Page:Works of William Blake; poetic, symbolic, and critical (1893) Volume 2.djvu/36

22 haunted tradition as Blake's bad angel made flesh. If Blake had only begun "William Bond" more conventionally with tho word "maids" where he has written "girls," even that poem might have eluded the biographer. The "Crystal Cabinet" has been the occasion of a yet more unfortunate suggestion. A foot-note in the Aldine edition explains it as giving "under a very ideal form the phenomena of gestation and birth." This is Interpretation at its wit's end, and is likely to produce more anger than laughter in any real reader of Blake. It is adopted with amazing gravity in the last edition of Gilchrist. Mr. Rossetti enforces his idea by citing the verses from Felphain that tell of Blake's visionary faculty, as

"Three-fold in soft Beulah's night;"

and the passage in the "Descriptive Catalogue," telling how the "Three Men" in his " Ancient Britons," namely, the Strong, the Beautiful, and the Ugly, "were originally one man, who was fourfold ; he was self-divided, and his real humanity slain on the stems of generation."

These passages, it is evident, do not support the " gestation" theory of the "Crystal Cabinet" at all. Some lines in "Jerusalem," p. 70, l. 18, &c, would have been of more use, especially as they belong to a date near that when the "Crystal Cabinet" may be presumed to have been written. But in spite of the obvious appropriateness none of the early editors, who had done everything with Blake except (as charity must needs suppose) read him, have thought it useful to refer us to the passage.

The whole of p. 70 is appropriate. It begins with the form of mighty Hand, sitting on Albion's cliffs, threatening Albion. He has three heads that contradict one another, and it is his opinion that ideas are nothing, but that all wisdom consists in the agreement or disagreement of ideas. Bacon, Newton, and Locke are the presiding spirits of his three heads. Below these : —