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URIZEN IN CHAINS.From The First Book of Urizen.
What is called, then, Blake’s account of the creation is really his account of the fall of the universe out of eternity into time and space, and the consequent appearance of man in his contracted and sense-bound condition. Urizen is the agent in the fall; but he must not be identified with Satan any more than with Jehovah. He, as nearly as possible, represents reason. When he stands in the eternal order working on those things supplied him by Los (imagination), he is a fountain of light, intellect, and joy; when he is rent from Los’ side, he becomes self-closed, all repelling, shut up in an abominable void and soul-shuddering vacuum, and his intellect becomes dark and cold because his reason has nothing to work upon except what is supplied by the narrow inlet of the senses.
Thus shut in the deep, he broods until his thoughts take outward shape and form, and there arises “a wide World of solid obstruction.” He then proceeds to write his books of wisdom. But his vision being quenched, he is confined to that which his still all-flexible senses provide. He knows much about the terrible monsters that inhabit the bosoms of all—the seven deadly sins of the soul. From his prolonged fightings and conflicts with them there is distilled a kind of wisdom, which he gathers into his books; but it is joyless wisdom, negative rather thanpositive, restrictive, retributive, censorious, jealous, cruel, penal, and is best solidified in the decalogue with its reiterated “Thou shalt not.”
Eternity, which is present and within, rolled wide apart, “leaving ruinous fragments of life.” Rent from eternity, Urizen becomes a clod of clay, and Los, beholding him, becomes like him, and is compelled to continue the work of creation in constricted forms. With his hammer he forges links of hours, days, and years. Man with his head, spine, heart, appears; then are formed his eyes, ears, nostrils, throat, tongue, feet—little members that hide from him eternity, and cause him to see the things that are within as though they were without, like the stars of night seen through a great telescope.
After the man the woman appears, whom the Eternal myriads named Pity. She is an emanation from Los, and is named by Blake Enitharmon. Los embraces her, and she begets a child in her own image—a Human Shadow, who is named Orc (passion).
Thus grows up a world of men, women, children, with their various hungers and needs. The Eternals try to provide for these needs by science and religion; but as they can build their science and religion only from their experience and observation of the contracted universe, the science is sand, and religion a web, and earth’s wretched children remain under the cruel rule and curse of Urizen and his sons, calling his laws of Prudence the Eternal Laws of God.
The Song of Los(engraved 1795) adds many interesting particulars of the process by which the world, with its philosophies and religions, has become what it is.
Los, the Eternal Prophet, is the father of all systems of thought, but it does not follow that all are equally true. For Los is out ofthe divine order, and therefore the systems inspired by him and his many sons, while containing streaks of the eternal truths, are all out of focus.
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LOS.From The First Book of Urizen.
Thus Rintrah gave Abstract Philosophy to Brahma in the East, and it is defective because it is abstract. The same applies to all modern theosophical revivals of Hindoo religion. An abstraction for Blake was a falling away from concrete reality, and he found his deliverance in the Christian doctrine of God.
Palamabron, another son of Los, gave abstract Law to Trismegistus, Pythagoras, Socrates, and Plato. Abstract Law is also negative, and therefore Orc (passion) finds himself chained down with the chain of Jealousy, and howls in impotent rage.
Sotho teaches Odin a Code of War which at any time may become the philosophy of a nation.
All these, abstract philosophy, abstract law, the Mahometan Bible, Codes of War, with the Churches, Hospitals, Castles, Palaces, which they involve, while seeking to catch the joys of eternity, serve in reality to obliterate and erase eternity altogether, and the children of men schooled in these philosophies behold the vast of Nature shrunk before their shrunken eyes. After the shrinkage there can only arise a philosophy of the five senses, and then Newton and Locke, especially Locke, Rousseau and Voltaire, have it all their own way.
From all this Blake looked for deliverance to the thought-creating fires of Orc, which had flared up in France, and might be expected to spread over Europe, and set even Asia in a conflagration. The Kings of Asia, snug in their ancient woven dens, are startled into self-exertion, and emerging uneasily from their dens, call on kings, priests, counsellors and privy admonishers of men to use their immemorial rights to teach the Mortal Worms,and keep them in the paths of slavery. Happily, Orc’s fires are insatiable. Raging in European darkness, he arose like a pillar of fire above the Alps, and, while “milk and blood and glandous wine in rivers rush,” led the wild dance on mountain, dale, and plain, till the sullen earth shrunk away, and there dawned the eternal day.
The Book of Los(engraved 1795) begins with the lament of Eno, aged Mother, as she recalls the “Times remote, when love and joy were adoration and none impure were deemed.” For now, alas! Los, who alone could teach joy and liberty, is bound “in a chain and compelled to watch Urizen’s shadow.” Yet he cannot be bound for ever. Maddened by hard bondage, he rends asunder the vast Solid that has bound him, only to fall through the horrible void of error—“Truth has bounds, Error none”—till his contemplative thoughts arise and throw out some sort of standing-ground amidst the dire vacuity. Urizen by his contemplative thoughts, it will be remembered, had created “a wide World of solid obstruction.” Now the two dæmons become rivals, and the grim conflict of the ages is waged incessantly. Los with hammer and tongs organizes lungs (understanding, see Swedenborg), and some Light even appears; but the book closes with no sign of the ultimate triumph of Los, for Los and Urizen are here rivals: there can be no victory until they cease to be rivals, and re-enter into the union of the eternal order.
The Book of Ahania(engraved 1795) gives the story of Fuzon, Urizen’s most fiery son, and therefore the one most obnoxious to his curse. He is mortally wounded by a poisoned rock hurled at his bosom from his father’s bow, and his corse is nailed to the topmost stem of the Tree of Mystery, which is religion. Thenfollows the sad and beautiful lament of Ahania—the wife and emanation of Urizen, and mother of the murdered Fuzon. She recalls, like Eno, the former days, when Urizen stood in the divine order, and she, his lover and wife, joyed in the transports of love, when her heart leaped at the lovely sound of his footsteps, and she kissed the place whereon his bright feet had trod; when she knew the thrilling joys of motherhood, and nursed her Babes of bliss on her full breasts. These things were now but a memory. Urizen with stern jealous cruelty had put her away, compelling her to walk weeping over rocks and dens, through valleys of death, a shadow upon the void, and on the verge of nonentity, a deep Abyss dividing her from her eternal love. Thus she weeps and laments, wearing a sorrow’s crown of sorrows, the remembering happier things.
These short prophetic books, though entirely congenial to the author, were written in a tongue unknown to the public, general or particular. There was every sign that Blake would continue to produce more works, and even on a much larger scale, in this particular kind of composition, and the signs were equally clear that he must look to something else to procure the wherewithal that would enable him and his wife to live.
This something was, of course, engraving, but even the demand forhisengraving was growing less, and the grim spectre of poverty made his unwelcomed and uncalled-for appearance along with the spectres whom Blake could command. Over this oppressive and grinding spectre he had no command at all.
In 1796 he was asked by Miller, a publisher in Old Bond Street, to make three illustrations to be engraved by Perry for Stanley’s English paraphrase of Bürger’sLenore. The elements of romance and weird horror in Bürger’s work were quite inkeeping with a side of Blake’s nature that had shown itself inElinor, and so the illustrations were accomplished with marked power and success.
The same year he was engaged on designs for Young’sNight Thoughts, intended to illustrate a new and expensive edition of what was then considered one of England’s great classics. The work was to be published by Edwards, of New Bond Street.
Blake was less free and happy illustrating Young than Bürger. Young has since been slain by George Eliot, but even if she had not killed him, his popularity must have waned in another generation or two. For there was very little healthy human blood in his veins. He was other-worldly, and so was Blake; but whereas Blake saw in the other world a world of transcendent beauty of which this world was the vegetable mirror, Young saw in it only a reflection of his own particular world. Hence Blake was a mystic, and Young an egotist. Blake forgot himself in the magnificence of eternity, Young’s religion was “egotism turned heavenwards.”
This is probably the reason why Blake’s designs for Young were among the least powerful and interesting things that he did. Give him the Book of Job, or Dante, and he transcends himself, but with Young or Blair to work upon, though he does remarkable work, yet it somehow falls short of his best.
Mr Frederick Shields, who covered the walls of the Chapel of the Ascension with strange pinks and ten thousand hands, has analysed all the more important of Blake’s designs, which amounted to five hundred and thirty-seven. Of these only forty-three were published.The Night Thoughtswas to appear in parts: only one part was published, and Young was handed over to Stothard in 1802 before he was to be, in an elaborate dress, a complete success.
The following year (1797) Blake was at work onThe Four Zoas, or The Death and Judgment of the Ancient Man. He revised this work a few years later at the time he was planning theMiltonandJerusalem. I shall have something to say about it when dealing withJerusalem. I will only say just now that the minor prophetic books were preliminary trials to his big flights, and when here, as inJerusalem, a big flight is made, it is found that Blake’s mythology has received its completion, and that all the things fermenting in him and striving for utterance do, in these long poems, come to the surface. Anyone who would know him intimately must not be discouraged by their extraordinary appearance, but struggle with them, as with a foreign language, until they yield the last secrets of their mystic author.
William Hayley, “the poet,” as he delighted to call himself, enjoyed a wide reputation as the author ofThe Triumphs of Temper, which appeared in 1780 and was intended as a poetical and pleasing guide to young ladies how to behave under the provocation of testy fathers and sour aunts, with the promise of a peerless husband if their tempers were triumphant.
For us the poem is pleasantly incongruous and stirs to laughter in the wrong places. The perfect heroine Serena, set down in the midst of artificial society by day, is transported to infernal and supernal regions by night. In the Inferno she sees all the wicked vices in action, and in the Paradise the graces attending on their queen Sensibility. Hayley humbly hoped to emulate Pope’s satire in treating of Serena’s days, and Dante’s sublimities in her nights. He was singularly fortunate in the artists he found to embellish his darling offspring. Stothard and Maria Flaxman, in turn, supplied charming designs, and even Romney was induced to present the divine Emma as Sensibility with her pot of mimosa, to whom Stothard had already done more than justice.
Hayley had been a close student all his life, having mastered Greek and Latin and the more important modern languages. He had read extensively the world’s best literature. Taughtby Meyer, he had taken up miniature portrait painting till he excelled his master and his eyes failed. He wrote plays which Garrick nearly liked, but which the undiscerning public never liked at all. He reckoned himself not merely a connoisseur in art, music, architecture, and sculpture, but also as one who might have distinguished himself in any one of these difficult arts had envious time permitted. Confident that Heaven had bestowed on him her best gift of poetry, he felt it his duty to renounce his opportunity to excel in so many arts and devote himself to that which all discerning people acknowledged to be the highest.
The Triumphs of Temperwas his first great success, and the many highly flattering things said to him by artists and famous literary men confirmed him in the faith, though he had never really doubted, that he was a man of genius. That was the opinion of elegant Mrs Opie, feeling Anna Seward, diffident Romney, copious Hannah More, and portentously learned Edward Gibbon. Yet time has been pitiless with the bard of Sussex, and instead of discovering a steady or even a flickering light shining in the gross darkness of his times, we of the twentieth century can see in him, if we take the trouble to see at all, nothing but an amusingly solemn specimen of a male Blue-stocking.
With so assured a position and never a shadow of self-doubt, he was able to live with himself on most cordial terms of good temper and serenity, and, like others of his type, extend his self-esteem to his fellows, particularly if they were publicly admired. To these he generally effected an acquaintance by a polite little letter of self-introduction.
His most important catch was Romney, to whom he was introduced by Meyer in the autumn of 1776. Hayley possessedaccidental advantages over Romney in good birth and education. Romney was sufficiently impressed through self-conscious lack of these, and when in addition he found that his diffidence was met by Hayley’s confidence, his depression by serenity, he allowed him to gain that ascendancy over him which was out of all proportion to his intrinsic merit, and which has irritated all biographers of the artist against the poet. Yet if Hayley contrived to get possession of Romney and his pictures, he also helped him for a considerable time to fight against his melancholy. Let us in fairness remember that.
Another important friend was Cowper, whom Hayley caught considerably later in life. Visits were exchanged, and Hayley set himself with much good will to combat the ghastly melancholia that was getting its death-grip on him. After Cowper’s death there was some friendly wrangling between Hayley and LadyHeskethabout who should write his Life. Hayley was easily persuaded to undertake it, and by its accomplishment won for himself a latter rain of gratifying applause just when his popularity seemed to be on the decline.
Hayley lived till 1820, which was actually long enough to outlive his public. HisLife of Romneywas not a success. He and his works would have died together but for his unfortunate habit of fastening himself on to great men. His cancerian grip of them has given him vicarious immortality, and made him obnoxious to the kicks of those who write the lives of Romney, or Cowper, or Blake.
The particular friend of Hayley who most concerns us here was Flaxman. He introduced Blake to Hayley from motives of pure kindness, knowing Blake’s struggle to live, and believing that Hayley was just the man to help him.
Flaxman had drawn Hayley’s attention to Blake in a letter written as early as 1784, in which he quotes Romney as saying that Blake’s historical drawings rank with those of Michael Angelo. But not until 1800 did the two men meet. Early in that year—May 6th—Blake wrote to Hayley to condole with him on the loss of his son Thomas Alphonso, who had been studying sculpture with Flaxman. By September it was settled that Mr and Mrs Blake should leave Lambeth and go and settle at Felpham, where Blake would be only a stone’s-throw from Hayley, and ready to help him in his poetical and biographical works by engraving for them suitable designs.
Blake was destined to stay three years at Felpham, and he always regarded this period as marking a most important crisis in his life. Since the publication of hisPoetical Sketchesin 1783 he was conscious of being under a cloud. His visions that had been so bright and inspired him to songs of such divine simplicity had not vanished, but they had lost their crystalline clearness. His cloudy vision appeared in uncertain art. It is true that his allegiance to the linear schools never wavered, and Michael Angelo remained the supreme master in his eyes, but for a time he was fascinated by the luscious ornament and colour of the Venetian school, and with his passion for uniting contraries believed that he might marry Florence and Venice. The same uncertainty appeared in his spiritual life. We have followed him through various stages of rebellion, and seen how his faith in rebellion received a rude shock from the Reign of Terror. Since then he was learning more and more to explore the riches of the past, but he had not gone far enough to place his rebellion and to see it and that of his rebel contemporaries in its proper historical perspective. He was disturbed also by a restless ambition of worldly success.Many men whose gifts were much inferior to his own were famous and rich. Sir Joshua did all that a spiritually blind man could do, and was reckoned with the giants. Romney, whose art Blake much preferred to Reynolds’s (he was decidedly of the Romney faction), on account of its greater simplicity and more scrupulous regard to outline, was sufficiently famous and remunerated; but Blake, whose gifts were rarer than any, had scant recognition and scant money, and he still hoped that with an influential patron he might take his place in contemporary fame, and incidentally make enough money to relieve him of all anxiety for the future. For he was being ground by poverty. His wants were simple enough—food, clothing, materials of work—but when the supply falls even a little below the want, then the grinding process begins and carries on its inexorable work until the spirit breaks. But now friend Flaxman had introduced him to poet Hayley, who was not only famous for his literary work, but also for a remarkable and untiring zeal in the service of those he reckoned his friends.
Blake’s hopes rose high, and his spirits overflowed. He wrote an enthusiastic letter to Flaxman attributing to him all his present happiness, and enclosing lines in which he recalls his successive friends “in the heavens”—Milton, Ezra, Isaiah, Shakespeare, Paracelsus, Boehme—and concludes by affirming that he has seen such visions of the American War and the French Revolution that he “could not subsist on the earth, but by conjunction with Flaxman, who knows to forgive nervous fear.” Flaxman had studied Swedenborg, and could perfectly understand such language.
On September 21st, 1800, Sunday morning, he writes to the “dear Sculptor of Eternity” that he has arrived at theircottage with Mrs Blake and his sister Catherine, and that Mr Hayley has received them with his usual brotherly affection.
He found Felpham “a sweet place for study.” The quiet, cleanness, sweetness, and spiritual atmosphere of the place stirred his cosmic consciousness and gave him quick access to the great memory reaching back far beyond his mortal life, and enabled him to recall his works in eternity that were yet to be produced in time.
And Hayley was excessively kind. Still under a cloud, shaken in self-confidence, Blake’s consequent diffidence united with his instinctive trust of men, and for a month he believed that Hayley was a prince.
Hayley was busy decorating his “marine villa,” to which he had lately come from Eartham. Flaxman had already been drawn in to help, much as Mrs Mathew had used him at an earlier date; and now Blake was bidden to paint a set of heads of the poets which were to form a frieze to Hayley’s library. Hayley was at work on some ballads,Little Tom the Sailorand others, to which Blake was to contribute designs.Little Tomwas for the benefit of a Widow Spicer at Folkestone and her orphans, as Blake understood, and also for the emolument of Blake, as we learn from a letter of Hayley’s to the Reverend John Johnson.
Hayley always loved to teach his friends. He had been anxious to improve Romney’s epistolary style; and now it occurred to him that he might teach Blake miniature portrait painting. As usual, his purpose was thoroughly kind. He did not think that Blake’s work had much marketable value; but he believed that if he proved an apt pupil he could procure him plenty of sitters from among his neighbours who would pay well, and thus Blake would become a real success.
In this Hayley showed himself a wise child of this world, but hardly a child of light. Blake’s genius did not lie in drawing portraits. A face for him immediately became a symbol, and lost its time traits as it gained in eternal significance. It is often said that Enitharmon was Mrs Blake; but if this were so, she was Mrs Blake as no one but Blake could ever see her. In reality he possessed the faculty which was pre-eminent in the authors of the Book of Genesis and St John’s Gospel. As the characters of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, of Peter, James, and John were seen and portrayed in an eternal light, so likewise Blake would have striven to present his opulent sitters, but the result would not have been that for which they would have been willing to pay their money.
Blake took kindly and without question to the new task. “Miniature,” he says, “has become a goddess in my eyes.... I have a great many orders, and they multiply.” Hayley was glowing with satisfaction. But Blake, in one little month, after repeated efforts of self-deception, could no longer hide from himself that he saw Hayley as he really was. He was learned, of course, and genteel, and kind, and admired with gush what it was correct to admire. But of insight there was none. He was born under a watery sign and not a fiery. He was really a crab ambling around his enclosed garden with his lame leg, and getting his claws into the tender skin of those who, he had been told, were really men of fire.
Blake’s disappointment was bitter. His patron was blind to his real genius, to which he must at all costs be faithful. Hayley was, and continued to be, very much a corporeal friend, but he was a spiritual enemy. Blake’s fond hopes were dashed. He tottered on the verge of a horror of great darkness, and escapedthe darkness only by falling into a mild and pleasant slumber, lulled by Hayley’s amazing amiability, mildness, and crooning serenity. From this slumber he might—who knows?—never have awakened, but for the discernment of his real friends—Flaxman and Butts—whose faith finally aroused him and drew him away from the enchanted ground.
But though he saw, he said nothing. His spiritual friends (on the other side) commanded him “to bear all and be silent, and to go through all without murmuring, and, in fine, hope, till his three years shall be accomplished.” When Hayley was more than usually exasperating, Blake vented himself in an epigram, and, much relieved, went on quietly.
Thus, when Blake was convinced that Providence did not mean him to paint miniatures, he wrote:
“When Hayley finds out what you cannot do,That is the very thing he’ll set you to do.”
Again, Blake discovered that Hayley’s virtues and faults were both of the feminine order. It was a feminine instinct that had prompted him to writeThe Triumphs of Temperand theEssay on Old Maids. A brilliant epigram of Blake’s accounts for this odd psychic twist, and flashes Hayley before us:
“Of Hayley’s birth this was the happy lot:His mother on his father him begot.”
That was the true state of affairs. But Blake obeyed his spiritual friends, and for a long time no sign appeared in his letters that there was anything the matter.
Hayley was also anxious to teach Blake Greek. Like most men of his times, he believed that no man could attain to the highestdegree of excellence who had not mastered Greek and Latin. He probably thought that a knowledge of Greek would at least correct some of Blake’s vagaries. Blake was quick at languages, and soon Hayley was able to write to Johnson: “Blake is just become a Grecian, and literally learning the language.... The new Grecian greets you affectionately.”
Blake, however, never attained to his teacher’s proficiency; he learnt just enough to be able to formulate to himself the nature of the Greek genius, and to see it in relation to his own. “The Muses were the Daughters of Memory.” The inspiration of the Bible was from a higher source than Memory. Memory is the indelible record of experience. Inspiration is always a breaking into experience to the creation of something new. Then only is the new creation handed over to Memory. Thus Inspiration feeds Memory, but is not its fruit. Imagination is the true instrument of Inspiration. When Blake saw all this clearly, he wrote in the Preface toMilton: “We do not want either Greek or Roman Models if we are just and true to our own Imaginations.” Greek and Latin have their abiding place in Memory, and Blake was about to write fine things about Memory, which he calls the Halls of Los; but for himself they did not stimulate his imagination. To master them would add to his culture; but mere culture is always barren.
Hayley’s last attempt to teach Blake was in March 1805, the month in which Klopstock died. He translated parts of Klopstock’sMessiahaloud for Blake’s benefit. Certain lines by Blake with big gaps have been preserved, which are hard for us to understand. The only thing we are quite sure about them is that they were written “aftertoo muchKlopstock.”
There was one great name that held Hayley and Blake alike at this time. We know that Blake had always admired Milton’s superb gifts, while he disliked his theology. Blake’s special friends had also been preoccupied with Milton. Fuseli, for example, not only disagreed with Dr Johnson’s strictures on the poet, but he had been inspired by his ardent imagination to paint a series of pictures illustrating the poet’s works, and these had been on public view at a Milton Gallery opened on May 20th, 1799, and reopened March 21st, 1800.
While Blake was with Hayley he naturally heard much of Milton from his latest biographer; and again their united interest in Cowper led them back to Milton, because of Cowper’s cherished desire to edit Milton, with notes and translations.
In 1790, when Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery was a success, “bookseller” Johnson was fired with the idea of bringing out a magnificent Milton Gallery, “surpassing any work that had appeared in England.” It was to contain Cowper’s notes and translations and Fuseli’s illustrations, for which the best engravers were to be found. The services of Sharpe and Bartolozzi were enlisted, and Blake was asked to engraveAdam and Eve observed by Satan. The project fell through owing to Cowper’s mental indisposition; but when Hayley was engaged on theLife of Cowperand Blake on its engravings, Cowper’sMiltoncame uppermost again in their minds, and it occurred to Hayley that it would be a good plan to bring out a fine edition of the delayed work, with engravings after designs by Romney, Flaxman, and Blake. The profits of the work were “to be appropriated to erect a monument to the memory of Cowper in St Paul’s or Westminster Abbey.” To this work was to be added Hayley’sLife of Milton, so that the whole necessarily would spread out to three quarto volumes. The project was abandoned. Instead of the three volumes, one volume with Cowper’s notes finally appeared in 1808, and instead of the proceeds going to a monument in St Paul’s, they were given for the emolument of an orphan godson of the Sussex Bard.
Thus Blake’s thought and time were fully occupied. Besides the designs for Hayley’s ballads, engravings were required for the CowperLife. Butts was to be kept supplied with a fresh picture as fast as Blake could paint it; and his own more secret thought was ruminating over Milton, and his stay at Felpham, and his dreams for the future. These were to take form in his longest poetical works—Milton,The Four Zoas, andJerusalem; but as they are of extreme importance for understanding Blake, they must be kept over to another chapter.
Blake was thoroughly interested in this work, for he admired Cowper, and considered that his letters were “the very best letters that were ever published.” It is necessary to remember his reverence for Cowper, as also for Wesley and Whitefield, because in the poems there are many vigorous attacks made on religion, and some of Blake’s modern imitators follow him in the attack. The moderns for the most part are irreligious, but Blake professed to love true religion and true science. What he hated above all things was religion divorced from life and art. Such religion becomes very intense, as in the Pharisees, and when great decisions are called for, as in the trial of Christ, it invariably utters its voice on the wrong side.
Blake’s engravings for the CowperLifewere after designs by other artists, the most important being the head of Cowper by Romney. To engrave after another is irksome, and therewas further irritation when he found that Hayley was as ready to instruct him how to engrave as to paint miniatures.
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MIRTH AND HER COMPANIONS.
Since Hayley could never disguise his inmost thoughts, Blake soon perceived that he intended to keep him strictly to the graver, as he had no opinion of his original works, whether in poetry or design. Blake found relief in painting for Thomas Butts, who was his friend and patron for over thirty years, and to whom he sent exquisite pictures, and some letters priceless for their revelation of the writer.
From these we learn the nature of Blake’s spiritual crisis at Felpham.
Miniature portrait painting drove home to him the vast difference between historical designing and portrait painting. Portrait requires nature before the painter’s eye, historical designing depends on imagination. Nature and imagination were as antithetical in Blake’s eye as nature and grace in the theologian’s, and just here he kept as far away from pantheism as he could in his obstinate determination to keep nature and imagination as separate as the sheep and the goats. While agreeing with Blake in keeping them apart, I suppose most of us would say that the finest portrait painting depended on imagination no less than historical designing.
The atmosphere of Felpham induced in Blake long fits of abstraction and brooding, and he pushed his thoughts on miniature forwards to the recollecting of all his scattered thoughts on art. He determined to discontinue all attempts at eclecticism. Venetianfinesseand Flemishpicturesquewere “excellencies of an inferior order” and “incompatible with the grand style.” He was convinced that the reverse of this—uniformity of colour and long continuation of lines—produces grandeur. So saidSir Joshua, who did not always practise what he preached in his discourses; so said Michael Angelo, whose profession and practice were one; so said Blake, who was decided, while adhering to the principles of the great Florentine, to be true to his own genius, so that his work should be as distinct from Michael Angelo’s as Caracci’s from Correggio’s, or Correggio’s from Raphael’s.
Here was strength for Blake in knowing his own mind about his art and methods, and following it. It helped him out of his paralysing diffidence, which Hayley fostered, and made more clear the real issue between him and his patron. He strove to see the situation in the largest light possible. The old question of God’s providence exercised him. Did God bring him to Felpham? Did God keep him there? If so, it must be because it was not fit for him at present to be employed in greater things. That thought kept him patient. When it is proper his talents will be properly exercised in public. But God guides by cleansing man’s understanding and pushing him forwards to a decision. He understood his art, yet Hayley objected to his doing anything but the mere drudgery of business. He trusted his art, and he saw how he must work. Let him trust himself, and then? He saw all clearly now, as he had seen it in the first month, although he had stifled his apprehensions. God had given him a great talent. It would be affected humility to deny it. If he stayed with Hayley he would paint miniatures, make money, and make his beloved Kate comfortable for life; but he would sell his divine birthright. If he obeyed God by following the gifts He had bestowed on him, then farewell to Hayley and lovely Felpham: he must return without delay to London, and once more he and Kate together must face the grinding life of poverty. Anyone who knows Blake must know what decision he wouldmake. He made it silently, irrevocably. By the beginning of October 1803 he and Kate were back again in London, lodging in South Molton Street, with a sense of escape and liberty which more than compensated for the uncertain prospect of the future.
Blake had not quite finished with Felpham. Before leaving he had had a disagreeable affair with a private in Captain Leathe’s troop of 1st or Royal Dragoons. From a letter of Blake’s to Mr Butts, dated August 16th, 1803, we learn that this man was found by him in the garden, invited to assist by the gardener without his knowledge. He desired him politely to go away; and on his refusal, again repeated his request. The man then threatened to knock out his eyes, and made some contemptuous remarks about his person. Blake thereupon, his pride being affronted, took the man by the elbows and pushed him before him down the road for about fifty yards. In revenge, the soldier charged Blake with uttering sedition and damning the King. Blake had no difficulties in gathering witnesses for his defence. He was summoned before a bench of justices at Chichester and forced to find bail. Hayley kindly came forward with £50, Mr Seagrave, printer at Chichester, and protégé of Hayley’s, with another £50, and himself bound in £100 for his appearance at the Quarter Sessions after Michaelmas. The trial came off at Chichester on January 11th, 1804. The Duke of Richmond presided as magistrate. Hayley had procured for the defence Samuel Rose (Cowper’s friend), and between them they had no difficulty in releasing Blake.
There would have been no need to repeat this story, except that the event made a deep impression on Blake. Skofield, the soldier’s name, became in his mind an abiding symbol, and the soldier’s contempt for his person decided him to change his deportment.
Blake’s humble birth and childlike trust of his fellows had united to produce in him a too passive and docile manner. There was plenty of fire within, and the lamb knew how to roar; but he judged that his roar need not be provoked if his appearance somehow warded people off from taking a liberty with him. Diffidence is not a virtue. Blake’s too passive deportment changed as he gradually became more self-confident. Hence the Skofield episode left a lasting mark on both his mind and body.
Blake’s decisive step in leaving Hayley and following his own will immediately preceded the noonday glory of his genius. Hayley must have thought that Blake was extremely ungrateful after the invariable kindness that he had shown him; and if Hayley liked to call his neighbouring friends around him and put his case to them, probably all, without a single dissentient voice, would have agreed that he had shown himself a Christian and a gentleman, and that charity itself could not demand of him to trouble himself any further about such a crazed visionary as Blake. Blake not only thought otherwise, but turning to the Gospel as he was wont to do, he found a word of Christ that convinced him that Christ was on his side. “He who is not with me is against me.” There were a thousand evidences that Hayley was not with the real Blake that was striving to manifest himself in time, and therefore he was against him, and an enemy to his genius. Blake went to Felpham shaken in himself and diffident. When there is diffidence (dispersal of faith) there is a lamentable waste of precious energy. Blake left Felpham reassured that the light he had seen in his youth was the true light, and confident (confidence is concentration of faith) that if he remained faithful to his real self, he would also be found on the side of Christ, and that this true self-confidence must result in beautiful work of thecreative order. That was the supreme hour in his life. The full vision must come. Like Habakkuk, he was on his tower, assured that though it tarry it would come and not tarry. He was not impatient. “The just shall live by his faith.” Blake had faith, and he asked no more; but he gained a thousandfold more, and the full vision came to him in a way that must seem odd to a child of the world, but wonderfully appropriate to one who understands what is the nature of the fire that sustains and consumes the artist’s soul.
During the months of 1803-4 a certain Count Truchsess, who owned a valuable collection of pictures, exhibited them at a gallery in the New Road, opposite Portland Place, London. The pictures were by German, Dutch, Flemish, Italian, Spanish, and French masters. The masters included Albert Dürer, Hans Holbein senior, Breughel, Vandyck, Michael Angelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Bourdon, Watteau.
Blake went to see the pictures, and must have been unusually excited and thrilled at seeing works by Michael Angelo and Albert Dürer directly, and not through the blurred medium of poor engravings. The divine frenzy stirred in his soul. The next day, suddenly, he was enlightened with the light he enjoyed in his youth. The cloud that had hung over him for twenty years vanished, the grim spectre (reason) who had haunted his ways and checked his inspiration fled with the cloud. Blake was drunk with intellectual vision, and in his drunken hilarity came to himself, knew what was his proper work, and once for all gave himself with passionate surrender to that which his whole and undivided being saw to be good.
It will take us the rest of our time gathering some of the fruits of Blake’s richly matured genius.
Blake wrote an enthusiastic account of his mystic experience to Hayley, of all men—Hayley who had so exasperated him, and made him sore, and, in his soreness, say biting things. Now he was thoroughly at peace with himself, and could regard Hayley with the kindness and tolerance that before had been impossible. For a while he continued to correspond with him while he was occupied with hisLife of Romney. Blake engraved a portrait of the artist for the frontispiece which never appeared, and a fine engraving of Romney’sShipwreck, which appeared along with the other engravings by Caroline Watson. TheLife of Romneywas a dreary performance. Like theLife of Cowper, it revealed its subject only when it gave his letters. For the rest, it abounds in a welter of elegant eighteenth-century words and phrases which assure us that “the poet” never saw even Romney and Cowper as they really were, and therefore it is not surprising that he saw in Blake merely a mild and harmless visionary who might do paying work if only he would listen to the wise counsel that he was always ready to give.
Peace be with Hayley! Among those that appear before Peter’s Gate, we cannot help thinking that he will be more readily admitted than the vast crowd of eighteenth-century squires who will knock at the gate, and stamp and fume if it is not opened to them on the instant.
Blake’s “three years’ slumber,” as he called it, hypnotized, I presume, by Hayley’s lulling kindness, were amongst the most important in his life. If he slumbered, yet his dreams were unusually active; and, since feelings are more intense in dreams than when wide-awake, it is not surprising that Blake’s inner life was in a violent commotion. Any stirring of his feeling immediately set his supersensual faculty vigorously to work. Visible persons and things were tracked back to invisible principalities and powers, his cosmic consciousness quickened, the need to create possessed him, and he found relief only in giving rhythmic expression to his spiritual reading of mundane things.
This was the mental process that we saw at work in hisFrench RevolutionandAmerica. Now it was moving among the persons and things connected with his own life; but it is not less important, for the same mighty agencies govern individuals and nations alike, and link them up together, so that they are interchangeable manifestations of eternal laws and states.
The practical outcome wasMilton,Jerusalem, and a revision ofThe Four Zoas, begun some time about 1795. These claim our close attention, for they contain, for those who have patience to probe their forbidding exterior, the treasure of one who had run the road of excess, not of profligacy but rebellion, and now reached the palace of wisdom.
On April 25th, 1803, Blake wrote to Thomas Butts: “I have written this poem (Milton) from immediate dictation.” Later in the same year (July 6th), he writes: “I can praise it, since I dare not pretend to be any other than the secretary; the authors are in Eternity. I consider it the grandest Poem that this world contains. Allegory addressed to the intellectual powers, while it is altogether hidden from the corporeal understanding, is my definition of the most sublime Poetry.” In the Preface toMiltonBlake asserts, in effect, that Shakespeare and Milton were shackled by the Daughters of Memory, who must become the Daughters of Inspiration before work of the highest creative order can be produced. Here he regards Memory as a hindrance, and comparing the Preface with the above quotations, we learn that he strove to put Memory aside while the authors in Eternity were dictating to him.
But in theJerusalemthere are, scattered throughout, references to what he calls the Halls of Los, familiar to readers of mystical literature as the Akashic or Etheric records, and called by Yeats the great Memory.
“All things acted on Earth are seen in the bright Sculptures of Los’s Halls, and every Age renews its powers from these Works.”[4]
Here Memory serves to renew an age, and then becomes the recipient of the age’s inspired works.
These passages, taken together, open up again the great questions of Inspiration, Memory, Creation, Mechanism, and since each one of these words is now made to stand for differing conceptions, they are ambiguous, and we may not use them without first defining sharply what we mean. We speak of the truepoet like Shakespeare, the true mystic like Blake, the true saint like Catherine of Siena, and the true Book like the Bible as all being inspired, yet in each case the inspiration is of a different order. The common element which justifies the one word is originality. Shakespeare’s inspiration depends on the great Memory, on his own complex nature, and his consuming spirit of observation; but at the moment of his inspiration, all these things seem in abeyance, and the words well up as if a spirit not himself had given them to him. His originality consists in the unique impression that his rich understanding gives of the elements supplied by the Past and Present, but not in the creation of a new element. The same may be said of Dante, Milton, Shelley.
The inspiration of the Bible contains all these elements, which constitute its purely human side, but there is something else which has given it its supreme power in all ages. The writers of the Bible remember and observe and think, but they also utter themselves as they are moved by the Holy Ghost. It is this last mysterious happening that inspires the creative element. The inspired poet has aided his observation and experience by drawing on the great Memory, the inspired Bible has added to the great Memory something that was not in it before. The poet can renew us, yet keeps us within the circle of the cosmic consciousness. The Bible can inspire us and lift us out of the circle far above the seven heavens of the cosmos. And that is our rescue from that nightmare of eternal recurrence which set Nietzsche’s fine brain tottering down to its foundations.
The inspiration of the poet is general, and that of the Bible unique; but there still remains a special kind to which Blake, like many other mystics, laid claim.
When Blake was perplexed at Felpham, he referred to his spiritual guides, who were in their turn subject to God. They, according to him, were the real authors and inspirers of his prophetic books. This sort of language was rare in the eighteenth century, but is quite familiar to readers of theosophical books, ancient or modern.
They teach that there are seven planes of consciousness from the physical to the mahaparanirvanic, which together make up the cosmos. The two highest planes are beyond the reach of human conception; but there are not a few to-day who claim to have attained to the fifth nirvanic plane. Here the consciousness is so finely developed, and its vibrations respond so readily, that the subject comes into touch with other intelligences, and often submits to them entirely for guidance.
In St Paul’s day this teaching was familiar at Ephesus in the form of gnosticism. He did not disbelieve in the reality of the seven planes, but he disagreed with the gnostics in their blind faith in the trustworthiness of the guides. He believed that many of them were so evil that when Christians became conscious of them, they needed the whole armour of God to protect them against their wiles. Here is the difference between the Christian and pantheistic teaching. The pantheist thinks that because a thing is spiritual it is therefore holy and good; Christianity believes in fallen spiritual beings. The pantheist believes that to reach the nirvanic plane is to attain to holiness; Christianity says that all the planes of the cosmos are tainted, and if one reached even the seventh, one would still have need of cleansing. Theosophy keeps one for ever within the cosmic circle; Christianity lifts one beyond the circle into the ascended Christ, and teaches that one is safe on the different subtle planesof consciousness only while one abides in Him. Doubtless there are good guides, but the danger is great because it is so difficult to try the spirits.
Blake here as elsewhere wavers between the two views. With certain reservations he dips on the Christian side. He travels round the cosmos, but in a spiral; and the top of his spiral—his Jacob’s Ladder—reaches not to the seventh plane but to the Throne of God, which is far above the charmed circle. Hence man is able to climb beyond the defiled cosmos into the pure heaven of God. That is his redemption.
Blake’s vision, then, ranging freely among the planes of consciousness, gives him access to the great Memory which is within the cosmos; and at rare moments he goes beyond the cosmos, and then his words proceed from the highest inspiration.
In appraising the value of Blake’s defamation of the Greeks’ inspiration, one must remember that he was not a profound Grecian. His studies with Hayley cannot have carried him into the heart of the Greek genius. When he limits its inspiration to Memory, there is no scholar, I imagine, that would agree with him. The Greeks did make an invaluable contribution to the world’s memory; and while one source of their inspiration came from the past, we must further admit that it was the past wedded to the present which actually produced something new, that is, of the creative order.
Blake’s own inspiration when it came from his spiritual guides is not of such a high order as the Greek’s at his highest. The so-called guides, if we may trust St Paul, are inside of the cosmos, like the great Memory, and their source of wisdom is from this world, which is the arena of the Church in her militant course.It is only by watching her that they are able to get glimpses of the manifold wisdom of God. Hence to place oneself under their guidance is a hindrance to receiving that highest inspiration that comes direct from the Spirit of God.
Blake was wrong, too, in his efforts to shut off Memory. Of course he could not succeed. Every page ofJerusalemshows that Memory was at work though shackled. Memory alone could have made it coherent and a luminous whole, as it had madeParadise Lost; but it was not free enough to keep its different scenes, often very beautiful, from flying far apart, and the imagination grows weary in trying to capture the complete picture.
The one thing in these poems that we can positively affirm to be new is their symbolism, and that cannot be defended. Symbolism is beautiful only as it is universal, or can become so. It should be one language against many tongues. But Blake’s is not even the tongue of a nation or a tribe. It is his own private invention, and, incidentally, uncouth, forbidding, unintelligible, and in actual fact a little insane. It is true that we can learn his symbolism after much labour; but a beautiful and catholic symbolism is the one thing that we have a right to understand, without learning, through the imagination, which Blake always affirmed to be divine.
Blake could not afford to indulge these idiosyncrasies. Like all mystics, he found it difficult to adjust the inner things that were real to him to the outer that were but a shadow. Since most people find the outer things are the substantial reality, they are not only moving in a different world from that of the mystic, but they are puzzled to know when the letter of his statements is to be taken.
Ezekiel says that he ate his meat baked with cow’s dung; Blake, that Hayley, when he could not act upon his wife, hired a villain to bereave his life. We know sufficient of Blake’s relation to Hayley to understand that Hayley’s murderous purpose was towards Blake’s spiritual life, not his corporeal, and that he tried to prevail on Blake through his wife. We may hope also that Ezekiel did not really eat “abominable flesh,” or lie for a preposterously long time on his left side. We mention the mystic’s hazy treatment of external actions, to explain Blake; but we hope the mystic of the future will be more considerate of what his words are likely to convey to others, and then clear them of all ambiguity.
Blake should have guarded himself perpetually here, but was too proud or wilful to do so. Hence with his merging of inward and outward things, and using the same language for both, added to his private symbolism, what should have been his greatest poems have become submerged continents in which you may discover endless treasures only if you dare to dive, and can hold your breath under water.
Let us dive for the sake of understanding the growth of Blake’s mind.
I will takeMiltonseparately, andThe Four ZoasandJerusalemtogether.
Blake’s feelings towards Milton had always been divided. He saw in him the highest order of poetic genius, but also, ominously present, the spirit of reason (Urizen) enthroned in the wrong place, and a servile love of the classics that placed him under the heel of the Daughters of Memory. To change the metaphor, Milton’s Pegasus was ridden by Urizen.
Blake’s final criticism of Swedenborg was that he drew theline in the wrong place between heaven and hell; and his amendment was to take his two contraries and marry them. From that time forward his first question in trying a man’s religion was, Where do you draw the line? Popular religion always draws it in the wrong place. Good things are reckoned evil and evil things good. But as Blake continued to put his question to the world’s great spirits, he counted twenty-seven different answers that had produced twenty-seven different churches, each church having its own particular heaven and corresponding hell. He had hoped to unite all these contraries as successfully as he had Swedenborg’s; but when he came to Christ’s division, finding that nothing would unite His sheep and goats, and His wheat and tares, he henceforth took Christ’s dividing line as absolute, and the line of any other as right only when it coincided with Christ’s.
Applying this test to Milton, Blake saw that he wrongly divided heaven and hell, and that this fatal mistake necessarily affected the characters of his Messiah and Satan. Messiah, who should have stood for the supreme poetic genius, was the embodiment of restrictive reason, and Satan, who by immemorial tradition is absolute evil, was endowed with a marvellous imagination that inevitably brought with it certain virtues. When Blake inquired for the root cause of this perversion in Milton, he traced it to the fact that Reason had largely usurped the place of Imagination. He then took one more customary step. He set Milton in his imagination in the light of the eternal order. Seen in this perspective, the prime fact about him appeared that he had fallen in his encounter with Urizen and come under his dominion, and the last was that his redemption would be effected only by going down into self-annihilation and death with Christ, and then rising again with the life of pureimagination. Once imagination (Los) is supreme, then reason (Urizen) falls into his proper place, and the return into the eternal order is accomplished.
During Blake’s stay at Felpham, Milton was continually present in the minds of both himself and Hayley. Hence he was for Blake an actual person in the Felpham drama, Mr and Mrs Blake and Hayley being with him the chief characters, and Skofield and his confederates the rabble. Then passing, as inThe French Revolution, from actual persons and events to the unseen things of which they were the temporal manifestation, Blake saw each person in his eternal state, and as a symbol of that state, and he lost sight of the earthly puppets, as they were merged into their monstrous and eternal counterparts. The transition made, the poem is no longer intelligible to the corporeal understanding, and Hayley might read it a hundred times without suspecting that he was the villain of the piece.
The characters are Los, Urizen, Palamabron and Rintrah, sons of Los, Satan, and Skofield, who keeps his own name. Satan for a time is Hayley, Palamabron by turns Blake and Wesley, Rintrah, Whitefield. This is a seemingly harsh judgment of poor Hayley, akin to Michael Angelo’s treatment of Biagio da Cesena; but the harshness is humorously softened when Satan is discovered decked with half the graces. He is kind, meek, humble, and complains gently when his kindness fails to call forth gratitude. He is the personification of Hayley’s virtues, which together make up (hypocritic) holiness.
Blake had made the startling discovery, which Nietzsche has popularized in our time, that the graces in wrong places are vices. Nietzsche went on to make the absurd assertions that humility and pity are the virtues of the herd and are never rightin any place. Blake believed that the graces coupled with insight and understanding took on a new quality which made them divine.
To give examples: Blake, while submissive to Hayley, was humble, but at the risk of his birthright.
Hayley, exerting himself to find rich neighbours to sit for Blake to paint in miniature, was kind, but he was suffocating his genius.
To the scribes and Pharisees, Christ meek would have been Christ weak.
Modesty in one who does not know that all things that live are holy is prudery.
To pity oneself or another for the troubles that come through slackness is effeminacy. The true virtue here is to damn. Hence the right place for a man clothed from head to foot in hypocritic graces is hell, his right name is Satan.
But when a man has stripped himself of his virtues, and annihilating himself goes down with Christ into death, then he rises again into newness of life and vision, and the graces of the new life, still called by their old names, but now in their right places, are flaming, beautiful, irresistible.
Once Blake saw his man in his setting in eternity, he escaped from his initial resentment, and he could write calmly to Hayley and subscribe himself, “Your devoted Will Blake.”
I may remark that Blake did not think he had invented new values, like Nietzsche, in his indictment of the virtues. His language was his own, but his conclusions were precisely the same as those of Wesley, Whitefield, Bunyan, St Paul, when they, in effect, speak of man’s righteousness as filthy rags, and of his need to be clothed with thelivingrighteousness of Christ before his garment can be reckoned beautiful and clean.
A few quotations fromMiltonmay be given as Blake’s final word on Hayley. I will write Hayley for Satan, and Blake for Palamabron.
“Blake, reddening like the Moon in an eclipse,Spoke, saying, You know Hayley’s mildness and his self-imposition;Seeming a brother, being a tyrant, even thinking himself a brotherWhile he is murdering the just.”“How should Hayley know the duties of another?”“Hayley wept,And mildly cursing Blake, him accused of crimes himself had wrought.”“So Los said: Henceforth, Blake, let each his own stationKeep; nor in pity false, nor in officious brotherhood, whereNone needs be active.”“But Hayley, returning to his Mills (for Blake had servedThe Mills of Hayley as the easier task), found all confusion,And back returned to Los, not filled with vengeance, but with tears.Himself convinced of Blake’s turpitude.”“Blake prayed:O God protect me from my friends.”“For Hayley, flaming with Rintrah’s fury hidden beneath his own mildness,Accused Blake before the Assembly of ingratitude and malice.”“When Hayley, making to himself Laws from his own identity,Compelled others to serve him in moral gratitude and submission.”“Leutha said: ‘Entering the doors of Hayley’s brain night after night,Like sweet perfumes, I stupefied the masculine perceptions,And kept only the feminine awake; hence rose his softDelusory love to Blake.’”“The Gnomes cursedHayley bitterly,To do unkind thinks in kindness, with power armed; to sayThe most irritating things in the midst of tears and love—These are the stings of the Serpent!”
These are enough to show Blake’s method, and his remorseless understanding of Hayley. There is present an irresistible touch of humour which preserves them from being too bitter.
For the rest, the poem narrates Milton’s encounter with Urizen; his going down into self-annihilation and death; his judgment, and final redemption as he ascends to the heaven of the imagination. Milton’s heaven is then the heaven of Jesus, and his hell remains its irreconcilable contrary.
In this poem Blake’s full-grown mythology appears. The mythical persons, places, states are ominously present; but since they appear with much more particularity inThe Four ZoasandJerusalem, I may pass to them to extract what is necessary for understanding the mature Blake.
JerusalemandThe Four Zoasshould be studied together. The latter was begun about 1795, and rewritten at Felpham. The early prophetic books—Urizen,Los—stand as preliminary sketches to this large poem. They are woven into it with scarcely a change of word.
Blake’s great scheme is mainly in line with historical Christianity, which of course is catholicism. He starts with the eternal order and unity. Without attempting to explain the origin of evil, he narrates the fall out of unity and order into diversity and disorder, and how as a consequence of the fall creation appears. He is obliged to use the word “creation,” but there is no realcreation in his cosmogony. There are only three possible theories of creation. Creation from within God, which is pantheism, and makes the universe an emanation; creation from something outside of God, which is dualism, and not likely to be accepted in the West; and creation out of nothing, which is catholicism. Blake learnt from Swedenborg the emanative theory. Swedenborg tried to avoid the pantheistic conclusion of his foundation principle, and believed that he had succeeded. His doctrine of the human God was certainly fine, and nearly catholic. Blake sways between the two. His doctrine of creation is pantheistic, but his affirmation that “God doth a human form display to those that dwell in realms of day” is splendidly catholic, and so, on the whole, is his doctrine of the fall. Since Blake’s day the problem has become enormously complicated, because we have to take account of the vestiges in man’s body of an animal ancestry, and the still more infallible signs in his soul of a divine origin. Perhaps we shall eventually all come to believe in both evolution and a special creation to account for man’s unique place in the universe. At any rate a denial of the fall involves a definite departure from historical Christianity, and it is important to see that it was an integral part of Blake’s scheme and without it that scheme falls to pieces. Not that he pressed the letter of the Adam and Eve story. It stood for him as a divinely simple witness of an ancient simplicity and unity from which man has departed by disobedience and the assertion of a life and a self independent of God. His way back into unity is by the cross of Jesus Christ, where the self-hood dies, and the day of judgment, which finally separates in him the gold from the dross, and presents him in his divine humanity perfect before the human-divine God.
Between these two stupendous facts—the fall and the redemption—Blake finds a place to say all that he wishes about the manifold things of heaven and earth and hell.
The unity from which man departs is made up of four mighty ones—the Four Zoas—who are the four beasts of the Apocalypse, taken from the four beasts of Ezekiel, who probably appropriated four of the many monstrous symbolical beasts of Assyria.
Blake invented names for them. Of these—Urizen, Urthona-Los, Luvah, and Tharmas—Urizen and Los are by far the clearest conceived figures. Perfect unity is maintained so long as Los is supreme. Reason is important in its right place. It becomes an evil when it usurps the place of imagination and thinks it can see as far. The essence of the fall is disorder. Redemption restores order, which is unity. Science alone breaks down because it is built up on observation and induction. Its observation is insufficient, for it is the observation of a shrunk universe. It gathers its materials through the five senses. But there are other avenues in regenerated man. If science were built up on the observation or vision of the whole instead of a very small part, it would become divine science and coincident with religion.
Religion breaks down whether built on nature or experience. If on nature, it is nature only as seen through limited vision; if on experience, it is the experience of fallen man, and therefore it is of vital force only when it transcends nature and becomes super-natural, and rests on a revelation not from man’s experience, however deep, but from God.