that at the same time nature, when studied, strengthens talent, nor across the blinding vision did he see, when drawing from imagination, the piece of paper on which he was wrongly tracing the shape of his idea. He said, "I draw perfectly from vision," and added, that others drew imperfectly from nature.

But the study of nature improves the faculty of comparison between art and the idea, even if it weakens the idea, and the study of vision weakens this, even if it strengthens the idea. A purely visionary artist would never know when he drew correctly from vision. His correctness would depend entirely on a harmony between the nerves of the hand and the nerves that produced the vision, an inborn harmony, unaided and uncriticised, and his work would therefore be wonderful when he was at peace with himself and in solitude, but easily spoiled by distraction, irritation, or fatigue, and diverted or weakened even by poetry.

Therefore when Mr. Mathews, in the preface to the Poetical Sketches, explains the fact that these verses were not corrected, by saying that since 1777 Blake was too busy with "his profession" to attend to poetry, he must have been repeating an expression of Blake's own, a recollection of the absorbed fascination of original art study that had suddenly taken him away from the pen so soon after the time when he wrote these early poems. None of them bears a later date than the last year of his apprenticeship.

His writing, whose recommencement was put aside by art study, had probably stopped when the composition of the drama of Edward III came to an end, in that year before he began his new course of life-study.

He does not tell what broke it off. It was probably some chilling lack of sympathy in some friend; but once checked, all poetry was forgotten for the human form, and lines that can be drawn must have filled his mind, not lines that could be written.

He could to a certain extent draw whenever he chose, but he could no more command himself to be poetic when distracted by the irritations of daily life than we can command ourselves to go to sleep when we are worried or cross. In later years he wrote a good deal of verse when angry, and it is so remarkably poor that it makes his real poetry even more of a miracle.

His great secret was, that when he was able to devote himself to imagination entirely he had genius. When dis

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tracted by the miserable self-consciousness that either doubts. itself or rages at the doubts of some one else, his mind was unable to free itself from self-consciousness and enter into the absorbed trance of poetic creation.

He therefore was wise in resenting, as he always did, the disparagement which those who cannot criticise believe to be criticism. "Doubts are always injurious, especially when we doubt our friends," he says; and also, "Doubt is self-contradiction"; and again, "If the sun and moon should doubt they'd immediately go out." Later he says, in one of his letters, "I must be shut up in myself or reduced to nothing." He talks of the mythic persons of his imagination, when they became destroyed by arguments or other distractions of the mind, as being "dissipated and drawn out into nonentity."

Some one once told him that Raphael died of dissipation. He appears to have understood by dissipation distraction, especially distraction from artistic contemplation-the tearing to pieces of a mind continually trying to concentrate itself and continually disturbed. He therefore answered that he thought what was related was quite possible, and added that "some people had nothing to dissipate," which was probably true of the imagination of those to whom he was speaking. This dissipation caused by any interruption and disturbance is always painful. It is like being awakened from a sweet, warm sleep to encounter some disagreeable task on a winter's morning. It is, in fact, so very like this, that Blake always called unimaginativeness "winter." The loss to us all from the foolish disturbance of imaginative peace that checked the growth of the play Edward III must always remain irreparable.

As the blood of martyrs, however, is the seed of the Church, some good may yet come of that broken poem if even one of those who read it achieves a perception how much easier it is to injure an artist than to produce a work Those who are not artists are constantly injuring those who are, beyond all power of reparation. The result is that the art, even of the most gifted periods, only grows by fits and starts when the destroyer is otherwise occupied. The destroyer is sometimes an individual, sometimes a vast chorus, and not infrequently acts as the perverter, believing himself to be the helper of art. He renders only such kinds possible as can be done with his foolish approval. Most art students are such perverters, and they injure each other. We have the decadence of art in art-schools, and the per

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petuation of mediocrity and imitation as a consequence. true dream is never mediocre. We all paint the darkness in our sleep with a force above that of an Academician. Our minds are then at liberty. We have no self-consciousness, and therefore no self-contradiction. We are not what Blake, in The Keys of the Gates, calls "a dark Hermaphrodite."

CHAPTER VI

TRUE LOVE AND FALSE METRE

IN what poetry Blake wrote during the years of his apprenticeship there is no trace at all either of Swedenborgianism or of the myth of Los, Albion, and the four Zoas which was the subject of his chief works later on. He was an enthusiastic reader of Shakespeare at this time, and it was remarked with surprise that he took a great pleasure in the poems, the Venus and Adonis, and the Lucrece. They were not fashionable. The taste that admired Pope could hardly be expected to enjoy them.

His own first poems were written between the years 1768 and 1777, or, as the preface to the volume of Poetical Sketches says, were "commenced in his twelfth and occasionally resumed till his twentieth year." Chatterton produced his poems, attributed to "Thomas Rowley, a monk of the fifteenth century," in the year 1768. He was born in 1752, five years before Blake, and is credited with being the first of the moderns to break away from the poetic standard of the misguided eighteenth century. It is just possible that he influenced Blake, who afterwards upheld his pretended "Thomas Rowley" poems as being really written (he meant inspired) by Thomas Rowley, or an influence or spirit so called. Blake had a way of attributing the good in art to influences or spirits as the "authors" rather than to the man that held the pen or pencil. He disclaimed the authorship of his own poems more than once.

He would have considered it as quite probable that even an actual Thomas Rowley, having died three hundred years before, might have influenced Chatterton's mind from his eternal station in the Universal Mind to which he had entered. If so, what Chatterton wrote he rightly attributed to dictation. Blake would even speak of a mental influence that produced work of any sort as having " dictated" it, as

we shall see in the letter to Hayley about his brother Robert, after Robert's death. It is in this sense that he continued to attribute the Ossian of Macpherson to a real Ossian, after Macpherson had admitted having written the poems himself.

But the early verses in the Poetical Sketches are stamped with a quality that shows them as essentially and intimately Blake's own, and if he began them in 1768, as Mr. Mathews tells us, he is undoubtedly a pioneer.

None the less, he was continually roused to complete artistic acts by hints, just as people unable to originate are roused to imitation and distortion by completed artistic work. We could wish to know, though we must always despair of knowing, the order in which these poems were written. The most surprising thing about them is that they are so easy in style and so few in number. They are all he has to show during seven years, and yet each probably only occupied a few minutes. The reason must have been that his solitude was still used more for reading than for writing, and more for walking than for either. He always delighted in long country walks, and the engraving for his apprenticeship filled up most of the hours that found him unfatigued.

How much and how often he loved lightly, in a dreamy and silent way, before he met Polly Woods, we shall also never know. We suspect that the persons spoken of in the poems were not the subjects of any long or intimate affection. They were certainly not Kate his wife, though he addresses "Kitty" in one of them, perhaps by a marginal insertion in the MS. which is lost to us. He was already married when she good-naturedly allowed them to be published.

The unfinished drama Edward III, being taken as the last, would leave the years of his real romance, its breaking off, the meeting of his future wife, his twelve months' engagement, and the twelve months after his marriage, without any poetical production at all, which was probably the case.

"Clara Woods," who seems to have been called "Polly" familiarly, since we are told of "Polly" without being told that Clara had a sister, was the name of the girl who was his real first and last love.

After something less than a year the courtship came to a sudden end. Blake was jealous. Polly was flirting. He protested. We know of what kind his protests were. Polly may be glad not to have been treated like the Westminster boy. She kept the upper hand in the quarrel. He probably considered her want of strict fidelity as a crime of lèse-majesté