Yeats & Ellis, ed., Works of William Blake (1893) & Yeats’ edn. of Poetry of William Blake (1910)

Prospectus for an Edition of the Works of William Blake [1893]
[Held as William O’Brien Collection of National Library of Ireland , Cat. LO P115, Item 54.]In preparation: The Poetic Books of William Blake / collected and their Myth and Meaning Explained / by / Edwin John Ellis / and / William Butler Yeats 'author of the "Wanderings of Oisin". / Bring me to the test / And I the matter will re-word, which madness / Would gambol from’ / London: / Bernard Quaritch, 15 Picadilly, 1891. Title verso, b & w ill. Of engraving by Blake, with intertwined text: 'Such Visions have appeard to me as I my Ord[eal] Race have Run / Jerusalem Is Named Liberty’

Quotes Swinburne’s essay, 1868: 'Into these darker parts of the book we will not go too deep. Time, patience and insight on the part of writer and reader might perhaps clear up all details and lay bare much worth sight and study. It is feasible, and would be worth doing, but not here. If the singular amalgam called BLAKE’s works should ever get publshed and edited to any purpose, this will have to be done .’ (pp.287-8.)

An opportunity has now offered itself for the completion of the task half performed by MR SWINBURNE. A large and important manuscript poem by Blake, which has remained for a hundred years in the possession of the Linnell family, has for the first time been read, sorted, paged, and printed by the editors of this collection. The work, called the "Book of Vala", was given by BLAKE on his death-bed to his friend and helper JOHN LINNELL. It was written on loose sheets, and the order of the parts, the meaning of the story, and even some of the words themselves, defied elucidation.

"Vala", however, has been made to yield up her secret, and tis proved of incomparable value in aiding the interpretation of much that was difficult or doubtful in the myth that runs through all the poems. For its literary quality it will probably rank as BLAKE’S masterpiece. Rough sketches in pencil decorate the margin. Some of these will be reproduced, by permission of the brothers LINNELL, in the present endition.

The entire text will be given, with explanatory coment of all the so-called Prophetic Books, and by their aid the meaning will appear of much that is otherwise quite incomprehensible even in the apparently simple "Songs of Innocence and Experience".

As far as possibe the poems will be given in the form of facsimile form BLAKE’S own copies, thus placing the accuracy of the text beyond dispute, while incorporating the original designs with the works in which they were placed by the poet and painter himself. A short biographical acount, in which some new matter is introducted and the interpretative value of the incidents emphasised, will be appended.

VERSO: Messrs Edwin John Ellis and W. B. Yeats, the eminent Blake enthusiasts and critics, are about to bring out a new Commentary [which will] throw an entirely new light on the poet’s hitherto misunderstood mysticism. [.] Two volumes, the first containing the Key to Blake’s system, and explanations of the names and stories of his poems, the second the whole of Vala printed from the original manuscript [.] and over 150 pages of facsimiles from poems engraved by BLAKE with illustrations, the latter shaded to indicate the hand-colouring from the best examples available, a series of 350 facsimiles of BLAKE’s works, by W. GRIGGS, assisted by Mr EDWIN J. Ellis. / The edition will consist of 500 copies of the ordinary issue, and 150 copies on Large Paper. / The price cannot be fixed yet. / Bernard Quaritch.

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W. B. Yeats’s MS annotations to The Works of William Blake (Quaritch 1893), made on his own copy in May 1900, being NLI MS40,56/4/; [Hall LL; WADE 218; 21pp. O’Shea omits 44, 280, 412-413.]

Annotations
[On title-page verso:] The writing of this is mainly Ellis’s, in asmuch as the biography is by him. He [.] trebled in size a biography of mine. The greater part of the "symbolic system" is my writing; the rest of the book was written by Ellis [?workes] one short account of the works by me, except in the case of the "literary period" the account of the minor poems, and the account of Blake’s art theories which are all his own except in so far as we discussed everything together. / WBY May 3 1900

PS The Works is full of misprints. There is a good deal here & there in the biography etc with which I am not in agreement. I think that some of my own constructive symbolism is put with too much confidence. It is mainly right [this] part[s] should be used rather as an interpretative hypothesis than as a certainty. The circulation of the Zoas, which seems to me unlike anything in traditional symbolism, is the chief cause of uncertainty, but most that I have written on the subject is at least part of Blake’s plan. There is also uncertainty about the personages who are mentioned by him too seldom to make one know them perfectly; [v] him [v.] their characters. / WBY May. 1900 [n.d.]

See marginal corrigs., e.g., 'Book of Thel’ for 'Book of Hell’ (p.36) and 'change’ for 'change’ (p.263.)

Text
"The Fall of the Soul" (pp.2[62]-63)
The correspondences of the four states of humanity - Beulah, Alla, Al-ulro, and Or-ulro - to head, heart, loins and womb, is a phase of the correspondence of macrocosm and microcosm. When man is in harmony with the Divine scheme they are continuous with each other and differ alone in that the one series is universal and the other particular. Men may, however, be out of harmony with the Divine scheme and then the soul may plunge head downwards in the opaque, or in some other way alter the true positions of the states and regions. In the symbolic books are many drawing of such souls; some fall headlong, others lie upon their sides or float obliquely on the air, and all express divers conditions of the life of man. The soul whose head is plunged in the opaque and his loins in the luminous world,, is in that state symbolised by the inverted pentagram of the occultists; and, if we follow the interpretation of certain mystics in its greater detail and in its finding the cause of evil not in the ascension of the merely instinctive loins but in the fall of the active and reasoning head. Imagination, in the Blakean symbol, having been deserted by its Angel of the Presence, Reason, works alone through the still vital instincts, and Reason having rejected spiritual life drags the man further and further into the barren world of external sensation. Meanwhile the emotional nature that was once united to the great emotions of the universe is narrowed down to the mere instincts [262] of the Al-ulro, or to change [n.b.; Yeats has altered the typo 'charge’ to 'change’ in the margin: 1900] the symbol, the heart is full of water, the head is in the earth, and the loins are in the air and light. When the Reason has rejected all but the external world it begins to war on the emotions and instincts, to give them dead laws like those it has found in the opaque - to hid "wisdom in a silver rod and love in a golden bowl" - it make dogma to confine religion, and marriage to confine love, and from these dogmas and laws we have to seek freedom by rising into pure imagination, and standing erect once more. When the human form is described or drawn as lying upon its side it is then in one region only, generally that immediately above the earth, the region of instinctive or vegitative feeling. When it falls or lies obliquely it is half falling, half resting. As soon as the fall of Los in the second chapter of the book of Los becomes oblique contemplative life begins. A being on the other hand may have head and heart both above Alla, while his loins create merely in the world of emotion, leaving to the feet alone - to mere physical movement from place to place - the whole instinctive region, Or-ulro being entirely out of the range of the personality. Such a being may be said to be in the fours states of Humanity in action, for the term seems needed to balance "the four states of Humanity in Repose", described by Milton. It must be remembered that there is both fire and light, God and His Angel of Presence - and the light is in the zenith and fire beyond it. A being, such as we are describing, therefore, would have this [recte, his] head in the Divine ecstasy and seek by his emotions - his heart - the bodying forth of ecstasy, and by the loins or creative faculty its expression in objective shapes of art or speech. There is a symbolic figure of this nature described as "America", page, 8, lines 16-17, the four regions being expressed by gold, silver, brass, and iron, a method of symbolism taken with its correspondences from the image in Daniel or from the occult tradition, from which the biblical writers in all probability drew the image itself. [263] (pp.262-63.)

I: "The Necessity of Symbolism"
The Hindu, in the sculptured caverns of Elephanta; the gipsy, in the markings of the sea shell he carries to bring him good fortune; the Rosicrucian student [marg. note: For the Rosicrucian student [underlined] The Hermetic students of the G. D.] in the geometric symbols of medieval magic, the true reader of Blake in the entangled histories of Urizen and his children, alike discover a profound answer to the riddle of the world. Do they find anything in their obscure oracles that cannot be known from the much more intelligible dialectics and experiments of modern science and modern philosophy? To answer this question it is necessary to analyze the method whereby the mystic seeks for truth, and to inquire what the truth is he seeks for. Blake has discussed the first portion of his problem in many places, but particularly in two tractates called "There is no Natural Religion". By Natural Religion he understood attempts to build up a religious or spiritual life from any adjustment or "ratio" of the impressions derived from the five senses. These impressions may, indeed, be used in poetry and prophesy as a key to unlock religious truths, but "correspondence", as Swedenborg called the symbolic relation of out to inner, is itself no product of nature or natural reasons, beginning as it does with a perception of a something different from natural things with which they are to be compared. "Natural Religion" was two-fold to Blake. It was a solution of problems and a restraint of conduct: when only a restraint it was deadening, when only a solution it was .;’ p.[263])

These two degrees [Will - or emotion - and Reason] are the most important, and much of Blake’s system is but the history of their opposing lives differing from and yet completing one another, as love does wisdom - will, understanding - substance, form. The systems of philosophy and dogmas of religion are to the mystic of the Blakean school merely symbolic expressions of racial moods or emotions - the essences of truth - seeking to express themselves in terms of racial memory and experience - the [240] highest degree cloaking itself, as it were, in the second. The German produces transcendental metaphysics, the Englishman positive science, not because either one has discovered the true method of research, but because they express their racial moods or affections. The most perfect truth is simply the dramatic expression of the most complete man. "No man can think, write, or speak," says Blake in the second "Natural Religion" booklet, "from his heart but he must intend truth. Thus all sects of philosophy are from the poetic genius adapted to the weaknesses of the every individual." (pp.240-41.)

The five atmospheres and their symbols and correspondences may be thus tabulated [diagram, p.26]]

Yeats has a ref. sign [cross] in L. margin against Al-ulro, with an MS note added in the footer area: 'The west [guts] were it not closer [would] work open upon "Ideas"[.] See description of Golgossooza in Book I Jerusalem (P19). There however the Easter[n] [guts] is [opposite] the [lower] "ulro". [End]

[See also the more complex diagram:]

Header: "Songs of Innocence and Experience" - contains marginal corrigs. in WBY's hand, e.g., 'in the next song but two [corrig. for one], the "Divine Image" [.&c.] (p.10.)

In the song called "Night", all the terms are used in symbolic sense [sic], as in the prophetic books. It relates the [10] power of the passions, whether devouring loves or destructive angers, when mind has gone down into the darkness of experience from the light of imagination, as when "Urizen fell as the midday Sun down into the West" ("Vala", Night, VI, l.258; here pp.10-11.)

In the last, the "Voice of the Ancient Bard," the symbolic identification of all is made clear. More is identified with the Image of Truth. The word Image here explains the use of the term Imagination, as equivalent to Christ as a spiritual body divinely present in each heart. Doubt, Clouds, and [11 .; NLI photocopy discontinued]

Works of Blake - Vol. III: Wade 218; LL - Hall; 5pp. pl.91; img omitted RNP. O’Shea 220.
Pages are from Night, II, pp.22-25, and Night VI, pp.61-63; and facs. of title page. Annotations incl. 'Urizen goes from South to East, &c. The reverse of his natural way, which is the track of the sun. Is this all his Fall? [Presumably, re-reading in 1900.]

Notice Gilchrist [December 10th 1825; Blake aetat. 68]: 'Shall I call Blake artist, genius, mystic, or madman. Probably he is all. [.]

Quotes Blake: '“[.] Everything is good in God’s eyes.” On my putting the obvious question - "is there nothing absolutely evil in what men do?" "I am no judge of that - perhaps not in God’s eyes." / He sometimes spoke as if he denied altogether the existence of evil, and as if we had nothing to do with right or wrong, it being sufficient to commend all things alike as the work of God. Yet at other times he spoke of there being error in heaven. I asked about the moral character of Dante in writing his Vision [marginal emphasis by Yeats, 1900]. "Was he pure?" "Pure," said Blake, "do you think here is any purity in God’s eyes? The angels in heave are no more so than we. 'He chargeth his angels with folly.’"

Further: ‘From this subject [Dante, Milton, Locke and Atheism] we passed over to that of good and evil, on which he repeated his former assertions more decidedly. He allowed, indeed, that there are errors, mistakes, &c., and if these be evil, then there is evil. But these are only negations. Nor would he admit that any education should be attempted except the cultivation of imagination and the fine arts. What are called the vices in the natural world are the highest sublimities of the spiritual world .’[.] He reverted soon to his favourite expression, "my visions”. 'I saw Milton and he told me to beware of being misled by his "Paradise Lost." In particular, he wished me to show the falsehood of the doctrine that carnal pleasures arose from the Fall. “The Fall could not produce any pleasure.” [This sentence underlined by Yeats]. As he spoke of Milton’s appearing to him, I asked if he resembled the prints of him. He answered, "All." "What age did he appear to be?" "Various ages. Sometime a very old man." He spoke of Milton as being at one time a sort of classical Atheist, and of Dante as being now with God [underlined by Yeats, 1900.]. His faculty of vision, he says, he has had from early infancy. He thinks all men partake of it, but it is lost from want of cultivation. He eagerly assented to a remark I made that all men have all faculties to a greater or lesser degree. I am to continue my visits, and to read to him Wordsworth, of whom he seems to entertain high ideas.’

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Poetical Works of William Blake, ed. & intro. by W. B. Yeats (London: George Routledge & Sons. Ltd. 1910), xlix, 277pp.

Note on "Ideas of Good and Evil" (p.89)
The MS Book has upon its title-page the above inscription, which was possibly a first and rejected attempt towards a title for the poems afterwards called "The Songs of Innocence and Experience", but probably first thought for a title of "The Songs of Experience" alone, "experience" and eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil being one and the same in Blake’s philosophy. The first possibility is made unlikely by the fact that the MS. book contains none of "The Songs of Innocence," which therefore probably preceded it. If this be so, it might have been begun between 1789 and 1794. He kept it by him well-night all his life, and jotted down in it a record of all manner of wayward moods and fancies. The title "Ideas of Good and Evil" was soon forgotten, but, having at any rate his partial sanction, may well serve us better than such unnaming and uncomely titles as "Later Poems" or ["]Miscellaneous Poems". The editor follows the example of Gilchrist’s book in including under the title poems from other sources than the MS. book. [.] (P.267.)

Introduction: 'Early in the eighteenth century a certain John O’Neil got into debt and difficulties, these latter apparently political to some extent; and escaped both my marrying a woman called Ellen Blake, who kept a shebeen at Rathmines, Co. Dublin and taking her name. He had a son James, I am told, by a previous wife or mistress, and this son took also the name of Blake, and in due course married, settled in Londo as a hosier, and became the father of five children, one of whom was the subject of this memoir. John O’Neil had also a son by his wife Ellen; and this son, settling in Malaga, in Spain, entered the wine trade, and became the founder of a family, and from one of this family, Dr. Carter Blake, I have this story. [.; xi].

Swedenborg had said that the old world ended, and a new began, in the year 1757. From that day forward the old theologies were rolled up like a scroll, and the new Jerusalem came upon the earth. How often this prophecy concerning the year of his birth may have rung in the ears of William Blake we know not; but certainly it could hardly have done other than ring there, when his strange gift began to develop and fill the darkness with shadowy faces and green meadows with phantom footsteps. [.] In later life he called the seeing of visions being in Eden; and on his system Eden came again when the old theology passed away. The profound sanity of his inspiration is proved by his never having, no matter how great the contrast between himself and the blind men and women about him, pronounced himself to be chosen and set apart alone among men. Wiser than Swedenborg, he saw that he had but what all men might have if they would, and that God spoke through him but as He had spoken through the great men of all ages and countries.

'The essentials of the teaching of "The Prophetic Books" can be best explained by extracts mainly from the "prose writings", for the language of the books themselves is exceedingly technical. "God is in the lowest effects as well as in the highest causes," he wrote on the margin of a copy of Lavater’s Aphorisms. "For let it be remembered that creation is God descending according to the weakness of man. Our Lord is the word of God, and everything on earth is the word of God, and in its essence is God." That portion of creation, however, which we can touch and see with our bodily senses is "infected" with the power of Satan, one of whose names is "Opacity"; whereas that other portion which we can touch and see with the spiritual senses, and which we call "imagination", is truly, "the body of God", and the only reality; but we must struggle to really mount towards that imaginative world, and not allow ourselves to be deceived by "memory" disguising itself as imagination. We must mount by poetry, music, and art, which seek for ever "to cast off all that is not inspiration", and "the rotten rags of memory", and to become "the divine members". For this reason, he says that Christ’s apostles were all artists, and [xxxii] that "Christianity is art", and ["]the whole business of man is the arts", that " Israel delivered from Egypt is art delivered from nature and imitation"; and that we should all engage "before the world in some mental pursuit". We must take some portion of the kingdom of darkness, of the void in which we live, and by "circumcising away the indefinite", with a "firm and determinate outline", make that portion a "tent of God", for we must always remember that God lives alone, "in minute particulars" in life made beautiful and graceful and vital by imaginative significance, and that all worthy things, all worthy deeds, all worthy thoughts, are works of art and imagination. In so far as we do such works we drive the mortality, the infection out of the things we touch and see and make them exist for our spiritual senses - "the enlarged and numerous senses"; and beholding beauty and truth we see no more "accident and chance", and the indefinite void "and a last judgement "passes over us, and th world is consumed," for things are "burnt up" "when you cease to behold them."

"Reason", or the argument from the memory and from the sensations of the body, binds us to Satan and opacity, and is the only enemy of God. Sin awakens imagination because it is from emotion, and is therefore dearer to God than reason, which is wholly dead. Sin, howver, must be [xxxiii] avoided, because we are prisoners, and should keep the rules of our prison house, for "you cannot have liberty in this world without what you call moral virtue, and you cannot have moral virtue without the subjection of that half of the human race who hate what you call moral virtue." But let us recognise that these laws are but "the laws of prudence", and do not let us call them "the laws of God", for nothing is pleasing to God except the glad invention of beautiful and exalted things. He holds it better indeed for us to break all the commandment than to sink into a dead compliance. Better any form of imaginary evil - any lust or any hate - rather than an unimaginative virtue, for "the human imagination alone" is "the divine vision and fruition" "in which man liveth eternally." "It is the human existence itself." "I care not whether a man is good or bad," he makes Los, the "eternal mind", say in Jerusalem ; "all that I care is whether he is a wise man or a fool. Go, ut off holiness and put on intellect." By intellect he means imagination. He who recognises imagination for his God need trouble no more about the law, for he will do naught to injure his brother, for we love all which enters truly into our imagination, and by imagination must all life become one, for a man liveth not but in his brother’s face and by those "loves and tears of [xxxiv] brothers, sisters, sons, fathers, and friends, which if man ceases to behold he ceases to exist."

The great contest of imagination with reason is described throughout "The Prophetic Books" under many symbols, but chiefly under the symbolic conflict of Los, the divine formative principle which comes midway between absolute existence and corporeal life, with Urizen, "the God of this world" and maker of dead law and blind negation. Blake considered this doctrine to be of the utmost importance, and claimed to have written it unde the dictation of spiritual presences. "|I have weritten this poem from immediate dictation," he wrote, of " Jerusalem", "twelve or sometimes twenty or thirty lines at a time without premeditation, and even against my will. The time it has taken in writing was thus rendered non-existent, and an immense poem exists which seems the labour of a long life, all produced without labour or study." It is not possible in a short essay like the present to do more than record these things, for to discuss and to consider what these presences wer would need many pages. Whatsoever they were, presences or mere imaginings, the words they dictated remain for our wonder and delight. There is not one among these words which is other than significance and precise to the laborious [xxxv] student, and many passages of simple poetry and the marvel of the pictures remain for all who cannot or will not give the needed labour. Merlin’s book lies open before us, and if we cannot decipher its mysterious symbols, then we may dream over the melody of evocations that are not for our conjuring, and over the strange colours and woven forms of the spread pages. [pp.xxxii-xxxvi.]

Intro. ends: Boehme held himself permitted to speak of much only among his "schoolfellows"; and Blake held there were listeners in other worlds than this. He knew, despite the neglect and scorn of his time, tha fame even upon the arth would be granted him, and that his work was done, for the Eternal Powers do not labour in vain.’

[Ends with verses: 'Re-engraved time after time, / Ever in their youthful prime; / My designs unchanged remain, / Time may rage but rage in vain. / For above Time’s troubled fountains, / On the great Atlantic mountains, / In my golden house on high, / There they shine eternally.’ (p.xlix; end Intro.)