book of Hayley's again won an audience.
June 1 8th, 1808, is the engraver's date to the duodecimo
edition of Hayley's Ballads on Animals. These prints are
unfair examples of Blake's skill and imperfect versions of his
designs ; they have more than his ordinary hardness of man-
ner. Two ā The Eagle and The Lion ā are repetitions from the
quarto. TJie Dog, The Hermifs Dog, and The Horse, are new.
.^ā¢:r. 48.] LETTERS TO HAYLEY. 22$
The last-named is, perhaps, the finest in the series. Even
though the horse's hind leg be in an impossible position, and
though there be the usual lack of correct local detail, very-
striking and soulful is the general effect ; especially so is that
serene, majestic, feminine figure, standing before her terrified
child and bravely facing the frenzied animal, which, by mere
spiritual force, she subdues into motionless awe.
VOL. L
Q
CHAPTER XXI.
THE JERUSALEM AND MILTON. 1804. [ut. 47.]
In two letters to Mr. Butts (p. 185-7) Blake had alluded to
a 'long poem' descriptive of the 'spiritual acts of his three
years' slumber on the banks of Ocean.' This was entitled
Jerusalem ; the Emanation of tJie Giant Albion, 1804, Printed
by W.Blake, South Molton Street; it is a large quarto volume
of a hundred engraved pages, writing and design ; only one
side of each leaf being engraved. Most copies are printed
with plain black and white, some with blue ink, some red ;
a few are tinted. For a tinted copy the price was twenty
guineas.
The Jerusalem is prefaced by an ' Address ' to the public,
in a style to which the public is little accustomed : ā
Sheep. /-ā-^ ^\^Goats.
To the Public.
""^After my three years slumber on the banks of Ocean, I again
display my giant forms to the public : my former giants and fairies
having received the highest reward possible ; the . . . and ... of
those with whom to be connected is to be . . . I cannot doubt that
this more consolidated and extended work will be ... as kindly re-
ceived . . . &c. * * Ā» Reader, what you do not approve, &c. ... me
for this energetic exertion of my talents.
Although the Jerusalem was conceived, and in great part
written at Felpham, it was finished in London whilst the
work of engraving for Hayley was still going on. At page
38 we find : ā
From JERUSALF.ir.
^.T. 47.] THE JERUSALEM. 227
In Felpham I saw and heard the visions of Albion ;
I write in South Molton Street what I both see and hear.
In regions of humanity, in London's opening streets
I see the awful Parent Land in light.
Behold I see !
Verulam ! Canterbury ! venerable parent of men !
Generous immortal guardian ! Golden clad ; for cities
Are men, fathers of multitudes ; and rivers and mountains
Are also men : everything is human ! mighty ! sublime I
The poem, since poem we are to call it, is mostly written
in prose ; occasionally in metrical prose ; more rarely still it
breaks forth into verse. Here is the author's own account
of the matter: ā
When this verse was first dictated to me, I considered a monoton-
ous cadence, like that used by Milton, Shakspeare and all writers of
English blank verse, derived from the modern bondage of rhyming,
to be a necessary and indispensable part of the verse. But I soon
found that, in the mouth of a true orator, such monotony was not
only awkward, but as much a bondage as rhyme itself. I, therefore,
have produced a variety in every line, both in cadence and number
of syllables. Every word and every letter is studied, and put into
its place. The terrific numbers are reserved for the terrific parts, the
mild and gentle for the mild and gentle parts, and the prosaic for
inferior parts : all are necessary to each other.
There is little resemblance to the ' prophetic books ' of
earlier date. We hear no longer of the wars, the labours,
the sufferings, the laments of Ore, Rintrah, Urizen, or
Enitharmon. Religious enthusiasm, always a strong element
in Blake's mental constitution, always deeply tinging his
imaginative creations, seems, during the time of the lonely
sea-shore life, to have been kindled into over-mastering
intensity. ' I have written this poem from immediate dicta-
'tion, twelve, or .sometimes twenty or thirty lines at a time ;
' without premeditation, and even against my will ; thus an
' immense poem exists which seems to be the labour of a long
'life, all produced without labour or study,' he wrote in a
letter already cited to Mr. Butts. Such a belief in plenary
inspiration, such a deliberate abjuring of the guidance and
Q 2
228 LIFE OF WILLIAM BLAKE. [1804.
control of intellect and will, could have but one result.
' Scattered upon the void in incoherent despair,' to borrow
his own too appropriate vvords, are our thoughts whilst the
eyes wander, hopeless and dispirited, up and down the large
closely-written pages. The following lines instance in brief
the devout and earnest spirit in which Blake wrote, the high
aims he set before him, and afford also a glimpse of the most
strange and unhappy result, ā dark oracles, words presenting
endless obstacles to all but him who uttered them : ā
Trembling I sit, day and night. My friends are astonisht at me :
Yet they forgive my wand'rings. I rest not from my great task :
To open the eternal worlds ! To open the immortal eyes
Of man inwards ; into the worlds of thought : into eternity
Ever expanding in the bosom of God, the human imagination.
O Saviour ! pour upon me thy spirit of meekness and love.
Annihilate selfhood in me ! Be thou all my life !
Guide thou my hand, which trembles exceedingly, upon the Rock
of Ages !
While I write of the building of Golgonooza and of the terrors
of Entuthon :
Of Hand and Hyle, and Coban ; of Kwantok, Peachey, Brereton,
Slayd, and Hutton :
Of the terrible sons and daughters of Albion and their generations.
Scofield, Kox, Kotope and Bowen revolve most mightily upon
The furnace of Los, before the eastern gate bending their fury.
They war to destroy the furnaces ; to desolate Golgonooza,
And to devour, the sleeping humanity of Albion in rage and hunger.
There is an ominous sentence in one of the letters to Mr.
Butts, where, speaking of the Jerusalem, he says, ' the persons
' and machinery entirely new to the inhabitants of earth {some
'of the persons excepted)! The italics are mine, and, alas! to
what wisp-led flounderings of research might they not lure a
reckless adventurer. The mixture of the unaccountable with
the familiar in nomenclature which occurs towards the close
of the preceding extract from the Jerusalem is puzzling
enough in itself; but conjecture attains bewilderment when
we realize that one of the names, ' Scofield ' (spelt perhaps
more properly Scholfield, but pronounced no doubt as above).
/i;t. 47.] THE JERUSALEM. 229
was that of the soldier who had brought a charge of sedition
against Blake at Felpham. Whether the other English
names given were in some way connected with the trial
would be worth any practicable inquiries. When we con-
sider the mystical connection in which this name of Scofield
is used, a way seems opened into a more perplexed region of
morbid analogy existing in Blake's brain than perhaps any
other key could unlock. It is a minute point, yet a signi-
ficant and amazing one. Further research discovers further
references to ' Scofield,' for instance,
' Go thou to Skofield :
Ask him if he is Bath or if he is Canterbury :
Tell him to be no more dubious : demand explicit words :
Tell him I will dash him into shivers where and at what time
I please. Tell him, Hand and Skofield, they are ministers of evil
To those I hate : for I can hate also as well as they.'
Again (not without Jack the Giant Killer to help) : ā
' Hark ! hear the giants of Albion cry at night, ā
We smell the blood of the English, we delight in their blood on
our altars ;
The living and the dead shall be ground in our crumbling mill.
For bread of the sons of Albion, of the giants Hand and Skofield :
Skofield and Cox are let loose upon the Saxons ; they accumulate
A world in which man is, by his nature, the enemy of man.'
Again (and woe is the present editor !) : ā
" These are the names of Albion's twelve sons and of his twelve
daughters : ā '
(Then follows a long enumeration, ā to each name certain
countries attached) : ā
'Skofield had Ely, Rutland, Cambridge, Huntingdon,
Norfolk, Suffolk, Hertford, Essex, and his emanation is Guinivere.' (! ! !)
The first of the three above quotations seems meant really
as a warning to Scholfield to be exact in evidence as to his
place of birth or other belongings, and as to the 'explicit
words ' used by Blake ! Cox and Courthope are Sussex
names : can these be the - Kox ' and ' Kotope ' of the poem,
and names in some way connected, like Schofield's, w^ith the
230 LIFE OF WILLIAM BLAKE. [1804.
trial ? Is the wild, wild tale of Schofield exhausted here ?
Alas no ! At leaf 5 1 of the Jerusalem occurs the design
which is reproduced opposite. In some, perhaps in all,
copies of the Jerusalem, as a whole, the names inscribed
above the figures are not given, but at least three examples
of water-colour drawings, or highly-coloured reproductions of
the plate exist, in which the names appear as in our plate.
Who ' Vala ' and ' Hyle ' may personify I do not pretend to
conjecture, though dim surmises hurtle in the mind, which,
like De Quincey in the catastrophe of the Spanish Nun, I
shall keep to myself. These two seem, pretty clearly, to be
prostrate at the discomfiture of Schofield, who is finally
retiring fettered into his native element. As a historical
picture then, Blake felt it his duty to monumentalise this
design with due inscription. Two of the three hand-coloured
versions, referred to above, are registered as Nos. 50 and 5 1
of the Catalogue in Vol. II., and the third version appears
as No. 108 in the Burlington Catalogue. I may note another
point bearing on the personal grudges shadowed in the
Jerusalem. In Blake's Public Address (see Vol. II.), he says,
' The manner in which my character has been blasted these
' thirty years, both as an artist and a man, may be seen,
' particularly in a Sunday paper called the Examiner, pub-
' lished in Beaufort's Buildings (we all know that editors of
' newspapers trouble their heads very little about art and
' science, and that they are always paid for what they put
'in upon these ungracious subjects); and the manner in
' which I have rooted out the nest of villains will be seen in
' a poem concerning my three years Herculean labours at
* Felpham, which I shall soon publish. Secret calumny and
' open professions of friendship are common enough all the
' world over, but have never been so good an occasion of
poetic imagery.' Thus we are evidently to look (or sigh in vain)
for some indication of Blake's wrath against the Examiner in
the vast Jerusalem. It is true that the Examiner persecuted
him, his publications and exhibition, and that Leigh Hunt
/TJT. 47-J THE JERUSALEM. 23 I
was prone to tell ' good stories ' of him, as we shall see later ;
and in some MS. doggerel of Blake's we meet with the line,
'The Examiner whose very name is Hunt.'
But what form can the irate allegory be supposed to take
in the Jerusalem ? Is it conceivable that that mysterious
entity or non-entity, * Hand,' whose name occurs sometimes
in the poem, and of whom an incribed spectrum is there
given at full length, can be a hieroglyph for Leigh Hunt .''
Alas, what is possible or impossible in such a connection .''
Of the names strung together in the first extract in this
chapter, many do not occur again throughout the book ; and
to some, the perplexed reader fails, to the last, to attach any
idea. Their owners can hardly be spoken of as shadows,
for a shadow has a certain definition of form. It may be
surmised that the Jerusalem is to be regarded as an allegory
in which the lapse of the human race from a higher spiritual
state, and its struggles towards a return to such, arc the
main topics. ' Jerusalem ' is once spoken of as Liberty ; she
is also apostrophized as 'mild shade of man,' and must,
on the whole, be taken to symbolize a milennial state.
There is sometimes a quaint felicity in the choice of
homely, familiar things as symbols, as in this description of
Golgonooza, the ' spiritual fourfold London ' (for so it is
afterwards called in the Milton) : ā
Lo!
The stones are pity, and the bricks well-wrought affections,
Enamelled with love and kindness; and the tiles, engraven gold,
Labour of merciful hands ; the beams and rafters are forgiveness ;
The mortar and cement of the work, tears of honesty ; the nails
And the screws and iron traces are well-wrought blandishments,
And well-contrived words, firm fixing, never forgotten.
Always comforting the remembrance : the floors humility ;
The ceilings devotion \ the hearths thanksgiving.
Far more curious is the following song. It seems to in-
dicate again that Jerusalem may have with Blake, in a wide
acceptation, its not unusual significance of ' The True
Church ; ' seeing that the portion of the poem in which this
song occurs is addressed 'To the Jews,' and that the British
232
LIFE OF WILLIAM BLAKE.
[1804.
V
1
A
nation, nevertheless, seems here as elsewhere in Blake's
writings, to be ' the chosen people,' or as one may say, ' the
Jews regenerate.' This song is given as an example of what
Blake could do in his most exacting moods, if indeed he
really expected any listener other than a ' spectre ' or ' ema-
nation ' of his own to hearken to such strains ; combining
as they do, localities familiar only to penny-a-lining with
conceptions * pinnacled dim in the intense inane.' The early
part of the song is included, indeed, not without hesitation,
lest the reader should laugh at one whose creation was not
for laughter; but it had better speak as a
whole for itself, and for its author's wildest
exigencies. The inmost cell of the poetic
mind will not find the familiar names in
such connexion altogether unwelcome ;
and after the stanza commencing,
' The Rhine was red with human blood,'
the verse opens out into reaches of utter-
ance much nobler, and surely, here and
there, not unsuggestive of prophecy.
To the yews.
The fields from Islington to Marybone,
To Primrose Hill and Saint John's Wood,
Were builded over with pillars of gold ;
And there Jerusalem's pillars stood.
Her little ones ran on the fields,
The Lamb of God among them seen ;
And fair Jerusalem, his Bride,
Among the little meadows green.
Pancras and Kentish Town repose
Among her golden pillars high,
Among her golden arches which
Shine upon the starry sky.
The Jew's-Harp House and the Green Man,
The Ponds where boys to bathe delight,
The fields of cows by Welling's farm,
Shine in Jerusalem's pleasant sight.
^
MT. 47.]
THE JERUSALEM.
233
She walks upon our meadows green
The lamb of God walks by her side,
And every English child is seen,
Children of Jesus and His Bride :
Forgiving trespasses and sins,
Lest Babylon, with cruel Og,
With moral and self-righteous Law,
Should crucify in Satan's synagogue.
What are those golden builders doing
Near mournful, ever-weeping Paddington ?
Standing above that mighty ruin
Where Satan the first victory won ?
Where Albion slept beneath the fatal tree,
And the Druid's golden knife
Rioted in human gore,
In offerings of human life?
They groaned aloud on London Stone,
They groaned aloud on Tyburn's brook :
Albion gave his deadly groan.
And all the Atlantic mountains shook.
Albion's spectre from his loins
Tore forth in all the pomp of war,
Satan his name : in flames of fire,
He stretched his Druid pillars far.
Jerusalem fell from Lambeth's vale
Down through Poplar and old Bow,
Through Maiden, and across the sea.
In war and howling, death and woe.
The Rhine was red with human blood,
The Danube roll'd a purple tide.
On the Euphrates Satan stood
And over Asia stretch'd his pride.
He wither'd up sweet Zion's hill
From every nation of the earth,
He wither'd up Jerusalem's gates,
And in a dark land gave her birth.
Rv^
Z"^'
rj*Ā»^
^34
LIFE OF WILLIAM BLAKE.
[1804.
He wither'd up the human form
By laws of sacrifice for sin,
Till it became a mortal worm,
But, O ! translucent all within !
The Divine Vision still was seen.
Still was the human form divine ;
Weeping, in weak and mortal clay,
O Jesus ! still the form was Thine !
And Thine the human face ; and Thine
The human hands, and feet, and breath
Entering through the gates of birth
And passing through the gates of death.
And, O ! Thou Lamb of God ! whom I
Slew in my dark, self-righteous pride,
Art Thou return'd to Albion's land?
And is Jerusalem Thy Bride?
Come to my arms, and never more
Depart; but dwell for ever here ;
Create my spirit to Thy love.
Subdue my spectre to Thy fear.
Spectre of Albion ! warlike fiend !
In clouds of blood and ruin roU'd,
I here reclaim Thee as my own.
My selfliood; Satan arm'd in gold.
Is this thy soft family love?
Thy cruel patriarchal pride ?
Planting thy family alone.
Destroying all the world beside?
A man's worst enemies are those
Of his own house and family;
And he who makes his law a curse
By his own law shall surely die.
In my exchanges every land
Shall walk, and mine in every land.
Mutual, shall build Jerusalem,
Both heart in heart and hand in hand.
^CT. 47.] THE JERUSALEM. 235
Many of Blake's favourite metaphysical and theological
tenets are enlarged upon. As, for instance, the antagonism
of Reason to Faith : ā
And this is the manner of the sons of Albion in their strength :
They take two contraries, which are called qualities, with which
Every substance is clothed : they name them Good and Evil.
From these they make an abstract, which is a negation.
Not only of the substance from which it is derived, ā
A murderer of its own body : but also a murderer
Of every divine member : ā it is the Reasoning Power,
An abstract, objecting Power, that negatives everything.
This is the spectre of man, ā the holy Reasoning Power;
And in its hohness is closed the abomination of desolation.
And again : ā
Are not religion and politics the same thing? Brotherhood is
religion.
He who would do good to another, must do it in minute par-
ticulars :
General good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, and flatterer.
For Art and Science cannot exist but in minutely organized
particulars,
And not in generalizing demonstrations of the Rational Power.
The Infinite alone resides in definite and determinate identity.
Here is another theme he loved to dwell on : ā
All that has existed in the space of six thousand years
Permanent and not lost : not lost nor vanish'd ; and every little
act,
Word, work, and wish that have existed, ā all remaining still
In those churches, ever consuming and ever building by the
spectres
Of all the inhabitants of earth waiting to be created ;
Shadowy to those who dwell not in them ā mere possibilities ;
But, to those who enter into them, they seem the only realities.
For everything exists ; and not one sigh, nor smile, nor tear,
One hair, nor particle of dust ā not one can pass away.
236 LIFE OF WILLIAM BLAKE. [1804,
All things acted on earth are seen in the bright sculptures of
Los's Hall. And every age renews its powers from these works :
With every pathetic story possible to happen from Hate or
Wayward Love. And every sorrow and distress is carved here ;
Every affinity of parents, marriages and friendship's are here
In all their various combinations; wrought with wondrous art,
All that can happen to man in his pilgrimage of seventy years.
Interesting fragments, surely, if only as being so eminently
characteristic of the man. A few more such ā mere fragments
ā I will add before proceeding to speak of the decorative
designs with which every page of the original is enriched : ā
Wherefore hast thou shut me into the winter of human life
And closed up the sweet regions of youth and virgin innocence
Where we live forgetting error, not pondering on evil :
Among my lambs and brooks of water, among my warbling birds,
Where we delight in innocence before the face of the Lamb,
Going in and out before him in his love and sweet affection ?
Vala replied weeping and trembling, hiding in her veil.
When winter rends the hungry family and the snow falls
Upon the ways of men, hiding the paths of man and beast,
Then mourns the wanderer: then he repents his wanderings and
eyes
The distant forest ; then the slave groans in the dungeon of stone,
The captive in the mill of the stranger sold for scanty hire :
They view their former life : they number moments over and over
Stringing them on their remembrance as on a thread of sorrow.
Imagination [is] the real and eternal world, of which this vegetable
universe is but a faint shadow : and in which we shall live, in our
eternal or imaginative bodies, when these vegetable mortal bodies
are no more.
It is easier to forgive an enemy than to forgive a friend.
Without forgiveness of sin, Love itself is eternal Death.
O Albion ! why didst thou a female will create ?
Negations are not contraries. Contraries mutually exist.
But negations exist not; exceptions, objections, unbelief.
Exist not ; nor shall they ever be organized for ever and ever.
from JERUSALEM.
MT. 47.] THE JERUSALEM. 237
If I were pure, never could I taste the sweets of the forgiveness
of sins.
If I were holy, I never could behold the tears of love :
Of Him who loves me in the midst of His anger.
I heard His voice in my sleep, and His angel in my dream
Saying, Doth Jehovah forgive a debt, only on condition that it
shall
Be paid ? Doth He forgive pollution only on condition of purity ?
That debt is not forgiven ! that pollution is not forgiven !
Such is the forgiveness of the gods ; the moral virtues of the
Heathen, whose tender mercies are cruelty. But Jehovah's salvation
Is without money and without price, in the continual forgiveness
of sins.
The vegetative universe opens like a flower from the earth's
centre,
In which is eternity. It expands in stars to the mundane shell.
And there it meets Eternity again, both within and without.
What may man be ? Who can tell ? But what may women be
To have power over man from cradle to corruptible grave ?
He who was an Infant, and whose cradle was a manger,
Knoweth the Infant Sorrow, whence it came and where it goeth.
And who weave it a cradle of the grass that withereth away.
This world is all a cradle for the erred, wandering Phantom,
Rock'd by year, month, day, and hour. And every two moments
Between, dwells a daughter of Beulah, to feed the human vegetable.
Rock the cradle, ah me ! of that eternal man !
The magic influences of one of the ' daughters of Beulah '
are thus described : ā
She creates at her will a little moony night and silence,
With spaces of sweet gardens and a tent of elegant beauty
Closed in by sandy deserts, and a night of stars shining ;
A little tender moon, and hovering angels on the wing.
And the male gives a time and revolution to her space
Till the time of love is passed in ever- varying delights :
For all things exist in the human imagination.
ā¢ This last line contains what deserves to be called the
corner-stone of Blake's philosophy. For his philosophy Aad
238 LIFE OF WILLIAM BLAKE. [1804.
corner-stone and foundation, and was not miraculously
suspended in the air, as his readers might sometimes feel
tempted to believe. Amid all contradictions, incoherences,
wild assertions, this principle, ā that the conceptions of the
mind are the realities of realities, that the human imagination
is an eternal world, ' ever expanding in the bosom of God,' ā
shines steadily forth : and to readers of a speculative turn,
who will be at the pains to examine by its light these erratic
writings, the chaos will resolve itself into substance, though
not into form and order. It is needless to tell such thinkers
that Bishop Berkeley was one on the list of Blake's favourite
authors. But, with his fervid, dauntless imagination, the
artist seized hold of the metaphysician's theory of Idealism,
and strove to quicken it into a grand, poetic Cosmos.
There is another ' Song ' in the Jerusale7n, addressed To
the Deists, beginning ā
I saw a monk of Charlemaine,
which follows soon after the one already quoted To the Jews.
As it is far less singular and characteristic than its predeces-
sor, however, the concluding beautiful stanza is all that shall