Blake was thirty-three when in 1790 he wroteThe Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
It marked a crisis in his life. Hitherto, with all the generous exuberance of youth, he was striving to leave the past behind, and reach forth to something new that by sheer glory and beauty should sweep up in its course the youth of the ages to come.
For a time he believed that Swedenborg could supply him with the fire to fashion and direct his own genius; but after poring long over his pages, he began reluctantly to discover that the fire of his imagination had either never been kindled or it was long since extinct. Whatever else remained in Swedenborg—and there were undeniably many good things—was impotent for the supreme task of supplying the creative spark.
Blake was disappointed and disillusioned. Never again did he make an impetuous rush to embrace any man, however dazzling his gifts. But not yet had he learnt the vital value of the past. If no new prophet arrived, there was still himself, and if he trusted himself with passionate faith, he might yet accomplish the desired thing.
In 1791 the outer events of his life ran a new course. Some time previously, Fuseli had introduced him to a bookseller and publisher named Johnson, living at 72 St Paul’s Churchyard.
This Johnson was a remarkable man. His sympathies were with rebels, whom he detected, welcomed, and encouraged. But he had none of the hard narrowness of advanced liberals, and his eye and heart were quick also to discover and cheer such a shy, diffident, conservative genius as Cowper. He was a friend to the authors whose works he published; and in a little upper chamber he gave weekly dinner parties, to which were bidden William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, Tom Paine, Dr Price and Dr Priestley, and now Blake himself. In the ’eighties Blake had moved among elegant Blue-stockings who were above all things anxious to show themselves true daughters of Sarah: now in the ’nineties he was one of a party of rebels who despised the past, and were hailing the French Revolution, believing that after a few more of such upheavals a millennium would surely come in which man would be perfected.
Foremost among the rebels was William Godwin. Ten years younger, Blake might have been captivated by Godwin, as later on Shelley, Coleridge, and Bulwer Lytton were to be. There was always something clean and fresh about Godwin, and his hopes and aspirations for mankind were generous. Brought up in the narrowest sect of Calvinism, and believing while still a boy that he was assuredly one of the elect, he rebounded in later life to a liberal humanism, and retained little of his Calvinism except an unshaken belief in his own election. The first edition of hisEnquiry concerning Political Justiceappeared in 1793, which he stated all his first principles. These can be summarized briefly:
The characters of men originate in their external circumstances, and therefore man has no innate ideas or principles, and no instincts of right action apart from reasoning. Hereditycounts for almost nothing. It is impression makes the man. The voluntary actions of men originate in their opinions.
Man is perfectible.
Man has negative rights but no positive rights.
Nothing further is requisite, but the improvement of his reasoning faculty, to make him virtuous and happy. Freedom of will is a curse. It is not free or independent of understanding, and therefore it follows understanding, and fortunately is not free to resist it. Man becomes free as he obeys it. It follows that our disapprobation of vice will be of the same nature as our disapprobation of an infectious distemper.
A scheme of self-love is incompatible with virtue.
The only means by which truth enters is through the inlet of the senses.
Intellect is the creature of sensation, we have no other inlet of knowledge.
Government is in all cases an evil, and it ought to be introduced as sparingly as possible.
Give a state but liberty enough, and it is impossible that vice should exist in it.
Thus Godwin was rationalist, altruist, anarchist, and non-resister. It is not probable that Blake ever readPolitical Justice, his patience not being equal to the task. While ardently desiring political justice and liberty, it was soon plain to him from his personal knowledge of Godwin that all his first principles were false. It was not true that man’s character originates in his external circumstances, although these do act on him. The differences between men are traceable to a fundamental inequality. One man turns everything he touches into dross, another into gold. Why? Blake had no need to argue. Being a mystic,he knew that man’s innate principles, ideas, and instincts differed, that heredity could not be ignored, that beyond the five inlets of the senses which reason alone recognizes, there are a thousand inlets for the man whose spiritual understanding is awakened.
He shivered at the thought of what the world would become if the rationalist had his way; for though he would sweep away superstitions, injustices, cruelties, yet from his invariable lack of discrimination he would crush with these the flowers and fruits of imagination, intuition, and inspiration. Besides, whether State or no State, what sort of life would man’s be when his fundamental instincts and passions were allowed no expression? Blake had not the statesman’s power of looking at men in the mass, but he knew that the individual was of extreme importance in any community, and also that the individual’s value lay in his power of passion, and therefore Godwin’s calm, reasoned,doctrinairescheme for bringing the Millennium made no appeal to him whatever, and the two men went their separate courses.
It is interesting to note later that Shelley attained to liberty and song just so far as he shook off Godwin. When he talked with exaggerated nonsense about kings and priests, he was but repeating what he imbibed from Godwin in his early undiscriminating youth.
Mary Wollstonecraft was something quite new in the feminine way. Suffering in youth all the torments of a repressed and restricted woman-child, and possessing a full, passionate nature, she rebelled. Everywhere she turned she saw woman set in an utterly false position, and, as a consequence, silly, affected, degraded. Even those who made a bid for some solid knowledge simpered, and too often, like Mrs Piozzi, repeated by rote, andin Johnsonian periods, what they did not understand. Mary never doubted for a moment that woman enfranchised economically would rise to great things. Unerringly, she detected the true cause of woman’s failure. “It is vain to expect virtue from women till they are in some degree independent of men.” “Women must have a civil existence in the State.” Poor Mary was terribly alone, and had to work out her new faith in woman without any human assistance. Fearlessly she exposed the delicate immorality of Dr Gregory’sLegacy to his Daughters, the “most sentimental rant” of Dr George Fordyce, the oriental despotism of Rousseau; and not content with such small game, she entered the lists against the arch-conservator Edmund Burke, for which Walpole named her “a hyena in petticoats,” and Burke himself reckoned her with the viragoes andpoissardes. Mary’s wide sympathies were not only for women. Her knowledge of children had convinced her that they too had rights, and she had an irresistible faith that with tyranny put down and political liberty won, the oppressed peoples of the world would prove themselves capable of the highest things. And therefore she flung herself into the cause of the French Revolution, and made that her bone of contention with Burke.
There is no finer contrast than Fanny Burney for bringing into relief the special characteristics of Mary Wollstonecraft as a type of new woman. Fanny welcomed with breathless interest the French emigrants as they arrived one by one at Juniper Hall, and listened with horror as Talleyrand, M. d’Arblay, M. de Narbonne recounted the atrocities of the people. Mary took a room in Paris and watched their progress through her window. Fanny was completely overcome at the news ofLouis XVI’s martyrdom. Mary watched him go to his death, and would not allow a momentary pity to make her forget the down-trodden poor.
Fanny was a slave to conventions. Mary followed her own nature. Fanny refused to correspond with Madame de Genlis, and asked Queen Charlotte whether she had not done right, and at her father’s bidding dropped Madame de Staël, to whom she was attracted. Mary consulted no one about her friendships, and in defiance of legal bonds was willing to be the mother of Charles Imlay’s child because she loved him.
Alas! Charles Imlay was faithless; and when Mary returned to England with little Fanny Imlay, alone and broken in spirit, it was bookseller Johnson who befriended her as he had our lonely Blake. Obviously there was much in common between her and Blake. He was with her in her hope for women, and children, and the poor. She had found herself in spite of mistakes, and her character and her works were informed with vital passion. Had Blake been single, and she drawn into friendship with him, she would have become the perfect type of new woman, imaginative, understanding, impassioned, inspired; as it happened, it was into Godwin’s arms she fell, and not Blake’s, and while Godwin took her in like a wandering dove, and gave her shelter and sympathy, yet the slight chill of his marital deportment and reasoned ways would have hindered her, had she lived, from bringing her fine character to full fruition.
Tom Paine presents another type of rebel with whom Blake came into contact. He had already made for himself fast friends and bitter enemies by aiding and abetting the American Rebellion. The thirteen colonies, though irritated by the Stamp Act, were not at once inclined to rebel, and even after Charles Townshend’sproposal of tea-duty, South Carolina, Pennsylvania, New York, and Delaware still held back. Paine could wield a powerful pen, and by this means he kept the flame of discontent alive, and urged the States on till Jefferson composed a Declaration of Independence to which the four backward States were brought reluctantly to agree, and on July 4th, 1776, the American United Colonies declared themselves Free and Independent States.
After this success Paine felt that his pen was equal to any task. Having returned to England and fallen in with the Godwin set, he of course shared with them in their sympathies for the French Revolution, and in addition declared himself a deist, and set himself, in hisAge of Reason, to discredit the Bible. It was all very well when he was doing the rough work of fanning rebellion, but he was ludicrously unfit for the fine work of criticizing the Bible. Its poetry and mysticism and manifold wisdom were not even suspected by him. He stolidly read through the sublime chapters of Isaiah, and thought them worse than the production of a schoolboy; and when he came to the stories of the Nativity, which, whether fact or poetry, are marvellously beautiful, he became so grossly indecent that one is bound to relegate him to the vulgarest order of Bible-smashers.
His deism was a symptom of the times. Dr Priestley, who also attended Johnson’s dinners, was a polished ornament of the sect. They persuaded themselves that God, having set the universe agog, remained Himself wholly outside of it. It was well that Blake should come into personal touch with these rebel deists. They could never appeal to him even for a moment, for he was penetrated all his life with the belief that God dwelt inside of His creation; and since all theological rebellion tended more and more in the direction of a mechanical deism, he began to suspectthat he must look elsewhere to discover the wisdom that should crown his years.
Yet there was something in Paine that appealed to Blake. They were both worshippers of liberty, and while they could not meet on theological ground, they were stirred alike by the portentous and successive crises on the other side of the Channel. Paine felt that he still had work to do. He had served his apprenticeship in America, he would now put forth his whole strength in hisRights of Man, and help forward the sacred cause of Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité.
There were other rebels—Holcroft, playwright and translator, friend of Godwin, afterwards to be sent to Newgate; Hardy and Thelwall; Horne Tooke, who raised subscriptions for the relief of Americans and spoke of the transactions at Lexington and Concord as “inhuman murders.” He was to be tried along with Holcroft and sentenced to twelve months’ imprisonment.
Now Blake sympathized with all these rebels in their political aspirations; but whereas their watchword was reason, and their revolt was in the name of reason, he believed that reason carried one very little way, and that the elemental deeps of life and passion that lie far under reason must be stirred and aroused if the work of rebellion was to bring forth lasting fruit. In any case, the reason-bound men had little to teach him. He had looked to Swedenborg, he had taken knowledge of his advanced contemporaries. Godwin rebelled for political liberty, Mary Wollstonecraft for liberty of women and children, Tom Paine for liberty of man. What was left for Blake? The sex question had never been dragged out into the light. The subject was unclean. Sexual morality consisted in repression. Nowhere as here does repression breed such poisonous fruits. Was notsex a part of that vital fire and passion in which Blake believed with his whole heart? Was it not true that whatsoever lives is holy? Must not there be liberty for the sexual instinct if it was to be kept clean? For the next ten years Blake became the advocate of bodily liberty, indistinguishable from free-love. This was to be the recurring theme again and again in his prophetic books. This was to be his contribution towards the new kind of man or superman for whom he was groping. Afterwards, when he had given substance and form in his prophecies to the vague and indefinite thoughts that lay in him, he was to learn how to estimate and place them. Not until he had walked the road of mental excess was he to arrive at the palace of wisdom. Once there, he was to revise even his ideas on rebellion.
Keeping these persons and things steadily in view, let us now follow in order and detail the works of Blake’s most rebellious period.
As was fitting, Blake sounded the note of rebellion in a poem on the French Revolution.
At this stage—1790-91—the Revolution had not advanced far. The Reign of Terror and the execution of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were still in the future. But the Bastille had fallen, and the noise of its fall set the nerves of the overstrung English liberals vibrating. The battle in prose was waged by Paine, Mackintosh, and Mary Wollstonecraft against Burke, and their names came at once into notoriety. Blake was as outspoken, and even more fearless, for he wore publicly thebonnet rougeas the outward and visible sign of his faith, but fortunately for him, his natural medium of expression was poetry, and that of a kind hitherto unknown, and so, say what he would, no one paid him the smallest attention. What came doubtlessly as asurprise to himself was that his poem found a publisher; and the first Book, with the promise that the remaining Books of the Poem, which were finished, should be published in their order, was announced to the world by bookseller Johnson in 1791, at the modest price of one shilling.
Blake has a strange allegorical method of dealing with the Revolution which can only irritate those who are not accustomed to his ways. Thus he speaks of the seven dark and sickly towers of the Bastille. To these he gives the descriptive names of Horror, Darkness, Bloody, Religion, Order, Destiny, the Tower of God, and he gives descriptions of the prisoners in the towers corresponding to their names. All these were imprisoned because in some form or other they had bidden for liberty. One was the author of “a writing prophetic”; another, a woman, “refused to be whore to the Minister and with a knife smote him”; another had raised a pulpit in the city of Paris and “taught wonders to darkened souls.” The horror of their condition is described with great power, although with too congested an accumulation of baneful images. Thus: “In the tower named Darkness was a man pinioned down to the stone floor, his strong bones scarce covered with sinews;the iron rings were forged smaller as the flesh decayed.” That is a Dantesque touch. But when one reads farther down of “an old man, whose white beard covered the stone floor like weeds on margin of the sea, shrivelled up by heat of day and cold of night; his den was short and narrow as a grave dug for a child, with spiders’ webs wove and with slime of ancient horrors covered, for snakes and scorpions are his companions,” then the piled-up details prevent a clear image, and detract from the value of what has gone before. In contrast to the wretched inhabitants of the Bastille, we are presented withthe King and his nobles. Here are names, but no portraits. The King stands for the spirit of kingship in all ages and his nobles are those who uphold “this marble-built heaven,” and “all this great starry harvest of six thousand years.” They must resist to the death the crooked sickle stretched out over fertile France “till our purple and crimson is faded to russet, and the Kingdoms of earth bound in sheaves, and the ancient forests of chivalry hewn, and the joys of the combat burnt for fuel.” (As Blake penned these fine words something of his early Elizabethan passion must have stirred in him.) The King, through whom the spirits of ancient Kings speak, peers through the darkness and clouds, and involuntarily sees the truth: “We are not numbered among the living.” Life is with the prisoners who have burst their dens. Let Kings “shivering over their bleached bones hide in the dust! and plague and wrath and tempest shall cease.”
The Archbishop of Paris, symbol of traditional religion, arises and addresses the King. For him revolution can only mean atheism. “God so long worshipped departs as a lamp without oil.... The sound of prayer fails from lips of flesh, and the holy hymn from thickened tongues.”
Clergy as well as nobles vanish, mitre as well as crown. “The sound of the bell, and voice of the sabbath, and singing of the holy choir is turned into songs of the harlot in day, and cries of the virgin in night. They shall drop at the plough and faint at the harrow, unredeemed, unconfessed, unpardoned; the priest rot in his surplice by the lawless lover, the holy beside the accursed, the King, frowning in purple, beside the grey ploughman, and their worms embrace together.”
This, fine as it is, calls out a still finer speech from Orleans. “Can nobles be bound when the people are free, or God weepwhen His children are happy?” Then to the Archbishop he cries: “Go, thou cold recluse, into the fires of another’s high flaming rich bosom, and return unconsumed, and write laws. If thou canst not do this, doubt thy theories, learn to consider all men as thy equals, thy brethren, and not as thy foot or thy hand, unless thou first fearest to hurt them.”
Finally the voice of the people is heard rising from valley and hill. What though “the husbandman weeps at blights of the fife, and blastings of trumpets consume the souls of mild France, and the pale mother nourishes her child to deadly slaughter, yet when the will of the people is accomplished, then shall the soldier throw down his sword and musket and run and embrace the meek peasant ... the saw and the hammer, the chisel, the pencil, the pen, and the instruments of heavenly song sound in the wilds once forbidden ... and the happy earth sing in its course, the mild peaceable nations be opened to heaven, and men walk with their fathers in bliss.”
This and much more is what the capture of the Bastille symbolized for Blake. We see that his hopes ran high. The Revolution was to rectify no temporary disorder. It was to set the people free for the first time in the world’s history, and so effect a Kingdom of God on earth which had been the passionate yearning of imprisoned souls in all ages. The Kingdom was to come by passion and not intellect, by fire and not snow. And so to colddoctrinaireGodwin and such-like, he would have said as Orleans to the Archbishop in the poem: “Go, thou cold recluse, into the fires of another’s high flaming rich bosom.” Godwin was to go, as we know, into Mary’s flaming rich bosom, and to warm as he chilled her; but even Mary could not bring him to the flaming point which burned inthe bosom of William Blake as it had in the bosom of Jesus Christ.
Blake’s obscurity protected him from the persecution that was pursuing its victims in the Johnson circle.
On July 14th, 1790, Dr Priestley had arranged a dinner party in Birmingham to commemorate the capture of the Bastille, for which he was mobbed, and his house, containing a fine library, philosophical instruments, and laborious manuscripts, was destroyed. In 1792 Tom Paine was marked out by the Home Office as another victim; but while he was reporting at Johnson’s his public speech of the preceding evening, Blake advised him to decamp at once to France or he was a dead man; and he, taking the hint, escaped safely to Calais, and was ready to take his part in the National Convention, to which the Department of Calais had appointed him. Paine never returned to England, but he was to encounter many perils during the Reign of Terror, and to write theAge of Reason, in which he attacked at once the Bible and French atheism.
Blake, still fired by liberty, wrote hisSong of Libertyaccording to Dr Sampson about 1792.
Liberty was the new-born terror, fire, and wonder, brought forth by the eternal Female. Under its inspiration England was to be healed, America renewed, Spain to burst the barriers of old Rome, and Rome herself to cast her keys deep down into eternity. But liberty has a dire conflict with Urizen, here called the jealous King and the gloomy King, who with his grey-browed counsellors, thunderous warriors, curled veterans, and ten commands, makes a fight for life. Liberty stamps the stony law to dust till Empire is no more, and is confident that the lion and wolf shall cease. The sons of liberty are sons of joy, and countingthat everything that lives is holy, proceed to act whenever they will.
Thus Blake stumbles again on the vexed subject of sex, and it was to remain something of an obsession with him for many years.
His main thoughts can be gathered fromThe Visions of the Daughters of Albion, which he engraved and printed in 1793. The heroine Oothoon, a Blakean Tess, loves and is beloved by Theotormon. But Bromion, forcibly conveying her to his stormy bed, tears her virgin mantle in twain. Satiated, he cries to Theotormon: “Now thou mayst marry Bromion’s harlot, and protect the child of Bromion’s rage, that Oothoon shall put forth in nine moons’ time.”
Theotormon refused. Consumed with jealousy, and reckoning Oothoon a defiled thing, he cannot receive her, and the two, loving, remain apart, consuming their days in misery and tears.
Oothoon calls on Theotormon’s eagles to rend away her defiled bosom, that she may reflect the image of Theotormon on her pure transparent breast. The eagles rend their bleeding prey, at which Theotormon, considering that Oothoon suffers what she deserves, severely smiles. She, with no touch of resentment at his self-righteous cruelty, which in truth she is too self-effacing to perceive, reflects the smile, “and as the clear spring, muddied with feet of beasts, grows pure and smiles.” It is plain that, whatever her past acts, she is a pure living soul, and Theotormon with his conventional morality is neither clean nor alive. She is “a new-washed lamb tinged with the village smoke,” or “a bright swan by the red earth of our immortal river,” but she has only to bathe her wings, and she is white and pure to hover round Theotormon’s breast.
With the cleansing of her breast comes the clearing of her vision. She is no longer enclosed by her five senses, nor her infinite brain into a narrow circle, but she sees through nature, and comes to see Theotormon as he really is. He was only a selfish devourer. But she cries:
“Can that be Love, that drinks another as a sponge drinks water,That clouds with jealousy his nights, with weepings all the day,To spin a web of age around him, grey and hoary and dark;Till his eyes sicken at the fruit that hangs before his sight?”
Then she names it aright:
“Such isself-lovethat envies all, a creeping skeleton,With lamplike eyes watching around the frozen marriage bed!”
Her own love has risen far above such selfishness. She will even lie by his side on a bank, and view him without jealousy as he takes his delight with “girls of mild silver, or of furious gold,” and into the heaven of generous love she will bring no selfish blightings. Then with these lovely words she concludes her golden speech:
“Arise, you little glancing wings, and sing your infant joy!Arise, and drink your bliss, for everything that lives is holy.”
Here we get in poetry, as later in theEpipsychidionof Shelley, a beautiful conception of love and sexual morality. It is what all with any touch of poetical feeling have at times felt since the days of Shelley, and it has appeared in many modern novels and plays. But we must keep in mind that man’s deepest feelings and thoughts are revealed by his acts and not his words, howeverbeautiful they may be. Blake was to push his mental liberty to its utmost extent, and advocate a freedom that should satisfy the exorbitant demands of the most modern eroto-maniac; but the fact remains that in his own life he fulfilled to the letter the requirements of traditional morality, not because his wandering fancy was inactive, but because, things being as they are, it is not always possible to translate poetry into act, and the old morality is the only thing that reckons with the disabilities of this tiresome old world.
In this same year Blake wrote and engravedAmerica, A Prophecy.
We have already seen his interest in the French Revolution, and his excited hope that it would lead to the regeneration of Europe and the world. He now works backwards to the American War of Independence, and considers that the Demon’s (Orc’s) light that France received had first been kindled when the thirteen States of North America struck for liberty.
He expected much from America. Believing at this period that rebellion was the direct road to liberty and wisdom, his expectation of America was great because, being farther removed from tradition, her position predisposed her to rebel.
England’s boast of colonies was to him a vain boast, and her watchword “Empire” had no magic for him. While the thirteen States of North America were possessions of England, and were ruled by thirteen governors of England’s choosing, he believed that America must remain enslaved and unfruitful, and therefore Earth must lose another portion of the Infinite. To lose a portion, however small, of the Infinite is unutterable loss, and so Blake’s fiery impetuous sympathies burned towards those men—Washington, Franklin, Paine, Warren—who had stirred theStates to insurrection and revolt. His imagination leapt to an ensuing liberty in which social evils should be left far behind.
“Let the enchainèd soul, shut up in darkness and in sighing,Whose face has never seen a smile in thirty weary years,Rise and look out; his chains are loose, his dungeon doors are open;And let his wife and children return from the oppressor’s scourge.They look behind at every step, and believe it is a dream,Singing: ‘The sun has left his blackness, and has found a fresher morning,And the fair moon rejoices in the clear and cloudless night;For Empire is no more, and now the Lion and Wolf shall cease.’”
Then all the things that religion has repressed spring up and flourish. The pristine fiery joy, once perverted to ten commands, burns through all obstructions, and, as a flame of life, leaps to life, rejoicing in all living things, even in the harlot who remains undefiled, “though ravished in her cradle night and morn.” And man walks amidst the lustful fires unconsumed. The fires serve to make his feet “become like brass, his knees and thighs like silver, and his breast and head like gold.”
Blake exulted in his vision and proclaimed it in unfaltering tones because he knew that “the soul of sweet delight can never be defiled.” Here he adds a touch or two to his vision of sex inThe Vision of the Daughters of Albion, and he reaches its heart. Thesoulof sweet delight is eternally clean. Once a man has grasped this truth, and it may cost him much mental fight to reach it, then he is able to think and speak cleanly of the passion of love, he can go naked, like Adam in Eden, and the angels of the highest heaven, and know no touch of shame.
There is much in modern literature and art that Blake would have detested, but he would have loved the soul of Sonia theundefiled harlot that Dostoieffski has revealed with such wonderful power in hisCrime and Punishment.
Blake followed the American conflict until “the British soldiers through the Thirteen States sent up a howl of anguish” and threw their swords and muskets to the earth. They were unable to stand before the flames of Orc; and since those flames had now reached to France, Blake dreamed that nothing could withstand their hungry course till the regeneration of the world should come.
All this and much more is said in Blake’s symbolical way. Here, as inThe French Revolution, there are no portraits. The rebels of the States, and even Paine, are mere names, and much less real than the angels of the States who carry on the real business. These angels lived in an ancient palace built on the Atlantean hills between America and England. It is interesting to note these things, because the angels of the States are suggested by the angels of the Kingdoms in the apocalyptic book of Daniel, which Blake loved and instinctively understood, and the Atlanteans have always had an irresistible attraction for men of a theosophical turn of mind. Blake was a close student of the apocalyptic books of the Bible all his life; his knowledge of the Atlanteans probably came to him through his Rosicrucian readings.
Americalets us see the profound admiration Blake felt towards Paine for his action in the American War. Later on we shall find him criticizing with some asperity the deism that his friend confessed.
I must pass over Blake’s other writings of this year, and merely recount that he again changed his residence, and went to live in Lambeth at 13 Hercules Buildings. Dr Samsonsays that it is now numbered 23, but authorities cannot agree whether it was this house or the next.
In 1794 Blake engraved hisEurope: A Prophecy, which is the last of his poems dealing with contemporaneous political events.
Europe stood for Blake in his rebellious mood as the symbol of tradition, authority, science, religion. It was the dead past. “Enitharmon slept eighteen hundred years. Man was a dream, the night of Nature and their harps unstrung.” Europe, during this long sleep, was without vision, inspiration, art, and true nature. Her religion, divorced from art, was repressive, and existed by trading on men’s fears. Falling under the tyranny of the five senses, she believed only so much as the senses could testify of; hence she was rational, utilitarian, unimaginative, and joyless. She squinted so abominably with such eyes as she had that she saw nothing as it was. God, man, nature, became creations of man’s perverted reason, and God was used as an efficient policeman to keep insurrectionary nations in subjection and vital men in order.
But Blake believed that he had already seen the morning star that heralded the full blaze of the Sun. Already the invisible powers who control nations and men were stirring and preparing for their last fearful conflict, which should result in new heavens and a new earth. The angels were at war. Urizen and his many sons were tightening their sinews for the last life-and-death grip; against them was Orc, the horrent demon, “already a kindled and quenchless fire, Los, the spirit of inspiration far more nearly allied with fiery passion (Orc) than with cold intellectual reason (Urizen), Los’ wife Enitharmon and their many sons and daughters, Rintrah, Palamabron, Elynittria andOcalythron. These Ossianic and Miltonic principalities and powers were waging huge and terrific war in the heavenly places, and already on earth was kindled in France the earthly counterpart and shadow of the invisible horrible conflict.
The work of regeneration, once begun, could not be arrested. Passion, fire, energy, all the irresistible things pent up in hell, were let loose; and they would involve Europe and the world in an ocean of blood. The whole cosmos, inward in the heavens, outward in the sun, moon, stars, and earth, was dyed in crimson, until the tribulation such as was not since the world began should work up to the grinding pains of labour, and in infinite pain there should come to the birth the new age of which the prophets and poets had dreamed in all ages.
“The Sun glow’d fiery red!The furious Terrors flew aroundOn golden chariots, raging with red wheels, dropping with blood!The Lions lash their wrathful tails!The Tigers couch upon the prey and suck the ruddy tide;And Enitharmon groans and cries in anguish and dismay.Then Los arose: his head he reared, in snaky thunders clad;And with a cry that shook all Nature to the utmost pole,Called all his sons to the strife of blood.”
Blake was very sanguine. He had endured the rude shock of the Reign of Terror, and though he had thrown aside the red cap, he was determined to see in these horrors nothing but the grim accompaniments of every regenerating process. Enitharmon, once awake after her long sleep, would call together the sweet ministers of melodious songs. Ethinthus, Queen of Waters, Manatha-Varcyon on her golden wings, Leutha, softsoul of flowers, Antamon, Prince of the Pearly Dew, “all were forth at sport beneath the solemn moon, waking the stars of Urizen with their immortal songs; that Nature felt thro’ all her pores the enormous revelry, till Morning opened the eastern gates.”
Larger Image
THE ANCIENT OF DAYS.Frontispiece to Europe.
Europehas for frontispiece one of Blake’s most famous designs—The Ancient of Days. The vision was seen against the dark gloom of the upper story of his Lambeth house. Its real ground lay in the Book of Proverbs. Wisdom says: “When He prepared the heavens, I was there: when He set a compass upon the face of the depth ... then I was by Him, as one brought up with Him.”[3]
The author of the Proverbs looks back to the first creation, which God saw to be very good. Blake looks forward to the new. What if all around are dark clouds? Yet the Ancient of Days is in an orb of light, and He is stooping down and measuring the deep with His compasses. Nothing can stay His hand. The upheaval of Europe, involving the world, is the prelude to the new creation when the Almighty’s vision for His universe shall be fulfilled.
Europetouches the limit of Blake’s rebellion. During the next thirty years history was to comment on the French Revolution in a way that was not his in his impetuous prophetic books. He was to learn that rebellion is a road to wisdom because it is a species of excess. Excess teaches a man to know what is enough, and when Blake knew the exact value of rebellion he was prepared to read the Past afresh, and find that its treasury contained priceless jewels that he never even suspected, while he was passionately searching for some new thing.
InEuropeBlake reached the boundary of his rebellious mood. The impetus of his rebellion might by its own strength have carried him further down the stream; but the Reign of Terror was a rude check, and among other things it enabled him to climb on to the bank and view the course of events with some degree of detachment.
He found that he could no longer refuse to listen to another voice that had been sounding more or less loudly for some years—the voice of his own experience, and, that which inevitably follows, the voice of the experience of mankind. His thought flew backwards and forwards, backwards to Eden and innocent Adam, followed by the wilderness and the curse, forwards to some more years of travail, and then the crimson dawn glowing on the gathered fruits of experience.
Would experience eventually restore the innocence that was lost with Eden? Were they even things of the same kind? No; Blake was sure that they were contraries, contrary as Swedenborg’s heaven and hell, contrary states of the human soul. But many contraries can be married. Innocence married to experience must vanish as innocence, but rise again in a new form in the more fruitful married relation. It appears that with most men innocence lost never returns. Blake never lost his. It is seen in all its infantine simplicity inThe Songs of Innocence, and it couldshow itself at any time during his long life. But this divine element is sadly rare even in the poets, and it is its irresistible presence in Blake that makes him wellnigh unique. In ourselves we find from experience knowledge of good and evil, complicated views on philosophy and theology, puzzled brains, and a frightfully murky atmosphere, and it seems Utopian to imagine that it will ever be otherwise.
Blake maintained, and so had the Saints, that when experience had effected its work and disposed of its dirt, smoke, and mud, a glorious something would emerge which innocence could never know, but which will include the innocence that we see in lambs and babies and buttercups and saints. Between what we are and what we shall be is a sandy desert; and, since Eden is lost, all, even the Christ, have to pass through the desert to gain the promised land. The words of Christ are not the words of one who has lived only in Eden. They are crystalline clear, flaming, simple, deep, and infinitely wise, we should almost say innocent, but as to “create a flower is the labour of ages,” so when we look behind the words of Christ, and seize their implications, we discover not only the sorrow and joy, labour and triumph of His own experience, but that of the past labouring ages; and until we know something of present living experience added to that of the past, we shall never have an inkling of even the simplest words that lie on the face of the gospel.
It was fitting that in 1794, when Blake uttered his prophecy of things to come inEurope, he should also gather together hisSongs of Experience, and engrave them for the joy of posterity.
The Little Girl LostandThe Little Girl Foundbring together better than any perhaps the two contrary states of innocence and experience.
Lyca, being innocent and only seven summers old, wandered, allured by the wild birds’ song. She is lost but not dismayed. Falling asleep, the beasts of prey come around her and minister to her, and finally convey her tenderly to a cave.
Then her parents, experienced but not innocent, arise and seek her. They pass through all the sufferings, sorrows, sighings, of this waste howling wilderness, buying the experience that almost kills them, till in terror they find Lyca among the wild beasts. But beholding Lyca they learn her secret, and
“To this day they dwellIn a lonely dell:Nor fear the wolfish howlNor the lion’s growl.”
The Clod and the Pebblegive the two contrary states of love. The clod proclaims the love that forgets itself in ministering to others; the pebble the love that would bind and devour all others, making them contribute to its own delight.
A Poison Treeshows how repressed things secrete poison.
“I was angry with my friend:I told my wrath, my wrath did end.I was angry with my foe:I told it not, my wrath did grow.”
The repressed anger ended in murder. Blake was sure that any passion repressed was equally fatal.
The Schoolboygives the miserable experience that is thrust upon us all through the blind cruelty of those who would educate us. This experience is so contrary that nothing could be more calculated to crush native innocence, joy, and spring.
“O! father and mother, if buds are nippedAnd blossoms blown away,And if the tender plants are strippedOf their joy in the springing day,By sorrow and care’s dismay,How shall the summer arise in joy,Or the summer fruits appear?Or how shall we gather what griefs destroy,Or bless the mellowing year,When the blasts of winter appear?”
How indeed? The question is to parents, schoolmasters, professors, priests. The conditions for young lives are created by those who would strangle life. Yet when experience has been its most contrary, even nailing its victim to a cross, just there is deliverance.
“Whate’er is born of mortal birthMust be consumed with the earth,To rise from generation free.”
It was Blake’s supreme experience that he had been set free from generation. It was by a re-generation, and that had come to him through the death of Jesus.
“The death of Jesus set me free.”
The same year 1794 saw Blake spinning fast the special mythological web with which he was to clothe or strangle his vision. He had separated from all his spiritual teachers; but Swedenborg lived on in him much more than he owned or even recognized, and Ossian and Milton still governed his imagination. Milton’s huge figures were imitated in the mythological figures which were to stalk about his universe to the end; Ossian’s fantasticnames, which always fascinated him, provoked others still more fantastic. By means of these uncouth dæmons he determined to set forth his own particular view of the cosmos, which, starting with eternity, was to fall into creation, and finally, after lightning, thunder, rolling clouds, and a sea of blood, accompanied by roarings, shrieks, and howlings, was to attain to salvation by a return to the divine order.
The “return” is treated of with great fullness in theJerusalem: the “fall” is hardly more than sketched in the fragmentary Books ofUrizen,Los, andAhania. But as the process of return is the exact reverse to that of the fall, an understanding of the one enables one to fill in the gaps of the other. If there were other books dealing with the fall more in detail, I for one can contemplate the loss with equanimity.
The Book of Urizenis supposed to be the account of the creation, and those who endorse this view proceed to identify Urizen with the Jehovah of the Old Testament, which is as false as to identify him with the Jesus of the New, although it is only too true that scores of Christians worship Urizen under the names of Jehovah and Jesus.
In strict truth, Blake gives no account of the creation at all. To create can only mean that which the Catholic Church affirms that it does mean, to make something out of nothing. To reject this leaves two alternatives—either that God made the universe out of something outside of Himself, which is dualism, or out of something inside of Himself, which is pantheism. Blake, like Swedenborg, adopted the last, but whereas Swedenborg tried to evade the pantheistic conclusion by his doctrine of discrete degrees, Blake swam in the pantheistic sea, and was saved from drowning by clinging to the rocks which he discerned standingout in bold outline, and a perception of the ultimate irreconcilable antinomy of good and evil, of sheep and goats, which is a direct contradiction of pantheism, and fits in only with the catholic doctrine. There are other such contradictions in Blake, which did not in the least trouble him. With his passion for contraries he harboured them all, marrying them when he could, and just leaving them when they absolutely refused to unite. He had not the requisite talent for building a coherent system.