BOOKS.

WILLIAM BLAKE'S POEMS.*

THERE are few men of genius who demand more sympathy and consideration from the critic than William Blake. He lived less in our world than in one of his own creation, and the ordinary maxims which govern the conduct of most people were overlooked by him. Little regard did he give to that which is the daily care of intelligent Englishmen,—money-making. He took no thought of the morrow, cared nothing for fortune, and was content, day by day, if only he could earn sufficient to supply the daily wants. His joy was in his work, and in the exercise of an imagination vivid enough to transform the children of the brain into grand or lovely shapes, to endow them with life, and to enable him to con- verse with them as with friends. His vast powers—and those who care least for Blake must allow that his powers were extra- ordinary—never produced more than the pittance of a humble clerk, and in his old age he lived, with his admirable wife, in two rooms, one of which was his studio, his bedroom, and his kitchen, while the other was kept for the reception of company. Blake's position, be it remembered, was not due to any kind of extrava- gance, or inconsiderateness, or thoughtless generosity. He was scrupulously just in his dealings, lived always within his small income, and lived, too, thanks to his natural refinement and the management of his wife, without the tokens of sordid penury. Nevertheless, "last shillings," we are told, were at all periods of Blake's life a frequent incident of his household economy ; but he believed he should always be supplied with money when he needed it, and he was not disappointed. So intrinsically great was the man, that he gave dignity and beauty to everything around him, and so tender and sympathetic was his nature that those who knew him best loved him with no common love. There is another side to Blake's life, of which we shall say a word presently, but it is pleasant to dwell for a moment on some of the beautiful incidents recorded by his biographers. Blake possessed, if ever man did, "the sweet peace that goodness bosoms ever." We are told bow, in his old age, he put his hands on the head of a lovely little girl, and said, "May God make this world to you, • The Poetical WOrill of William Blake, Lyrical and Miscellaneous. Edited, with a Prefatory Memoir, by William Michael Rossetti. London: George Bell and sons. my child, as beautiful as it has been to me ;" and his friend, Mr. Palmer, writes, "If asked whether I ever knew among the in- tellectual a nappy man, Blake would be the only one who would immediately occur to me." Conversing with him, says the same friend, you saw or felt nothing of his poverty, and he declares that the high, gloomy buildings to be seen from his windows in Fountain Court "assumed a kind of grandeur from the man. dwelling near them." The artist kept no servant, and was accustomed every morning to light the fire and fill the kettle for breakfast before his wife got up. She was an excellent manager, a good cook, and as patient, one would imagine, at least in later life, as Job himself. In his last illness he needed no one but his Kate. "You have ever been an angel to me," he said, and on the day he died "he composed and uttered hymns to his Maker so sweetly to the ear of his Catherine, that when she stood to hear him he, looking upon her most affectionately, said, My beloved, they are not mine. No ! they are not mine !'" He told her they would not be parted ; he should always be about her, to take care of her. The widow followed her husband a few years later, and in her last hours lay calmly and cheerfully "repeating texts of Scripture and calling continually to her William, as if he were only in the next room, to say that she was coming to him,. and would not be long now." It is as sad as it seems extra- ordinary that William Blake and his wife should have been buried in an unmarked grave. Several friends followed the artist to his grave in that most dreary of resting-places, Bunhill

and yet there was not one to raise even a simple stone to his memory. It is too late now, for the exact spot is unknown, and Mr. Gilchrist observes that as it was a common grave, "it was doubtless—to adopt the official euphuism for the barest sacrilege- -used again, after the lapse of fifteen years, say." It seems to us a kind of shame that such a man should have been so treated. He left not a debt behind, but the last debt due to his memory from friends remained unpaid.

The beautiful and "first collected edition" of Blake's lyricar poems, edited by Mr. W. M. Rossetti, reminds us of the change that has taken place of recent years in the estimation of the poet- artist's genius. Of Blake as an artist it is not the place to speak now, and yet so closely did he blend the two arts in which he excelled, that it is scarcely possible to mention the one without alluding to the other. It is impossible, too, to write distinctly of either without taking into account the amazing idiosyncrasied or aberrations of the artist. Blake, as everybody knows, saw visions and dreamt dreams. He professed, as some modern spiritualists profess, that he was directly inspired, and any at- tempt to shake him in this belief was altogether futile. He drew visionary heads, and was able to summon up almost at will any historical personage whose portrait he might wish to take. Even, "the Devil himself would politely sit in a chair to Blake, and inno- cently disappear." He believed in a previous existence, and said' once to Crabb Robinson, "I was Socrates, or a sort of brother. I musthave had conversations with him. So I had with Jesus Christ. I have an obscure recollection of having been with both of them.'r On another occasion, the artist said, "You never saw the spiritual sun ? I have. I saw him on Primrose HilL He Said, Do you take me for the Greek Apollo? No! That (pointing to the sky), that is the Greek Apollo ; he is Satan!' " The often-told story of Blake and his wife sitting in a summer-house, in the dress of Adam and Eve before the Fall, is merely mentioned in a note by Mr. Rossetti, who observes that the anecdote has a mythic air, and that it has been "retailed oftener than was needful for such a triviality in the case of so lofty a man as Blake." To which remark it may be replied, that the story was originally told by Mr. Thomas Butts, the best friend Blake ever had, who himself found the pair in the arbour in this singular condition; that it is accepted by Mr. Gilchrist, and that the fact of Blake being a "lofty" man seems an insufficient reason for omitting a charac- teristic anecdote. One of the noteworthy incidents in Blake's life was his connection with Hayley—Cowper's Hayley. The author of The Triumphs of Temper gained a reputation in his day which to. us is wholly incomprehensible. He was a man of considerable cul- ture, but as a poet he was contemptible. The common-place and applauded poetaster and the visionary and waregarded poet were- scarcely likely to coalesce; nevertheless, for four years Blake managed to live, to use Mr. Rossetti's own words, "under Hayley'a patronage ;" and "The Hermit" does appear to have acted a most generous part towards a man with whom he could have had little sympathy. "Mr. Hayley acts like a prince," wrote the artist, after nearly eighteen months' experience, yet he after- wards, in doggrel verse, accused the mild Hayley of the vilest conduct :—

"And when he could not act upon my wife, Hired a villain to bereave my life."

It seems to us impossible to doubt that Blake, whose susceptible temperament may be judged of from the intercourse he held, or -thought he held, with spirits, was to some extent crazed. If he were not, how are we to account for much of his poetry which is absolute and unmitigated nonsense. Even Mr. Gilchrist, who

stands up manfully for Blake's sanity, allows that he has written much which is hard to fathom, that it is impossible to trace any distinct subject in the "Europe," or "to determine whether it mainly relates to the past, present, or to come!" that another of the "prophetic books" is "shapeless and unfathomable ;" and the best he can say of "The Song of Los" is that we seem to

,catch in it a thread of connected meaning. On this matter, the .opinion expressed by Mr. Rossetti is, we think, sound :— "To call Blake simply a madman would be ridiculous and despicable; -even to call him (as some have done) an inspired madman would be most incomplete and misleading. But it may, I think, be allowed to say that he was a sublime genius, often perfectly sane, often vieionary and exalti, without precisely losing his hold upon sanity, and sometimes .exhibiting an insane taint We have his product before us, and are constrained to form some estimate of it. There are portions of it which not one of us can possibly hoodwink himself into receiving as the right sort of thing. We must condemn them as faulty, and even heinous, according to any true standard of art. If we eliminate them SB coming from the mad chink of Blake's mind, we leave indemnified tho far larger proportion of his work to which the same censure does not apply. But if, on the other hand, through timorous respect and -consideration for his genius, we flinch from this conclusion, we are then -compelled to say that Blake, in full possession of his rationality, could write much that was fatuous and nonsensical—' balderdash,' to use a plain word—as well as much that was noble and admirable; and this leaves an uneasy sense of insecurity in his reader, and casts a slur over the whole body of the author's work."

To this we may add, that if Blake's mind were thoroughly sane, -there are passages in his poetry which are perverse to a degree that is inexcusable—witness "the wholly amazing poem" called 4' The Everlasting Gospel,"—and harsh remarks on his contem- poraries which seem out of harmony with the beautiful and humble spirit of the man as manifested in his serener moments.

As a poet, Blake's power of conception was far beyond his skill in execution. Imagination will be found combined with exqui- site felicity of expression in all poetical work that is destined to -enduring life. Itis through the lovely marriage of pure words that a grand or beautiful thought is secured to posterity. It is possible, no doubt, for art, when too refined and finessing, to overlay nature ; but this affords no argument for despising art, of which our greatest poets have always been the profoundest students. Blake unfor- tunately did not care, or was unable to bestow the needful labour on his poems. Possibly, and not altogether unreason- -ably, the poetical deadness of an age which applauded the tame but carefully composed productions of Charlotte Smith and Darwin, of Hayley and Miss Seward, led him to despise the art which had been employed so unprofitably. Mr. Rossetti allows that Blake was often palpably faulty in his transgression, even -of the obvious laws of grammar and of metre ; that in at- tempting; "the heroic sublime," he generally lost himself in an Ossianic tumidity and mistiness ; that he made an arbitrary use of words and symbols, and that of his poems, -a certain proportion "is really not intelligible save by an effort of conjecture." Above all is this the case, in the bio- grapher's opinion, with the "Prophetic Books," which "are dark -and chaotic to the extremest degree; ponderous and turbid, battling and baffling like the arms of a windmill when the wind blows shifthigly from all quarters." Yet while avowing that these books,

-taken as a whole, are neither readable nor even entirely sane, Mr. Rossetti considers it highly desirable that this "very unreadable

series of works" should be republished in ordinary book shape. We disagree with him altogether. Blake wrote a great deal of what, had it been the work of a smaller man, would be accounted trash, and the sooner it is forgotten the better for his fame. We venture indeed to think that Mr. Rossetti would have done wisely to omit a good deal contained in this small volume, since there .are passages here as free almost from mind and meaning as any -combination of words could well be. It appears that, in some instances, the editor has exercised his judgment, having omitted .certain pieces contained in the MS. volume in the possession of his brother, and one poem printed by Mr. Swinburne, because it appears "a performance of too much tenuity and caprice for re- production here." We can but wish Mr. Rossetti had been still more scrupulous in rejecting pieces hitherto unpublished, which are likely to depress rather than enhance the reputation of the poet. Fortunate, perhaps, it might have proved for Blake, had he chanced in his life-time to receive the homage, not always considerate, as it seems to us, which is now paid to him by a small circle of admirers. Much that they say con- cerning him is in the highest degree true, and is expressed, it need scarcely be said, since the chief of these admirers is Mr. Swin- burne, in the most eloquent language ; but much also will as little bear examination as the wildest outbursts of the poet himself. We start, for instance, when we are told, as we lately have been told in a critical journal, that Blake is the greatest English poet of the eighteenth century. If the writer had asserted that certain of Blake's short lyrics were marked by a sublety of thought, a spon- taneity, and a lyrical charm such as no other poet of his age has equalled, while acknowledging at the same time the stupendous defects visible in all but a few of his choicest pieces, most sensi- tive readers of poetry would have acknowledged the justice of the criticism ; but it is something like fatuity to give such a position to a poet whose loveliest work is always his slightest, and who was unable, unless as it were by a splendid chance, to give perfect expression to his most original conceptions.

Blake is, we think, always most satisfactory and lovely when in his most childlike moods. Like his great successor Words- worth, the simplicity of childhood attracts as nothing else can the spiritual and poetical parts of his nature. Scarcely more

than a child himself when he began to sing—the Poetical Sketches were published between Blake's twelfth and twentieth years—he

retained a child's heart all his life through. Often in his little songs he shows an exquisite sense of lyrical sweetness; and also a naturalness of mood which is as rare as it is delightful. The following charming lyric is said, but the statement seems scarcely credible, to have been written by Blake before he was fourteen years old. It has but one faulty line, the conventional allusion to Phcebus :—

" How sweet I roamed from field to field,

And tasted all the summer's pride, Till I the Prince of Love beheld, Who in the sunny beams did glide.

He showed me lilies for my hair, And blushing roses for may brow ; He led me through his gardens fair Where all his golden pleasures grow.

With sweet May-dews my wings were wet, And Phcebus fired my vocal rage ; He caught me in his silken net, And shut me in his golden cage.

He loves to sit and hear me sing, Then, laughing, sports and plays with me ; Then stretches out my golden wing, And mocks my loss of liberty."

Then there is the "Mad Song," a lyric which, if composed by a youth in his teens, is one of the most extraordinary instances of precocity on record ; and an invocation to Memory which Fletcher might have been proud to have written, and which reminds us of that poet. At this early stage of his poetical life, and to the close of it, Blake is excellent only as the writer of short lyrics. Any work demanding a sustained flight is utterly beyond his strength of wing. Many of the poems now published will be new to almost all readers, and feye probably are acquainted with the "Poetical Sketches" which appeared, as Mr. Rossetti points out, before the first publications of Cowper and of Burns. If it be true, which is, perhaps, open to question, that Blake never sur- passed "in absolute, lyrical gift, nor yet, indeed, in literary finish,

the most excellent things in his earliest volume," there is no doubt that the "Songs of Innocence" have made a stronger, although at best but a faint impression on the public. Strange to say, the name of Blake does not appear in Mr. Palgrave's Golden Treasury, but Archbishop Trench quotes five songs in his collection of which two have taken a place in our popular poetical

literature ; we allude to "Holy Thursday" and the "Chimney- sweep." Another poem, too well known to be quoted, is "The Tiger," of which we have here two versions. Two tiny poems that follow each other in the volume may be quoted as illustrating Blake's simplicity and purity of style. They are the merest buds of poetry, but the odour from them is more fragrant than from many a full-blown flower. The first of these songlets is called_ "Love's Secret:"—

"Never seek to tell thy love,

Love that never told can be : For the gentle wind doth move Silently, invisibly.

"I told my love, I told my love. I told her all my heart, Trembling, cold, in ghastly fears, Ah ! she did depart!

"Soon after she was gono from me, A traveller came by, Silently, invisibly, He took her with a sigh."

Still more striking, in its singular brevity and "The Wild-flower's Song ":—

" As I wandered in the forest, The green leaves among, I hoard a wild-flower

Singing a song :-

'I I slept in the earth In the silent night ;

I murmured my thoughts, And I felt delight.

In the morning I went, As rosy as morn, To seek for new joy, But I met with scorn.'"

Blake's life and poetry is so alluring a subject, and suggests so many topics for discussion, that we part from it unwillingly,— not, however, without thanking Mr. Rossetti for the careful manner in which he has edited the volume, and for the clear and concise narrative of the artist's life. It is scarcely needful to say that we are very far from agreeing with many of the opinions expressed from time to time by Mr. Rossetti on matters poetical. In the present case, however, we find comparatively few remarks that are open to controversy, and the skilful manner in which the editor has accomplished a by no means easy task deserves our heartiest commendation. naturalness