and life because the psychology inherent in it was borne out by experience, in the same sense as that of the churches is; while the myth which expressed it equally gave enhanced importance to the events and sentiments of individual lives, by showing them as parts of a grandiose whole.

6. Its psychology was apparently more complex than any that is usually associated with the traditional myth, and in this respect better corresponded to the infinitely complex conception of the material universe, which has been gaining on the European mind since Descartes.

7. The myth which embodies this psychology is confused and ugly because its personifications of tendencies and forces are not complete enough, and are never entirely freed from their roots in abstraction. They are continually undergoing metamorphoses, and are always distinct from their actual appearance. No kind of tolerable plasticity or comeliness could be or is maintained for more than a short passage with this ungainly machinery. Besides, the habits of these tremendous persons are extremely few and mostly gross; they are without the finer shades, and, like their emotions, are bewilderingly common to a whole group of names. One can but deplore that reality as revealed by vision is neither so varied, so highly organised, nor so beautiful as the material universe that deludes the senses.

8. It is obvious that the writer of these books was becoming less and less observant in regard to this unworthy 'contraction of spirit perceived by the five senses'; and so his stock of images steadily perished, losing in fineness and vividness as the finer shades of all that in youth he had been so eagerly enchanted by wore out in his vision-laboured mind.

9. The language he employs becomes more and more monotonous and exasperating, since all æsthetic control over it is abandoned, even when he does not write subconsciously at the dictation of visions endowed with only part of the faculties of their amanuensis. Tedious repetitions of every kind abound, while the natural malapropism of a self-educated mind leads to peculiar efficacy being attached to just those words the writer does not quite understand, such as 'redound' or 'chartered.'

It is obvious that, if these are main characteristics

of the prophetic books, as I think they incontrovertibly are, they must be very poor literature. With so absolute a trust in vision, it is not likely that they can hold, in respect to great poetry, a relation more favourable than that which the Book of Ezekiel or the Apocalypse bears to the Book of Job. Even compared with Ezekiel's, Blake's prophecies stand at a very sorry disadvantage, having neither so simple a message, so significant a relation to history, nor so intelligible an aim as the establishment of an ideal theocracy. The elder prophet's visions are not subject to violent metamorphoses; nor can it be claimed that any of Blake's is so acceptable as that of the valley of dry bones, or presents so elaborate and imposing a cumulative effect as that of the four living creatures, combined, as it magnificently is in Ezekiel's last chapters, with the completion of the holy city. And, of course, in the matter of style, Milton,' Vala,' and 'Jerusalem' are not to be compared with the vision of the seer on the banks of Chebar as it stands in our Authorised Version of the Bible.

On the other hand, Blake, having apprehended with marvellous integrity certain of Jesus' most exquisite intuitions, at which popular Christianity has always boggled, a far richer harvest may be gleaned from his prophetic writings than from those of Ezekiel in phrases vividly expressing an exquisite religious sense.

'If God dieth not for Man and giveth not himself eternally for Man, Man could not exist, for Man is Love as God is Love; every kindness to another is a little Death in the Divine Image, nor can Man exist but by Brotherhood.'

I have not space to quote more generously, but this idea, in Blake's own view, and in that of any Christian, must necessarily be the most central. It is a mercy that this, like all Blake's ideas that have been understood, is expressed in plain terms, as well as, presumably, in code. Let me suggest what seems to me to have been the main drift of Blake's myth, before passing on to consider the fatal effects on his mental habit of trust in vision and misuse of language.

As flowing water in a pipe might suppose that the conduit's shape was proper to itself, so the love which is man is led to conceive his individuality. Deluded by

the coils he is passing through, his action is contorted by them. He sins when the pipe kinks; he acts rightly when it is straight. To forgive his sins we must separate him in our thoughts from the state he traverses. To be our true selves, we must not be self-complacent when our life runs straight, nor suffer shame and abasement, which are effects of the same selfishness that caused our complacency, when our life is contorted and wicked. Such would seem to have been Blake's doctrine of states. Now the flowing water was imagination (just as its dynamic was love) confined in the body of this death (or mortal life), subject to mechanical laws. By cultivating imagination to the point of vision the pipe disappeared; selfhood was transcended; and life became a current in a sea, a thought in the mind of God.

A strange passage of Milton' seems to hint that, after two other of the Elohim had failed to die in order to redeem Satan (whose self-division from them had created their selfhoods), Jehovah covered himself with the material universe as with a leprosy (perhaps by creating sinless but ignorant Eden); then the body of death was perfected in hypocrite holiness.' Nature, a most formidable tetter, barked about' the Lamb (i.e. the symbol of divine self-sacrifice); and in this act Jehovah 'died as a reprobate; he was punished as a transgressor'; for his own love and initiative made him the tempter and liberator in ignorant Eden. The Creation was the act of mercy whereby he took upon him the consequences of Satan's sin (law, judgment, and condemnation), as Jesus died for man's sins.

We who are not visionaries have our witless being in the body of Jehovah's death, until, having consented that Jesus should annihilate our selfhood, we escape. In Blake's last poem, which was published as an antiphonal response the year after the appearance of Lord Byron's 'Cain,' the divine Jehovah, the spirit of love, the symbol for whose inner life (as for that of Jesus) is the Lamb, says to Satan, 'Such is my will that thou thyself go to Eternal Death in self-annihilation, even till Satan, selfsubdued, put off Satan into the bottomless abyss whose torment arises for ever'; and then a chorus of angels informs us how the inner life of the Elohim, among whom both Satan and Jehovah are numbered, consented

to the covenant of forgiveness of sins, and took their original stations in the divine firmament, fixed by peace, brotherhood, and love, in the mind of God. Not men, nor yet those 'fallen fiends of heavenly birth,' but the states through which both passed-the first in what they call matter, the second in imagination--are consumed in the eternal fire. The whole myth is like a nest of boxes; each has the same four selfhoods, Zoas, or sides; each has a bottom and a lid-i.e. a power of self-assertion and of self-abdication. The larger boxes enclose the actors of the orthodox myth, as children imagine limit beyond limit in trying to picture space; smaller ones are souls' histories-not alone of men, for the tiniest are those of ant, caterpillar, etc.; nay, even in pebble or grain of sand the same drama may be repeated by the same actors under different names. Each contained all; for Blake saw men in stones and weeds, men who were imaginations, and (save for sense-delusions) each one the equivalent of God-that is, each one capable of loving and understanding all.

But this is divination. No reasonable man will feel convinced that Blake's prophetic writings have been understood until he is shown a full paraphrase of them which he can understand. In the meantime there may be less impertinence than appears, in advancing considerations why we should not hope ever so to understand them. The most overwhelming is that, though a man possessed by great themes insecurely grasped may write confusedly, no man not mad, having definite and important ideas to convey, would have wrapped them up so impenetrably. This reflection brings those who entertain it great advantage; by it they become defenders of Blake's sanity. They, and not those devoted scribes who labour to discover the immaculate order of his system of ideas, should be fired by a conscious generosity. Though less quixotic, are they not as chivalrous? For, as Prof. Raleigh says, 'What can be intelligibly deciphered can be intelligibly expressed, so that it needs no deciphering'; and, we add, must have been much better so expressed.

When Blake bids the artist or poet cultivate imagination to the point of vision, one doubts whether Homer or Michael Angelo or Shakespeare would have given

the same advice; it seems a little odd among æsthetic maxims, and I was glad to find a parallel to it.

'N'assimilez pas la vision intérieure de l'artiste à celle de l'homme vraiment halluciné. Je connais parfaitement les deux états; il y a un abîme entre eux. Dans l'hallucination proprement dite, il y a toujours terreur; vous sentez que votre personnalité vous échappe; on croit que l'on va mourir. Dans la vision poétique, au contraire, il y a joie, c'est quelque chose qui entre en vous. Il n'en est pas moins vrai qu'on ne sait plus où l'on est. . . . Souvent cette vision se fait lentement, pièce à pièce, comme les diverses parties d'un décor que l'on pose; mais souvent aussi elle est subite, fugace comme les hallucinations hypnogogiques. Quelque chose vous passe devant les yeux; c'est alors qu'il faut se jeter dessus avidement.'

Thus Flaubert wrote to Taine, apparently in answer to direct questions. This parallel to Blake's visionary habit exemplifies an exactly similar relation between it and the cultivation of imagination. The differences between the two cases are particularly instructive. Flaubert was at vast pains to acquire a stock of precise information about objects, persons, places, and periods with which his work was concerned; though we are to understand that he often wrote his actual descriptions from visions for which his mind had been thus prepared. What preparation had Blake's mind? Mr Hewlett has answered that question:* the passage is too long to quote. It was in every way opposite to Flaubert's, whose Tentation de S. Antoine' was 'couronnée' by the Protestant Faculty of Theology at the University of Strassburg because of the great erudition it revealed.† The estimate of received

'Contemporary Review,' October 1876, pp. 774-84.

+ Blake read much, but understood only about half he read. No one can picture Blake's mind who does not realise how every passage which baffled his immediate comprehension was supposed by him to be transcript from a visionary revelation (see the legend of his colour print 'Pity,' and his account of his picture after Gray's 'Bard'). An amusing instance of his ineffectual reading is reported by Crabb Robinson (Gilchrist, p. 362). He said Milton had come to him in vision and begged him to correct the false doctrine promulgated in 'Paradise Lost' that sexual intercourse arose out of the Fall.' The famous passage (Bk IV, 1. 740) actually illustrates the opposite opinion. But both Blake and the visionary Milton had forgotten or failed to grasp this fact. What mental deterioration awaits a great poet when he is forced to visit such ill-trained minds to supply them with reality and save them from the illusion of matter-of-fact knowledge!