The first, or untitled poem, may be summed up in the words, "I did well to be angry," and belongs to a mood very like that which produced the paragraph in extra-page 3 of Milton beginning If you account it Wisdom, when you are angry, to be silent and though the Milton lines were probably written a little later, as the expression Anger me not, thou canst not drive the harrow in pity's paths, suggests, if we are not mistaken in seeing through its symbol an allusion to the poetic failure of Hayley's "beautiful and affectionate ballads." The second poem, called the Everlasting Gospel, appears to have been written as a substitute for the first, using as much of it as Blake cared to retain in his altered mood, and aimed at the kind of imagination that had produced Stothard's Canterbury Pilgrims, as distinguished from the kind that had produced Blake's own design of that subject. But the most outrageous piece of doggerel ever written by any man of real poetic ability was now set down by Blake in what may be called his second period of wrath against Hayley. The first had been mainly an inspired wrath against a spiritual enemy, and fine poetry had arisen from it. The second, when he suspected him of having hired the Examiner, was purely personal, and the poetic result is deplorable. In part justification of Blake's suspicion of Hayley it must be remembered that he lived in times when Walpole's saying, "Every man has his price," was by no means ancient history, when votes were frankly bought and sold at elections, and when the press was so venal that Shelley (a few years later), without fear of being accused of writing anything unlike what was to be seen in real life, could put into his Peter Bell the Third the incident of the enemy of an author enclosing copies of his book to the papers with a fivepound note in each and this brief notice, "Pray abuse." To know that Hayley had not done anything of the kind Blake would have needed some of that gift of instinctively judging personal character at sight, so common in imaginative people who are purely prosaic and sentimental, and so rare in poets. Blake could judge situations, as the Tom Paine incident showed, but to see into the heart of a speaker while he was speaking was not his strong point. The fact that he was what is called "a bad listener" was of the utmost use to him all through life in defending his genius from being frittered away by the personal influence of the presence of people who had none. Personal influence over minds quite apart from personal opinions, a nervous exudation merely—is, unfortunately, strong in the unimaginative. Byron, for example, was full of it. He made unpoetic people think him the greatest of poets, but while he was staying with Shelley in Switzerland, though he wrote, in Childe Harold, the best pages of poetry that have come from his energetic and egotistic pen, he so affected Shelley that Shelley was not able to write at all. A complete extinction of poetic faculty now came over Blake during his wrath with Hayley, Flaxman, Stothard, and Cromek, and will be noticed in the "Screwmuch" lines given in the Chatto and Windus edition. They were printed for the first time in the Quaritch edition, where some explanation of them is given. They are so bad that their badness accounts for the very small portion of them that remains to us, for it is told by a friend of D. G. Rossetti, who had the privilege of seeing him after he had bought for ten shillings from Palmer of the British Museum that invaluable MS. book from which so much, both poetical and biographical, has been gathered, that there were many loose papers in the book besides the sketches of Blake and his wife (reproduced in the Gilchrist second edition) for which Rossetti really bought the book. Many of these loose sheets contained verses which were so bad that Rossetti threw them into his waste-paper basket, from which Swinburne rescued a few fragments not quite so worthless as the rest. Of course, the main mass of the "Screwmuch" lines, which we see to have been crowded out of the now choking MS. book, went to the housemaid. In Gilchrist's time, and until Mr. White of Brooklyn generously sent to England the original of the book for the present writer's use, no one seems to have guessed who "Screwmuch" was. The light that would have been shed on this part of Blake's life if the masks of "Daddy,” “Jack Hemp," and the others had been lifted in time from their owners' faces is now lost to us for ever. There remains this warning to all poets-Beware of anger! CHAPTER XXV 'PUBLIC ADDRESS AFTER this doggerel, but during the period when Blake was scrambling for dear life against want of employment and the desertion of Hayley and Flaxman, he prepared the misguided prose document, which is here printed from the fragmentary notes in the MS. book. The paragraphs are here placed in what seems the order in which they were written by the author. Gilchrist's second volume contains them in a somewhat fanciful sequence. Sentences are dropped and pages transposed without any ascertainable reason. What was, at best, a series of hurried and angry jottings comes forth as a Public Address in an order which adds to their incoherence, and with a title which their author's MS. does not place at their head. In putting the words Public Address here the only object is that readers may recognise at a glance what Gilchrist has given under that name. An editorial note at the beginning of the prose selections in Gilchrist's volume, of which this is one, refers to it without giving any hint of the fact that the title is not the author's, and instead of admitting that the text is not the author's either, the editor leads the reader astray by this explanatory note: "It has been compiled from a very confused mass of MS. notes. . . . As evidence of the writer's many moods these pieces of prose are much best left unmutilated." Not one of the pieces is so left. Even the Descriptive Catalogue is silently deprived of its own preface, and these pages, like the description of the picture called the Last Judgment, are both jumbled and garbled. For this when pretence to literal reproduction is madeno pardon can ever be accorded, but it is right to say that even though it has not been quite faithfully fulfilled, the task that Gilchrist's editor should have attempted was not an easy one. Paragraphs intended for a late place in the prospectus or Address were often written by Blake on early pages of his notebook just as blank space offered itself on turning over the leaves, backwards and forwards, long after the later pages had been crowded with sentences intended for the opening lines of the manifesto, for which he seems to have hoped to find space there. But the displacements and alterations actually made by the Gilchrist editor were not due to error thus caused. He divides what is continuous at his own fancy, and makes a new composition of the fragments. In all else but the claim to accuracy his editorial note is admirable. The punctuation here and elsewhere is conjectural. Blake's own is on a wrong-headed system which confuses the text. It was a convention of his own day, now obsolete, and was adopted by the translator of Lavater, and by Flaxman in private letters. These probably influenced or "infected" Blake. The numbers printed here at the margin indicate the number of the page of the MS. book in which the paragraph printed beside it is to be found. The sequence has not been departed from except when an examination of the MS. gave the impression that the later page was the earlier written. Here and there extra sentences written later or sideways on the margin are indicated. This enables the reader to perceive that Blake's style is not broken to scraps because he was too scatter-brained to write continuously, but because he was here jotting down meditations and recollections for consideration and after-use, employing a notebook already too full to hold them properly. These notes for a prospectus or advertisement were intended for issue with the engraving to the Canterbury Pilgrims. (On page 57 of the MS. book we learn that in some form this seems to have been printed.) "This day (no date) is published Advertisment to Blake's Canterbury Pilgrims from Chaucer, containing anecdotes of Artists." Where is it? Some erased sentences have been restored for their biographical value-marked erased. What others would have been erased also we cannot tell, since the entire prospectus seems to have vanished as soon as it was published. The present arrangement may stand until the lost print is found. Nothing else can settle the matter. PUBLIC ADDRESS (Gilchrist's title for the following) 66 CHAUCER'S CANTERBURY PILGRIMS, BEING A COMPLETE INDEX OF HUMAN CHARACTERS AS THEY EXIST AGE AFTER AGE [No date. This title is written on a page of the MS. book containing rhymes that allude, among other things, to the death of Schiavonetti, that occurred on June 7, 1810. The title seems written later than the rhymes, and as a note for those prose paragraphs. The title, however, was written after the paragraphs, of which those on page 68 at any rate were written before May 2, 1810, when Blake found the word golden and noted it on a margin, where it is squeezed by these paragraphs.] 61 The originality of this production makes it necessary to say a few words. While the works of Pope and Dryden are looked upon as the same art with those of Shakespeare and Milton, while the works of Strange and Woollett are looked upon as the same art with those of Raphael and Albert Dürer, there can be no art in a nation but such as is subservient to the interests of the monopolising trader,*1 who manufactures art by the hands of ignorant journeymen, till at length Christian charity is held out as a motive to encourage a blockhead, and he is accounted the greatest genius who can sell a good-for-nothing commodity at a great price. Obedience to the will of the monopolist is called Virtue, and the really virtuous, industrious, and independent Barry is driven out to make room for a lot of idle sycophants 62 with whitloes on their fingers.** Englishmen ! rouse yourselves from the fatal slumber into which booksellers and trading dealers have thrown you, under the artfully propagated pretence that a translation or a copy of any kind can be as honourable to a nation as an original, belying the English character in that well-known saying,-Englishmen improve what others invent. This, even Hogarth's works prove a detestable falsehood. No man can improve an original invention.* Since Hogarth's time we have had very few efforts of originality,*** nor can an original invention exist without execution organised and minutely delineated and articulated either by God or man. (Margin, sideways.) I do not mean smoothed and niggled, and poco-penned and all the beauties paled out, blurred and spotted out, but drawn with a firm hand at once, with all its ** spots and blemishes, which are beauties, not faulty,*** like Fuseli, Michael Angelo, Shakespeare, and Milton. I have heard many people say, 'Give me the ideas; it does not matter what words you put them into,”—and others say,- "Give me the design; it is no matter for the execution." These people knew enough of artifice but little of art. Ideas cannot be given but in their minutely appropriate words. Nor can a design be made without its minutely appropriate execution. The unorganised blots of Rubens and Titian are not art, nor can their method ever express 63 66 1 The words between * and ** erased. Between ** and *** erased, |