The Sea of Time and SpaceAuthor(s): Kathleen RaineSource: Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Vol. 20, No. 3/4 (Jul. - Dec., 1957),pp. 318-337Published by: The Warburg InstituteStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/750785Accessed: 13/12/2009 19:19

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THE SEA OF TIME AND SPACE

By Kathleen Rairle

The tempera painting discovered at Arlington Court irl I949, and pro- visionally entitled 'The Sea of Time and Space' (P1. 2 I a), is clearly dated,

under Blake's signature, I82 I . It is in fact a fine example of Blake's late and mature style, the style of the Dante illustrations and the Job engravings. Its allegorical character was from the first surmised, but what is the allegory, who are the figures who play their parts in the energetic cyclic movement of descent through cliff-hung caverns to a dark tumultuous sea, and reascend into a distant celestial world, where innumerable radiant beings surround the sun's chariot? Who are the central figures-the red-clad man with the dark clever face who crouches on the edge of the sea, and the majestic woman who stands behind him, and points his way upwards to the shining world?

To those who suppose that Blake in his later years had quite turned from classical to Biblical themes, it may well come as a surprise to find him, in this beautiful and elaborate composition, returning to myths that had formed his imaginative world thirty years before; for in 'The Sea of Time and Space' we have his most complete and profollndly considered representation of the essentials of Neoplatonism, of the descent and return of souls, of the crossing of the sea of time and space. The painting is based upon Porphyry's treatise on Homer's Cave of the Nymphs, to which Blake has added details from the Odyssey, and from other Platonic sources. The figure on the sea-verge is Odysseus, newly landed in Ithaca, in the cove of Phorcys, close to the cave of the nymphs. In the distance, sheltered by trees, we see the tall classical pillars of his house. Behind him, and still unseerl by Odysseus, stands Athene, depicted not with helmet and gorgon-shield, but as the Divine Wisdom, a figure somewhat resembling the Beatrice of Blake's Dante illustrations. Odysseus, though kneeling on the land, is silhouetted against the tempest- tossed sea which has so long held him captive. He is in the act of throwing something out to sea, but with his face averted. What has he thrown? Out at sea, a nymph or goddess has caught a scarf-like wreath that spirals upwards above her head, dissolving into radiant cloud. She is Leucothea, or Ino, who lent Odysseus her sea-girdle by which he came safe ashore-not, in this instance, on the coast of Ithaca, but on the shore of Phaeacia. Blake has com- bined the two accounts of the hero's coming safe to land; from the landing on Ithaca (Odyssey, Book XIII) comes Athene, and Phorcys, and the Cave of the Nymphs; from the Phaeacian landing (Book V) the episode of Leucothea's girdle. Odysseus had been shipwrecked, and alone survived in the tempest:

But Cadmus' beauteous daughter (Ino once, Now named Leucothea) saw him....

Leucothea takes pity on the hero, and advises him to swim for the shore:

Thus do (for I account thee not unwise) Thy garments putting oS, let drive thy raft As the winds will, then, swimming, strive to reach Phaeacia, where thy doom is to escape.

3I8

a-w llllam rlaxe, l ne rea ot l lme ancl rpace, I 62 I, l empera, l ne ln atlonal l rust (Arlington Court) (pp. 3I8 .)

By (Lourtesy oJ the Flerpont Morgan Llbrary

b-William Blake, Drawing for CThe Sea of Time and Space,' Pierpont Morgan Library, New York (p. 336!

THE SES OF TIME AND SPACE 3I9

lsake this. This ribbon bind beneath thy breast, Gelestial texture. Thenceforth ev'ry fear Of death dismiss, and, laying once thy hand On the firm continent, unbind the zone Which thou shalt cast far distant from the shore Into the Deep, turning thy face away.l

It is this throwing with averted face that Blake has represented in Odysseus' strange posture; for when he was safe on land

. . . loosing from beneath His breast the zone divine, he cast it far Into the brackish stream, and a huge wave Returning bore it downward to the sea, Where Ino caught it....2

Guided by Leucothea, and by two lesser sea-spirits, are four dark-coloured horses breasting the waves out at sea. Here again Blake is literally following Homer, who in a long simile compares the ship that carried Odysseus from Phaeacia to Ithaca to a team of four stallions:

1 Gowper's translation. Blake possessed a copy of Chapman's Homer, but Chapman's translation makes no mention of the gesture of throwing with averted face, so clearly de- picted by Blake. Pope emphasizes this detail, even repeating it in the account of Odysseus' obeying of Leucothea's instructions. My reason for believing that Blake was using Gowper's translation rather than Pope's (apart from Blake's recorded dislike of Pope's Homer-

. . . Hayley upon his Toile He seeing the sope, Cries, "Homer is very much improv'd by Pope")

-is that another detail, discussed below, is not to be found in Pope, although it is re- tained both by Ghapman and Cowper. This is the simile of the ship compared to four stallions. Pope does not specify the number.

It is most likely that Blake compared all these texts, and perhaps even the Greek. But if he used one translation only, it would seem to have been Cowper's. He could scarcely have failed to read Cowper's Homer, at the time of his association with Hayley over Gowper's portrait, if not before.

2 The garment that Odysseus has thrown back into the sea is evidently a sea-garment, or material body, for which he has no further use, and must return, for it was but lent. The theme of the sea-garment is one that he used in Night the First of The Four toas, and while there are other sources (the Hermetica, notably) there are traces in this episode, attributed to

Enion and Tharmas, "demon of the waters," of allusion to Leucothea's sea-girdle. It is in fact Blake's Enion who weaves such a gar- ment for the spectre (i.e. material manifesta- tion) of Tharmas:

. . . he sunk down into the sea, a pale white corse. In torment he sunk down and flow'd among her

filmy Woof. In gnawing pain drawn out by her lov'd fingers,

every nerve She counted, every vein & lacteal, threading them

among Her woof of terror. Terrified & drinking tears of

woe Shudd'ring she wove nine days and nights, sleep-

less; her food was tears. Wond'ring she saw her woof begin to animate

There are links between Blake's Enion and Ino or Leucothea. In the passage quoted, the weaver is Enlon; but tn The Mental Traveller it is "a woman old" whose "fingers number every nerve" of a baby boy, whose nurse she is. This nurse is "Eno, aged mother," in fact Ino, who when a mortal was the nurse of Dionysus. The story of the boy child of The Mental Traveller is recognizably drawn from Taylor's account ofthe Mysteries of Dionysus, and thus we find that Blake's eclectic mind had early established a link between the Homeric account of Ino and her sea-girdle, and Ino as nurse of Bacchus. The "filmy woof" Blake understands as the mortal body; and it is that same filmy woof that in the painting we see dissolving into cloud.

KATHLEEN RAINE 320

She, as four harness'd stallions o'er the plain Shooting together at the scourge's stroke, Toss high their manes, and rapid scour along, So mounted she the waves....3

These four horses doubtless had for Blake a symbolic significance not intended by Homer. The fourfold vehicle is a symbol to which he had given much thought; his own Four Zoas-the four living creatures are central to his symbolic system. The Zoas doubtless derive principally from the four living creatures of Ezekiel's chariot, and the four beasts about the Throrle in Revelation. These he gives special place in his painting of the Vision of the Last Judgement-'WThese I suppose to have the chief agency in removing the old heavens & the old Earth to make way for the New Heaven & the New Earth." They are, as he says of his own Zoas, the "four mighty ones" that are in every man, the mysterious powers of life.4 The chariot of the sun in the heavens above the sea is, likewise, driven by four horses, but bright and radiant. One may hazard the suggestion that those above are the energies of the spiritual humanity, and the dark horses of the sea, their "vehicular forms," or manifestation in the physical world.

This is a speculative digression; yet it is necessary to point out that where Homer gives but an image, Blake may read into it a symbolic meaning reached by other ways. The significance in Greek mythology of Leucothea's girdle I do not know; and here it may well be that Blake is not mistaken in takirlg it to be the physical body. But he has no authority for making the girdle dissolve into cloud, as he here depicts it, other than his own habitual use (derived, it is true, from well-authenticated traditional sources) of cloud as a symbol for the physical body.

For these black bodies and this sunburnt face Is but a cloud....

He depicts it as cloud because he took it to mean the body. The three main figures of the central group-Odysseus, Leucothea, and

Athene compose into what at first sight appears to be a single circling rhythm, descending through the spiral of cloud that the sea-goddess holds in her upraised right hand, through the horizontal of her outstretched left arm, repeated in the seaward-thrust arms of Odysseus, and then caught into the upward rhythm of the figure of Athene who stands behind him, pointing to the heavenly world with a draped upraised arm that seems to carry with it the whole strong movement of the central group, counter-clockwise, against the violent clockwise downward flow of the current of movement through the cave and out to sea, on the right. But a closer examination shows that the apparent movement is continually arrested, broken into a series of staccato movements that seem to be centred in the figure of Odysseus himself, pulled as it were in two directions. fIis outward-thrust arms suggest a clockwise movement that is checked by the counter-clockwise tensing of his body, and his averted face. The spiral of cloud in the hand of Ino seems to be ascending,

3 Gowper's translation. 4 Cf. Jung's four functions, reason, sensation, feeling, intuition.

THE SEA OF TIME AND SPACE 32I

clockwise, and, on the opposite side of Odysseus' kneeling figure, the move- ment is reversed. Athene with her left hand points to the eternal world; with her right, downwards to the sea; but it is the upward sweep of her left arm and hand that carries the eye, from the tips of the fingers of Odysseus as he rids himself of his sea-garment, up in the direction that she seems to be summoning him to travel. Her hand reaches to the lowest steps of the staircase that ascends to the sun's shining realm. Both goddesses are pointing the way to the eternal world, though for the moment Odysseus sees neither of them- Leucothea by her own command, Athene because he has not yet recogrlized her.

Against this upward movement is balanced the violent descending energy expressed in the groups of figures on the right, who follow the course of the stream that issues from the Cave of the Nymphs and flows downwards, to enter the sea with the force of a river in spate. But here, again, the apparent flow is checked. The horses of the sun-chariot, about to move forward, are restrained by the group of women who are grooming them with towel and curry-comb; and at the mouth of the cave the descending downward movement to the sea is, again, braked and held by the commanding figure of a woman carrying a bucket, and advancing up the stairs. But here it is necessary to give the text of Homer's account of the strange cave near whose entrance Odysseus arrived at last upon his native shore. r give Thomas Taylor's translation, because this was the text upon which Blake was chiefly working) for it prefaces Porphyry's treatise on the Carre of the Nymphs.5

High at the head a branching olive grows And crowns the pointed cliffs with shady boughs. A cavern pleasant, though involv'd in night, Beneath it lies, the Naiades' delight: Where bowls and urns of workmanship divine And massy beams in native marble shine; On which the Nymphs amazing webs display, Of purple hue and exquisite array. The busy bees within the urns secure Honey delicious, and like nectar pure. Perpetual waters through the grotto glide And lofty gates unfold on either side; That to the north is pervious to manliind; The sacred south t'immortals is consign'd.

We {ind each detail of this strange and beautiful imagerzr reproduced in Blake's painting. The entrance of the cave stands high in a cliff-face, on which grow tufted oliere-trees. Above are two groups of small figures a reclining nymph pouring water from an urn or water-pot; and a pair of lovers, reclining in Arcadian ease, turned towards one another. In the deepest and highest recess stand winged female figures bearing on their heads "bowls or

6 This treatise was first published in I788, separate work in I823; but Blake must in the second volume of Taylor's translations certainly have read Taylor's Porphyry on its of Proclus' Mathematacal Commentaries. It first appearance, for there are unmistakable forms part of an essay On the Restoration of the allusions to its symbolism in The Book of Ehel Platonac Ehweology. It was republished as a (I789).

KATHLEEN RAINE 322

urns." Below this group, other nymphs are weaving on a great loom. Three hold shuttles in their upraised hands. On the left, a reclining nymph holds up a coil of yarn upon her wrists, while a second, standing, winds it oK, to pass to the weavers at the loom. On the right, two others are measuring off the {inished fabric.

From the recesses of the cave flows a stream that trickles down over the steps, but gathers force as it rushes below the lowest steps of the cave to the sea. In the very mouth of this rushing flood, a last group of figures consists of Phorcys, the "old man of the sea," and the Three Fates, with spindle, thread and shears. The Fates are mentioned neither by Homer nor by Porphyry we shall presently consider on what grounds Blake felt justified in introducing them here but the cove where Odysseus was put ashore in Ithaca is, according to the Homeric story, dedicated to the sea-god.

On the left, high above the sea and the clouds, there is yet another sequence of distant figures, very different in character from the groups of the cave. Here we see the radiant world of the immortals that opens from the cave by its southern gate:

That to the north is pervious to mankind, The sacred south t'immortals is consigned.

Here the chariot of the sun is seen surrounded by radiant spirits, scarcely distinguishable from the flames of light that pulse from the creative fire. To the chariot four bright horses are harnessed, groomed by female figures who seem to be restraining the horses, eager for their journey; but in the car the god himself is sunk in sleep, or deep contemplation. There are other signi- ficant figures; but here it is necessary to pass from description to exposition. For this painting is no mere illustration to an episode in Homer, but a pictorial statement of a metaphysical theme.

Why, it may be askedn should Blake have chosen to illustrate this rather than some other episode from the Odyssey? The answer is quite evident; he was not primarily concerned to illustrate Homer, but rather the Neoplatonic symbolic interpretation of the story of Odysseus. With this symbolism Blake had been long familiar indeed he may have read Porphyrzr before he read Homer, for the Northern Gate, in Porphyry's symbolic sense) first appears in Blake's work in the Book of 7Chel in I78g. He would then have met Odysseus first as a symbolic figure of man, somewhat like his own Albion. All the symbols of the Arlington Court painting must be familiar to Blake students- urns, looms, cave, stream, sea, northern and southern gates, the sea-garment. He had adopted them long before and made them so much his own that some Blake scholars have judged the symbols in this painting to be too personal to derive from any source but Blake's own imagination. But they are his not by invention, but by adoption from writings that for several years were his chief imaginative food. What is remarkable is that Blake returned so late to mythological themes that had been among the earliest formative influences on his work. Long after the excitement of discovery was exhausted, the Neo- platonic symbolism retained its hold upon him through its inexhaustible

THE SES OF TIME AND SPACE 323

depth of truth, its completeness, and its beauty. The date of this painting serves to refute those who take over-literally Blake's condemnation of the classical philosophers (he meant in particular Aristotle, Plato in some aspects, and the Roman moralists) and suppose that he turned into so orthodox a Christian in his later years as to renounce his early realization that All religions are one. This work alone, painted with such evident love, such wealth of detail, makes it clear that he had neither renounced nor forgotten the Neoplatonic philosophy.

Odysseus, for the Neoplatonists, symbolized man, whose progress from birth to death, through material existence, is likened to the hero's perilous sea-voyage. The sea was universally taken in the ancient world as a symbol of matter, on account of its mutable flux. Blake's "sea of time and space" is, therefore, a traditional piece of Neoplatonic and Hermetic symbolism. The sea is "Dire resounding Hyle's mighty flood,"6 or "stormy mire," and Odysseus is man, who makes his perilous journey of life across the stormy and unstable sea of material existence. ". . . the person of Ulysses, in the Odyssey, represents to us a man, who passes in a regular manner, over the dark and stormy sea of generation; and thus at length, arrives at that region where tempests and seas are unknown, and finds a nation who

Ne'er knew salt, or heard the billows roar.

Indeed, he who is conscious of the delusions of the present life, and the enchantments of this material house, in which his soul is detained, like Ulysses in the irriguous cavern of Calypso, will, like himself, continually bewail his captivity, and inly pine to return to his native country."7

In a note to the second edition of his Orphic Hymns, Taylor writes to the same effect: "Let us build for ourselves the raft of virtue, and departing from this region of sense, like Ulysses from the charms of Calypso, direct our course by the light of ideas, those bright intellectual stars, through the dark ocean of material nature, until we arrive at our father's land. For there having divested ourselves of the torn garments of mortality, as much as our union with body will permit, we may resume our natural appearance, and may each of us at length, recover the ruined empire of his soul."

The stripping off of the ragged garments of mortality is an aspect of the symbol that Taylor often stressed, and the many instances in Blake's writings in which the body is compared to ragged or filthy garments, and that experi- enced in the body to "the rotten rags of memory," seem to echo Taylor's many allusions to the beggar's rags of which Odysseus divested himself when he returned to Ithaca. ". . . a life in conjunction with body is contrarwr to nature, and is an impediment to intellectual energy. Hence it is necessary to divest ourselves of the fleshly garments with which we are clothed, as Ulysses did of his ragged vestments, and no longer like a ragged mendicant, together with the indigence of body, put on our rags."8 But though Blake uses the beggar's rags in this sense elsewhere, the discarding of the mortal rags is, in

6 Proclus' Hymn to the Sun, tr. Taylor. 8 T. Taylor; note to 2nd edition of the 7 T. Taylor: Note to his translation of Orphic Hymns.

Plotinus on the Beautiful, I 789.

KATHLEEN RAINE 324

this composition, merely implicit in the throwing out to sea of the sea-girdle, whose symbolic meaning is the same.

This sea-voyage symbolism, with an implicit parallel with the Odyssey, Blake would also have found in Taylor's translation of the Delphic Oracle upon Plotinus; again, the author or transmitter- is Porphyry, Plotinus' biographer; and the author of The Cave of the J>ymphs can hardly have failed to have had in mind the Odysseus parallel.9 Here it is Plotinus who has made the crossing of "Hyle's mighty flood":

Freed from those members that with deadly weight And stormy whirl enchain'd thy soul of late: Oer life's rough ocean thou hast gain'd that shore Where storms molest, and change impairs no more; And struggling through its deeps with vig'rous mind, Pass'd the dark stream, and left base souls behind.

Plotinus through his spiritual wisdom has come in sight of the Islands of the Blessed, as Odysseus reached Ithaca through his courage; and it may well be that Blake himself, in I82I, chose this theme because he, too, felt that for him the buffietings of the long voyage were almost over, and that, guided by the Divine Wisdom, he had come within sight of the golden countrwr

Where streams ambrosial in immortal course Irriguous flow, from Deity their source. No dark'ning clouds those happy skies assail And the calm aether knows no stormy gale. Supremely blest thy lofty soul abides Where Minos and his brother judge presides; Just Aeacus, and Plato the divine, And fair Pythagoras there exalted shine, With other souls who form the general choir Of love immortal, and of pure desire.

It is to "that sweet golden clime" that Athene points the way to travel-worn Odysseusv

But it is the cave itself whose symbolism forms the subject of Porphyrzrs treatise and the essence of Blake's painting. Porphyry is doubtless right in saying that the Cave is not an invention of Homer's) and that long before Homer's time such caves were sacred places, consecrated especially to the female powers, the nymphs. Indeed the mysteries of the cave must be among the most ancient, universal, and archetypal, concerned, as they are, with man's entry into this life and his departure from it. The secret of the Cave of the Nymphs is related to the mysteries of the identity of womb and tomb, celebrated in so many forms in mystical initiations from the most primitive known or surmised, to the highly philosophic rites of Eleusis.

The cave symbolized, long before Plato's famous parable) the world: ". . . the ancients, indeed, very properly consecrated a cave to the world. . . ." And later, he says, men established ';templesn groves and altars to the celestial gods, but to the terrestrial gods, and to heroes, altars alone, and to the sub-

9 On the Restoration of the Platonic Theology, IQC. &t!., I788.

THE SES OF TIME AND SPACE 325

terranean deities pits and cells; so to the world they dedicated caves and dens, as likewise to Nymphs, on account of the water which trickles, or is diffused, in caverns, over which the Naiades preside." Ceres educated Proserpine and her nymphs in a cave; Temples of Mithra were caves watered by springs or fountains; and the Pythagoreans, and after them Plato "showed that the world is a cavern and a den" and here Porphyry quotes from the Seventh Book of The Republic, "Behold men as if dwelling in a subterraneous cavern, and in a den-like habitation, whose entrance is widely expanded to the admission of light through the whole cave."

There are many instances in Blake's works of the cave symbol used in this traditional sense. In fThe Marriage of Heaven and Hell, "man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern." "Five windows light the caverned man"; and the first stage of the Binding of Urizen is the encaverning of "the immortal mind". While it is possible that Blake came by so well-known a symbol as the cave from other sources, it seems likely that he came to know it first through Porphyry; for neither Plato nor any other of his followers gives so full an exposition of its symbolism.

The Naiads preside over generation, and dwell near perpetually flowing streams of water; ';For we peculiarly call the Naiades, and the powers that preside over waters, Nymphs; and this term, also, is commonly applied to all souls descending into generation." The cave is, in fact, the place of genera- tion, where the mystery of the descent of souls takes place in its womb-like depths, where perpetually flowing waters are the sacred source of generated existence. The river of life rises in the most secret depths of the world-cave, and like "Alph, the sacred river," runs through "caverns measureless to man, down to a sunless sea"- the sea of hyle.l°

The river-source in the depths of a cave is mentioned also in the Orphic Hymn to the }Fates who are there described as presiding over the issuing flow; and also in the Hymn to the Furies, who seem to bear a mysterious kinship to the Fates. Blake's Three Daughters of Urizen are fontal-goddesses, evidently based upon the Orphic interpretation of the Fates; and it seems likely that it is by reason of this association of the Fates with the flow of waters from the world-cave that Blake felt it permissible to represent them in this composition, although Porphyry makes no mention of them. According to Orpheus, they are those

Who in the heavenly lake (whose waters white Burst from a fountain hid in depths of night And thro' a dark and stony cavern glide, A cave profound) invisible) abide....11

Taylor notes that "it is not wonderful that the water is called white, since Hesiod . . . speaks of the Stygian waters as falling into the sea with silvery whirls." This, I suggest, is the source of the imagery of the sequence in the left-foreground of Blake's composition, where the gentle trickle from the Cave

10 There can be no doubt that Coleridge, through caverns, to a "sunless sea"-sunless familiar as he was with the Neoplatonists, had because this is a world of spiritual darkness. this symbolism in mind when he wrote of hLs 11 Tr. Taylor river, descending from a Paradisical world

326 KATHLEEN RAINE

of the Nymphs becomes the irresistible and deadly swirl of generation into the terrible sea.

Water itself is a symbol of the greatest possible significance. "What's water but the generated soul?" and Yeats' definition sums up the teaching of Porphyry and his masters; for "souls descending into generation fly to moisture" for which reason the water-loving Naiades are not only the powers presiding over generation, but the generated souls themselves. "On this account a prophet asserts, that the Spirit of God moved on the waters." Heraclitus says "that moisture appears delightful and not deadly to souls," and that the lapse into generation (although this is in reality a death from eternity) is delightful to them. "Hence the poet calls those that are in genera- tion humid, because they have souls which are profoundly steeped in moisture. On this account such souls delight in blood and humid seed; but water is the nutriment of souls and plants." "It is necessary," Porphyry concludes, "therefore, that souls, whether they are corporeal or incorporeal, while they attract to themselves body, and especially such as are about to be bound to blood and moist bodies, should verge to humidity, and be corporealized, in consequence of being drenched in moisture. . . . Souls that are lovers of body, by attracting a moist spirit, condense this humid vehicle like a cloud. But the pneumatic vehicle being condensed in these souls, becomes visible through an excess of moisture. . . . But pure souls are averse from generation; so that as Heraclitus says, 'a dry soul is the wisest.' Hence, here also, the spirit becomes moist and more aqueous through the desire of coition, the soul thus attracting a humid vapour through verging to generation. Souls, therefore, proceeding into generation, are the nymphs called Naiades." Such a "moist soul" is the figure, half-immersed in the water, and sunk into a blissful sleep of Lethean forgetfulness, to be seen in the extreme right foreground.

"To the nymphs, likewise, who preside over waters, a cavern, in which there are perpetually flowing streams is adapted. Let, therefore, the present cavern be consecrated to souls, and, among the more partial powers, to nymphs that preside over streams and fountains, and who, on this account, are calledfontal and Naiades." So Porphyry concludes his exposition of the world-cave. Porphyry's cave is the womb by which man enters life; but, seen otherwise, it is the grave in which he dies to eternity. But for those who leave it by the South Gate, it is, conversely, the grave of this world, that is the re-birth into the world of immortals.

There could be no fitter symbol of this identity of womb and tomb than those "bowls or urns of workmanship divine," that Blake has represented as carried on the heads, in the manner of water-pots, of winged nymphs, in the deepest recess of the cave. In these bowls, according to Homer's text, the bees deposit their honey. Now the bees are souls proceeding into generation; and the winged souls, about to descend into the cave, make their way first to these womb-like urns-"the funeral urns of Beulah," Blake names them, signifying that the descent of souls into the wombs of this world is a death from eternity. Porphyry quotes Sophocles who says of souls:

In swarms while wandering, from the dead A humming sound is heard.

THE SES OF TIME AND SPACE 327

Proserpine herself was called the honied, and the moon, who presides over generation, called a bee. Bees were thought an apt symbol of the descent and return of souls, because "this insect loves to return to the place from whence it first came," as souls that descend into generation will make their way home to the eternal world. For this reason not all sollls are called bees, but only those who, because they live justly, will find their way back to the place from whence they descended.

Are Blake's winged figures intended to suggest these bees ? Blake is sparing in his use of wings, for his spiritual beings are well able to fly without their assistance. Whether or not these nymphs are the bees, it is plain that Blake has given them wings to indicate their spiritual nature. They have newly come to the cave, "not in entire forgetfulness" of their heavenly origin. Blake, as was ever his way, has not interpreted the accident of the symbol, but its essence; the symbolic meaning of the bees, as Porphyry expounds it, is that of winged i.e. spiritual beings, descending into generation. Blake's winged urn-bearing nymphs have the same significance. Porphyry is not (like Virgil in his Fourth Georgic) discussing real bees, but human souls so symbolized; and what better representation could there be of the symbolic essence of bees, than winged female figures bearing urns of honey?

Descending from the highest recess, we come to a group of wingless nymphs at work about a loom. The looms of generation upon which Blake's Daughters of Albion, directed by Vala, and his Daughters of Beulah, directed by Enitharmon, weave the bodies of mankind, are to be found in many passages both in Ehe Four goas and in jKerusalem; and Blake's "every female is a golden loom" seems to derive directly from Porphyry. Painting this com- position in I82I, Blake had his own work behind him, and in these nymphs at their loom we can recognize the Daughters of Albion whose shuttles are plied in cruel delight to weave Blake's own World of Generation. The three women who throw the shuttles have faces bealltiful, but intent with passion, difEerent indeed from the calm nymphs of the urns, though less savagely cruel than the Three Fates in the Stygian waters below. Blake's looms of generation correspond exactly to Porphyry's description:

". . . to souls that descend into generation, and are occupied with corporeal energies, what symbol can be more appropriate than those instruments pertaining to weaving? Hence also the poet [Homer] ventures to say 'That on these the Nymphs weave purple webs, admirable to the view'. For the formation of the flesh is on and about the bones, which in the bodies of animals resemble stones. Hence these instruments of weaving consist of stone, and not of any other matter. But the purple webs will evidently be the flesh which is woven from the blood.... Add, too, that the body is a garment with which the soul is invested, a thing wonderful to the sight."

The figure of the little girl on the right of the loom seems to be becoming enmeshed in what the three nymphs are weavitlg. Perhaps Blake here intends to represent the process of generation. Thus it is, Porphyry explains, that Proserpine "who is the inspective guardian of everything produced from seed,

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is represented by Orpheus as weaving a web; and the heavens are called by the ancients a veil, in consequence of being, as it were, the vesture of the celestial Gods." Blake has his famous Veil of Vala, "the outside surface of earth":

. . . the Daughters of Albion Weave the Web Of Ages & Generations, folding & unfolding it like a veil of Cherubim.

This symbol of the loom of life is widespread in mythology. Penelope's web, woven by day and undone by night, is the fit symbol of the never- completed pattern of life. Porphyry quotes Proclus' explanation that the rape of Proserpine was the consequence of her leaving her webs unJinished. In eternity all is perfect; but "the unfinished state of her webs indicates, I think, that the universe is imperfect, or unfinished."

Gray found the same powerful symbol of weaving nymphs in a cave in the Orkney saga. A man from Caithness saw twelve weird women enter a hollow hill: "curiosity led him to follow them; till looking through an opening in the rocks, he saw twelve gigantic figures resembling women; they were all employed about a loom, and as they wove, they sang the following dreadful song" and this, as Gray's Ode The Fatal Sisters, Blake had illustrated as long ago as the year I 793-4.

See the grisly texture grow ('Tis of human entrails made,) And the weights that ply below Each a gaping warrior's head.

Shafts for shuttles, dipt in gore Shoot the trembling cords along, Sword, that once a monarch bore, Keep the tissue close and strong !

There is little similarity between Blake's early illustration of Gray's poem and his later interpretation of Porphyry; unless there be a recollection of the early group of three figures (Mista, Sangrida, and Hilda) in the group of three who ply the shuttles in the later composition. In this triple group, Blake may, besides, be signifying that the bodies woven on the looms may be single, double, or threefold, as he describes them in The Four toas.

There are instances in Blake's writings of weaving in a cave, that can only derive from the Homeric Cave of the Nymphs. In The Gates of Paradise much that is obscure is illuminated in the light of this source. Male and Female stand together and

Round me flew the Flaming Sword; Round her snowy whirlwinds roar'd, Freezing her Veil, the Mundane Steel. I rent the Veil where the Dead dwell: When weary Man enters his Cave He meets his Saviour in the Grave. Some find a Female Garment there, And some a Male, woven with care, Lest the Sexual Garments sweet Should grow a devouring Winding sheet.

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Here the world-cave is the grave "where the dead dwell," and where man finds his woven garments. This is pure Porphyry. The Saviour himself descended into this Cave, the earth, and here in the "grave" of souls dead to eternity, Man meets his Saviour, who also puts on a "body of death."

Blake has used the image of the stone looms for purposes of his own:

. . . and they drew out from the Rocky Stones Fibres of Life to Weave, for every Female is a Golden Loom. The Rocks are opake hardnesses covering all vegetated things; As they Wove & Cut from the Looms, in various divisions They divided into many lovely Daughters, to be counterparts To those they Wove; for when they wove a Male, they divided Into a Female, to the Woven Male: in opake hardness They cut the Fibres from the Rocks; groaning in pain they Weave, Calling the Rocks Atomic Origins of Existence, denying Eternity 12

The drawing out of fibres from the rocky stones seems to be a recollection of Homer's stone loom upon which the purple garments are woven.

The looms of generation passed, we reach the fourth, and lowest, stage of the descending series, the Stygian waters of the river's mouth, where the Fates control the entry upon "the sea of time and space." With faces of savage cruelty and joy one unwinds the thread from a great distaff-like coil held by Phorcys; a second measures the yarn with her fingers, and the third cuts it with her shears. Sir Geoffrey Keynes has drawn attentionl3 to the phallic appearance of this coil; and this would be consistent with the symbolic signi- ficance that Porphyry attributes to Phorcys, as the god of generation.

". . . according to Plato, the deep, the sea, and a tempest, are images of a material nature. And on this account, I think, the poet [Homer] called the port by the name of Phorcys. For he says 'It is the port of the ancient marine Phorcys'."

Plato in the Timaeus names Phorcys among the ennead of gods who fabricate generation, and Taylor quotes Proclus' commentary:

". . . as the Jupiter in this ennead causes the unapparent divisions and separation of forms made by Saturn to become apparent, and as Rhea calls them forth into motion and generation; so Phorcys inserts them into matter, produces sensible natures, and adorns the visible essence."

There is something of Phorcys in Blake's Tharmas, "demon ofthe waters''l4 who is, besides, the "parent power." The sea, likewise, is

. . . the World of Tharmas, where in ceaseless torrents Its billows roll, where monsters wander in the foamy paths.

12J. III. 67. sistent with his marine kingdom. Was he like 13 Note in the Arts C:ouncil C:atalogue of the "old man of the sea," the shepherd not of

the I95I Exhibition of Blake's tempera paint- sheep but of the seals? This is pure specula- ings. tion. Phorcys is, in this sense, described as a

14 Tharmas is described as a "shepherd," shepherd. an occupation that seems strangely incon-

0

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It may be objected that Phorcys, as the Old Man of the Sea, ought to be bearded and old. But Blake is interpreting the symbol according to Porphyry's definition as the god of generation. Blake never followed the accidents of a symbolic tradition at the expense of the essential meaning-';not because I think the Ancients wrong, but they will be pleas'd to remember that mine is Vision & not Fable." The Furies, for example, he represents as "three Men & not by three Women"; again, "the Greeks represent Chronos or Time as a very Aged Man; this is Fable, but the Real Vision of Time is in Eternal Youth.''l5 So it seems that Blake has depicted the god of generation as young. The "vision" had been with him for many years, and Blake's own Sgure of Tharmas, who may himself have derived in part from the classical Phorcys, had in the course of years assllmed a character that in its turn had influenced his representation of the Homeric god. But it is curious to notice that Tharmas himself was at one moment a bearded figure, emerging from the sea in the traditional manner of the Old Man of the Sea. When Vala's eyes

. . . were open'd to the world of waters She saw Tharmas sitting upon the rocks beside the wavy sea. He strok'd the water from his beard....ls

This is the Phorcys of tradition, as Homer describes him, and Virgil in the Fourth Georgic.

We may discover, in the descending series of groups, a diagram of Blake's Four Worlds of Eden, Beulah, Generation, and Ulro. The bright world of the sun is the golden countrzr of Eden. The women with the urns are the "daughters of Beulah" with their "funeral urns" into which souls descend in sleep from the eternal world. Blake's Beulah is a lunar- "moony"-world. Descending from Beulah we Snd the looms of Generation, Blake's third world; and below roll the waters of Ulro, material existence, the world that opens below "the bottoms of the graves", or "leads from the gates of the tomb." The tomb is the cave, and this is the grave of immortals; Ulro is the world of those dead to immortality.

It is not strange that Blake should introduce these four worlds into a Platonic composition; for the four worlds derive, originally, from Platonism. Highest is Plato's Intelligible world, the world of the gods; lowest is the world of ignorance and opinion, the cave. Some critics have surmised a Cabbalistic source for this painting, doubtless-and rightly- because of this evident depiction of the Four Worlds. But the Cabbalistic Four (Aziluth, Briah, Yetzirah, and Assiah) which Blake also knew, are common to the Jewish and the Platonic traditions, and their significance is the same.l7 Blake was certainly familiar with both traditions, which, in any case, are united in the works of such authors as Agrippa and Fludd. They correspond, Blake would no doubt have argued, to the real rlature of things there are these four worlds, and both traditions rest upon the unchangeable nature of the human imagination. We must remember that Blake knew the late Platonists before he knew Plato. In Plato's own writings the Cave is the lowest world of the

15 A Vision of the Last jrudgment. 17 It is possible that the Cabbalistic Four 16 Ehe Four Zoas Night the Ninth. Worlds derive from Platonlc sources.

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Four, the world of materialism, of ignorance, and of opinion. There is nothing in Plato to associate the Cave with the feminine mysteries of the cult of the Nymphs, with generation and death. In the treatise of Porphyry, the cave is, above all, sacred to the nymphs, and to generation; and every group in Blake's composition follows this account, from the figure of the fontal nymph pouring water from her urn, and the two lovers (signifying the married state of all nymphs) at the top of the hillside, to the weavers at the looms below. In Plato's Cave the prisoners sit bound, watching the shadows of things cast upon the walls; but Porphyry stresses the beauty of the Cave of the Nymphs, and this beauty, as of an arbour, or grotto, Blake has retained:

"Through matter . . . the world is obscure and dark; but through the connecting power, and orderly distribution of form from which also it is called world, it is beautiful and delightful. Hence it may very properly be denominated a cave; as very lovely, indeed, to him who first enters into it . . . but obscure to him who surveys its foundation, and examines it with an intellectual eye. So that its exterior and superficial parts, indeed, are pleasant, but its interior and profound parts are obscure, and its very bottom is darkness itself."

Porphyry describes the great beauty of the flowery caves of Mithra; and stresses that the Cave is not only a symbol of this world, but, also, holy ground -a shrine sacred to the mysteries of the Naiads; and so Blake has shown it.

Homer speaks of the northern and southern entrances of the Cave of the Nymphs; and in explaining these, Porphyry passes to astronomical symbolism. For a cavern iS an image or symbol of the world and

"there are two extremities irl the heavens, viz. the winter tropic, than which nothing is more southern, and the summer tropic, than which nothing is more northern. But the summer tropic is Cancer and the winter tropic is Capricorn. And since Cancer is nearest to us, it is very properly attri- buted to the Moon, which is the nearest of the heavenly bodies to the earth. But as the southern pole, by its great distance, is invisible to us, hence Capricorn is attributed to Saturn, the highest and most remote of all the planets. Theologists therefore assert, that these two gates are Cancer and Capricorn."

By the logic of astrological symbolism, it follows that souls enter generation by the moon-governed gate of Cancer, since the moon is the ruler of genera- tion, and also of the waters. Conversely, souls leaving this world through the gate of Capricorn, enter Saturn's golden country of eternity.

"The northern parts . . . pertain to souls descending into generation. And the gates of the cavern which are turned to the north, are rightly said to be pervious to the descent of men; but the Southern gates are not the avenues of the Gods, but of souls ascending to the Gods. On this account the poet does not say that they are the avenues of the Gods, but of im- mortals; this appellation being also common to our souls, which are, per

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se, or essentially, immortal. It is said that Parmenides mentions these two gates in his treatise On the JEature of Things; as likewise, that they are not unknown to the Romans and Egyptians."

These two entrances Blake has faithfully depicted, in the vital downward current of generation, and in the radiant staircase, rising from the distant extremity of the cave, into a golden world. Blake himself had long ago assimilated the Northern and Southern Gates into his own system, attributing the Northern Gate, through which souls descend into generation, to Los, or Urthona. The first mention of the Northern Gate occurs in The Book of Thel, from which we must conclude that Blake read Taylor's Porphyry very soon after its publication in X 788:

The eternal gates' terrific porter lifted the northern bar: Thel enter'd in & saw the secrets of the land unknown. She saw the couches of the dead, & where the fibrous roots Of every heart on earth infixes deep its restless twists. A land of sorrows & of tears where never smile was seen.

Thel's "land unknown" is the world of the cave, as seen by a spirit hovering on the verge of descent into incarnation.

This passage from Thel throws light upon the four trees that stand about the loom of generation. They occupy the whole height of the picture, their twisted roots in the water, their crowns reaching to the golden country above the cave. They clearly suggest that the roots of life are in the lower world, its leaves in eternity. One is reminded Blake perhaps had in mind the tree Yggdrasil whose roots were in the waters of deepest hell, and its branches in the heavens. These trees are the only non-Platonic element in this composi- tion. It may be that Blake has borrowed them from another composition, which, while mainly Christian in inspiration, states almost the same symbolic theme, 'The River of Life'. Here the trees of life grow by the river, as they are described in the last chapter of the Book of Revelation:

"And he shewed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God, and of the Lamb. In the midst of the street of it, and on either side of the river, was there the tree of life, which bore twelve manner of fruits. . . ."

There are many similarities between these two paintings, and it seems that here Blake has introduced into his classical allegory this element from the Christian text.

Of the Southern Gate that leads upwards out of the cave into the world of immortals Porphyry's description is necessarily less detailed than that of the cave. Those who pass through the Southern Gate pass into the galaxy, outside the seven spheres of the planets that govern this world. "Capricorn and Cancer are situated about the galaxy. . . . According to Pythagoras, also, the people of dreams18 are the souls which are said to be collected in the galaxy,

18 Gornelius Agrippa also writes of these, of Pluto cannot be unlocked: within is a quoting Orpheus as his authority: "The gates people of dreams."

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this circle being so called from the milk with which souls are nourished when they fall into generation." These people of dreams are the spirits departed from, or awaiting, incarnation; and we see a multitude of them, about the chariot of the Sun. They are scarcely distinguishable from the bright flames that emanate from the sun as it rests on its golden chariot.

Critics have not agreed as to whether Blake shared the Platonic belief in the reincarnation of souls, the cycle of descent and return. Ellis and Yeats assumed that he did so; and this painting, an expression of this theme, con- taining as it does so much else that Blake had made his own, seems to confirm their belief; there are passages that it is possible to read as confirmation of this view. The Sons of Albion upon the "starry wheels''l9

. . . revolve into the Furnaces Southward & are driven forth Northward, Divided into Male and Female Forms time after time.

This makes it at least allowable to conclude that the same souls return. The presence of the sun as the heart of light in the eternal world seems to

need no justification; but in fact it is consistent with Porphyry's thesis, for he says that "the Sun and Moon are the gates of souls, which ascend through the Sun, and descend through the Moon." It is, therefore, understandable that the bright ascending souls should be clustered about the sun's chariot.

It is of these disincarnate spirits that Heraclitus says "We live their death, and we die their life." And in these words, we have the heart of the myth of the CDave of the Nymphs, the descent and return of souls in a ceaseless round of death and rebirth, suggested by Blake in the very composition of the paint- ing, with its circling or spiralling rhythms. These words are of the essence of Neoplatonism, and of Porphyry's theme. Taylor gives from the Gorgias Plato's quotation of Euripides' variant on the same paradox, "who knows whether to live is not to die, and to die is not to live"- for, says Socrates, perhaps in reality we are the dead. One may say that this is the heart, also, of Blake's philosophy; generated man is sunk in "deadly sleep,)' and he enters his cave, or grave, when he is born into this world. Something of this alterna- tion of life and death is, it seems to me, suggested by Blake in the difference of character in the people of the two worlds. In strange contrast with the fierce vitality of the descending spiral of generation, the sun-god in his chariot is sunk in profound sleep. Blake is suggesting the contrasting states, of life in this world as death in the other; or, in this case, the waking of the one as the sleep of the other. Modern psychologists would say that the waking of con- sciousness is the sleep of the unconscious and indeed this whole theme would as readily lend itself to a psychological as to a metaphysical interpretation. Below, all is wakeful energy and action; in the world of the immortals, there is profound sleep.

Yet the four horses of the sun's chariot seem impatient to run their course, and four female figures are grooming them with towels and curry-combs. The divine world will presently awake and move into life, and then the world of generation will sink into the sleep of death; or does Blake intend to suggest that the sun's horses will presently lead forth the divine chariot, descend the

l9J. I. 5.

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steps, and bring the light of immortality into the Cave? There can, in any case, be no doubt that, as the central figure of the celestial group, the sleeping figure of the sun-god is intended to convey the Heraclitean paradox that is the central mystery of the myth. Whether we adopt a metaphysical or a psychological explanation, this is an amazing representation of the human condition.

To Blake, the sun as the symbol of deity is one that unites his Christian with his classical symbols. Swedenborg's angels saw the Lord as the Sun, in the midst of innumerable bright spirits; and so always did Blake himself. The painting of 'The River of Life', predominantly Christian in inspiration, shows that river flowing towards just such a spirit-encompassed sun as this, and is, indeed, communicating the same truth in other terms, the return of all souls to

. . . that sweet golden clime Where the traveller's journey is done.

The god in the chariot of the sun is indeed a strange figure. He does not appear to be intended to resemble the traditional Apollo he has no "bow of burning gold" and there is a strange and striking resemblance to the figure of God in the fifth plate of the jkob engravings, "Then went Satan forth from the presence of the Lord," though there the drowsy God is not yet actually sleeping, as he appears to be here. Yet the symbolic event, though stated in other terms, is strangely parallel. The separation of Satan (the Self- hood, as Blake invariably defines him) from God (the Divine Humanity) is about to initiate just such a cycle of Experience, of descent and return, in the sufferings of Job, as is here symbolized by the voyage of Odysseus across the stormy sea of time and space, and his final home-coming. One thinks, also, of the opening lines of fhe Gates of Paradise,

My Eternal Man set in Repose, The Female from his darkness rose.

Again, the sleep of the Eternal Man-who is, for Blake, the divine in man - initiates a descent into the "grave" or "cave" of this world, the putting on of a bodily garment in the cave, and a final return of the Traveller to his native country:

But when once I did descry The Immortal Man that cannot Die, Thro' evening shades I haste away To close the Labours of my Day.

Now this cycle of descent and return, the journey of the Traveller who leaves his native country to return to it again, is not Christian: it is Platonic. And even into his interpretation of Job, I conjecture that Blake is carrying that grand conception that re-echoes from Heraclitus down through the Greek philosophers and poets, "we live their death, and we die their life." When the Satan or Selfhood or Traveller of Experience awakes, or comes into being as a separate entity, the divine in man sleeps or dies; when the Lost Traveller

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returns, the God awakes. How deeply Blake was influenced by this concept, I can here only suggest.

The fable of the gyres of history told by Plato in his Politics speaks of the god Saturn, who now guides the world, now relinquishes it and allows it to run down in revolutions in a direction contrary to those in which the god turns the world. When Saturn guides the cycle, all creatures grow from age to youth; when he falls asleep and leaves the world to guide itself, all moves from youth to age, as now. Saturn is the ruler of the Golden Age, and of the "sweet golden clime," the Galaxy where the People of Dreams return from one cycle of incarnation, or await their descent. The god in the chariot here, I would suggest, has affinities with this Platonic figure of Saturn.

In such a context, the human figure of Odysseus, travel-worn by the shore, becomes profoundly moving. Unlike the other figures who play their part about him, he acts and suffers the jollrney, bllt knows neither its beginning nor its end. He is guided by the goddesses, but is not himself wise as the gods are wise, but wise only as men grow wise, from long and bitter experience. Yet we see that he has come safely through the tempests and dangers of the sea, and we see, as he does not, that his future path leads up the golden stairs. Yet his wary crouching figure has, rather, the air of a brave man ready to face danger, than of other-worldly self-assurance. He is the man who has travelled the hard way, whose heroism has been made possible only by his temporary ignorance of the whole in which he enacts his part.

Two figures in the right foreground provide concrete proof if that be needed- that Blake was working not merely from Homer, but from Porphyry; for of these figures there is no mention in Homer's text. They illustrate Socrates' parable of the tubs, from the Gorgias:

". . . that part of the Soul in which the desire is contained, is of such a nature that it can be persuaded, and hurled upwards and downwards. Hence a certain elegant man . . . denominated, mythologizing, this part of the soul as a tub . . . he farther said, that the intemperate nature of that part of the soul in which the desires are contained, was like a pierced tub, through its insatiable greediness."

In Hesiod, too, Porphyry says, "we find one tub closed, but the other opened by Pleasure, who scatters its contents everywhere." Taylor further quotes from Olympiodorus' commentary on Plato,

. . . the tubs are the desires . . . the initiated, therefore i.e. those that have a perfect knowledge, pour into the entire tub; for these have their tub full, or, in other words, have perfect virtue. But the uninitiated, viz. those that possess nothing perfect, have perforated tubs. For those that are in a state of servitude to desire always wish to fill it and are more inflamed, and on this account, they have perforated tubs, as never being IUll.

There is more to the same purpose, in which the image is changed from a pierced tub to a sieve, and elaborated beyond our present purpose.

336 KATHLEEN INE

These two conditions, Blake has represented by two women. One whose aspect is sober and resolute, has turned her back upon the swirling waters, and begun to climb the steps of the cave, against the current of generation. In her right hand she carries a full bucket; and her left hand, in a gesture mirroring that of Athene, is raised towards the celestial world. She is the initiated soul, who is beginning her journey of re-ascent. Her upward progress is opposed, as Sir Geoffrey Keynes observes, by the nymphs of the cave; for she is a "dry soul," and her progress is contrary to their nature and function.

Close to her, in the extreme right of the foreground, the uninitiated soul dominated by desire lies, deeply sunk in "deadly sleep", half immersed in the water, and reclining over her tub (or sieve) which lies on its side, the water lapping into it, for ever unfilled. Her expression is one of bliss and uncon- sciousness, for the lapse into generation is delightful to the soul attracted by moisture. She is a "moist soul" proceeding on her downward journey to the sea. She has summoned, like Lyca in A Little Girl Lost, the "sweet sleep" of generation, and she is on the descending path: ". . . by the sieve Plato signifies the rational in subjection to the irrational soul. But the water is the flux of nature: for, as Heraclitus says, moisture is the death of the soMl."20

These two figures are related very directly to the spiritual situation of Odysseus himself; for he has reached the point of return from the sea. He is no longer on the descending path, but about to take the upward way of the "dry soul," pointed for him by Athene the divine Wisdom.

Such is the wealth of meaning that Blake has worked into this beautiful composition, with its inexhaustible vitality of the everlasting cycle of death and rebirth. He has given us the essence of Neoplatonism, and, incidentally, made incontrovertibly clear how much of his own system comes from that source. So many of Blake's most frequent symbols are here that some critics have thought this painting too personal to be an illustration of any allegory but Blake's own.21 But Blake was not an inventor of symbols. He was un-

Morgan Library (published in Pencil Drawings by William Blake, Second Series, ed. Keynes, Nonesuch I957) was made at a time when Blake was more closely following Porphyry's symbols than he was when the finished paint- ing was elaborated. The date of the pencil drawing is not certainly known, and Mr. Preston suggests the possibility that it may have been made much earlier than the Snished work. I feel it right to give this view of a distinguished Blake scholar, although I cannot accept it. There seems to me to be more, rather than less, detail that is speci- fically related to the classical sources in the later work. In the drawing, Odysseus is in the act of throwing, but the sea girdle is not shown. The figures of the horses are not there, nor more than the barest indication of the group about the sun. The Fates are recognizable in the foreground, but not Phorcys; and in the later version, the charac-

20 Olympiodorus, Op. Cit. 21 Such an interpretation is given by Sir

Geoffrey Keynes in his notes to the painting in the Arts Council catalogue of the exhibi- tion of Blake's tempera paintings, arranged in I95 I by the William Blake Trust; and also in a publication of the Princeton University Press (I954) entitled Studies in Art and Litera- ture, for Belle da Costa Greene (edited by Dorothy bliner). Much that is true and valuable can be discovered by this method. Another distinguished authority who has held a similar view is Mr. Kerrison Preston, who has kindly allowed me to read an unpublished essay on the Arlington Court painting, which in many respects diffiers from Sir Geoffrey Keynes' exposition, but is no less true to Blake's symbolic system as a whole. Mr. Preston is prepared to grant that Blake is illustrating Porphyry, but suggests that the pencil drawing (P1. 2 I b) in the Pierpoint

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restrainedly eclectic but was so because he believed in a universal symbolic language; but no artist was ever more scrupulous in his observance of tradi- tional meanings. This work is a most scrupulous, and deeply pondered, study of a theme of classical mythology. Blake has studied Porphyry, the Orphic Hymns, and Homer in at least one translation and probably several. The composition suggests the most careful study of the text itself, and the com- mentaries. To be a visionary, as Blake certainly was, is not to be an innovator of symbols; it is, rather, to possess the imaginative insight by which alone the age-old symbols of the world's myths can be rightly understood. Visionary imagination is a natural initiation into the secret language secret because it only becomes comprehensible to those minds capable of grasping its subject- matter-handed down from antiquity, in all art and poetry whose theme is imaginative knowledge. There is nothing personal in this painting except the style of the draughtsmanship and composition, that is inimitably Blake's own. Any initiate of the traditional symbolic language could not fail to receive its communication. From all others, it withholds its secret, and presents only those over-valued aesthetic qualities that in a secular age usurp the place, in art-criticism, of the communication of meaning, which is the purpose of all religious art.

I remember seeing this painting for the first time at the Art Council's exhibition of Blake's tempera paintings, in I95I. It was at that time closed to me; it reminded me though none of the figures correspond of Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, through the common theme of a cycle of descent and return, from sea to cloud, and river to sea. Yeats' use of river and sea symbolism might equally have come to mind, though the cycle is peculiarly Joyce's theme. The similarities are not accidental; for these three great artists in myth are all scrupulously exact in their use of traditional symbols, though each has a different statement to make, within those terms. It is to be deplored that when a painter or a poet adheres strictly to the traditional symbols common to all great religious art of the Western tradition and beyond, both before and after Christ, that he is likely, in this age of ignorance and, in Plato's sense, opinion, to be accused of a use of symbols too private and personal to be under- stood, if not of madness. He is fortunate if he escapes with nothing worse than references to the Collective Unconscious. Blake ceases to be obscure when we discover his sources, which are traditional. In this respect no poet or painter has been more gravely misunderstood, even by some of his most sincere admirers.

terization of Odysseus is more studied; it is chapter "Of Worship paid in Caverns" in surely not possible to study the face of Blake's which he stresses the practice of fire-worship, central figure and not to feel that he has especially in the cult of Alithras; Blake had, exactly captured the character of Homer's ofcourse,readBryant,andasBasire'sappren- "wary-wise," intelligent, eloquent, and above tice may even have worked on some of the all guileful Greek. engravings of Persian cave-temples, several of

What of the flames that pour out of the which indicatesymbols of fire-worship; in any cave, on the right of the painting, beside the case, he would have seen these being pre- looms? Neither Porphyry nor Homer men- pared. What, then, could be more natural tions fires in connection with worship in than for Blake to add, on the authority of caves, and here I think Blake is using a dif- Bryant, a detail of the symbolism of cave ferent source. Bryant's Mythology contains a temples that he did not find in Porphyry?