the great trees, and yards outside of Fyfield; and, anyway, it is in its dotage now, fallen away to a stump. Much closer to my heart is Bablock Hythe, not because the poet sings of it, but because I still owe an indignant waterman there a penny for pulling me in his punt hung on a cable across the "stripling Thames". I could have done it for myself, and, in any case, I had no money with me. I have a keener recollection, too, of Marcham. I was allowed by the good people of the manor house there to dig in the ruins of the abbey outpost which they use to store potatoes in; and I unearthed some lovely fragments of old glass and pieces of leads from the panes and the bones of a dinosaur, I think. Though they politely gave me tea and I as politely praised rather doubtful bric-a-brac in the shape of ostrich eggs or elephant tusks, I could not seem to fire them with enthusiasm for my dinosaur. I am afraid he is still pathetically mixed with potatoes. Perhaps dinosaurs are no rarity in Marcham.

Berkshire, more than most shires, keeps green in the memory. It is an humble county of forgotten villages and of men, judged by the graspers of the world, obscure. But it is a place that gets into the heart; it gets into the marrow of one's bones. It remains like a thought that will come under a starry sky of man's unity and loveliness in all his humblest ways and loves, joys and griefs. It is a place one can no more forget than the sea. It is a beauty one has loved.

ROBERT P. TRISTRAM COFFIN.

WILLIAM BLAKE

BY JOHN GOULD FLETCHER

THE French Revolution, an event of which the reverberations were destined to dominate the history of two-thirds the inhabited world throughout the nineteenth century, and up to the interval of the Great War in the twentieth, was permitted by one of those ironic dispensations of Providence of which history affords so many examples, to have more intellectual and spiritual effect on France's next-door neighbour than upon France herself. In that country the result of the Revolution was that the bourgeois class took the place of the old aristocracy, and Napoleon, with his purely military genius, replaced the faded glories of the bygone days of Louis the Fourteenth.. It was in conservative, reactionary, phlegmatic England, ruled still by the old land holding aristocracy, that the Revolution went immediately to people's heads and produced in literature and the arts generally the effect of a spiritual explosion. Byron, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, as well as Turner and Constable, could not have been what they were had the Revolution not unconsciously inflamed their ardour; and the same is true in a still greater degree of the one man who, though largely unknown to his contemporaries, was the most important precursor of the whole Romantic movement in England, and whom we now see to have been, either as poet or artist, at once more radical and more logical in his revolt than any other. William Blake was born in the year 1757, the same year in which Swedenborg, the strange Northern mystic and visionary, declared that he had been admitted into Paradise, and had received confirmation that the prophecies of the Last Judgment contained in the Apocalypse had all been fulfilled and that the Dispensation of the Holy Spirit had begun. His father, a respectable hosier, was himself one of the first members of the Church of the New Jerusalem which had come into being as a result of Swedenborg's doctrine, and which had recruited its members largely from dissentient sects. There is a sort of ingrained

Calvinism perceptible in Blake's writings and character that leads one to suppose that before he became a Swedenborgian his father may have been a Presbyterian. As a young man, he may himself have seen Swedenborg, who had lived in London during his last years, and who died there in 1772. Blake grew up, the second of a family of three sons and one daughter, in any case, in an atmosphere profoundly impregnated with the spirit of Swedenborg's teachings, and, like his great predecessor, he possessed the gift of "vision", with this exception, that according to his own account it was natural to him from his earliest days. He was wont to say that he had "seen God Almighty putting his face to the window" at the age of four, and “a treeful of angels at Peckham Rye" at the age of seven.

Most of Blake's admirers and critics have spent pages in the effort to describe exactly what he meant by this faculty of "vision", without realising that in its essence this faculty is something common not only to him and Swedenborg, but also to every imaginative man upon earth who tries to pierce behind the veil of appearances and to state in some artistic or philosophic form the essence of reality. We may therefore accept Blake's visionary faculty, without supposing that it was anything else than a normal faculty, shared by him with thousands of others known and unknown, who do not exercise it so constantly. He spoke, as Crabb Robinson noted, of his visions in the tone of ordinary speech; mentioned seeing Socrates or Jesus Christ in the same tone that you and I speak of seeing Smith or Jones; and probably with better reason, for Blake may really have seen further into the character of Socrates or Jesus than you or I see into the inmost nature of any of our neighbours.

In any case, we must be prepared to accept the visionary form of Blake's writings if we are to understand him at all. When we have once done so, it becomes apparent that in his case the visionary element was entirely subsidiary to the revolutionary nature of his message. Even as regards the dates of his writings, it is clear that, if the French Revolution had not happened, Blake would have been in all probability merely a minor poet and water colourist, with a turn to eccentricity. Apart from the Poetical Sketches, Tiriel (the most Ossianic and least interesting

of the mythical books) and the fragment of An Island in the Moon, he wrote nothing up to 1789, when he was thirty-two years old. But this year, the year of the outbreak in France, produced the Songs of Innocence and Thel. In 1790 appeared The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, a document of primary and decisive importance in the history of his intellectual development. It is apparent that here Blake was risking everything, and ready to appear before the world as the thoroughgoing preacher of the sacredness of rebellion. The year following he projected a great poem in seven books on the French Revolution; the first book being, as appears from the unique copy preserved, actually set up with a view to publication, but not published. Despite the announcement following the title-page, that "the remaining books are finished and will be printed in order”, I cannot believe that Blake actually wrote more of this poem than we possess.

Yet, as in the case of all honest artists, Blake was unable to keep silence, though the public wanted none of his work. In 1793, the year of the Terror, he wrote America, to which he prefixed the significant words "A Prophecy", and the same year he wrote in his manuscript notebook this sentence, so poignant in its revealment of deep suffering and despair: "I say I won't live five years, and if I live one, it will be a wonder.' And this note takes on added significance when we reflect that it was about four years after this that he sat down to the great task of producing in carefully written MS. the masterpiece by which he hoped to be remembered if he was to pass out of the world, the poem Vala. As it happened, life had other things in store for Blake, like many great men before or since his day; the crisis passed over, and a change of scene and occupation produced in him other fruits. In 1801, he was rescued from poverty and neglect by Hayley, who, thanks to Flaxman's recommendation, constituted himself his patron. It was probably about this time that Blake presented to Mrs. Flaxman, in testimony of her husband's kindness, the illustrations to Gray's poems which have recently been discovered. Hayley, as is known, took Blake and his wife off to the country, where Blake had an interesting if somewhat hectic time for three years, ending up with quarrelling with his patron, and being committed for trial on a trumped-up charge of

sedition brought against him by one Schofield. In later years, he was wont to refer to this period as "his three years' slumber on the banks of the ocean". Yet it was not so much a slumber as an awakening of the poetic fires within which had died down. During this period Vala was rehandled, in the light of fresh developments that occurred to Blake, and then became The Four Zoas, or the Torments of Love and Jealousy in the Death and Judgment of Albion, the Ancient Man, a title we shall have to refer to later in the course of the necessary discussion and clarifying of Blake's thought. It suffices to say here that the new development of his thought was destined to make his work less personal and autobiographic on one side, and even more complexly allusive and figurative on the other. Vala or The Four Zoas was never printed, but long fragments and ideas from it were used as the ground-work to the later Milton and Jerusalem-works both of which bear the title-page date 1804, though Milton—which exists in three copies only—was not off the press until 1809, while Jerusalem, the single hand-tinted copy actually printed by him, did not appear until 1820.

The later years of Blake are of interest mainly to students of his development as a designer, in which field he has been somewhat better served by his critics than as a poet. Yet he was not altogether silent, though his works have come down to us only in manuscript. The Pickering MS. dates from the period of his residence with Hayley at Felpham, and is fairly accurate and complete. But the poem which well might have been Blake's final masterpiece was never, so far as we know, actually finished. It exists only in rough drafts in the notebook which Rossetti bought for ten shillings, and the second of its sections, partially incomplete, is headed with the title which might well stand as the title of all Blake's literary work: The Everlasting Gospel.

In all these works, the fundamental quality of Blake's mind is his uncompromising rebelliousness. He is in revolt against the hypocrisy that parades itself as morality, the injustice that masks itself as law, the make-believe that calls itself religion. His attitude to all of these things is the attitude of the eternal protestant. It was not for nothing that he admired, most of all the English poets, Milton; for Milton too is the eternal protestant