strength and sympathised in their infinite sorrows. So his people were no longer our people, nor was his world our world.

Then, when his dream was ended, when he returned to our gloomy and commonplace life, he would not believe that he had dreamed. He could not recognise the unreality of his wonderful vision; and when the necessities of daily life and monotonous labour crushed his genius, he could not bring himself to regard that as life. Little by little his soul took refuge in its dreams. In them and by them at least he could live. And he passed through the world, his eyes fixed on the country of his marvellous visions. Then, our world gradually disappeared from his existence. His dreams! Who would dare to call them dreams? It was we, poor blind folk, who dreamed. And he threw back at us the epithet that was flung in his face :" Dreamers! Dreamers all of us, unaware of life's irreality. Why can we not awake? Our life has no existence. That glorious vision, that is reality. Every child sees it and reflects it in his innocent eyes; it dwells in the memory of every artist. All the prophets have declared it; the fields, the flowers reveal it with songs of joy. We alone are blind, and heavy with sleep. Our world is a negation. His world alone exists.

His songs are echoes of this mysterious world, born in his own spirit, bounded by his closed eyelids. It is here we find his almost unique originality. We call these dreamers mystics, and the world has seen many of them. But there have been relatively few who have described their visions in poetic language. There have been hardly any whose mystic faith was strong enough to transport them absolutely into the world of invisible objects, to illumine this invisible world so vividly that the very existence of our universe was forgotten and denied. There is an element of mysticism to be found in all the poets, but there is also a clear vision of the world and of life. They may be lifted above our earth, but they do not lose sight of it. They know all the petty failings of our human nature, they can share them, and by them rouse their passions. There are few who leave our visible world sufficiently to forget its laws, and to be careless of the human mind's demands. Nevertheless, that is what Blake did. He wrote neither about men nor for them, in so far as we understand them. He belongs to the invisible world, and it is its inhabitants that he addresses. When Dante passed through the doleful city, and wandered in the kingdoms of eternal light, it was always men belonging to our world that he met : he thought like a man; he wrote for

men. Still higher in the world of dreams are those who, like John in Patmos or like Paul on the road to Damascus, see what the eye of man cannot see, what his tongue is powerless to describe, what his mind can hardly grasp. Blake almost always lives in such a world. Of all the modern poets he is the most intensely mystical.

His mysticism is such that our language is no more sufficient to describe his visions than his pencil was capable of expressing them fully. He needed to employ a new language, to take our words and give them an unknown meaning, to invent names for his supernatural visitors, to pile metaphor on metaphor in order to express the inexpressible, to show us the invisible by means of extraordinary images, and with our perishable language to attempt to bring us the words of life eternal. A philosopher would employ a long series of abstract expressions: for a poet, the only language possible is that of symbol.

Thus the two chief characteristics of Blake's poetry are for its inspiration-mysticism; for its expression-symbolism. They constitute his originality, and are the source of his greatness, and also of his defects. There is perhaps no writer in whose works we can better observe, from a literary point of view, the effect of mysticism on a poetic soul. This mysticism showed itself early in him, it developed, fashioning all his thoughts and conceptions till it became an integral part of his life. He put forth spontaneous and splendid poems full of imagination and fancy. At first little fettered by symbolism, it gradually weighed him down; and the moment came at last when he could not express himself except by the most complex symbols. Little by little the visionary ceased to speak our tongue; in the end his mystic vision and the symbols which described it reached a sphere in which our eyes could no longer follow them, our mind no longer comprehend them. They are beyond us, and almost cease to be literature.

It will be for us to examine this mysticism, in the different phases of its development, from the literary point of view; to see the gradual destruction of the poetic element in the artist's mind, the creation of new elements of inspiration, soon spoilt by symbolism, and finally the decline and fall of one of the greatest poetic geniuses of the century. Consequently, after a short study of Blake's life, his character and his visions, we shall attempt to explain the cosmogony of his universe, and describe its myths. Then we shall study, more closely, his powers of expression as a poet, in order to find out what

constitutes his genius, and what are its defects and limitations. Finally, we shall see by a cursory examination of his works, how their mysticism and symbolism, which in the beginning gave such charm and beauty to his poetry, were finally the cause of its ruin.

But in thus examining his mind and his work, we shall have become acquainted with him by degrees, and grown accustomed to his peculiarities. We shall have discovered beauties of the highest order in the midst of much that has been severely but justly called nonsense. We shall have learnt not to reject them scornfully because they are mingled with dross, and perhaps we shall achieve a more just appreciation of the poet. Then we shall understand why his admirers are at once so rare and so enthusiastic. And, if we attain no other result, we shall have at least prepared our minds for a more profitable perusal of his works, so disconcerting and at the same time so attractive. We shall have become more capable of understanding them, and consequently will appreciate them better.

T

II: HIS LIFE

O careless observers, Blake may well seem to have had no history. The seventy years of his life passed almost unnoticed by the world; and, at his death, writers of obituary notices could not fill more than a few lines with the events of his obscure and monotonous career.

In the eyes of those who only knew him superficially, Blake was merely an engraver, half-artist, half-artizan, who now and then ventured to invade the realm of poetry, but without gaining from it either wealth or fame. He lived like an ordinary workman, and his years of apprenticeship were followed by a long and painful life of toil, unvaried except by sundry changes of abode, and the coming and going of patrons and clients. He had to struggle perpetually against actual want, and often could only live from day to day. He married a young girl as poor as himself, lived happily with her in the house she kept for him, died in her arms at the age of seventy, and was followed to the grave by a very few friends. The world knew no more of him than this; and men soon forgot the few books that he sold, the few pictures shown in his ill-attended exhibitions, and the few engravings purchased by two or three of his friends at a reasonable price, and by an indifferent public for sums ridiculously small.

At first sight, there can be nothing more insignificant than such a life as this: the life led by the majority of men, not worth the trouble of writing. For any man's more intimate acquaintances, however, those who come into closer contact with him, the broad lines of his life take, little by little, a more definite form. The man shows some striking characteristic: he ceases to be commonplace, and becomes individualized. Such was the case with Blake even more than with other people. His personality could not help making a very strong impression upon all who came into contact with him. He produced, almost immediately, the effect of being someone outside the common run of humanity. Though he went along the dusty and common highroad of life, he left footmarks that were quite different from all the others; and he was no ordinary fellow-traveller. And the more one came to know him, the more interesting he appeared. He was not one of those who impress us at first by an uncommon exterior or a

semblance of originality, but whom, on probing them to the bottom, we find in the end to be just like everyone else. His words and his acts engraved themselves deeply upon the minds of his visitors, who have reported them for us; and they help us, more than any mere biography could do, to understand the man and to perceive his originality. As far as his external life was concerned, he resembled the generality of men in his character and in the thousand small details through which it found expression in his daily life, he stands far apart from them.

And the distance is much greater if, beneath and through his actions, we try to reach his inmost soul. No one could succeed in doing this during his lifetime. Even his wife, who seldom went further from him than the length of his right arm, who, during her long years of widowhood, never wearied of talking about him, and who worshipped him as a god, was far from having sounded the depths of his mind. It is only through the whole of his works, through his letters, his spoken words, his poems, his engravings, that we can arrive at a more precise view of him than that taken by his contemporaries. And, in spite of all this evidence, there remain depths in him that cannot be penetrated, because of the unique originality hidden beneath this seemingly commonplace and insignificant life. He had an extraordinary inner vitality, which created, as it were, a new man within the external man, which controlled all his actions and inspired all his artistic work, which, during his life and for long afterwards, caused him to be regarded as a madman, but which gained him, in the end, a place among those whose work remains a joy for ever.

His story, as an outside chronicler might recount it, is soon told. First there was the period of childhood and apprenticeship, which lasted about twenty years, and ended with his marriage (1757-1782). Then followed a second period, also of about twenty years, a time of continual toil and struggle, helped and hindered by patrons or friends; the monotonous labour of the engraver being, however, varied by a rich output of poetry, as though the artistic spirit must somehow find expression (1782-1803). And then came the period of old age (1803-1827), during which the poet remained almost silent, while the engraver seemed to have found his true vocation, and produced his masterpieces. This was a time of great artistic activity, and the artist's private life was quieter and happier in these Of his family we know but little. His father, James Blake, appears

years.