read of these antinomians of the Middle Ages in a source that selected so aptly the aspects of their teachings that would have interested him.

A very interesting article in Englische Studien for 1920 suggests that Blake had also come into contact with the traditions of the Cabala that had been built up by the Jewish scholars during the Middle Ages. The author of this article is quite sure that Blake had read some one of the cabalistical books by this time accessible at second-hand to Englishmen in various works on the Cabala, and more directly accessible in German versions available in Blake's time.95 It is not certain that Blake could actually read German well enough to find his way in the highly complicated paths even of the Kabbala Denudata. But Herr Fehr certainly presents a convincing case for Blake's having in some way got hold of cabalistic ideas. Blake's use of the "blue Mundane Shell" for the whole visible world of appearance, as in Milton I, 19 (Ellis' edition), is one example that he points out. Another is the indebtedness of Blake's handling of Albion in the Jerusalem to the cabalistic doctrines of the Adam Kadmon who, symbolically, contained in his members all the world.96 Herr Fehr says:

96

Blake had in his mind some such cabalistical conception of Adam Kadmon and his significance when he planned the great prophetic poem Jerusalem. Here he astounds the critics by an incomprehensible symbolical geography. Poplar, Paddington, Malden, Canterbury, appear as members of the giant Albion, and the mystification becomes still more confusing when we look at one of the illustrations which he has added to the poem. Here he exhibits on a large scale his own body which comprehends the whole universe with Sun, Moon, and Stars. It is of course Adam Kadmon-as Albion translated from the Jewish into the British-that meets us here.""

Herr Fehr points out other striking resemblances, but these are the most important. Again it is very difficult to prove anything, but it is interesting to note the possibility of such a contribution to the resources upon which Blake could draw for his own work.

Finally, in all Blake's writing and in all his reading and think

95 Bernhard Fehr, "William Blake und die Kabbala," Englische Studien, LIV (1920), 139-48.

96 Ibid., p. 142.

97 Ibid., p. 144.

ing one influence was beyond any question constantly at work: that of the Bible, both the Old and the New Testaments. To trace such an influence in detail is impossible because of its all-pervasive character; to suggest its main lines is to develop the subject of Blake's religious belief, the business of another chapter. Here it is possible to notice only two things about Blake's reading of the Bible: First, that the sections of the Bible that seem most to have impressed his imagination are not the more lucid and humanly simple passages like the Psalms of David or the Parables of the New Testament. Rather, Blake's imagination seems to have been caught by the whirling denunciations of Isaiah or those strange visions of horned beast and jeweled wall that have made the Revelation of St. John the Divine the delight of visionaries of all ages. Much that seems unbelievably strange in Blake's Jerusalem may be traced back to those visions of Patmos in which finally the aged apostle is supposed to have seen "that great city, the holy Jerusalem, descending out of heaven from God."98

And the second thing is that just as Blake's imagination sought out and appropriated what was most congenial to its own native workings, so Blake's general point of view colored and interpreted all he read. The Everlasting Gospel of 1810 shows what the central figure of the New Testament became in his hands. In the light of his own inspiration he seems to have read his own Bible. Indeed, in a certain sense Blake may be said to have made his own gospel and his own Christianity. M. Berger has pointed out that Blake's religion of art carries to a superlative degree ideas already current even in his own lifetime in the various romantic groups of England, France, and Germany." But, as the French critic recognizes, there can be no question of Blake's pre-eminence in thoroughness and energy of conviction.

From this inquiry into the elements of Blake's life and reading that may have influenced his mysticism two things emerge into certainty: The first is the extraordinary isolation of spirit in which he passed his life, an isolation that confirmed the bias of his own temper without that enlargement and enrichment that results from

98 Rev. 21:10.

90 Berger, op. cit., p. 207.

really effective and critical contact with one's peers. And the second is the fact that in his reading, where he enjoyed practically his sole opportunity for receiving influence from other minds, he seems in general to have paid faithful attention only to writers of a persuasion congenial to his own. Where they have confirmed his own leanings there is reason to think he has appropriated; where they have differed, he has often transmuted the alien conception into a form more harmonious with his own view; but there is practically no evidence to suggest any real modification of his way of thinking. In his reading as in his social contacts, where he encountered disagreement Blake seems to have summarily rejected what displeased him and stood firm in his own conviction.

CHAPTER VI

BLAKE'S MESSAGE

William Blake set forth his vision of man's life in a series of works, almost all in verse, extending from the years just before 1789, the date of the Songs of Innocence, to 1820, when Jerusalem was engraved. Practically all of these works are accompanied by illustrations, from one point of view an integral part of the text, but often so loosely related that they may in general be left for consideration with Blake's pictures by any study which is primarily concerned with the content of the writings themselves. These may be roughly classified into three main groups: the lyrics the Songs of Innocence and of Experience; the treatises-the Marriage of Heaven and Hell and the Everlasting Gospel; and the symbolic narratives. The last group, by far the largest and, for our purposes, the most important, falls into three natural groups: first, the socalled "Minor Prophetical Writings," beginning with Tiriel, in 1789, and running through the Song of Los, in 1795, and comprehending in all eleven distinct poems or fragments of poems; second, the Nine Nights of Vala, a huge agglomeration of between four and five thousand lines, which Blake seems to have worked on between 1795 and 1804, which he never completed or even fully organized, and which he seems later to have used as a sort of quarry, not only retelling the stories, but transposing whole passages into Milton and Jerusalem; and third, the most complete and mature of his "Prophetic Books," Milton, some two thousand lines long, written between 1804 and 1808, and Jerusalem, The Emanation of the Giant Albion, carried from 1804 to 1820, a fairly complete work of about five thousand lines.

Any complete study of Blake's literary work must also take into account several more miscellaneous but very important sources: his letters, of which about eighty-seven are known, centering, because of the chance of appreciative preservation, about three

periods of Blake's life, the first with a group of some eleven letters written to various people from 1800 to 1803; the second with thirty-two letters addressed to William Hayley, written at various times from 1803 to 1805; and the third, more than twenty years later, with twenty-four written between 1824 and 1827 to John Linnell. In general, the third group is of less interest than the first two groups, which throw very important light upon Blake's temperament and his relations to other people, to say nothing of the important matter of vision. Then there are his marginal comments on other writers, notably on Bacon, Swedenborg, Reynolds, and Wordsworth, and some incidental critical writings like the Descriptive Catalogue of 1809 and the "Public Address" of 1810, and, finally, what is for the student of Blake's mind and temper the most important of all, Blake's private notebook, chiefly contained in that famous collection of poems, epigrams, and fragments, ranging all the way from the grossly indecent to the delicately poetic, known as the "Rossetti Manuscript.”

Superficially viewed, this appears to be a very heterogeneous mass of material. But if one disregards differences of form and discrepancies in detail and is careful to take into account the relation to context as well as the apparent meanings of terms, he soon finds that these various works do make a whole so far as fundamental point of view and controlling energy are concerned. To take an extreme example, it would seem as if no two things could be more unlike both in theme and in form, than the Songs of Innocence, 1789, and Jerusalem, 1804-20, but the point of view revealed in the "Voice of the Ancient Bard," which closes the Songs in the particular copy which Dr. Keynes uses for his text, is the point of view of Jerusalem. Again, the plea for enfranchised love in the Visions of the Daughters of Albion, of 1793, arises out of the same faith in unrestricted energy that inspires the antinomian Christ of the Everlasting Gospel of twenty-five years later.

The same is true of the complicated symbolism through which the majority of Blake's visions are expressed. At first it seems so complicated, so obscure, so incoherent, so utterly unrelated to any world of meaning with which the reader is familiar, that his first impulse is to dismiss it as mad nonsense. But the more the pro