THE EVERLASTING GOSPEL The probable date of most of this poem is 1810. not all written at once. Part seems a little earlier. But it was In Gilchrist's Life,' vol. ii. p. 96, a poem is printed called The Woman taken in Adultery, described as Extracted from a Fragmentary Poem entitled "The Everlasting Gospel.' This extract begins with twelve lines, to be referred to here in their place. They are not, properly, part of the poem at all. There should be fourteen lines to this first section, if it is to be understood as Blake meant it, but the third and fourth are quietly removed without any mark made to show that they had been dropped. This deceives the reader, because a few asterisks and a blank space later on seem to indicate where the first omission occurs in the straightforward and continuous presentation of the poem. The portion which follows appears to be a continuation, an extract from some longer work. There are forty-two lines of it. But once more the reader is deceived. In Blake's MS. this portion has fifty-seven lines. The suppressed sixteen are dropped out, some here, some there, and not a sign is made. The Aldine Edition of Blake's Poems appeared next with a much fuller and less misleading text. But even this is not free from very serious garbling. Had any indication of its alterations been given, or had it been entitled a selection or arrangement from the original, no complaint could have been made. But a footnote professed to give the poem in full. There are omissions, divisions, and rejoinings in it that are not marked, and that were neither necessary nor justifiable. Both as a key to much of Blake's mystical and symbolic method, and as a contribution to his biography, the poem is of very great interest and value. Not the least use was made of it in Gilchrist's 'Life' or in the Aldine Edition from either point of view, and the reader was not permitted to see a text that might have enabled him to do for himself what the editors and biographers had not done for him. This seems almost incredible, but neither Mr. Gilchrist nor the brothers Rossetti ever knew what the poem was about. In their treatment of it they were guided by mere fancy or personal taste, working without comprehension and in a patronising spirit. It is true that Blake never properly prepared the original manuscript for the printer. He wrote it by fits and starts, filling with it irregular blanks accidentally left in an already somewhat crowded note-book. He only partly sorted the frag. ments in any coherent order. Marginal numbers written by him against the lines here and there show that he made an attempt to do so, but his directions are not complete; they do not include all the sections of the poem, and therefore a coherent and complete text, based on the authority of the author himself, is not to be obtained. The intervention of an editor is absolutely necessary if the poem is to be given to the public. But as in both the first two attempts to present it, whether for Mr. Macmillan by Mr. D. G., or for Mr. Bell by Mr. W. M. Rossetti, the reader had been treated with little frankness, and the author with little scrupulosity, the present editor, acting with Mr. Yeats, took an opposite course in the Quaritch edition of Blake's works. In this, vol. ii. pp. 42-60, all that could be found in Blake's MS., and all that could be conjectured about the order of the lines and their date, was given so that the reader might at last edit the poem for himself, and come to his own conclusion both as to its order of composition and as to its meaning. In this way the feeling of distrust with which any one would have turned to a fresh form of the poem arranged by a new editor was avoided. This unsorted revelation of all the material of the poem having once been made did not need to be repeated, and on the next printing of the Everlasting Gospel' a fresh attempt to get it into some sort of order which would have been approved by Blake, even if not originally intended by him, was certain to be made. For this task the account of the MS., and the very full presentment of its matter in the Quaritch edition, was practically sufficient. But though the original had been returned to its owner in America, a MS. copy made by the present writer remained, in which the arrangement of the lines was exactly reproduced, whether written in sequence, in reverse order, or sideways, whether with or without marginal numberings. The value of this consisted partly in the way in which the insertion of the fragments among other matter in the book offered hints by which their order and dates could be inferred. It happened that the next editor to whom the duty of dealing with the question fell was Mr. Yeats. To him the present editor passed his copy, as he records in a note, and he arranged from it the form of the poem printed by Messrs. Lawrence and Bullen. In his editorial observations Mr. Yeats says of it: 'This poem is not given in full in the present book; for it is not possible to do so without many repetitions, for Blake never made a final text. The мs. book contains three different versions of a large portion of the poem, and it is not possible to keep entirely to any one of them without sacrificing many fine passages. Blake left, however, pretty clear direc tions for a great part of the text-making, and these directions were ignored by Mr. Rossetti.' Mr. Yeats also says of his own method of editing the poem that it omits ... a few fragmentary lines here and there, of whose place no indication is given,' adding that they are all to be found in the complete Quaritch edition. The present editor cannot now touch the work of his former collaborator without here paying a tribute to the ability with which his arrangement is made, and the conscientiousness with which it is described in the notes. Mr. Yeats was guided by considerations of readability and of space, and he worked with a knowledge that he must needs produce a result a little short of perfection, because no critical skill and no poetic insight could make an ideally coherent and consecutive poem out of the material Blake left. What Mr. Yeats did in his arrangement was never done so well before, and it is hardly to be supposed that it will be done any better by any one working after him under similar conditions. In the present volumes the first consideration that guides the editor is completeness. Here therefore now follow the isolated fragments which were omitted, without disingenuous concealment, by Mr. Yeats. The first appears to have been intended as the opening of a sustained paragraph like those that have a similar style of commencement. It, however, went no further, and whatever caused the interruption, Blake did not resume the subject, and preferred to drop the lines. They are as follows: 'Did Jesus preach doubt, or did he Give any lessons in philosophy, Charge visionaries with deceiving This was written in pencil, sideways, and in the same VOL. I. N |