IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL.

IN the MS. Note-book, to which frequent reference has been made in the Life, a page stands inscribed with the heading given above. It seems uncertain how much of the book's contents such title may have been meant to include; but it is now adopted here as a not inappropriate summarizing endorsement for the precious section which here follows. In doing so, Mr. Swinburne's example (in his Essay on Blake) has been followed, as regards pieces drawn from the Note-book.

The contents of the present section are derived partly from the Note-book in question, and partly from another small autograph collection of different matter, somewhat more fairly copied. The poems have been reclaimed, as regards the first-mentioned source, from as chaotic a mass as could well be imagined; amid which it has sometimes been necessary either to omit, transpose, or combine, so as to render available what was very seldom found in a final state. And even in the pieces drawn from the second source specified above," means of the same kind have occasionally been resorted to, where they seemed to lessen obscurity or avoid redundance. But with all this, there is nothing throughout that is not faithfully Blake's own.

One piece in this series (The Two Songs) may be regarded as a different version of the Human Abstract, occurring in the Songs of Experience. This new form is certainly the finer one, I think, by reason of its personified character, which adds greatly to the force of the impression produced. It is, indeed, one of the finest things Blake ever did, really belonging, by its vivid completeness, to the order of perfect short poems,-never a very large band, even when the best poets are ransacked to recruit it. Others among the longer poems of this section, which are, each in its own way, truly admirable, are Broken Love, Mary, and Auguries of Innocence.

It is but too probable that the piece called Broken Love has a recondite bearing on the bewilderments of Blake's special mythology. But besides a soul suffering in such limbo, this poem has a recognisable body penetrated with human passion. From this point of view, never, perhaps, have the agony and perversity of sundered affection been more powerfully (however singularly) expressed than here. The speaker is one whose soul has been intensified by pain to be his only world, among the scenes, figures, and events of which he moves as in a new state of being. The emotions have been quickened and isolated by conflicting torment, till each is a separate companion. There is his 'spectre,' the jealous pride which scents in the snow the footsteps of the beloved rejected woman, but is a wild beast to guard his way from reaching her; his 'emanation' which silently weeps within him, for has not he also sinned? So they wander together in 'a fathomless and boundless deep,' the morn full of tempests and the night of tears. Let her weep, he says, not for his sins only, but for her own; nay, he will cast his sins upon her shoulders too; they shall be more and more till she come to him again. Also this woe of his can array itself in stately imagery. He can count separately how many of his soul's affections the knife she stabbed it with has slain, how many yet mourn over the tombs which he has built for these: he can tell, too, of some that still watch around his bed, bright sometimes with ecstatic passion of melancholy and crowning his mournful head with vine. All these living forgive her transgressions: when will she look upon them, that the dead may live again? Has she not pity to give for pardon? nay, does he not need her pardon too? He cannot seek her, but oh! if she would return! Surely her place is ready for her, and bread and wine of . forgiveness of sins.

The Crystal Cabinet and the Mental Traveller belong to a truly mystical order of poetry. The former is a lovely piece of lyrical writing, but certainly has not the clearness of crystal. Yet the meaning of such among Blake's compositions, as this is, may sometimes be missed chiefly through seeking for a sense more recondite than was really meant. A rather intricate interpretation was attempted here in the first edition of these Selections. Mr. W. M. Rossetti has probably since found the true one in his simple sentence: "This poem seems to me to represent, under a very ideal form, the phenomena of gestation and birth" (see the Aldine edition of Blake's Poems, page 174). The singular stanza commencing "Another England there I saw," &c., may thus be taken to indicate quaintly that the undeveloped

creature, half sentient and half conscious, has a world of its own akin in somewise to the country of its birth.

The Mental Traveller seemed at first a hopeless riddle; and the editor of these Selections must confess to having been on the point of omitting it, in spite of its high poetic beauty, as incomprehensible. He is again indebted to his brother for the clear-sighted, and no doubt correct, exposition which is now printed with it, and brings its full value to light.

The poem of Mary appears to be, on one side, an allegory of the poetic or spiritual mind moving unrecognised and reviled among its fellows; and this view of it is corroborated when we find Blake applying to himself two lines almost identically taken from it, in the last of the Letters to Mr. Butts printed in the Life. But the literal meaning may be accepted, too, as a hardly extreme expression of the rancour and envy so constantly attending pre-eminent beauty in

women.

A most noble, though surpassingly quaint example of Blake's loving sympathy with all forms of created life, as well as of the kind of oracular power which he possessed of giving vigorous expression to abstract or social truths, will be found in the Auguries of Innocence. It is a somewhat tangled skein of thought, but stored throughout with the riches of simple wisdom.

Quaintness reaches its climax in William Bond, which may be regarded as a kind of glorified street-ballad. One point that requires to be noted is that the term 'fairies' is evidently used to indicate passionate emotions, while 'angels' are spirits of cold coercion. The close of the ballad is very beautiful. It is not long since there seemed to dawn on the present writer a meaning in this ballad not discovered before. Should we not connect it with the line In a Myrtle Shade (page 118), the meaning of which is obvious to all knowers of Blake as bearing on marriage? And may not 'William Bond' thus be William Blake, the bondman of the 'lovely myrtle tree'? It is known that the shadow of jealousy, far from unfounded, fell on poor Catherine Blake's married life at one moment, and it has been stated that this jealousy culminated in a terrible and difficult crisis. We ourselves can well imagine that this ballad is but a literal relation, with such emotional actors, of some transfiguring trance and passion of mutual tears from which Blake arose no longer 'bond' to his myrtle-tree, but with that love, purged of all drossier element, whose last death-bed accent was, "Kate, you have ever been an angel to me!"

The ballad of William Bond has great spiritual beauties, whatever its meaning; and it is one of only two examples, in this form, occurring among Blake's lyrics. The other is called Long John Brown and Little Mary Bell, and perhaps the reader may be sufficiently surprised without it.

The shorter poems, and even the fragments, afford many instances of that exquisite metrical gift and rightness in point of form which constitute Blake's special glory among his contemporaries, even more eminently perhaps than the grander command of mental resources which is also his. Such qualities of pure perfection in writing verse, as he perpetually, without effort, displayed, are to be met with. among those elder poets whom he loved, and such again are now looked upon as the peculiar trophies of a school which has arisen since his time; but he alone (let it be repeated and remembered) possessed them then, and possessed them in clear completeness. Colour and metre, these are the true patents of nobility in painting and poetry, taking precedence of all intellectual claims; and it is by virtue of these, first of all, that Blake holds, in both arts, a rank which cannot be taken from him.

Of the Epigrams on Art, which conclude this section, a few are really pointed, others amusingly irascible,-all more or less a sort of nonsense verses, and not even pretending to be much else. To enter into their reckless spirit of doggrel, it is almost necessary to see the original note-book in which they occur, which continually testifies, by sudden exclamatory entries, to the curious degree of boyish impulse which was one of Blake's characteristics. It is not improbable that such names as Rembrandt, Reubens, Correggio, Reynolds, may have met the reader's eye before in a very different sort of context from that which surrounds them in the surprising poetry of this their brother artist; and certainly they are made to do service here as scarecrows to the crops of a rather jealous husbandman. And for all that, I have my strong suspicions that the same amount of disparagement of them uttered to instead of by our good Blake, would have elicited, on his side, a somewhat different estimate. These phials of his wrath, however, have no poison but merely some laughing gas in them; so now that we are setting the laboratory a little in order, let these, too, come down from their dusty upper shelf.