blance of their moral constitution, that whereas Milton in his chastity realized his ideal, Blake's wild glorification of lust tallies not at all with his own behaviour. In spite of different principles, the moral conduct was the same. The third great common character in the life and work of the two poets comes from what may be called their spiritual attitude.

Both have an intense religious spirit, fostered by their early education and home environment. Both were fed intellectually on the Bible from their infancy, both grew up in an atmosphere of opposition to the prevalent religious current of their time: Milton among the puritans, Blake under a Swedenborgian father.

Thus not only were both filled with intense religious feeling, but, in spite of that, and also through that, both were great enemies of religion: thoroughgoing individualists and heretics, impatient of all discipline, contemners of all known dogmas, bitter opponents of all priests and churches.

For the spirit in them was not religious only; it was also, it was perhaps chiefly, intellectual and rationalistic. And not only did they feel the allurement of the individual search for truth, the irresistible attraction of the ideas originated in their own brain and not received from outside; but both were tempted farther still from all orthodox pales by their ardent quest for, beauty.

« God has inspired me with a vehement love of the beautiful » (1) writes Milton to Deodati. And Blake teaches that « the Poetic Genius is the true, man >> and the source of all Religions (2).

ue D

Therefore we find in both the high pride of intellectual aims; they are both persuaded that they have an important part to play among men. They both aspire to the highest achievements of literature; and, chiefly in their matųrity and old age, both go beyond literature art becomes for them an instrument of religion. The intellectual ambition that has grown in them since their childhood passes into a desire for religious action. Both become prophets of the Spirit that they feel in themselves. Here culminate in both all pride, all ambition, all aims of life.

Milton, after the failure of the kingdom of the Saints on this earth under takes to

<< Justify the ways of God to Man »;

And Blake gave his friends the impression.

<<That the redemption of mankind hangs on the universal diffusion of the doctrines broached in this MS », namely the manuscript of Jerusalem (3).

Thus three great fundamental traits of character among other minor ones, will bring about a close relationship in the work of Milton and of Blake : their generous pride, their passionate temperament, their ardour for religion and art considered as one.

But the great difference between them has its deep roots also in their

(1) Bohn, vol. III, p. 494.

(2) Tract: All religions are one.

(3) Sampson, Introduction, p. 45.

:

characters. Both were proud, but their pride took a different course. Milton s high idea of himself led him to keep a firm control over his nature he ruled over his own life like an imperious lord. He planned and mapped out his courses of action, and directed his passions into the channels prepared by his intelligence. He put down the flesh mercilessly and boasted of his control over it (1).

In similar circumstances, Blake let his strong nature carry him away, and twice fell ill over the disappointment of passion (2).

Blake's pride took the form of self-assertion and not of self-control. He refused to be bound, and he refused to bind himself. He proclaimed the sanctity of his desire, and would never be gainsaid.

This was with him the pure impatience of all control, for he could otherwise be sensible and shrewd in human affairs he saw Paine's danger before anybody else and the politician was saved by taking the visionary's advice (3).

The difference between the two poets is most marked in the course of their friendships. Milton was as superior to his friends as Blake to his, and fully as self-conscious. But Milton made the best, and Blake the worst of all each came into touch with; because Milton reined in his pride, and was affable, kind and self-controlled thus he learnt much from inferior men, from Hartlib, and Oldenburg, and Ellwood. And his friends admired him and stood by him to the end. In the bitter times of the Restoration, it is probable that they saved him from persecution, and perhaps he owed them his life (4). He kept on good terms with people from all parties: Oldenburg and his patrons, the Boyles, were royalists at heart and yet staunch friends of his. It can be said of him that he never lost a friend, and acquired more and more as he grew in years.

Blake, on the contrary, never could keep a friend, or treat one as an equal. He gathered round him at the end of his life a group of young men who considered him with mixed love and wonder, Samuel Palmer, the Linnells, Tatham, and others but they were the young levites round the old prophet: they listened and said nought, or else asked questions only. All the old friends, one after another, drop out of his life, offended by his uncontrollable temper. Mr. and Mrs. Mathews, who published his first book, and were held up to ridicule in The Island in the Moon (5); the good-natured Hayley who gave him help and employment, and was accused of the worst crimes, in a mystical sense; - Flaxman and Fuseli; and Butts, who kept it up longest and yet in the end became estranged (6), probably when he saw that his financial help was no longer needed. All, at one time or other, are subject to the bitterest attacks. Blake was one of the best befriended of artists or men of letters kind friend after kind friend took him in hand only to drop him

(1) Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce.

(2) Ellis, p. 38 and 90-91.

(3) Ellis, p. 162-163 (Gilchrist).

(4) Masson, vol. VI.

(5) Ellis, chap. VII, to IX.

(6) Ellis, p. 406.

with awe and wonder after a time. And yet Blake was a kind and loving man but his temper was uncontrollable and he never wanted to control it. All that was according to principle: whereas Milton deliberately followed Reason, Blake followed Desire, or the passing mood of the moment; much of his failure in life is due to that.

The same intolerance accompanied Blake in the intellectual world. There is of course an enormous difference between him and Milton in point of culture. Partly, no doubt, Milton's opportunities and splendid education account for the difference, but it is due even more to the difference in receptivity. Milton knew and assimilated every thing in the world of letters. Blake, who gathered for himself and by himself immense treasures of culture, had a veritable genius for rejection. He treated his intellectual friends like his living ones. His pugnacity is formidable and indiscrimately manifested. Homer and Ovid, Plato and Cicero (1), Bacon, Newton, Rousseau, Voltaire, even Swedenborg and Milton, even Isaiah and Ezekiel (2); not to mention Rembrandt and Sir Joshua Reynolds, are subject to most violent and often totally incomprehensible attacks.

Both Milton and Blake have the same contempt for authorities, but while Milton was a true scholar, Blake carries his total disregard of any achievement of his predecessors to an absolute indifference to science and scholarship. He will quietly put down the most hair-raising assumptions, and Dr. Garnett raises the wrath of Blake's most devoted and most suggestive English critic by picking up a few of them (3) :

<< That the Greek marbles are copies of the works of Asiatic patriarchs, >> that no one painted in oil except by accident before Vandyke, that ancient >> British heroes dwell to this day on Snowdon in «< naked simplicity », a » species of Welsh Mahatmas, as it would appear ».

We can sympathize with Mr. Ellis's anger at the accusation of madness hurled at Blake, but also with Dr. Garnett's amazement at the intellectual self-indulgence of the poet. For it seems that Blake wrote or said anything that came into his head, regardless of its objective truth, knowing full well apparently that he was talking nonsense, often doing it on purpose to puzzle his audience, suggests Gilchrist. Then Blake always had a mystical meaning which would explain anything. Surely a predominant element in all his extravagances is simply a wilful lack of intellectual self-control and abandonment to fancy. There is much of the spoilt child in Blake, and perhaps that ordinary human element would go far to explain his apparent «< mad

ness ».

Thus the element of wilfulness in Blake separates the two poets; and by adding it to the great fundamental resemblances we shall account for most of the variations of the Blakean music upon a Miltonic theme.

(1) Millon, Preface.

(2) Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

(3) Ellis, p. 173 after quoting Dr. Garnett.

CHAPTER II

The direct influence.

Blake was a patient student of Milton. It seems probable that Milton's works were among the few, books persistently read by him, Swedenborg's and the Bible being the other great influences. But Milton must have had besides, for Blake, the attraction of a high example to follow. For Milton was not only a religious thinker, but a great poet he had achieved — the only one to do so something similar to what Blake wanted to achieve he had created a great religious epic. So it is easy to understand why, in Crabb Robinson's reminiscences, Milton's name is perhaps the most frequently mentioned.

From his fervid meditations on Milton, as we shall see in examining the creed of the two poets, Blake drew many things that were not in Milton. But he had a real genius of intuition, and he often reveals to us true tendencies of Milton's mind, although he exaggerates the points of contact or of contrast between himself and his predecessor.

To see in what way his mind worked on Milton's ideas, it is important to study first a little of the direct relationship, by imitation or suggestion, between the two bodies of poems. It is unnecessary to hunt out all the similar passages, but some proof must be given, evincing how deeply Blake had fed on Milton, and so assimilated Milton's poetry as no longer to distinguish at times between it and his own.

The direct influence is most evident in Vala and in Milton. Vala is more or less a regular epic, with a tale to tell, and we are able to follow, even though it be from afar, the march of the events. On the contrary, Jerusalem is most obscure to the uninitiated, and the influence of Milton, which is ever for clearness and light, is less seen in that poem. But again in Milton, necessarily because of the name and subject of this poem, the presence of his conception of his great compeer is more evident in Blake's mind.

Precise comparisons will enable us to see how Blake used and transformed Miltonic material; and, having seen Blake's mind at work on concrete artistic facts, images and verses, we shall be better able to understand the way in which he treated Milton's more general ideas.

The similarity between Blake's Urizen and Milton's Satan has often been pointed out (1). The resemblance is one of position chiefly, not of character.

(1) Cf. M. Berger's, 'Blake.

Urizen attempts to seize the Supreme Power; he falls; he establishes his dominion on Earth over all men by means of false religions; he is finally conquered by Jesus. The main lines of his adventure are thus comparable to Satan's in Milton. But the precise episodes and the meanings given to them are far indeed from Milton's world of ideas or art. Still in many cases we can see in Blake's work a transposition of Milton's into another world.

In the first canto of Vala, Urizen's conspiracy with Luvah recalls Satan's with Beelzebub (1) :

Soon as midnight brought on the dusky hour,
Friendliest to sleep and silence, he resolv'd
With all his legions to dislodge, and leave
Unworship'd, unobey'd, the throne supreme,
Contemptuous; and his next subordinate
Awaking, thus to him in secret spake.

་་

Sleep'st thou, companion dear! what sleep can close

Thy eyelids, and remember'st what decree

Of yesterday, so late hath pass'd the lips

Of heav'n's Almighty? Thou to me thy thoughts
Wast wont, I mine to thee was wont t'impart :
Both waking we were one; how then can now
Thy sleep dissent? Assemble thou

Of all those myriads which we lead the chief:
Tell them, that by command, ere yet dim night
Her shadowy cloud withdraws, I am to haste
(And all who under me their banners wave)
Homeward, with flying march, where we possess
The quarters of the north ».

Thus, Satan. And, while Albion's family

Slept round on hills and valleys in the region of his love,

Urizen awoke and Luvah awoke, and they conferred, thus (2):

« Thou Luvah », said the Prince of Light, « behold our sons and danghters, >> Repose on beds. Let them sleep on; do thou alone depart >> Into thy wished kingdom, where, in Majesty and power, >> We may create a throne. Deep in the North I place my lot, >> Thou in the South. Listen attentive. In silence of this night, >> I will infold the universal tent in clouds opaque, while thou >> Seizest the chariots of the morning — >>

Urizen with darkness overspreading all the armies

Sent round his heralds secretly commanding to depart.
Into the North. Sudden with thunder's sound his multitudes

(1) Book V, 666.

(2) Vala, I, 445.