William Blake: Milton and Jerusalem – The Dusk of a Prophet

The text below is the excerpt of the book William Blake (ISBN: 9781783107773), written by Osbert Burdett, published by Parkstone International.

Toward the end of September of 1803, Blake and his wife left Felpham for 17 South Molton Street, but for the next two years he was still busy with commissions for Hayley, whose good offices over the trial could no longer be obscured by personal conflicts. Distance confirmed the peace between the two men and, except for Blake’s presence at the trial itself, there was next to no chance of their meeting. Correspondence was, indeed, an arduous duty, and when we contrast Blake’s studious politeness with his private exclamation: “I write the rascal thanks till he and I / With thanks and compliments are quite grown dry,” we feel that the weight of the Hermit’s hand was still upon him. It is curious how little they were able to help each other’s work. Hayley gave to Blake no opportunity that he valued, and when Blake agreed to enrich Hayley’s later publications with engravings, his plates were unable to attract any public to them. The rising of the romantic star was robbing Hayley’s spotlight of all sparkle. Taste had changed. Blake was still ahead, and Hayley had now fallen behind.

We have now to return to the work that had occupied Blake’s private energies during their quaint association. Possibly his reaction to the drudgery of business, to listening to Hayley’s vapid verse, to concern with conventional art and society in many forms, encouraged Blake to the opposite excess. It would be an irony worthy of the Muse if Hayley is to be blamed for the characteristics of Milton. Klopstock was the only new poet who had come his way at Felpham, and his tendencies were already fixed. The “long poem descriptive of the spiritual acts of my three years’ slumber on the banks of the ocean,” of which Blake had written to Butts in April 1803, was eventually called Jerusalem: the Emanation of the Giant Albion, 1804. It was printed by “W. Blake, South Molton Street.” This, like the Milton, was finished, or at any rate engraved and pressed, after his return to London. Examples of both poems, dated by the watermarks upon the paper, occur from time to time during the next sixteen years. Jerusalem is a large quarto of illuminated printing, and contains one hundred pages of writing and designs. Both are confined to one side of each leaf. The opening address to the public contains the defence of the measure already quoted in this work.

Here, as elsewhere in the prophetic books, the prose to be found in places is as lucid and burning as the verse is frequently measureless and obscure. While it is impossible to believe Blake’s assertion that “every word and every letter is studied and put into its fit place,” there can be no question that the substance is genuine. The method has nothing to recommend it. Blake was not a systematic thinker, and in attempting to create a system he created confusion. He wanted to be more symbolical and more systematic than his predecessors, and handicapped himself unnecessarily by endeavouring to invent both. “I must,” he had said in an passionate moment, “create a system or be enslaved by another man’s.” His system, then, had to be no less original than his symbolism. Yet there is a radical difference between the two elements that Blake was proposing to combine. Symbols are valuable because they are more pregnant with meaning than any system. We value symbols because they are not systematic, and systems because they are more orderly than symbols can be. Symbols can be given a resemblance to system only when they are perfectly familiar, and in the course of ages have received a traditional and largely fixed meaning. The endeavour to combine the virtues of two principles which are opposed to each other resulted in combining the defects of both.

The consequence is that all interpreters of Blake devote three-quarters of their efforts to his method, and when they have deciphered enough to prove that he meant something resent the suggestion that the meaning could have been expressed much better in another and more traditional way. Neither the lines that he used, the symbols that he invented, nor the system that he endeavoured to create are models for anybody. They are the aberrations of his genius, not its fruits, and if he had left nothing else, no one would read them. The prophetic books, in fact, are incapable of summary. Yet the commentaries upon them will continue to increase in number because the interest of detective minds and the impulse of curiosity are common in some degree to us all. Those who have most nearly succeeded in deciphering the symbolism have not brought us enough to show that the labour is worth the pains. There is no development of thought.

The machinery revolves; the epithets repeat themselves; the names change; the symbolism proliferates; Blake becomes as nearly unreadable as it is possible for a writer to be. No analysis, no cross-reference, no meditation can convince an impartial student of letters that Blake’s symbolic system is not arbitrary. The theme we feel to be real, the vision penetrating, but there is no reason but Blake’s misguided caprice for presenting it in his fashion. Its defects are more glaring than its qualities. The understanding is illuminated or darkened; the feelings are roused and repelled, but understanding and feeling are never so long convinced together as to make us exclaim that the matter in this manner was inevitable. This qualification is the unanswerable demur that meets those commentators who claim for Blake’s prophecies an equal place with the greatest of mystical writings.

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