of Innocence, or the lyrics he wished.

William
Blake and

to call The Ideas of Good and Evil,' the Imagin

him. He was

ation.

but when one reads those 'Prophetic
Works' in which he spoke confusedly
and obscurely because he spoke of things
for whose speaking he could find no
models in the world about him.
a symbolist who had to invent his
symbols; and his counties of England,
with their correspondence to tribes of
Israel, and his mountains and rivers,
with their correspondence to parts of a
man's body, are arbitrary as some of
the symbolism in the Axel of the
symbolist Villiers De L'Isle Adam is
arbitrary, while they mix incongruous
things as Axel does not. He was a man
crying out for a mythology, and trying
to make one because he could not find
one to his hand. Had he been a Catholic
of Dante's time he would have been well
content with Mary and the angels; or
had he been a scholar of our time he
would have taken his symbols where

1

Good and
Evil.

Ideas of Wagner took his, from Norse mythology; or have followed, with the help of Prof. Rhys, that pathway into Welsh mythology which he found in 'Jerusalem'; or have gone to Ireland-and he was probably an Irishman-and chosen for his symbols the sacred mountains, along whose sides the peasant still sees enchanted fires, and the divinities which have not faded from the belief, if they have faded from the prayers of simple hearts; and have spoken without mixing incongruous things because he spoke of things that had been long steeped in emotion; and have been less obscure because a traditional mythology stood on_the_threshold of his meaning and on the margin of his sacred darkness. If Enitharmon' had been named Freia, or Gwydeon, or Danu, and made live in Ancient Norway, or Ancient Wales, or Ancient Ireland, we would have forgotten that her maker was a mystic; and the hymn of her harping, that is in

Vala, would but have reminded us of many ancient hymns.

'The joy of woman is the death of her beloved, Who dies for love of her,

In torments of fierce jealousy and pangs of adoration.

The lover's night bears on my song,

And the nine spheres rejoice beneath my powerful control.

They sing unwearied to the notes of my immortal hand.

The solemn, silent moon

Reverberates the long harmony sounding upon my limbs.

The birds and beasts rejoice and play,

And every one seeks for his mate to prove his
inmost joy.

Furious and terrible they rend the nether deep,
The deep lifts up his rugged head,

And lost in infinite hovering wings vanishes with

a cry.

The fading cry is ever dying,

The living voice is ever living in its inmost

William Blake and the Imagin

ation.

joy.'

1897.

}

F1

There had been allegorists and teachers of allegory in plenty, but the symbolic imagination, or, as Blake preferred to call it, 'vision,' is not allegory, being 'a representation of what actually exists really and unchangeably.' A symbol is indeed the only possible expression of some invisible essence, a transparent lamp about a spiritual flame; while allegory is one of many possible representations of an embodied thing, or familiar principle, and belongs to fancy and not to imagination: the one is a revelation, the other an amusement. It is happily no part of my purpose to expound in detail the relations he believed to exist between

symbol and mind, for in doing so I should come upon not a few doctrines which, though they have not been difficult to many simple persons, ascetics wrapped in skins, women who had cast away all common knowledge, peasants dreaming by their sheepfolds upon the hills, are full of obscurity to the man of modern culture; but it is necessary to just touch upon these relations, because in them was the fountain of much of the practice. and of all the precept of his artistic life.

If a man would enter into 'Noah's rainbow,' he has written, and 'make a friend' of one of the images of wonder' which dwell there, and which always entreat him 'to leave mortal things,' 'then would he arise from the grave and meet the Lord in the air'; and by this rainbow, this sign of a covenant granted to him who is with Shem and Japhet, 'painting, poetry and music,' 'the three powers in man of conversing with Paradise which the

William Blake and his Illustrations.