that is to say, the introduction into his spirit of religion in its various forms, philosophical, sensual, or theocratic.

America tells us the story of his revolt. In America, which is the West, the “region of vegetative feelings," the passions and desires of our bodies have remained active, and, as a consequence, the longing for the infinite and the need of liberty have persisted also. It is therefore this part of the human spirit that rises in rebellion against the tyrannical powers of the world. Humanity awakes: the voice of Freedom resounds through space among the constellations and the clouds of Jehovah-Urizen. The standard of revolt is unfurled : angels fulminate against the false religions and false governments of the world: the Earth, which has so long worshipped a vain shadow, opens her eyes and sees the truth; and the flames of a new birth spring up round the universe. All this is symbolised by the war of American Independence: but the poet only makes use of one or two of its incidents, and embodies his principles in a few only of its chief personages, who appear for a moment before us, and then vanish. He sees only the vast conflicts that are waged in the eternal soul of humanity, and that end in the destruction of the five gates of the senses by the fires of passion. And while the text of the book is concerned with America and the war, the illustrations depict the history of the human soul, and we see symbolic figures of Orc wrapped in flames, of the Scarlet Woman preaching falsehoods, of the Earth bowing down before vacancy, of Urizen in his heaven, of the newborn man sheltered beneath the waving stalks of the cornfield of life, of old age seeking rest in the grave, and of the regenerated soul rising out of corruption.

The reader, puzzled by the inconsequence and unreality of the narrative, cannot help being impressed by the wild enthusiasm of this song of resurrection, and the sensation that it gives of a new life heralding, as it were, the dawn of a whole world's freedom.

The morning comes, the night decays, the watchmen leave their stations;
The grave is burst, the spices shed, the linen wrapped up :

The bones of death, the cov'ring clay, the sinews shrunk and dry'd,
Reviving shake, inspiring move, breathing! awakening !

Spring like redeemed captives when their bonds and bars are burst:
Let the slave grinding at the mill, run out into the field:

Let him look up into the heavens and laugh in the bright air :
Let the enchained soul shut up in darkness and in sighing,
Whose face has never seen a smile in thirty weary years,

Rise and look out; his chains are loose, his dungeon doors are open.
And let his wife and children return from the oppressor's scourge:
They look behind at every step and believe it is a dream,

Singing, "The Sun has left his blackness, and has found a fresher morning, And the fair Moon rejoices in the clear and cloudless night;

For Empire is no more, and now the Lion and Wolf shall cease.'

Resurrection, freedom, Spring-the symbols are all mixed, but they all speak to us of regeneration and of the triumph of life over death.

In this book, too, we find some of Blake's bitterest attacks upon the religion of the churches, and some of his cries of exultation over the destruction of the Decalogue by the immense force of man's desires. The hatred felt by entire nations towards priesthood and monarchy is expressed in these fiery lines.

Who commanded this? what God? what Angel?
To keep the generous from experience till the ungenerous
Are unrestrain'd performers of the energies of nature ;
Till pity is become a trade, and generosity a science,

That men get rich by, and the sandy desart is giv'n to the strong.
What God is he, writes laws of peace, and clothes him in a tempest ?
What pitying Angel lusts for tears, and fans himself with sighs?
What crawling villain preaches abstinence and wraps himself
In fat of lambs? No more I follow, no more obedience pay ! 2

Thus America is at once a scourge of satire and a trumpet of revolution, with all the biting force of the one and all the strident music of the other.

In Europe, the vision is darker still. The book is apparently intended to describe the growth of Christianity and civilisation in Europe during eighteen centuries. All this time, as Blake tells us in his own misty way, men had a religion preached to them which destroyed the ancient love of beauty and of nature. These were the eighteen hundred years of Enitharmon's sleep. But nature revenges herself. Little by little, science and philosophy grow and spread, until at last there arises a "natural religion" which kills the false Christianity of the priests. The children of Enitharmon strive against the children of Los-the powers of nature against those of prophecy. The former build a temple at Verulam: the Baconian philosophy of the senses and of reason. There all the world comes to worship, until thought 1 America, p. 6.

America, p 11.

has "chang'd the infinite to a serpent," and science has narrowed all our conceptions of Eternity. The end of false Christianity is at hand. The world awaits the " trump of the Last Doom." Albion's angel has not strength to sound it but Newton arises, and, seizing the trumpet, blows "the enormous blast." It is the blast of science destroying all that is left of religion. The legions of angels fall like autumn leaves, going to their graves. But now Enitharmon awakes: the love of Nature resumes its sway. She and her children are enveloped in the fires of Orc: that is to say, the passions of men, stronger than all laws, conquer the whole world. Here, as in America, this is the signal for the coming of freedom, which shows its light " in the vineyards of red France." The French Revolution has begun, and Los calls " all his sons to the strife of blood."

The whole book is obscure in the extreme, and written in symbolical language, to which the poet gives us no key. It marks a complete change of style in Blake's work. We are now among personages of his own creating: Rintrah, the "furious king"; Leutha, the "silent love"; Antamon," Prince of the Pearly Dew," Sotha and Thiralatha, "secret dwellers of dreamful caves." The clouds are Albion's council chamber: he himself is confined to the world of the five senses. The characters of the Book of Urizen appear unexpectedly and then vanish. Regarded as literature, the book makes very little impression upon us except that of irritation at its strangeness and obscurity, and amazement at the power of vision which could create and handle with ease a whole universe of its own.

But now the poet has surrendered himself entirely to his mysticism. The prophet will write no longer for men. This book exhibits in the few pages that compose it all the characteristics that are to dominate Blake's work from this time forward. A patient reading of it will constitute the best preparation for the study of the three great Prophetic Books, which we have now to examine in detail.

XXI: CHRONOLOGICAL SURVEY-(4) THE GREAT

T

PROPHETIC BOOKS:

VALA, JERUSALEM, MILTON.

HESE three books form a separate section of Blake's work. They are by far the longest of all his poems. Vala contains more than four thousand lines; Jerusalem an even greater number, and Milton about twelve hundred. The metre is a very long one, each line consisting of fifteen or sixteen syllables. Blake himself regarded these books as the most important of all his writings, and believed that by them he would become famous, at any rate in the world of his visions. They are vast epic histories, all written in symbolical language, and concerned with the adventures of mythical personages. Their action passes in no special place or period. The events described in them take place in eternity, outside of time. All three books have as their subject the fall and regeneration of the Universal Man; but each treats it from a different point of view.

Vala deals chiefly with the struggles of the four Zoas for mastery over the soul of man, who lies asleep upon the Rock of Ages. In Jerusalem we read of the labours of Los among the sons and daughters of Albion, and the persecutions endured by Jerusalem, Albion's Emanation. Milton recounts an episode of the same story, seen from far off, in the world of the Eternals, where we find Los employing Milton, and also Blake himself, for his own purposes. Blake wrote these three poems" without premeditation," a few lines at a time, just as the inspiration came to him. The separate pages were never worked up into a harmonious whole, and rarely subjected to any sort of revision, since it mattered very little to Blake whether or not any logical connection existed between one vision and another.

For this reason it is extremely difficult to give any connected summary of these books, as difficult as it would be to rearrange the disordered occurrences of some feverish dream. There is no clear sequence of events, each episode standing alone and unconnected by any relation of cause and effect with those that precede and follow it. An analysis of these pages would resemble the contents-tables of two or three different narratives shuffled together like a pack of cards,

with repetitions in one place and gaps that cannot possibly be filled in another.

The illustrations do not greatly assist us in deciphering the text. Those of Vala are at the foot of each page of the manuscript. Messrs. Ellis and Yeats have included a few facsimiles of them in the third volume of their William Blake. In Jerusalem, the pictures surround and mingle with the lettering. In Milton, they are fewer in number, and more roughly executed. And, particularly in the two first-named books, they seem to have little or no connection with the text, which they do not illustrate, in the ordinary sense, at all: still less do they explain it. At best, they only supply a sort of commentary, and express certain ideas of Blake's that are sometimes suggested by a page or a line of the text, but which more often appear to be entirely unrelated to it.

One might possibly make a connected story out of each of these books by dismembering them and suppressing all that did not fit in with the course of the narrative, by filling up certain gaps and making clear many obscure passages. But Blake would have been the first to condemn such treatment of his work; and, in any case, it could not produce the masterpiece that he dreamed of. All that one can do, therefore, is to indicate the broad lines of each book, without attempting any accurate description, and to point out some of the most remarkable passages.

VALA

This title is less appropriate than either of the other two-The Four Zoas and The Torments of Love and Jealousy-which appear on the first page of the manuscript. The nine cantos or Nights of the book were intended to contain the history of the " Four Mighty Ones" who " are in every Man," and especially that of Urthona— his " fall into Division and his resurrection into Unity," which must bring about also man's return to his primal state of unity with God and the universe. As a matter of fact, the subject of the book is much more involved than this; and we have to follow its development through three distinct series of events.

The first and most important of these, at any rate in the early part of the poem, is the division of each Zoa into Spectre and Emanation; the pursuit of the one by the other, the Emanation always rejecting and eluding the Spectre, and their final reconciliation and reunion