within Jerusalem, his bride, and until the end, only inasmuch as she represents the feminine half of himself. In a sense there is only one character. The myth tells the story of Albion’s ‘Fall into Division and his Resurrection to Unity’, that is, of his struggle to be reunited with his true bride, Jerusalem, as with the feminine half of himself. Blake implicitly assumes that every man has to go through a microcosmic version of the Fall—a breaking up and a remaking—in order to achieve spiritual wholeness and the consequent acceptance of life and foursquare entry and participation in it. The relationship of Albion and Jerusalem—like that in The Song of Solomon—is a series of conversions and lapses and reconversions to incarnate love. When at last such love grips the whole man, then male and female incompleteness is overcome in a union that is not only the marriage of a man and a woman, but an inner marriage of the two halves of the soul in a mystical union with Christ.

Albion is separated from his bride when the four faculties within him are jarred out of harmony. This happens because Albion allows Christ to be replaced in the centre of his soul by one of his own faculties, his intellect or Urizen (Your Reason). In pride Urizen sets himself up as superior to the other faculties which are: the passions or Luvah (lover); imagination or Los (loss); and Tharmas, or sensation.

Thus Albion is no longer guided from the centre of a fourfold being by Christ, but is being dominated by a part of his own Selfhood, his overly analytical reason, which treats him like a tyrannical father-god, Nobadaddy. The Spectre is the puritan sense of guilt which rises up to attend this false god, and the Spectre is continually reminding Albion that his non-rational activities are sinful. Christ is no longer being reborn continually within Albion. Instead, on the level of the imagination, of archetypal parents, there is born the bound enfant terrible named Orc. Orc appears to be the ascetic, and is even mistaken for Christ, but he is really the serpent, Satan, anti-Christ. Thus, because Albion is out of harmony within himself and is separated from his emanation, we get not only a false moral law, but a false Father, Son, and Holy Ghost in the persons of Urizen, Orc, and the Spectre. The tragedy is that they are so very often mistaken for true Christian values.

This inner confusion of course keeps Albion from loving spontaneously. In fact he must go so far as to deny his love for his wife because sexual love is forbidden by the rational god, and so seems all the more alarming and guilty when it breaks out from time to time with all the force of repression.

Jerusalem withdraws, sensing the fact that their love now is become lust. But she has no way of knowing exactly what has happened to Albion, and so she reacts in the worst possible way. She feels guilty too, and hurt, and so she flees from him, and at the same time tries to draw from him the kind of love that seems lost. To counterbalance Albion’s rational bias she becomes exaggeratedly insistent on the validity of the passions which come to dominate her as Reason dominates Albion. The two sides of human nature which are vital and healthful when operating together, now become destructive when each is trying to be the whole truth. On the one hand we find Albion bowing down to his god, Urizen, while on the other hand Jerusalem sets up Vala, her own passions, as goddess. She becomes the priestess of a kind of nature religion, or so she seems to Albion, fascinated by her possessive and elusive mystery, and he goes to her as he would to Lilith. In her effort to counterbalance Albion’s subjugation to reason, she has fallen into the equally disastrous over-emphasis on the earth-passions, and to Albion she seems full of ‘beautiful Witchcrafts’ of which he is deathly afraid yet which draw him irresistibly. For he is now the high priest of reason and must feel that his non-rational desires are sinful. And yet he has such desires and he feels more and more guilty as she goes all out to provoke them and then flees from the intensity of what she has provoked, verifying his guilty suspicion that love is lust. And yet she beckons him and flees and he follows, feeling unutterable guilt, and as if he were being lured to destruction by the angry father-god he is betraying, his own Reason, which now seems external and vengeful.

Within Jerusalem, who is now dominated by her own passions, the emanations, or female counterparts of the four faculties within Albion, are also out of harmony. None of the faculties within Albion can find its rightful mate within Jerusalem. This accounts for the confusing parade of lamenting figures that part and come together and redivide endlessly throughout the prophetic books. For just as Albion and Jerusalem fight and come together again in brief moments of understanding, so within them their faculties struggle to find one another.

Such moments of peace and resolution are ‘windows into eternity’, and, Blake insists pathetically, ‘there is a moment in every day that Satan cannot find.’ But for the most part, despite such rare moments, within Jerusalem Ahania flees from Urizen within Albion and there is no understanding between them on the intellectual level. On the level of imagination Los and Enitharmon are highly discontented. Luvah and Vala stir up the passions, but with torments of jealousy. And on the basic level of instinct or touch, Tharmas and his emanation, Enion, keep losing each other.

And thus, because Albion has forsaken Christ in the pride of his own intellect, he loses touch with Jerusalem at every level. In neither Albion nor his bride is there left anything resembling fourfold Christ-centred love, but instead only passions that are determined to assert the claims of self.

And it is basically the man’s fault, Blake comes to see in the prophetic books, although he blames Jerusalem for her ‘shadowy female’ tactics. ‘Let the men do their duty’, Blake writes in a marginal comment on Lavater, ‘and the women will be such wonders.’ And every man’s duty is precisely to become a man with all of his faculties functioning in harmony because Christ is at their centre. Although this is very difficult, anything less is impotence. Albion has become less than a man by being persuaded that his own reason is omnipotent and the passions sinful. In trying to become more than man—or, at least, something other than human—he has become less. And it is the refusal of the human reason to be limited, and the allowing of it to impose god-like laws of ‘perfection’ that cause the false body-soul dualism which, in turn, causes discord, impotence, and destructive action or inaction.

Jerusalem, too, is not herself. More correctly, she is beside herself. Albion is only dominated by the Reason within him. Jerusalem becomes her own passions. She becomes Vala, another woman, the ‘other woman’, all that she has feared. From now on we glimpse Jerusalem herself at very brief intervals only. We are dealing instead with Vala, her Shadow, just as what we now see of Albion is his Spectre. Jerusalem’s centre has moved outside herself into Vala who is Luvah’s rightful mate.

From here on in the prophetic books, Albion, dominated by his Reason, remains in a state of death-like trance and nightmare impotence, bound, like Hamlet, to ceaselessly questioning inaction. Jerusalem, on the other hand, ruled by passion, becomes over-intense, larger than life and more ceaselessly active. She keeps changing back and forth from herself into Vala, thus bearing a close resemblance to the witchlike ‘belle dame sans merci’, the glimmering femme fatale who lures the spell-bound romantic lover towards his death.

Both Albion and Jerusalem are now in the position of all ‘romantic’ lovers who flee towards some impossible image but do not in fact want to embrace it for all their agony of desire. And this false image of the beloved, by remaining unattainable, destroys as surely as it would heal were it stripped of illusion and embraced in its more limited and miraculous actuality.

It is death-in-life that Albion pursues in pursuing Vala rather than loving his wife, Jerusalem. And he has by this time almost resigned himself to death as a punishment for desiring when his god Urizen has prohibited desire. Because he has allowed his reason to pronounce sexual love guilty, it looms large all out of proportion, and he can think of his wife only in terms of passion, of Vala. No wonder that she is no longer a human being to him, but Vala, Woman, the primitive female writ large. He has forced her into this position, but all of her hurt reactions only make it worse.

She, seeing his death-like trance, tries to snatch a kind of life-from-death, striving for total possession of the impotent Albion. But Albion treats her as a harlot. He both hates and desires her provocation. Partly to regain the manhood he suspects he has lost and partly to minimize the appearance of his commitment to the passions, he must pretend to himself that she is not his wife, not the sensitive living creature and gentle wise companion he has loved, but a looming impersonal Temptress. And, treated as one, in spirit she becomes undifferentiated Woman with all her wiles who might as well be anyone (Enion) or Ahania or Enitharmon for all Albion apparently cares.

This is why she is jealous even as she flees from him, beckoning, and why the impossible image each flees towards is that of the unattainable, the possession of which must spell death. Everyone is exceedingly unhappy to say the least, and Albion mourns:

When I first Married you, I gave you all my whole Soul.

I thought that you would love my loves & joy in my delights,

Seeking for pleasure in my pleasures, O Daughter of Babylon.

Then thou wast lovely, mild & gentle; now thou art terrible

In jealousy, and unlovely in my sight …

Therefore I shew my Jealousy & set before you Death.

I have tried to indicate something of the difficulties that beset Albion and Jerusalem in the prophetic books, and it seems obvious that the fetters that bound them bear more than a passing resemblance to the spectral fetters Blake describes as the ruination of his work and marriage.

The only possible way out of such a predicament is, as Blake says, to ‘reduce that Spectrous fiend to his station’, that is, put in right perspective the perfectionist rules that the human reason proclaims, and so be willing to forgive imperfection in oneself and in the beloved. This is the only climate in which love can exist and break the bond of Selfhood. Then and only then, when patience and forgiveness have placed Christ again in the centre of the soul, and Urizen is no longer a tyrant but mild Rintrah, an important conscience and guide, can Albion and his bride come together in an affirmation of human love that is also mystical union in Christ, because they now see what the Spectre has long denied, that the senses are the gateway to eternity. It is important to remember that Blake never advocates doing away with reason altogether, as many critics think. Rather, Reason must be put in its right place where it becomes commonsense and intelligence applied to particular situations rather than cruel and impossible general laws.

Such an attempt to summarize briefly the main events of Blake’s prophetic book, may well read like a case history or a gnostic nightmare. I have purposely left out any indications of the similarity of Blake’s myth to the myths that the psychologists explore. The material speaks loudly enough for itself. Again, I have avoided drawing any parallels between Blake’s work and the symbols and beliefs of those gnostic sects to which there is often such startling resemblance, from the early gnostics themselves down to Swedenborg whose writings Blake knew intimately and owed much to. Many studies of Blake’s sources have been made and continue to appear, and I leave to their authors the tracking down of influences and similarities. I am more fascinated with the new things Blake is trying to say, using whatever of the past that seemed useful to him, but always in his own unique context.

What seems to me the exciting and unparalleled achievement of the prophetic books is their moving and human portrayal, long before the days of depth psychology, of what goes on in the fluid dream-like world of breakdown, breakdown above all of the vision that had held life together. Not only this, but instead of getting entirely lost in the inner guilts and despairs of Albion alone, we are given a clear picture of the frightening effects of his illness on the person closest to him, her resulting insecurity and the consequent breakdown of their relationship.

And still more important, we are shown the way out of this nightmare world, not through being told to let go completely on the analyst’s couch, but in an example of human courage and valiantly maintained love that seems to triumph like the dawn after seemingly endless night. It is a way out that worked in Blake’s own experience and one, he claims, that is a universal remedy for a necessary and universal illness. For Blake dared to see such breakdown as an almost inevitable consequence of original sin which is intellectual curiosity and pride. Breakdown is simply a stage in every man’s journey from innocence through the necessary anguish caused by experience, to that ‘reorganized innocence’ which is liberty and freedom.

II William's Shadow

Margaret Rudd

DOI: 10.4324/9781315675138-2

Having tried to give some answer to the frequent wail—‘but I can’t make out what the prophetic books are about!’—I must now tackle the more serious complaint that they are not poetry. If they are not poetry, what are they? And what of the undoubted poetry that they contain? How do they stand in relation to Blake’s early lyrics? And what do they mean in terms of his personal life and development?

Rex Warner in his review of a recent edition of Blake’s Jerusalem gives voice almost apologetically to the conventional fair-minded and intelligent but baffled point of view. This viewpoint could be said to constitute almost a school of thought as regards Blake, and is, unfortunately, much to be preferred to the many cranks who have defended Blake, or more often something they read into Blake, with wild and embarrassing enthusiasm. The attitude taken by such critics as Mr. Warner most ably represents is, on the whole, mistrustful of Blake, head-shaking and impatient, and yet more than half open to the ‘vision’ Blake talks about if it were not so buried in what they respectfully and too loosely call ‘mysticism’. Mr. Warner writes:

‘It must be admitted, however, that no beauties of typography or of presentation can make the poem anything but exceedingly difficult. There are, of course, many passages where the verse must sweep the reader along in its own fine frenzy and lead him to behold with delight and admiration something of the terrific vision of the mystic poet. But there are other passages which are most bleak and forbidding. Not only do “Four Universes round the Mundane Egg remain Chaotic”, but much else besides. And I imagine that there are many people who, when reading the Prophetic Books and after sticking on such a line as “The Hermaphroditic Condensations are Divided by the Knife”, will turn back to the earlier poems and will wonder whether all these visionary pages are worth a single one of the Songs of Innocense or of Experience.

‘Such an impatient attitude, though natural, is not to be commended. The author of “Jerusalem” and “Milton” is the same man as the author of “Tyger, Tyger” and “O Rose, thou art sick!” Everything we have from his pen must be respected, and almost everything can be admired. And if, in his later works, he becomes difficult to follow because of the peculiarity of his own system of mythology, we are not entitled to dismiss this mythology as a fraud or to deplore it as an unfortunate accident. This is what Mr. T. S. Eliot seems to do when he writes of Blake: “What his genius required, and what it sadly lacked, was a framework of accepted and traditional ideas which would have prevented him from indulging in a philosophy of his own, and concentrated his attention upon the problems of the poet.” To me it seems that, while nearly everybody does “need” this “framework of accepted and traditional ideas”, Blake is one of the great exceptions to the rule. He was a self-educated mystic, and had this not been so, his peculiar and powerful vision would certainly have been different. One must be bold indeed to suggest that it would have been in any way “better”.’

Remembering that it was Eliot who, in the same essay from which Mr. Warner quotes, put his finger on the phrase ‘a peculiar honesty’ to describe Blake, and who also commented that Blake ‘was naked, and saw men naked’ and that his ‘poetry has the unpleasantness of great poetry’¹ we cannot altogether discard Eliot’s judgement on the prophetic books, for it is sure to be a considered and a sensitive one. But I join Mr. Warner in decrying Eliot’s too facile dismissal of Blake’s ‘ideas’, and his insistence that Blake would have been better off writing from within a tradition. Mr. Eliot of all people with his critical acumen should have taken into consideration that more than anything else Blake’s vision is a severe criticism of most frameworks ‘of accepted and traditional ideas’. Such traditions, to Blake’s mind, were simply veils that must be torn away to reveal true art and true Christianity. We can hardly blame him, then, for not using one of these traditions for a vehicle as Mr. Eliot finds himself able to do. And, going a little deeper, we find that after all Blake did belong to a tradition, albeit an untidy one, and this is the tradition of the prophets.

¹ T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays 1917–1932, New York, 1932: ‘William Blake’, pp. 275–280.

One does often wish, with Eliot, that Blake had concentrated more on the problems of the poet, or alternatively, that he had not tried to put his prophecies into verse. The latter would almost seem preferable, since Blake states firmly that the poetry is second to the vision, and he seemed to know that he would never have the patience to polish the vast farouche bulk of the prophetic books into poetry.

His setting down of his prophecies into what is for the most part uneven and often blatantly careless verse has caused endless confusion, and the general tendency is to dismiss most of what Blake is saying simply because it is such a colossal failure as poetry, and especially since we know from his early lyrics what Blake is capable of achieving qua poet. Nevertheless, the prophetic books contain rare but lovely passages of poetry, and it is significant that these passages coincide with the most clearly articulated and deeply felt ‘vision’. But more of this later.

It seems to me only fair to give what Blake is saying a hearing even if we consider that it fails as poetry. This is especially true since Blake told us at the outset that the poetry was secondary, almost incidental. The prophetic books have not yet been given this thorough and impartial hearing. At best critics have generalized or abstracted passages from their context and used them to illustrate Blake’s views on some particular point, despairing of the whole as indecipherable nonsense.

It is such a sympathetic hearing that I am trying to give Blake in this study of the prophetic writings. As it becomes more and more clear to me what Blake is saying, I become more and more convinced that he has made in these poems a truly remarkable exploration of the human psyche. The probing of juxtaposed areas which we now, rightly or wrongly, separate into the business of psychology, theology, aesthetics, and so on, goes far beyond anything that has been written before or since, Freud not excepted, with a profundity that frightens those who do not want to see beyond the familiar and manageable. It is easy to dismiss, as many have done, such strangeness as nonsense, particularly since Blake had none of the language signs that we have today in the jargon of psychology, and he had to invent signs as he went along.

Blake’s vision is a modern one, and we may be only now catching up with it. What I mean by modern is that it represents a view of life, internal and external, that man today can recognize as a valid articulation and ordering of his particular form of chaos and angst. Such a view of life was almost wholly out of context amidst the rational and sentimental literature of Blake’s own day, and only now seems to be reaching a period that is ready for it. The prophetic books should, of course, have been written in the form of a psychological novel or fable, but psychology as such had yet to be invented, and the novel was still formal and externalized.

I think from his repeated prose remarks about the verse form of the prophetic books that Blake himself was very uneasy about it and dissatisfied. He himself confessed that he had used ‘inferior’ verse for the ‘inferior’ parts. He who was capable of writing ‘The Sick Rose’ must have realized that the poetry in the prophetic books was sparse. But although uneasy, he was not able to care enough to do much about it, so great was the pressure of the visions ‘dictated’ to him by the ‘supernaturals’.

Jack Lindsay, in a little known book on Blake, accuses him of a kind of ‘regional laziness’, and I think he is right. He phrases well, too, without making a study of the prophetic books at any length, one aspect of their value:

‘We have been permitted, in the spectacle of Blake’s mind, by some freak of the gods, to see something not ordinarily permitted. We have a number of examples of the finished image; but here we have been admitted into the subterranean or is it sublunary factories of the soul. As if a sudden side-section had been made of the various layers of the creative energies, like a landslide that exposes the stratification of a hill, we behold the whole plain of cosmos laid open before our eyes. A brief vision of fumes of light, and we fall through congealing plains of anguish; then we see a vast hand descend and grab the twisting little images worming about in the split darkness. We see the conflict, the long process of tempering, of amalgamation, of revolt, of subjection and of slow digestion. After all this universe of furious preparation we expect to find at least a Shakespearean world of imagery appearing. But instead we discover at the top scarcely more that a bubbling up of flowers and a handful of birdsongs. Still, they are very beautiful, and we have been shown all the vaults and corridors and sunken spaces of the spirit. It would be ungrateful to cavil.’¹

² Jack Lindsay, William Blake, London, 1927, p. 37.

Mr. Lindsay in his little book which is full of purple patches, but also full of insight, gives what seems to me the best description that I have seen of what Blake means by contrasting the masculine Spectre and the feminine Emanation, those predominantly male or female aspects of the soul which go bad if either tries to separate itself off from the whole human being and become its sole truth:

‘Blake uses two contrasted symbols to express those two conditions which beset the soul (dividing it). He calls them Spectre and Emanation. The first is all that tends to harden, to parch, to lose vital contact with life and set up an intellectual or moral abstraction in place of the living image. The other is all that tends to loosen, to weaken the bonds of individuality, to dissolve it in the common and glucose mass of life.’²

³ Ibid., p. 31.

Blake, in the prophetic books, not only describes these two states of the divided soul, but often gives every evidence of being in both himself, which ruins his poetry. He is, at these times, at the mercy of both Urizen and Vala. On the one hand, his writing is over-analytical and abstract and out of contact with any living image, individual to the point of eccentricity. On the other hand, it is full of undifferentiated characters who dissolve boringly into the glucose mass of life with their identical orgies of groaning, wailing, and jealousy.

I believe, too, that in the slipshod craftsmanship of the prophetic books there is more than a hint of defiance towards an audience too stupid to recognize the perfect lyricism of the Songs. Certainly it is there in Blake’s deliberate obscurity. There is in the prophetic books, besides this carelessness and defiance, a kind of lonely talking to himself, a grave buffoonery undertaken in order to keep up his own flagging spirits. It would seem, at first glance, akin to the solemn game that Jonathan Swift is playing in Gulliver and in A Modest Proposal. But whereas in Blake the game is a naïve even though esoteric one that he uses in his hurt to disguise his deep love of humanity, in Swift, we cannot help feeling that the delightful fantasy is a sophisticated device employed to keep at bay an almost pathological horror of human nature. Blake has much of the ‘unpleasantness’ Eliot speaks of, but it is more often like that of a wilful child determined to mystify and repel rather than Swift’s delicate disguise of his repugnance. Like Swift, Blake invents strange nonsense words and names, and like Swift too, takes infinite pains to measure out the topography and proportions of his strange landscape and relate them to each other and to actual life with absorbed precision.

A digression in order to discuss Blake’s invention of names is perhaps relevant, since so much nonsense has been written on the possible derivations of such names. Granted that Blake may well have read much occult and oriental lore, still the main motivation behind his invention of names is a kind of playfulness, an almost naïve whimsy.¹ Thus while Orc probably does go back to the early English word meaning ‘demon’ Urizen means simply ‘Your Reason’, and the following type of solemn pedantry on the subject, which is fairly common unfortunately, becomes merely ludicrous, even when it contains some truth:

⁴ Foster Damon writes (p. 69): ‘Their names were created at random. Some were anagrams; some were found in strange books such as Agrippa’s Occult Philosophy; some came from Ossian; one from the Bhagvad-Geeta; but the majority were invented for the sake of the sound alone.’

‘Perhaps some of Blake’s extraordinary names have been partly inspired by some of Bryant’s disquisitions—we shall see later that India may also have had a part to play in the matter.

‘Ur (Aur, Our) is given as a root for light and fire, and Blake’s Urizen is the Prince of Light.

‘On, eon, refer to the Sun.

‘Is, az, ees, also refer to light, fire and the Sun.

‘Zan refers to the Sun.

‘Is it too much to imagine Blake mixing up all these sounds, Ur, is (ees), Zan (eon) and coming to Urizen?

‘Bryant also tells us of an Urchon, God of fire, or Orchan, Orchanes, who might have produced Blake’s Orc.’

(Denis Saurat, Blake and Modern Thought, p. 61.)

Saurat goes on with this kind of conjecture:

‘The names even in Sonnerat are suggestive of Blake’s names. We come across Chittere-Parouvan (p. 123), the giant Erenien, Addi pouran (124), Aotan (130), Ouricati-Tirounal, Ananda-Perpena-desouomi (132), Paor Nomi (138), Tirounomaley, Paeni-Caori (144), Ani (154), Narissen (208), Allemaron (226), Amnemanta (39), Rudden Ruddiren. In the Bagavadan, Emadarmen (100), Outama-baden Pravetiden, Rouguen (73), Ouroucenem (334).

‘These can surely compare with Blake’s best such as Urizen, Enitharmon, Allamanda, Entuthon-Benython, Tiriel, Oothoon, Rintrah, Palamabron, etc. There is to the ear a similarity in the use of vowels and consonants in entirely un-English fashion, and Blake’s verbal imagination seems to me to produce births more comparable to these versions of Hindoo names than to anything else’ (p. 113).

Mr. Saurat goes on to deal with symbolism equally thoroughly, shedding more darkness than light on Blake’s poems:

‘Thus in the Zohar, Man’s brain is surrounded by shells (vol. I, pp. 119, 130, 137, de Pauly) but the shells have cracks which let the divine light come in and on men’s senses.

‘We shall here therefore merely tabulate some of the expressions of that order used by Blake:

Shells: 303, 312, 492, 532, 535, 539, 600–1, 660.

Egg: 513, 532–3, 572, 696, 702, 720, 740.

Windows: 232, 290, 291 (cf. also Zohar, vol. III, p. 433: where immortality dirties the windows).

Tent that cuts Man off from Heaven: 252, 59 (Zohar, vol. IV, p. 317).

Light: 350, 354, 428, 447–8, 523, 616, 698, 941.

Cold: (cf. Fludd—quoted in Saurat: Milton et le matérialisme chrétien, p. 26), 601, 620.

The two Suns, one dead and one living (Swedenborg and Cabala): 937.

The two forces: centrifugal and centripetal: the Prolific and the Devourer: 191–198.

Limits (gnostic: Oros): 340, 381, 398, 401.

Vortexes: 359, 360, 490, 641: Wheels: 427, 634–5 (Zohar, vol. IV, pp. 261–77, and vols. V, VI, notes p. 182).

Polypus: 534, 536, 574, 583, 643, 680, 683.

(p. 157).

Having duly admired the research, one might, after reading this and other efforts like it, comment feebly that one would have thought there would be more references to Egg! The most natural reaction is, like Blake’s characters, to go off in howls and shrieks and groans.

The intricacy and crudeness of the prophetic books in the bulk, which many of Blake’s critics like Saurat vie to outdo, bring us back forcibly time and again to the delicate passionate lucidity of Blake’s early lyrics. And we are left with an enormous question mark. How? When? Why? And above all—What happened to Blake that he should turn from writing what may well be the most simply expressed profundity in English poetry to writing the most bafflingly incoherent poems in our literature?

Is there not, we ask, more vision, and of a kind that embraces the heights and depths of the human situation, in one such lyric as The Sick Rose’, than in all the vast and complex panorama of the prophetic books? They tell the same story. The prophetic books are simply the many levels of the mysterious rose torn off petal by petal and laid out in a row to dry. The prophetic books could be described as a long and vague and cerebral explanation of the precisely felt and thought-out and incredibly alive image of the Sick Rose, which, in fact, needs no analysis to add to its bounded richness.

Is not the single phrase, ‘the invisible worm that flies in the night’, more graphic to describe the dark guilt within the very nature of love that destroys its living beauty and innocence, than the generation and history of Orc who is the ‘invisible worm’ explained? Is not this phrase more expressive of love’s terror at the self-destruction it helplessly carries within it than all the shrieks and howls and groans of the prophetic books?

The answer is and must be an unqualified yes. No defence of the prophetic books can alter this fact. Such ability to express in one sure stroke the whole beauty and sickness of human life, and also the hope for recovery, is the work of genius, and remains the high point of Blake’s career as poet. I am not setting out in this study to deny this in any way. What I hope to do is simply to give a fair hearing to the less poetically successful work of the same genius, which he none the less felt was his finest production because of the message it contained. I hope, too, in some way to evaluate it in terms other than those of poetry alone and yet not simply push it off into a pigeon-hole labelled ‘mysticism’ and of interest only to initiates. We do not need to plead for such a hearing for ‘The Sick Rose’. It speaks for itself and by its mysterious clarity draws fascinated listeners.

The Book of Thel and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell are the last of Blake’s poems which have this quality to any degree. After these books we begin to need ‘keys’ and the poems are a chore to read unless regarded as a kind of riddle. The subject matter of these two poems set side by side explains a good deal of the conflict which exploded into the prophetic books, no longer able to focus itself in one image. On the one hand, in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, although the duality is present, we get a predominant impression of tremendous delight in naked beauty and energy of the intellect and senses combined. But in Thel we are given a moving picture of the virginal soul fleeing in horror away from the unbearable energy and fleshly beauty of sexual passion back to the father in the quiet garden, and the direct question—‘Why a little curtain of flesh on the bed of our desire?’ The difficulties of Blake’s marriage, plus this ever-present antithesis, plus his lack of success which made him doubt his own message of the beauty of passionate life, seems to me to suggest what made Blake attempt the analysis of the prophetic books. These unhappy poems were born of doubt.

And it is clear that doubt as well as ‘pity divides the soul’. In passing I would like to voice a long-standing curiosity as to whether Blake was thinking of his wife when he wrote that ‘pity divides the soul’. Pity is the clearest picture we have of Catherine because of the famous story of their courtship. ‘I pity you,’ she said, and Blake is supposed to have replied, ‘Then I love you.’ But we do not hear that Catherine answered, ‘I love you, too.’ Los’ downfall—and Los is imagination—is due to Enitharmon’s pity. That Blake mistrusts pity emerges clearly.

Did Blake doubt that his wife loved him when she fled from his passion? And that she fled is clear. Was her pity and flight, instead of the love that should have proved his vision of the goodness and innocence of passion, what made him doubt it? And when he was not a success and she pitied rather than blamed him for that, did he doubt even more that she really could love him? Did he then have to prove his vision to her and to his audience and most of all to himself through the analysis of the prophetic books? Such interesting questions are unanswerable.

Thel is not only Catherine fleeing from passion, but one side of Blake. And it is this woman who is both Catherine and Blake’s anima or emanation that we are watching in his poems from now on. She is the Sick Rose. Blake is preoccupied with her, one would almost say obsessed, and he is trying to understand and explain her behaviour, for she is out of his control whether she is Vala or Thel or Oothoon. She veers too far in one direction and then in another. By different names and in different moods we follow her through the prophetic books, and we get the impression of one person, the Blakean woman. She emerges much more clearly as a person than Albion even although at times she is only a part of him. I think this was because Blake was watching her closely as he could not watch Albion who was himself. It is in the Blakean woman, drawn or written about, that we get the flavour of a real person and she is much beloved though it is hard to tell how much she loves, for she is at the mercy of her own moods and fears. Only when she is Jerusalem can Blake see the possibility of her maturity and liberation, and Jerusalem’s first name was America, her last, Liberty.

And so we get the prophetic books which are a kind of prose-in-the-form-of-poetry working out and analysis of why vision fails—in love, in art, and in religion—and road directions as to how it should be found again, rather than vision itself in the sense Blake meant it and had had it. We find precepts for life and poetry rather than these things themselves, the actual living belief that leaps joyously out from the incomparable early lyrics. The prophetic books, a record of the breakdown of vision and gropings back towards it, are highly interesting and necessary documents. There are indications that, had Blake lived long enough, he would have emerged from the prophetic books capable of writing ‘Songs of Reorganiz’d Innocence’ as lovely and profound as his early lyrics. ‘To see the world in a grain of sand’ and the lyric known as ‘Jerusalem’ are very late poems and prove that Blake could still write with gnomic lucidity. They hint at the lyrics he might have written had not the battle with the prophecies taken so long and consumed all his poetic energies. For we must remember that as an artist Blake’s career is directly the reverse of his career as a poet. He did his finest designs at the end of his life, and some of the Job engravings and Dante drawings are the artistic equivalent of the Songs.

Blake in the prophetic books is protesting too much that he has vision. There is something too insistent in his loud cries that he is the prophet and knows he has truth. The louder he cries the more we suspect that he is doubting his vision. And this is precisely what it was that plunged him into the heart of the sick rose and lost him his god’s-eye-view. ‘If the Sun and Moon should Doubt, They’d immediately go out.’ Blake’s poetic genius went out because he doubted what was essential to his vision, the fundamental goodness of life, and of the passions.

What made Blake doubt? It is obvious that he himself is not clear what it was—he casts around blaming it first on Urizen, then on Vala, and concocted the whole maze of the prophetic books to explain his doubt and overcome it. He still is not clear.

But his poetry knows what it was. We are told with startling clarity what the answer is, and it is a much simpler, more human and pathetic one than Blake’s cosmic explanations. In The Four Zoas, which is the first and therefore the closest-to-the-cause statement of Blake’s troubled state of mind, there is only one passage of beauty and pathetic inevitability that strikes the reader as heartfelt poetry. It is the finest passage in the prophetic books, and it is not about Albion’s subjection to Urizen, his loss of Christ, or his troubled relation with his wife.

Rather, it is about the desolate market where none come to buy wisdom. The lament is sung by Enion who has been driven out into ‘the deathful infinite’:

What is the price of Experience? do men buy it for a song?

Or Wisdom for a dance in the street? No, it is bought with the price

Of all that a man hath, his house, his wife, his children.

Wisdom is sold in the desolate market where none come to buy.

The wording of the first line, ‘What is the price of Experience? do men buy it for a song?’ takes on more particular meaning when we think of Blake’s Songs of Experience that were not bought. And the last line, ‘Wisdom is sold in the desolate market where none come to buy’, is a cry from the heart and out of Blake’s own experience.

Can anything be plainer? The experience that lies behind these lines is the main experience that lies behind the prophetic books. The primary cause of Blake’s doubt and confusion was his complete neglect by what should have been his audience. This initial doubt of the value of his vision set into motion all of the other ways in which a man can doubt himself, especially in relation to his wife and to his God. These latent doubts are the underlying causes of the prophetic books, and they tell an interesting psychological story.

By the time Blake came to write the prophetic books, he had virtually no audience. The purest work of his genius, the Songs, were totally disregarded. The difficult time at Felpham was preceded by an even more difficult time in London. Blake had no commissions and little money. No one seemed to care about what he was trying to say, and Blake began to doubt the vision of life that had once so confidently pervaded his whole being. It was a time of desperate neglect. Art was judged solely by the standards that made Hayley the popular poet of the day. It is no exaggeration to say that there was not a soul to comfort Blake about his work except Catherine, his wife. And this may have seemed too like pity.

It was probably she who told him not to mind, that neglect was the price he had to pay for wisdom. If she did say something of the sort in an effort to comfort him, he might easily in his hurt have banished her to ‘the deathful infinite’ where false rational standards hold sway. Seeing ‘rational’ men like Hayley praised and successful while his own far greater talent went ignored, he could have replied to her comfort he must doubt his own vision which had gotten him nowhere until he could prove it, or else disprove the standards of reason, but in the terms of reason itself. For that Blake had a residue of guilt about not ‘getting anywhere’ is apparent in a letter to Cumberland: ‘I thought my pursuits of Art a kind of criminal dissipation and neglect of the main chance.’ And even if his wife had continued to beg him not to be so foolish as to doubt his own vision, that of imagination, he might, like Urizen casting Ahania away for such advice, tell her that vision itself must be subjected to reason and ‘proved’ once intellectual doubts have set in and faith departed.

This surprising theme of the wife holding out for true vision, begging her deluded husband not to neglect imagination for what he suspects may be a higher intellectual vision, occurs again and again in the prophetic books. And again and again the wife is cast off, derided as weak and feminine for this advice. And thus begins marital strife in the prophetic books. Ahania is banished by her husband, Urizen, for the feminine wisdom of pleading with him not to become a tyrant over the other faculties; Enitharmon in the guise of Enion is banished by Los; and Jerusalem herself is deserted by Albion, although regretfully, as he leaves her and goes off into the dazzling abstract world of pure intelligence that she is afraid of, to ‘converse with fathers and brothers’, and ‘talk man to man’.

Blake, being no fool, himself suspected that the manly fourfold vision he was always harping on—that clear intellectual gnosis which even Urizen must bow to and which Blake calls ‘Eternity’—was not really so much to be preferred to ‘three fold’ vision—which is the artistic vision of Beulah—as he would like to persuade us, and possibly himself. Again, it is his poetry that knows more clearly than Blake does. The suspicion of the reader, that Blake is for the most part simply talking through his hat about the superiority of fourfold vision, is verified by the greatly contrasting quality of the poetry about Beulah and about Eternity. Contrast, in the following passage, the differences in quality and interest. The poetry about Beulah, the realm of artistic vision and marital harmony, is warm and tender and many-levelled, and most certainly contains thought. The lines about Eternity which I have underscored, are thin, pompous and didactic, and often shrilly insistent on the poet’s ability to reach his abstract pinnacle. So great is the difference not only in quality but in quantity, that it is as if Blake could hardly bear to fill out a minimum number of lines concerning Eternity, and he fills them out carelessly with a number of stock generalities and abstract tags, and turns with relief to telling us about Beulah where his real interest lies. But to admit outright that he preferred Beulah, would be to admit that the weak feminine advice had been right! None the less, Blake comes pretty close to admitting this.

Into this pleasant Shadow all the weak & weary

Like Women & Children were taken away as on wings

Of dovelike softness, & shadowy habitations prepared for them.

But every Man return’d & went still going forward thro’

The Bosom of the Father in Eternity on Eternity,

Neither did any lack or fall into Error without

A Shadow to repose in all the Days of happy Eternity.

So spake the lovely Emanation, & there appear’d a pleasant

Mild Shadow above, beneath, & on all sides round.

But the Emanations trembled exceedingly, nor could they

Live, because the life of Man was too exceeding unbounded.

His joy became terrible to them; they trembled & wept,

Crying with one voice: ‘Give us a habitation & a place

In which we may be hidden under the shadow of wings:

For if we, who are but for a time & who pass away in winter,

Behold these wonders of Eternity we shall consume;

But you, O our Fathers & Brothers, remain in Eternity.

But grant us a Temporal Habitation, do you speak

To us; we will obey your words as you obey Jesus

The Eternal who is blessed for ever & ever. Amen.’

And it is thus Created. Lo, the Eternal Great Humanity,

To whom be Glory & Dominion Evermore, Amen,

Walks among all his awful Family seen in every face:

As the breath of the Almighty such are the words of man to man

In the great Wars of Eternity, in fury of Poetic Inspiration,

To build the Universe stupendous, Mental forms Creating.

There is a place where Contrarieties are equally True:

This place is called Beulah. It is a pleasant lovely Shadow

Where no dispute can come, Because of those who Sleep …

… Beulah’s moony shades & hills …

Beulah is evermore Created around Eternity, appearing

To the Inhabitants of Eden around them on all sides.

But Beulah to its Inhabitants appears within each district

As the beloved infant in his mother’s bosom round incircled

With arms of love & pity & sweet compassion. But to

The Sons of Eden the moony habitations of Beulah

Are from Great Eternity a mild & pleasant Rest.

The lines about Beulah speak for themselves. But does not Blake succumb to just that Miltonic error he is trying to correct? He is not here speaking through Milton to show us Milton’s error, but is, for the moment, in dead earnest when he relegates woman to a lower order than her husband. In fact, he implies that she is of baser material altogether, as lovely as a flower, but also as transient, since she is unable to bear those pure visions of the intellect which are alone eternal. It is not until the end of Jerusalem that Blake corrects himself and Albion on this score, and, incidentally, Milton.

What do they mean, we may well ask, those capitalized abstractions and ludicrous generalities in the lines about Eternity? They convey no image. And have they anything at all of the Minute Particularity that Blake insists must be in all fine art? We get no sense of dazzling vision, but simply of vague and empty ideas, as unsatisfying as Milton’s Heaven.

Blake’s complete giveaway is in the single word ‘unbounded’. It is the measure of his unconscious insincerity here, that in every other instance in his writing it is a term of severe disapproval. He condemns other artists for not possessing the ‘wirey bounding line’ in thought and execution. There can be no true vision, he insists, without the bounding line. This he says over and over again. Yet in the passage above he would have us believe that only the ‘unbounded’ fourfold vision is manly and can be considered the highest.

This is one aspect of the ambiguity in Blake’s thinking, and it always appears when he is trying to convince us of the supreme desirability of fourfold vision. That he himself is not altogether convinced of its superiority to threefold poetic vision is apparent, although he uses all the terms of conviction. Another indication of his uncertainty is that on the one hand he states that Christ is the only true God, and he equates art with Christianity. Since Beulah is the realm of love and art, one would think that it would also be the realm of Christ and the highest vision. But we find, on the other hand, Blake is persuading us that there is yet a higher realm in fourfold vision, and here we hear nothing of Christ, but only of union with God the Father. Is this Urizen? we wonder in astonishment, for we are faced with one of many contradictions.

All of Blake’s longing that Albion might be allowed to stay in the peaceful moony realms of poetic insight and marital harmony emerges in the poetry about Beulah. But Albion, like Blake, must believe that it is too easy, too feminine a solution to remain where he is happy, while intellect is doubting the very existence of such happiness. And so, instead of expressing his truest vision of what Foster Damon describes as ordinary human life intensified, Blake sets out instead to ‘prove’ it. It is as if he feels that such felicity must first be contained and examined by the intellect before it can be enjoyed. Such a lack of spontaneity is often the price paid when the analysing intellect is regarded as more authoritative than the more earthy faculties. This is certainly one of Urizen’s most elementary illusions.

Because the emanation trembles to see him go off into the realm of abstract certainties, Albion accuses her of not being interested in the things he is interested in, of not ‘loving his joys’. Yet the predominant tone of this passage is that of his great tenderness because she remains in the realm he must regretfully leave, and because she insists on its validity despite his doubts and scorn.

I believe that Blake’s search for fourfold vision was the downfall of his poetry. It was tempting to him not only because such an inquiry seemed to be proving poetic vision in terms of the rational analysis admired by his contemporaries, but because this theory rounds off his fourfold pattern very neatly. Indeed, to talk about fourfold vision makes it seem as if some sort of beatific vision has been achieved, unless we look closely at the sterility of the actual vision on the page in front of us, and notice its contradiction of Blake’s much more glowing earlier statements about Christ and art and love being one. The Eden or Eternity of fourfold vision is a place without Christ or imagination or love. It has only the thin and terrible whiteness of the Father in whose light the songs of innocence would surely wither away, just as they must thrive in the sunny warmth and moony radiance of Beulah, the poet’s state of mind, or rather, state of being. Beulah was the place or state that Blake loved, there is no doubt about that, and it is where his Songs were written, even though he now relegates Beulah to a lowly position, describing it as simply a place of rest from the more arduous labours of eternity.

The idea of postulating a higher realm than Beulah came with the need to prove his vision intellectually to those who by their neglect made him doubt its validity. ‘If the Sun & Moon should Doubt, They’d immediately go out.’ And for Blake they did go out when he came to doubt his vision of gold-green days and children playing, the white starry night and amber mornings when lost children were found again. Such heightened and clear reality can be perceived only in the soft sunlight and moonglow of Beulah which is a land of maternal love and compassion, and not a realm of purgation where the only reality is to talk ‘man to man’ about the ‘Universe stupendous’ and the ‘fury of Poetic Inspiration’ under the terrible eye of the Father.

If to the amateur psychologist this would seem to open up significant vistas back to Blake’s childhood, let it do so without undue pressure, for there are many such glimpses if we look for them, and they all help to round out the portrait of an extraordinary and sensitive being, rather than a neurotic. We are told by Gilchrist of the small boy crying ecstatically that he had seen angels singing in a perfectly ordinary tree, ‘and only through his mother’s intercession escaped a thrashing from his honest father, for telling a lie’ (p. 6). We know that this same father was sympathetic enough to finance Blake’s training as an engraver and to give him enough money to buy prints to copy, but none the less like many practical fathers he continually wanted reassurance that he was not wasting his money, and we can see the adolescent talking big and abstract ‘man to man’ about the fury of poetic inspiration. And yet, from Blake’s letter to Cumberland we know that he was somehow made to feel that Art was ‘a criminal neglect of the main chance’ and as guilty as an illicit love. But more of this when we come to Blake’s strange relation with his patron, Hayley. It is enough to suggest that such a rich passage as the one we have been discussing reveals not only that it was Blake’s neglect by his contemporaries that made him doubt his vision and write the prophetic books to prove it, but that this doubt opened up a long corridor of doubts going back to his childhood.

If Blake is a mystic, his true mystic vision like his best poetry is shaped in Beulah’s realm, not in the negation of fourfold Eternity. For the burden of his religious vision, like that of his best poetry, is ‘Thy own Humanity learn to adore.’ But this is not what we are told in the so-called higher vision of Eternity. Here we find something more like gnosticism in its desire for a destructive union with the Father in order to contain in the human mind things that only the Creator can know.

All this is, of course, supposed to be Albion’s story, not Blake’s. Yet, even if we did not have the evidence of letters to connect Blake’s situation to Albion’s, it is easy to see that while Blake was writing the prophetic books, he himself was half caught in Albion’s state of confusion and subjection to Urizen. He refutes Urizen, or says he does, but remains confused on the question of whether Beulah’s vision or that of Eternity is more to be desired, although his poetry tells us where his real interest lies. There is a faint possibility that Blake deliberately wrote thinly about Eternity and richly and movingly about Beulah in order to imitate Milton. But this would defeat his own fourfold scheme, and I do not think that his writing in the prophetic books is nearly controlled enough to support this possibility, especially since in every other instance where he gives an ironic parody of Milton or Swedenborg in order to point out their errors, he gives us plenty of warning that he is doing this. Finally, in Milton such a parody would be a confusion rather than a subtlety, for he points out quite didactically the errors that Milton made which he, Blake, is going to correct.

The painful contradictions in the prophetic books stem largely from the fact that although Blake tells us he is over-coming the tyrant, Urizen, he tries to do it with Urizen’s weapons rather than those of poetry and Christ. And just when we are told that Urizen is routed, we are apt to find that once more he is tyrannizing over Blake’s poetry. In Jerusalem Blake is back on the right track, and it is Los or imagination who begins to win out. Los is once more Blake’s friend and brings back Jerusalem to Albion and sometimes wears the guise of Christ.

The question of Blake’s lack of an audience and popular success brings us to the problem of his relationship with his patron, William Hayley. It is a relationship which puzzles critics, and in which, one cannot help feeling, there is more than meets the bewildered eye that scans Blake’s rude epigrams on the subject. I think that it is a puzzle which can be more or less cleared up if it is examined in the light of those inner difficulties of Blake’s that I have been trying to piece together. And I feel it is a situation that can and ought to be clarified in such a way that Hayley regains a little of the dignity that he has lost through Blake’s epigrams and through Blake’s champions among the critics. Poor Hayley is usually dismissed by the irate Blakeans as, at best, a well-meaning but painfully obtuse buffoon whose only assets were a kind heart and considerable wealth. At the worst, he is made out to be the ruination of Blake’s genius, the Satan of Milton, as Blake would like to have us believe for want of a better scapegoat. Neither of these comfortable assumptions fits the facts closely enough.

At the time that Hayley suggested that Blake and his wife move from London to a cottage at Felpham, near his own mansion, Hayley was all that Blake was not. He was, in fact, the successful eighteenth-century man of letters, by far the most popular poet of his day, and a landed gentleman of culture and charm to boot. Hayley was fifty-five to Blake’s forty-three.

Blake, on the other hand, had been going through a period of total neglect. His vision and his expression of it seemed wholly unwanted. In London he and his wife had been near starvation with little work on hand and no commissions forthcoming. The invitation to Felpham seemed to come as a godsend. And there is no evidence that in suggesting this removal Hayley was motivated by anything but concern for Blake, whose genius he recognized, and by the kindness that seems to have characterized him in all of his dealings with the less fortunate artists he befriended. Hayley really cared for the cause of the arts, and, not content with personal success, set out to help other artists. It is almost harder to strike the right note of tact in being a benefactor than it is to be the grateful recipient of largesse. And Hayley was no fool. He knew an artist when he met one, and Cowper and Romney were among his debtors as well as Blake, so he could not have been so obtuse or as much the enemy of true art as he has been made out to be.

And it is clear that at first Blake accepted Hayley’s kindness in the same spirit in which it was offered. If anything, his first hopes and his initial ecstasy upon finding himself installed at Felpham were too blown up to last. It is significant that Blake hoped for a great revival of inspiration at Felpham.

What happened then was unforeseen, but wholly natural. In close proximity to the successful and charming man of letters who presided over the town from his walled estate, The Turret, Blake felt more than ever inferior. What was more, astute Hayley could see no hope of success for the first of the prophetic books, Vala, or, the Four Zoas. Quite reasonably, since Blake had no money and could not always live off his bounty, Hayley tried to turn Blake’s interest towards commissions that would be profitable, but which soon seemed to Blake mere hackwork designed to keep him from his own work. Blake had that stubborn kind of artistic pride that would rather starve than prostitute his art, even though his art sometimes seemed to him like a forbidden passion.

How like the repetition of an old parental pattern Hayley’s advice must have seemed to Blake. For although Blake’s father helped him to study art, he had wanted to whip him for saying he had seen a vision, and he did make Blake feel that his art was a guilty because unrewarding occupation: ‘I myself remember’, Blake writes to Cumberland, ‘when I thought my pursuits of Art a kind of criminal dissipation and neglect of the main chance, which I hid my face for not being able to abandon as a Passion which is forbidden by Law and Religion.’ It was Blake’s mother with her ‘arms of love and pity and sweet compassion’ who protected Blake from his father, and she probably became equated with his art. Is there any wonder that Hayley with his concern that Blake leave his unmarketable visions and take advantage of opportunity, began to be confused with archetypal images in Blake’s mind and in his myth? It was only a short step to further confusions. Note particularly the metaphor of illicit passion that Blake uses to describe his art. There is no doubt at all that the two images were inextricably connected in Blake’s mind. I do not want to labour the fact that Catherine was playing the role begun by Blake’s mother while Hayley was in the position of the condemning father. A number of images could have merged to account for Blake’s subsequent attitude.

It looks as if Blake, secure with a roof overhead, forgot, as it is easy to do, the near starvation of London from which Hayley had rescued him, and took it into his head to be touchy about the work Hayley had found for him to do. Hayley had taken considerable pains to persuade wealthy friends and neighbours to give Blake commissions, and, quite naturally, these commissions were for painted miniatures, not prophecies. To Blake it seemed a plot to keep him from doing his own work.

It is always galling to see genius expending itself in making fashionable gew-gaws for a livelihood, and Blake had genius. But what must have rankled most of all was that a man of third-rate talent was in a position to advise and dictate as if he were top authority, and at the same time was himself raking in all the sweets of success. But this was not Hayley’s fault, and, recognizing Blake’s genius, he did his charming best to compensate for the unequal distribution of material goods without hurting Blake’s touchy pride in another way, that of making him an out and out charity case. And so we find Hayley popping over to the thatched cottage from his walled estate, commissions in hand, and Blake growing more and more annoyed and having to suppress it.

Hayley not only subscribed to all the eighteenth-century canons of sensibility and sweet reasonableness, but typified them. Moreover, he was always preaching them to Blake, urging above all a more prudent way of life than that of a visionary. And he had a large audience who agreed without reservation with his way of thinking.

We can see how Blake, already full of doubts about his own vision of life, began to have even worse doubts, and how Hayley seemed to be the cause of them. Blake must at this time have felt he was failing his wife, too, for he was forty-three and had had no success at all, and he had subjected her to all the deprivations of the artistic life without justifying it. He may have felt that no matter how she stuck by him, in her heart of hearts she was comparing him unfavourably with the successful and suave Hayley. Catherine Blake was pretty and vivacious, and it is clear that she charmed Hayley who had an eye for pretty women. He had much affectionate regard for her which doubtless pleased her, particularly as she was completely unsophisticated and Hayley was a man of the world as well as a poet, and possessed charm and breeding.

It would seem that, starting from his own feeling of inferiority and a doubting of all that he stood for as an artist, Blake began to feel vaguely jealous of Hayley in relation to Catherine. If he thought at all he would have had to base such jealousy on the very shaky ground of Hayley’s open regard for Catherine and his reputation as a ladies’ man. Yet there remains Blake’s curious verse:

When H(ayley) find out what you cannot do,

That is the very thing he’ll set you to.

If you break not your Neck, ’tis not his fault,

But pecks of poison are not pecks of salt.

And when he could not act upon my wife

Hired a Villain to bereave my Life.

There is no existing evidence outside this verse that Blake actually had grounds for jealousy, and after the Blakes returned to London we find them friends once again with Hayley which is not likely were these accusations true. But who knows how much of a benevolent and romantic ‘father figure’ Hayley may have become to Catherine during the stay at Felpham, and, dazzled, she may have sung his praises until Blake was sick of the very name of their generous patron. And the more Blake seemed ungrateful, the more would she have done so, until Blake dashed off this doggerel in pure spite. However it happened, it remains true that, starting with good will on both sides, Hayley gradually became to Blake the Satan of his poem, Milton, which was written at Felpham. Hayley may even be the ‘traveller’ and the ‘angel’ of the lyrics. It is apparent that at close quarters the comparison of himself with Hayley became too painful to Blake.

And all this misunderstanding and shunting off of good will is a great pity. For there is in existence a letter written by Hayley, which Blake never saw, written in Blake’s defence to one of Hayley’s unperceptive and critical friends, a letter which seems to me to reveal a sensitive, albeit over-simplified, understanding of the nature of Blake’s genius and its basic disturbance that no one else even glimpsed. Far from being the obtuse patron who exploited Blake’s genius more than helping it, Hayley is here revealed as a most perceptive and willing friend to a man who needed a friend more than most and who quarrelled with all the people who tried to be his friends. Hayley understood Blake’s self-doubts and his self-torture, and, what’s more, recognized that Blake’s talent was genius and far beyond his own.

The letters which passed between Hayley and Lady Hesketh are as follows: Lady Hesketh wrote at the instigation of a disgruntled octogenarian who fancied himself a critic, to the effect that Blake lacked or ‘wanted perfection’. She writes:

‘May I be forgiven if I say to you, that some, among the very few now here, who have any pretensions to Taste, find many defects in your friend’s engravings …. Yet, if Mr. Blake is but new in the world, may it not be in reality kinder, to point out his failing than to suffer him to think his performance faultless—surely it may stimulate his endeavours after Perfection!’

Obviously, Hayley had already cautioned his friends not to criticize Blake’s work. Lady Hesketh complains that Blake pays little attention to the ‘Human Face Divine’, and, sin of sins, ‘the faces of his babies are not young’. This is, perhaps, a deeper insight into what Blake meant than Lady Hesketh ever knew:

Struggling in my father’s hands,

Striving against my swaddling bands,

Bound and weary I thought best

To sulk upon my mother’s breast.

My mother groan’d! my father wept.

Into the dangerous world I leapt:

Helpless, naked, piping loud:

Like a fiend hid in a cloud.

Hayley replies to Lady Hesketh at length, taking pains to mollify the good lady in an effort to win her support of Blake by drawing parallels between his case and that of her beloved relative, Cowper. He flatters her capacity for sensitive perception, and finally, by painting a pathetic picture of William and Catherine ill in bed, he makes a pointed appeal to her maternal and charitable instincts. The tone of Hayley’s letter is awkward and even clumsy, but it is a warming plea for kindness towards an artist whom Hayley realizes needs moral support and encouragement even more than bread. That is, of course, precisely what Blake did need. Whether Hayley himself was ever articulate enough to praise Blake to his face is doubtful from the turn of events and from Blake’s lines:

My title as a Genius thus is prov’d:

Not Prais’d by Hayley nor by Flaxman lov’d.

Hayley’s admiration may well have been expressed only in the form of material aid that was supposed to speak for itself, and in his activities among his friends on Blake’s behalf, and, of course, in companionable literary talk, man to man, chiefly about his own projects!

He writes to Lady Hesketh on July 15, 1802:

‘Pray suffer no mortal, my dear Lady, however you may give them credit for refined taste in Art, to prejudice you against the works of that too feeling artist, whose designs met with so little mercy from your Octogenaire admirable! … (there is) great spirit and sentiment in the engravings of my friend …. Whatever the Merits, or the Failings of my diligent and grateful artist may be, I know I shall interest your Heart and Soul in his Favour, when I tell you, that he resembles our Beloved Bard in the Tenderness of his Heart, and in the perilous powers of an imagination utterly unfit to take due care of Himself. With admirable Faculties, his sensibility is so dangerously acute, that the common rough treatment which true genius often receives from ordinary minds in the commerce of the world, might not only wound Him more than it should do, but really reduce Him to the Incapacity of an Ideot, without the consolatory support of a considerable Friend. From these excesses of Feeling, and of irregular Health (forever connected with such excesses) His productions must ever perhaps be unequal, but in all He does, however wild or hasty, a penetrating eye will discover true Genius, and if it were possible to keep his too apprehensive spirit for a Length of Time unruffled He would produce works of the pencil, almost as excellent and original, as those works of the pen, which flow’d from the dear poet, of whom He often reminds me—when his mind is darkened with any unpleasant apprehension—He reminds me of him also by being a most fervent Admirer of the Bible, and intimately acquainted with all its Beauties—I wish our beloved Bard had been as happy in a Wife for Heaven has bestow’d on this extraordinary mortal perhaps the only female on Earth who could have suited Him exactly—They have now been married more than seventeen years and are as fond of each other, as if their Honey Moon were still shining—They live in a neat little cottage, which they both regard as the most delightful residence ever inhabited by a mortal; they have no servant:—the good woman not only does all the work of the House, but she even makes the greater part of her Husband’s dress, and assists him in his Art—she draws, she engraves, and sings delightfully, and is so truly the Half of her good man that they seem animated by one soul and that a soul of indefatigable Industry and Benevolence—it sometimes harries them to labour rather too much, and I had some time ago the pain of seeing both confin’d to their Bed—I endeavour to be as kind as I can to two creatures so very interesting and meritorious.’

This seems to me to be a very fine and unsparing effort on Hayley’s part to win over an influential friend for Blake despite the obstacle of her mistrust. He flatters Lady Hesketh’s intelligence, not too subtly, but subtly enough, and he blatantly observes the note of elegiac reverence and precedence due to her dead relative, the poet Cowper. There is full recognition of Blake’s genius, but also of his tendency to be wild and hasty, and, best of all, of the psychological causes behind the uneven quality of his work. That adverse criticism might reduce Blake ‘to the incapacity of an Ideot’ is a very strong statement to make, but it shows that Hayley knew exactly where Blake was most vulnerable, and did not hesitate or mince words in an effort to save him from such a breakdown. Last but not least in this letter, there is to Hayley’s credit much pure and simple loving-kindness towards the Blakes as people, and an appreciation of Mrs. Blake’s good qualities as well as those of her husband. His description of her is not, incidentally, the description that would be written by a man who was amorously interested in his friend’s wife. It speaks well for Hayley’s delicacy that he refrained from mentioning that the delightful cottage that the Blakes were living in was his idea.

Hayley’s whole intention, it would seem, was to protect and help this vulnerable genius and the wife who was so suited to him. It is significant that Hayley clearly had no inkling of either the jealousy concerning Catherine or the irritation about work that he was provoking in Blake. Not the least interesting information that we get from his letter is that to eyes that had more opportunity to observe the Blake household than anyone else ever had, it seemed that this couple had indeed achieved the marriage ideal of male and female completeness that Albion and Jerusalem are always struggling towards in anguish. Whatever the difficulties of the marriage—and we have Blake’s word for it that there were ‘fetters’—they did not appear on the surface. It is tempting to conclude that Blake’s misgivings about his marriage like his hostility towards Hayley were dissatisfactions born of his self-doubt concerning his work, and had actuality only in the realm of imagination. What seemed to Hayley an ideal harmony in the little cottage, was probably torturing Blake because it just fell short of some impossible ideal, and as such the fetters could have seemed very real. But any theory like Murry’s that Blake ‘fell out’ with his wife or that he fell in love with another woman is surely off the track.

And Blake’s accusation of Hayley as ‘the other man’ or, potentially so, surely stems also from what Blake himself terms his ‘abstract folly’. Poor Hayley was the only person close enough to the Blakes to get personally involved in the myth, and his involvement may even be taken as a back-handed compliment from Blake, a kind of love! For it is assuredly true that although for mankind in general Blake had the greatest tolerance, at least theoretically, for those near and dear to him he held up superhuman standards, assuming them like himself capable of perfection, and any small lapse assumed monstrous proportions, and his suspicions became almost paranoid. We can hardly blame Hayley that in seeing and setting out to protect Blake from his own self-doubts, he did not also see the vast mythological ramifications of such doubt and the part he himself would play in them.

There is something pathetic and ridiculous about the whole misunderstanding. Hayley, whatever his limitations, could have become the sympathetic audience Blake so badly needed, instead of the focus for Blake’s projected doubts. Prepared to be the fatherly benefactor, Hayley was turned by the fertile imagination of his protégé genius into Satan, the arch-enemy of artistic vision, and would-be seducer of his wife.

It is apparent that at first Blake was wholly in agreement with the general opinion about Hayley’s charm and kindness. He was altogether delighted with his good fortune in finding such a patron. Since illustrating Young’s Night Thoughts in 1797 he had had no commissions, and his patron, Butts, was desperately overstocked with Blake’s work and could do no more for him. Therefore, Blake’s tone upon discovering such a willing patron as Hayley was one of joy and wonder only—‘And now Flaxman has given me Hayley, his friend, to be mine … Mr. H. acts like a Prince, I am at complete Ease … my several engagements are in Miniature Paintings. Miniature has become a Goddess in my Eyes, and my Friends in Sussex say that I Excel in the pursuit.’ And this is about the same work he later chafed at as mere hackwork unworthy of his genius. At this time Hayley was writing to Lady Hesketh about Blake: ‘As he has infinite genius, and a most engaging simplicity of character, I hope He will execute many admirable things in this sequestered scene, with the aid of an excellent wife, to whom he has been married seventeen years, and who shares his Labour and his Talents.’ Once again, Hayley emerges as perceptive rather than obtuse in seeing that Blake’s character was essentially joyous and simple, and that it was only through self-doubt that it turned into complexity and gloom. And Hayley set about quietly, wanting no thanks and not even letting Blake know, to ward off occasions for doubt. It is significant that it was Hayley to whom Blake wrote after the break had been made and the Blakes had returned to London, about the fetters that had bound his work and his marriage. Hayley needed no further explanation—he knew exactly the nature of these fetters that had made themselves felt at Felpham despite his vigilance.

For Blake soon became restive at Felpham executing his trivial commissions and with his inability to get on with his own work, and with, perhaps, being a kind of secretary to Hayley while Hayley himself was achieving tremendous success with his Cowper.

Blake writes ominously on September 11, 1801, his dissatisfaction with himself tremendously apparent, and his subjugation to abstraction instead of imagination become worse rather than better in the Hayley milieu. But nevertheless, he is still blaming himself for his own ‘abstract folly’ rather than casting around for a scapegoat: ‘I labour incessantly, and accomplish not one half of what I intend, because my Abstract Folly hurries me often away while I am at work, carrying me over Mountains and Valleys which are not Real, in a Land of Abstraction where Spectres of the Dead wander.’ Few more moving passages have been written to describe the bleak inner landscape of an artist who is in the bondage of his own fine intellect, which abstracts and analyses and dries up the spontaneous flow of images rather than channelling and shaping them.

Blake’s sense of unreality, of self-doubt and self-hatred emerges in another letter. Here again he is still aware that he can blame no one but himself, and if the visions have departed, it is because he is not worthy: ‘If it was fit for me, I doubt not that I should be Employ’d in Greater Things.’ But the letter ends with an accusation of Hayley.

After reading Hayley’s letters to Lady Hesketh, it is sad to find that Blake was writing unhappily to his brother that he must leave Felpham because of what he imagines is Hayley’s antagonism_

‘I did not mention our Sickness to you and should not to Mr. Butts but for a determination which we have lately made, namely to leave This Place, because I am now certain of what I have long doubted, Viz that H. is jealous as Stothard was and will be no further my friend than he is compelled by circumstances. The truth is, As a Poet he is frightened at me and as a Painter his views and mine are opposite; he thinks to turn me into a Portrait Painter as he did poor Romney, but this he nor all the devils in hell will never do. I must own that seeing H. like S., envious (and that he is I am now certain) made me very uneasy, but it is over and I now defy the worst and fear not while I am true to myself which I will be. This is the uneasiness I spoke of to Mr. Butts, but I did not tell him so plain and wish you to keep it a secret and to burn this letter because it speaks so plain …. But again as I said before, we are very Happy sitting at tea by a wood fire in our Cottage, the wind singing about our roof and the Sea roaring at a distance, but if sickness comes all is unpleasant.’

It is plain to see that at least a part of the sickness that destroys the pleasant atmosphere in the cottage is not physical but is the mental unease of jealousy and self-doubt. And this is Blake’s illness, not Hayley’s. The accusation that Hayley is jealous of him is pure projection. Hayley had no reason at all to be jealous of Blake. But Blake had plenty of reasons to be jealous of Hayley, some actual, some imaginary. If we turn each mention of Hayley’s name in this letter into the first person singular, we get something much nearer the truth. For Blake was uneasy at his own envy of Hayley’s success. He speaks of Hayley’s jealousy of him, but ends the sentence most ambiguously with what can be a reference only to his own mood of depression and envy: ‘but it is now over and I now defy the worst and fear not while I am true to myself which I will be.’ How could he know that Hayley’s jealousy was over? But he could know about his own mood. The shift to the future tense here reveals his shame at his present petty jealousy, a state of soul that keeps him from being true to himself.

Hayley, a literary lion of the first order, had no reason whatsoever to be envious of his obscure protégé who was to all eyes a failure. The only possible cause for jealousy would have been if he had suddenly realized that Blake had genius beyond his own. But this he recognized from the outset and had set out to protect and aid it. Nor had he any cause to be ‘frightened at’ Blake as a poet. What very likely rankled in Blake’s mind was that Hayley probably did not think of him as a poet, but rather as a painter and engraver. He, Hayley, was the poet, acclaimed so by all.

Nor was there anything in ‘circumstances’ to ‘compel’ Hayley to be friendly to Blake, as Blake implies. It was quite the other way round with the Blakes living so close to Hayley and having to keep up a pretence of gratitude they no longer felt. It is perhaps fair to note in passing that ‘poor Romney’ did not lose but gained by turning to portraiture at Hayley’s instigation.¹

⁵ Although later Hayley tried to make Romney give up portraiture, for which Romney’s son blames him.

So much for the effort to see Hayley more clearly from behind the smoke screen of Blake’s epigrams and the anger of Blake’s defenders. It is important to clarify Blake’s relation with his patron not only to vindicate Hayley, but in order to understand Blake.

And though Blake was grossly unfair to Hayley and misunderstood his motivation, we cannot say that Blake was entirely without a point. He had long ago made the choice to put art first and foremost even if it meant becoming a burden to his friends when the visions failed him, and even if it meant being ungrateful to these same friends if they seemed to be trying to turn him away from his own work. He puts the dilemma clearly:

‘I find on all hands great objections to my doing anything but the mere drudgery of business, and intimations that if I do not confine myself to this, I shall not live … for that I cannot live without doing my duty to lay up treasures in heaven is Certain and Determined, and to this I have long made up my mind, and why this should be made an objection to Me, while Drunkeness, lewdness, Gluttony and even Idleness itself, does not hurt other men, let Satan himself explain.’

Whether Hayley had already become Satan we will never know!