Another utterly superfluous blunder, the result of oversight, not of temptation, consisting of the mere intrusion of little unneeded words, is soon to follow. The next line is not the sinner, though it scans only by compression. The King now speaks to the Prince of Wales

And thou, my son, be strong. Thou fight'st fr a crown
That death can never ravish from thy brow-
A crown of glory; but from thy very dust
Shall beam a radiance to fire the breasts
Of youth unborn. Our names are written equal
In fame's wide trophied hall. "Tis ours to gild
The letters and to make them shine with gold
That never tarnishes. Whether Third Edward,
The Prince of Wales, Montacute, Mortimer,
Or even the least by birth gain brightest fame
Is in His hands to whom all men are equal.

It seems hardly credible, but in the unrevised sheets that poor Mr. Mathews so regretfully and kindly published the two lines above the last run:

The Prince of Wales, or Montacute, or Mortimer,

Or even the least by birth shall gain the brightest fame.

The editor of Blake's poems in "Gilchrist" quietly skips all this fine opening, and begins the play at the words "Our names are written equal." But to fully appreciate the fatal incapacity to correct which caused Blake to leave his manuscripts so full of flaws, it is not enough to have noticed cases of oversight where, among whole pages that were flung aside unread, there are lines left with the overgrowths of the first hurry and fever of improvisation unpruned. It is necessary to look at the kind of slips he leaves untouched in lines that he has read over and altered, believing that he had corrected them, and to see in these the halting and incomplete nature even of his alterations. The MS. of Vala has many such oversights. The poem is written entirely in a fluent and melodious line of fourteen syllables, on which Blake has so stamped the signature of his genius that he has made it his own for ever, as Spenser made the stanza of the Faery Queen and Petrarch the sonnet. It is a line almost as elastic as that of Shakespearian blank verse, and its elasticity enables it to fill itself with every different form of emphasis and significance. Here is an example of its use with an extra but unaccented syllable, a style of ending for which the technical term "weak" is so ridiculous and misleading:

Terrified, Urizen heard Orc, now certain that he was Luvah;
And creeping Orc began to organise a serpent body.
Vala, Night VII, line 153.

The second line is not very sonorous, but it has its just place in the general sound-scheme, as can be seen by even the hastiest reference to the page where it is found. Blake, whose pen was going at its usual headlong pace, did not set down the words so as to hit the true measure at once.

The line was first written thus:

Creeping, he began to organise a serpent body,

which lacks weight in two of the syllables. If we add to it the words "did Orc" at the end, it would be rhythmical, but, in the mouth of any one but a peasant, impossible.

Blake of course did not add the deficient syllables. He left the line at the moment, but he felt vaguely that something should be done to show that Orc, and not Urizen or Luvah, was the organiser of the serpent body. He changed the line into

And Orc he began to organise a serpent body,

and left it, again forgetting that he had lost the word "creeping," which is technical in his system and essential to the myth, for it implies that the state "length and breadth" is entered, and the state "height and depth" is abandoned. What remained was still not a line at all. But he was at the end of his patience, and he never took the trouble to make it one. The present writer, as editor, has been obliged here, as in other lines of Vala, to come to his aid, and this time actually to compound a line from his fragments. But this has not been done, as similar service was rendered in Rossetti's freer day, without a note (in the Quaritch edition) enabling the reader to see what had happened. Another example-lines 163 and 164 of Night IX, as numbered in the Quaritch edition-stood thus in the MS.:

Saying, O that I had never drunk the wine nor eat the bread
Of dark mortality, nor cast my eyes into futurity, nor turned
My back, darkening the present, clouding with a cloud.

Originally the second of these lines was written

Of dark mortality, nor cast my eyes into the west, nor turned,

which would have been a good line if it had ended at "west," a pause being suggested after "cast," thus emphasising "my

eyes." The words "nor turned" would then begin the next line. That they belong to that line is seen by the fact that it is too short without them. Blake, going over his MS., did not make the obvious correction that would at least sort up the lines into verses, and not leave syllables hanging to the end of one that were required to begin another. But, on consideration, he decided that the associations with the symbolic west and Urizen's journey (it is Urizen who is speaking here) did not make out his meaning clearly enough. He substituted the word "futurity" for "west," striking his pen through it. He even made this incorrect correction incorrectly, for he omitted to strike his pen through the word "the." So line 164 now stood thus:

Of dark mortality, nor cast my eyes into the futurity, nor turned,

in which swollen and chaotic state he left it, and it is so left in the Quaritch edition, the unerased definite article before "futurity" only being omitted, though the present writer regrets now that, weary with many emendations, he did not put the whole passage into metre with a note to tell what was done. It should obviously read:

Urizen wept in the dark deep, anxious his scaly form
To reassume the human, and he wept in the dark deep,

Saying "Oh that I had never drunk the wine, nor eat the bread
Of dark mortality, cast eyes into futurity,

Nor turned my back dark'ning the present, clouding with a cloud, Building arches high and cities, turrets, towers, and domes."

"Saying" at the beginning of the third line has the value of a single short unaccented syllable only. But this is only one of many places where editorial duty became too heavy to bear. So I left Blake, by an oversight, in the tangle of his own oversights, as he was left under compulsion in the days of the Poetical Sketches by Mr. Mathews. Yet whole paragraphs and pages in the finest parts of Vala, as in those of all his long poems, are flawless, musical, dignified, firm, melodious, and original in a degree, as is now gradually becoming admitted, above the highest reach of any other writer of English whatsoever.

Gradually we are forced into seeing that Blake, in his inspired moods, had the power of hypnotising himself,unless indeed other powers of a spiritual nature, as he himself suspected, hypnotised him. However this may have been, the result was that he became, when the fit was on

him, like Trilby in Du Maurier's novel, singing the divine bel canto when under the nervous concentration of Svengali's influence. When this went off she, it will be remembered, could not sing a musical note, and Blake, who did not always correctly record the song he sang, when in the fit, in his everyday state could not correct an erroneous line, even when its own musical form was plainly indicated in its errors. He fully recognised these two states in himself, but the account he gave of them was by no means always the same. When "exalted in terrific pride," he would claim that his errors were beauties, and that they were proofs of his genius, while every one who wished them changed was a mischievous fool, and his enemy. In saying this he was perfectly sincere, and in many cases perfectly justified. The people of his day would probably have been mischievously willing to see his few really good irregularities also ground down into flatness.

In another mood he simply said that his poems were "dictated to him," and that he "might praise them, since the authors were in eternity."

Whichever account we may accept, one thing follows. There were two Blakes, and they could not edit one another. Yet he absolutely requires editing. Rossetti solved the problem by touching him up secretly. The present writer, for sincerity's sake, and to relieve the reader from being distracted from enjoyment of the poems by a nervous apprehension that he is not really reading the author but the editor, has noted every emendation he has ventured to introduce. But to leave what Rossetti happily called the "pious duty" of correction unperformed would have been the very cowardice of pedantry, unfair to reader and to author.

The few examples of Blake's blunders here given are not intended as literary criticism, but as part of the material without which a narrative of the growth of his mind could not have been written, and Blake without Blake's mind would have been as far from the real Blake as was the Blake of the earlier biographical and critical essays, among all of which is to be found no portrait whatsoever. But however necessary it may be to know truly the paradoxical story of his metrical errors, even when we have dug up the root of this mystery we are still outsiders, and have not entered into his living mind. We must know also the causes and origins of his inspired moments. Many of the experiences in his daily life that suggested symbols to him are not to be recovered now. They were trifles that left no trace before