Footnotes:
[1]Gilchrist’s “Life of Blake.”
[2]It may be as well set down here as at any further stage of our business, that the date of Blake’s birth appears, from good MS. authority, to have been the 20th of November (1757), not the 28th; that he was the second of five children, not four; James, the hosier in Broad Street, being his junior, not, as the biography states, his senior by a year and a half. The eldest son was John, a favourite child who came to small good, enlisted, and died it seems in comparative youth; of him Mr. Gilchrist evidently had not heard. In some verses of the Felpham period (written in 1801, printed in vol. ii. p. 189 of the “Life and Selections”) Blake makes mention, hitherto unexplained, of “my brother John the evil one,” which may now be comprehensible enough.
[3]Our greatest poet of the later days may be cited as a third witness. Through the marvellous last book of theContemplationsthe breath and sound of the sea is blown upon every verse; when he heard as it were the thunder and saw as it were the splendour of revelation, it was amid the murmur and above the motion of the Channel;
près du dolmen qui domine Rozel,À l’endroit où le cap se prolonge en presqu’île.
[4]W. B. Scott. The few and great words cited above occur, it will be observed, in a poem affording throughout no inapt allegory of Blake’s life and works. More accurate and more admirable expression was never given to a theme so pregnant and so great. The whole “fable” may be well applied by students of the matter in hand to the history of Blake’s relations with minor men of more turn for success; which, as Victor Hugo has noted in his royal manner, is so often “a rather hideous thing.”
[5]It appears that some effort, laudable if wholly sincere, and not condemnable if partly coloured by personal feeling, has been made to rebut the charges brought against Stothard and Cromek by the biographer of Blake. What has been written in the text is of course based upon the assumption that Mr. Gilchrist has given an account of the matter as full and as fair as it was assuredly his desire to make it. As junior counsel (so to speak) on behalf of Blake, I have followed the lead of his biographer; for me in fact nothing remained but to revise and restate, with such clearness and brevity as I could, the case as laid down by him. This, finding on the face of it nothing incoherent or incredible, I have done; whether any man can disprove it remains to be seen. Meantime we are not left to our own choice in the matter of epithets. There is but one kind of phrase that will express such things and the doers of such things. Against Stothard no grave charge has been brought; none therefore can be refuted. Any reference to subsequent doings or sufferings of his must be unspeakably irrelevant to the matter in hand. Against Cromek a sufficiently heavy indictment has been laid; one which cannot be in the least degree lightened by countercharges of rash violence on Blake’s part or blind hastiness on Mr. Gilchrist’s. One thing alone can avail him in the way of whitewash. He is charged with theft; prove that he did not steal. He is charged with breach of contract; prove that his contract was never broken. He is charged with denying a commission given by him; prove that he did not deny it. For no man, it is to be feared, will now believe that Blake, sleeping or waking, forged the story of the commission or trumped up the story of the contract. That point of the defence the counsel for Cromek had best give up with all convenient speed; had better indeed not dream at all of entering upon it. Again: he is charged, as above, with adding to his apparent perfidy a superfetation of insolence, an accretion or excrescence of insult. Prove that he did not write the letter published by Mr. Cunningham in 1852. It is undoubtedly deplorable that any one now living should in any way have to suffer for the misdoings of a man, whom, were it just or even possible, one would be willing to overlook and to forget. But time is logical and equable; and this is but one among many inevitable penalties which time is certain to bring upon such wrong-doers in the end; penalties, or rather simple results of the thing done. Had this man either dealt honestly or while dealing dishonestly been but at the pains to keep clear of Walter Scott and William Blake, no writer would have had to disturb his memory. But now, however strong or sincere may be our just sense of pity for all to whom it may give pain, truth must be spoken; and the truth is that, unless the authorities cited can be utterly upset and broken down by some palpable proof in his favour, Cromek was what has been stated. Mr. Gilchrist also, in the course of his fair and lucid narrative, speaks once of “pity.” Pity may be good, but proof is better. Until such proof come, the best that can be done for Cromek is to let well alone. Less could not have been said of him than equitable biography has here been compelled to say; no more need be said now and for ever, if counsel will have the wisdom to let sleeping dogs lie. This advice, if they cannot refute what is set down without more words, we must give them;μὴ κίνει Καμάριναν. The waters are muddy enough without that. Vague and vain clamour of deprecation or appeal may be plaintive but is not conclusive. As to any talk of cruelty or indelicacy shown in digging up the dead misdeeds of dead men, it is simply pitiable. Were not reason wasted on such reasoners it might be profitable (which too evidently it is not) to reply that such an argument cuts right and left at once. Suppress a truth, and you suggest a lie; and a lie so suggested is the most “indelicate” of cruelties possible to inflict on the dead. If, for pity’s sake or contempt’s or for any other reason, the biographer had explained away the charges against Cromek which lay ready to his hand, he must have left upon the memory of Scott and upon the memory of Blake the stain of a charge as grave as this: if Cromek was honest, they were calumniators. To one or two the good name of a private man may be valuable; to all men the good name of a great man must be precious. This difference of value must not be allowed to weigh with us while considering the evidence; but the fact seems to be that no evidence in disproof of the main charges has been put forward which can be seriously thought worth sifting for a moment. This then being the sad case, to inveigh against Blake’s biographer is utterly idle and hardly honest. If the stories are not true, any man’s commentary which assumes their truth must be infinitely unimportant. If the stories are true, no remark annexed to the narrative can now blacken the accused further. Those alone who are responsible for the accusation brought can be convicted of unfairness in bringing it; Mr. Gilchrist, it must be repeated, found every one of the charges which we now find in his book, given under the hand and seal of honourable men. These he found it, as I do now, necessary to transcribe in a concise form; adding, as I have done, any brief remarks he saw fit to make in the interest of justice and for the sake of explanation. Let there be no more heard of appeal against this exercise of a patent right, of invective against this discharge of an evident duty. Disproof is the one thing that will now avail; and to anything short of that no one should again for an instant listen.
[6]It is to be regretted that the share taken in this matter by Flaxman, who defended Stothard from the charge of collusion with Cromek, appears to have alienated Blake from one of his first friends. Throughout the MS. so often cited by his biographer, he couples their names together for attack. In one of his rough epigrams, formless and pointless for the most part, but not without value for the sudden broken gleams of light they cast upon Blake’s character and history, he reproaches both sculptor and painter with benefits conferred by himself and disowned by them: and the blundering stumbling verses thus jotted down to relieve a minute’s fit of private anger are valuable as evidence for his sincere sense of injury.
To F. AND S.“I found them blind: I taught them how to see;And now they know neither themselves nor me.’Tis excellent to turn a thorn to a pin,A fool to a bolt, a knave to a glass of gin.”
To F. AND S.
“I found them blind: I taught them how to see;And now they know neither themselves nor me.’Tis excellent to turn a thorn to a pin,A fool to a bolt, a knave to a glass of gin.”
Whether or not he had in fact thus utilized his rivals by making the most out of their several qualities, may be questionable. If so, we must say he managed to scratch his own fingers with the pin, to miss his shot with the bolt, and to spill the liquor extracted from the essence of knavery. The following dialogue has equal virulence and somewhat more sureness of aim.
Mr. Stothard to Mr. Cromek.“For fortune’s favour you your riches bring;But fortune says she gave you no such thing.Why should you prove ungrateful to your friends,Sneaking, and backbiting, and odds-and-ends?”Mr. Cromek to Mr. Stothard.“Fortune favours the brave, old proverbs say;But not with money; that is not the way:Turn back, turn back; you travel all in vain;Turn through the iron gate down Sneaking Lane.”
Mr. Stothard to Mr. Cromek.
“For fortune’s favour you your riches bring;But fortune says she gave you no such thing.Why should you prove ungrateful to your friends,Sneaking, and backbiting, and odds-and-ends?”
Mr. Cromek to Mr. Stothard.
“Fortune favours the brave, old proverbs say;But not with money; that is not the way:Turn back, turn back; you travel all in vain;Turn through the iron gate down Sneaking Lane.”
For the “iron gate” of money-making the brazen-browed speaker was no unfit porter. The crudity of these rough notes for some unfinished satire is not, let it be remembered, a fair sample of Blake’s capacity for epigram; and it would indeed be unfair to cite them but for their value as to the matter in hand.
[7]Since writing the lines above I have been told by Mr. Seymour Kirkup that one picture at least among those exhibited at this time was the very noblest of all Blake’s works; the “Ancient Britons.” It appears to have dropped out of sight, but must be still hidden somewhere. Against the judgment of Mr. Kirkup there can be no appeal. The saviour of Giotto, the redeemer of Dante, has power to pronounce on the work of Blake. I allow what I said to stand as I said it at first, only that I may not miss the chance of calling attention to the loss and paying tribute to the critic.
[8]Written in 1863. Mr. Landor died Sept. 17th, 1864.
[9]Since the lines above were written, I have been informed by a surviving friend of Blake, celebrated throughout Italy as over England, in a time nearer our own, as (among other things) the discoverer of Giotto’s fresco in the Chapel of the Podestà, that after Blake’s death a gift of £100 was sent to his widow by the Princess Sophia, who must not lose the exceptional honour due to her for a display of sense and liberality so foreign to her blood. At whose suggestion it was made is not known, and worth knowing. Mrs. Blake sent back the money with all due thanks, not liking to take or keep what (as it seemed to her) she could dispense with, while many to whom no chance or choice was given might have been kept alive by the gift; and, as readers of the “Life” know, fell to work in her old age by preference. One complaint only she was ever known to make during her husband’s life, and that gently. “Mr. Blake” was so little with her, though in the body they were never separated; for he was incessantly away “in Paradise”; which would not seem to have been far off. Mr. Kirkup also speaks of the courtesy with which, on occasion, Blake would waive the question of his spiritual life, if the subject seemed at all incomprehensible or offensive to the friend with him: he would no more obtrude than suppress his faith, and would practically accept and act upon the dissent or distaste of his companions without visible vexation or the rudeness of a thwarted fanatic. It was in the time of this intimacy (see note at p. 58) that Mr. Kirkup also saw, what seems long since to have dropped out of human sight, the picture ofThe Ancient Britons; which, himself also an artist, he thought and thinks the finest work of the painter: remembering well the fury and splendour of energy there contrasted with the serene ardour of simply beautiful courage; the violent life of the design, and the fierce distance of fluctuating battle.
[10]The direct cause of Blake’s death, it appears from a MS. source, “was the mixing of the gall with the blood.” It may be worth remark, that one brief notice at least of Blake’s death made its way into print; the “Literary Gazette” (No. 552; the “Gentleman’s Magazine” published it in briefer form but nearly identical words as far as it went) of August 18, 1827, saw fit to “record the death of a singular and very able man,” in an article contributed mainly by “the kindness of a correspondent,” who speaks as an acquaintance of Blake, and gives this account of his last days, prefaced by a sufficiently humble reference to the authorities of Fuseli, Flaxman, and Lawrence. “Pent, with his affectionate wife, in a close back-room in one of the Strand courts, his bed in one corner, his meagre dinner in another, a ricketty table holding his copper-plates in progress, his colours, books (among which his Bible, a Sessi Velutello’s Dante, and Mr. Carey’s translation, were at the top), his large drawings, sketches, and MSS.; his ankles frightfully swelled, his chest disordered, old age striding on, his wants increased, but not his miserable means and appliances; even yet was his eye undimmed, the fire of his imagination unquenched, and the preternatural never-resting activity of his mind unflagging. He had not merely a calmly resigned, but a cheerful and mirthful countenance. He took no thought for his life, what he should eat or what he should drink; nor yet for his body, what he should put on; but had a fearless confidence in that Providence which had given him the vast range of the world for his recreation and delight. Blake died last Monday; died as he had lived, piously, cheerfully, talking calmly, and finally resigning himself to his eternal rest like an infant to its sleep. He has left nothing except some pictures, copper-plates, and his principal work, a series of a hundred large designs from Dante.... He was active” (the good correspondent adds, further on) “in mind and body, passing from one occupation to another without an intervening minute of repose. Of an ardent, affectionate, and grateful temper, he was simple in manner and address, and displayed an inbred courteousness of the most agreeable character.” Finally, the writer has no doubt that Mrs. Blake’s “cause will be taken up by the distributors of those funds which are raised for the relief of distressed artists, and also by the benevolence of private individuals”: for she “is left (we fear, from the accounts which have reached us) in a very forlorn condition, Mr. Blake himself having been much indebted for succour and consolation to his friend Mr. Linnell the painter.” The discreet editor, “when further time has been allowed him for inquiry, will probably resume the matter:” but, we may now more safely prophesy, assuredly will not.
[11]Of course, there can be no question here of bad art: which indeed is a non-entity or contradiction in terms, as to speak of good art is to run into tautology. It is assumed, to begin with, that the artist has something to say or do worth doing or saying in an artistic form.
[12]Observe especially in Chaucer’s most beautiful of young poems that appalling passage, where, turning the favourite edgetool of religious menace back with point inverted upon those who forged it, the poet represents men and women of religious habit or life as punished in the next world, beholding afar off with jealous regret the salvation and happiness of Venus and all her servants (converse of the Hörsel legend, which shows the religious or anti-Satanic view of the matter; though there too there is some pity or sympathy implied for the pagan side of things, revealing in the tradition the presence and touch of some poet): expressly punished, these monks and nuns, for their continence and holiness of life, and compelled after death to an eternity of fruitless repentance for having wilfully missed of pleasure and made light of indulgence in this world; which is perfect Albigeois. Compare the famous speech inAucassin et Nicolette, where the typical hero weighs in a judicial manner the respective attractions of heaven and hell; deciding of course dead against the former on account of the deplorably bad company kept there; priests, hermits, saints, and such-like, in lieu of knights and ladies, painters and poets. One may remark also, the minute this pagan revival begins to get breathing-room, how there breaks at once into flower a most passionate and tender worship of nature, whether as shown in the bodily beauty of man and woman or in the outside loveliness of leaf and grass; both Chaucer and his anonymous southern colleague being throughout careful to decorate their work with the most delicate and splendid studies of colour and form. Either of the two choice morsels of doctrinal morality cited above would have exquisitely suited the palate of Blake. He in his time, one need not doubt, was considerably worried and gibbered at by “monkeys in houses of brick,” moral theorists, and “pantopragmatic” men of all sorts; what can we suppose he would have said or done in an epoch given over to preachers (lay, clerical, and mixed) who assert without fear or shame that you may demand, nay are bound to demand, of a picture or poem what message it has for you, what may be its moral utility or material worth? “Poetry must conform itself to” &c.; “art must have a mission and meaning appreciable by earnest men in an age of work,” and so forth. These be thy gods, O Philistia.
[13]I will not resist the temptation to write a brief word of comment on this passage. While my words of inadequate and now of joyless praise were in course of printing, I heard that a mortal illness had indeed stricken the illustrious poet, the faultless critic, the fearless artist; that no more of fervent yet of perfect verse, no more of subtle yet of sensitive comment, will be granted us at the hands of Charles Baudelaire: that now for ever we must fall back upon what is left us. It is precious enough. We may see again as various a power as was his, may feel again as fiery a sympathy, may hear again as strange a murmur of revelation, as sad a whisper of knowledge, as mysterious a music of emotion; we shall never find so keen, so delicate, so deep an unison of sense and spirit. What verse he could make, how he loved all fair and felt all strange things, with what infallible taste he knew at once the limit and the licence of his art, all may see at a glance. He could give beauty to the form, expression to the feeling, most horrible and most obscure to the senses or souls of lesser men. The chances of things parted us once and again; the admiration of some years, at last in part expressed, brought me near him by way of written or transmitted word; let it be an excuse for the insertion of this note, and for a desire, if so it must be, to repeat for once the immortal words which too often return upon our lips;
“Ergo in perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale!”
[14]There are exceptions, we are told from the first, to all rules; and the sole exception to this one is great enough to do all but establish a rival rule. But, as I have tried already to say, the work—all the work—of Victor Hugo is in its essence artistic, in its accident alone philanthropic or moral. I call this the sole exception, not being aware that the written work of Dante or Shelley did ever tend to alter the material face of things; though they may have desired that it should, and though their unwritten work may have done so. Accidentally of course a poet’s work may tend towards some moral or actual result; that is beside the question.
[15]The reader who cares to remember that everything here set down is of immediate importance and necessity for the understanding of the matter in hand (namely, the life of Blake, and the faith and works which made that life what it was) may as well take here a word of comment. It will soon be necessary for even the very hack-writers and ingenious people of ready pens and wits who now babble about Balzac in English and French as a splendid specimen of their craft, fertile but faulty, and so forth—to understand that they have nothing to do with Balzac; that he is not of their craft, nor of any but the common craft of all great men—the guild of godlike things and people; that a shelf holding “all Balzac’s novels—forty volumes long,” is not “cabin-furniture” for any chance “passenger” to select or reject. Error and deficiency there may be in his work; but none such as they can be aware of. Of poetic form, for example, we know that he knew nothing; the error would be theirs who should think his kind of work the worse for that. Among men equally great, the distinctive supremacy of Balzac is this; that whereas the great men who are pure artists (Shakespeare for instance) work by implication only, and hardly care about descending to the level of a preacher’s or interpreter’s work, he is the only man not of their kind who is great enough to supply their place in his own way—to be their correlative in a different class of workmen; being from his personal point of view simply impeccable and infallible. The pure artist never asserts; he suggests, and therefore his meaning is totally lost upon moralists and sciolists—is indeed irreparably wasted upon the run of men who cannot work out suggestions. Balzac asserts; and Balzac cannot blunder or lie. So profound and extensive a capacity of moral apprehension no other prose writer, no man of mere analytic faculty, ever had or can have. This assuredly, when men become (as they will have to become) capable of looking beyond the mere clothes and skin of his work, will be always, as we said, his great especial praise; that he was, beyond any other man, the master of morals—the greatest direct expounder of actual moral fact. Once consent to forget or overlook the mereentourageand social habiliment of Balzac’s intense and illimitable intellect, you cannot fail of seeing that he of all men was fittest to grapple with all strange things and words, and compel them by divine violence of spiritual rape to bring forth flowers and fruits good for food and available for use.
[16]Could God bring down his heart to the making of a thing so deadly and strong? or could any lesser dæmonic force of nature take to itself wings and fly high enough to assume power equal to such a creation? Could spiritual force so far descend or material force so far aspire? Or, when the very stars, and all the armed children of heaven, the “helmed cherubim” that guide and the “sworded seraphim” that guard their several planets, wept for pity and fear at sight of this new force of monstrous matter seen in the deepest night as a fire of menace to man—
“Did he smile his work to see?Did he who made the lamb make thee?”
We may add another cancelled reading to show how delicately the poem has been perfected; although by an oversight of the writer’s most copies hitherto have retained some trace of the rough first draught, neglecting in one line a change necessary to save the sense as well as to complete the sentence.
“And when thy heart began to beat,What dread hand and what dread feetCould fetch it from the furnace deepAnd in thy horrid ribs dare steep?In what clay and in what mouldWere thine eyes of fury rolled?”
Having cancelled this stanza or sketched ghost of a stanza, Blake in his hurry of rejection did not at once remember to alter the last line of the preceding one; leaving thus a stone of some size and slipperiness for editorial feet to trip upon, until the recovery of that nobler reading—
“What dread handframed thydread feet?”
Nor was this little “rock of offence” cleared from the channel of the poem even by the editor of 1827, who was yet not afraid of laying hand upon the text. So grave a flaw in so short and so great a lyric was well worth the pains of removing and is yet worth the pains of accounting for; on which ground this note must be of value to all who take in verse with eye and ear instead of touching it merely with eyelash and finger-tip in the manner of sand-blind students.
[17]Compare the passage inAhaniawhere the growth of it is defined; rooted in the rock of separation, watered with the tears of a jealous God, shot up from sparks and fallen germs of material seed; being after all a growth of mere error, and vegetable (not spiritual) life; the topmost stem of it made into a cross whereon to nail the dead redeemer and friend of men.
[18]Compare again in theVision of the Last Judgment(v. 2, p. 163), that definition of the “Divine body of the Saviour, the true Vine of Eternity,” as “the Human Imagination, who appeared to me as coming to judgment among his saints, and throwing off the Temporal that the Eternal might be established.” The whole of that subtle and eloquent rhapsody is about the best commentary attainable on Blake’s mystical writings and designs. It is impossible to overstate the debt of gratitude due from all students of Blake to the transcriber and editor of theVision, whose indefatigable sense and patient taste have made it legible for all. To have extracted it piecemeal from the chaos of notes jotted down by Blake in the most inconceivable way, would have been a praiseworthy labour enough; but without addition or omission to have constructed these abortive fragments into a whole so available and so admirable, is a labour beyond praise.
[19]This exquisite verse did not fall into its place by chance; the poem has been more than once revised. Its opening stanza stood originally thus:—
“Sleep, sleep; in thy sleepThou wilt every secret keep;Sleep, sleep, beauty bright,Thou shalt taste the joys of night.”
Before recasting the whole, Blake altered the second line into—
“Canst thou any secret keep?”
The gist of the song is this; the speaker, watching a girl newly-born, compares her innocuous infancy with the power that through beauty will one day be hers, her blameless wiles and undeveloped desires with the strong and subtle qualities now dormant which the years will assuredly awaken within her; seeing as it were the wholewomanasleep in the child, he smells future fruit in the unblown bud. On retouching his work, Blake thus wound up the moral and tune of this song in a stanza forming by its rhymes an exact antiphonal complement to the end of the firstCradle Song.
“When thy little heart does wake,Then the dreadful lightnings breakFrom thy cheek and from thine eye,O’er the youthful harvests nigh;Infant wiles and infant smilesHeaven and earth of peace beguiles.”
The epithet “infant” has supplanted that of “female,” which was perhaps better: as to the grammatical licence, Blake followed in that the Elizabethan fashion which made the rule of sound predominate over all others. The song, if it loses simplicity, seems to gain significance by this expansion of the dim original idea; and beauty by expression of the peril latent in a life whose smiles as yet breed no strife between friends, kindle no fire among the unripe shocks of growing corn; but whose words shall hereafter be as very swords, and her eyes as lightning;teterrima belli causa.
[20]“His,” the good man’s: this lax piece of grammar (shifting from singular to plural and back again without much tangible provocation) is not infrequent with Blake, and would hardly be worth righting if that were feasible. A remarkable instance is but too patent in the final “chorus” of theMarriage of Heaven and Hell. Suchroughlicence is given or taken by old poets; and Blake’s English is always beautiful enough to be pardonable where it slips or halts: especially as its errors are always those of a rapid lyrical style, never of a tortuous or verbose ingenuity: it stammers and slips occasionally, but never goes into convulsions like that of some later versifiers.
[21]Such we must consider, for instance, the secondLittle Boy Lost, which looks at first more of a riddle and less worth solution than the haziest section of the prophetic books. A cancelled reading taken from the rough copy in theIdeaswill at all events make one stanza more amenable to reason:
“I love myself; so does the birdThat picks up crumbs around the door.”
Blake was rather given to erase a comparatively reasonable reading and substitute something which cannot be confidently deciphered by the most daring self-reliance of audacious ingenuity, until the reader has found some means of pitching his fancy for a moment in the ordinary key of the prophet’s. This uncomfortable little poem is in effect merely an allegoric or fabulous appeal against the oppression of formulas (or family “textualism” of the blind and unctuous sort) which refuse to single and simple insight, to the outspoken innocence of a child’s laughing or confused analysis, a right to exist on any terms: just as the companion poem is an appeal, so vague as to fall decidedly flat, against the externals of moral fashion. Both, but especially theGirl, have some executive merit: not overmuch. To the surprising final query, “Are such things done on Albion’s shore?” one is provoked to respond, “On the whole, not, as far as we can see;” but the “Albion” of Blake’s verse is never this weaving and spinning country of our working days; it is rather some inscrutable remote land of Titanic visions, moated with silent white mist instead of solid and sonorous surf, and peopled with vague pre-Adamite giants symbolic of more than we can safely define or conceive. An inkling of the meaning may, if anything can, be extracted from some parts of theJerusalem; but probably no one will try.
[22]With more time and room to work in, we might have noticed in these less dramatic and seemingly less original poems of the second series which take up from the opposite point of view matters already handled to such splendid effect in theSongs of Innocence, a depth and warmth of moral quality worth remark; infinite tenderness of heart and fiery pity for all that suffer wrong; something of Hugo’s or Shelley’s passionate compassion for those who lie open to “all the oppression that is done under the sun”; something of the anguish and labour, the fever-heat of sleepless mercy and love incurable which is common to those two great poets. The secondHoly Thursdayis doubtless far enough below the high level of the first; but the secondChimney-sweeperas certainly has a full share of this passionate grace of pain and pity. Blake’s love of children never wrung out into his work a more pungent pathos or keener taste of tears than in the last verse of this poem. It stood thus in the first draught:
“And because I am happy and dance and singThey think they have done me no injury,And are gone to praise God and his priest and king,Who wrap themselves up in our misery.”
The quiet tremulous anger of that, its childish sorrow and contempt, are no less true than subtle in effect. It recalls another floating fragment of verse on social wrongs which shall be rescued from the chaos of theIdeas:
“There souls of men are bought and sold,And milk-fed infancy, for gold;And youths to slaughter-houses led,And maidens, for a bit of bread.”
[23]This verse is of course to be read as one made up of rough but regular anapæsts; the heavier accents falling consequently upon every third syllable—that is, upon the wordsif,not, andhim. The next line is almost as rough, and seems indeed to slip into the solid English iambic; but may also be set right by giving full attention to accent.
[24]A strange and rather beautiful, if grotesque, evidence of the unity of faith and feeling to which Blake and his wife had come by dint of living and thinking so long together, is given by one of the stray notes in this same book: which we transcribe at full on account of its great biographical value as a study of character. Space might have been found for it in the Life, if only to prove once again how curiously the nature and spiritual habits of a great man leave their mark or dye upon the mind nearest to his own.
“South Molton Street.“Sunday, August, 1807.—My wife was told by a spirit to look for her fortune by opening by chance a book which she had in her hand; it was Bysshe’s ‘Art of Poetry.’ She opened the following:—‘I saw ’em kindle with desire,While with soft sighs they blew the fire;Saw the approaches of their joy,He growing more fierce and she less coy;Saw how they mingled melting rays,Exchanging love a thousand ways.Kind was the force on every side;Her new desire she could not hide,Nor would the shepherd be denied.The blessed minute he pursued,Till she, transported in his arms,Yields to the conqueror all her charms.His panting breast to hers now joined,They feast on raptures unconfined,Vast and luxuriant; such as proveThe immortality of love.For who but a DivinityCould mingle souls to that degreeAnd melt them into ecstasy?Now like the Phœnix both expire,While from the ashes of their fireSprings up a new and soft desire.Like charmers, thrice they did invokeThe God, and thrice new vigour took.’—Behn.“I was so well pleased with her luck that I thought I would try my own, and opened the following:—‘As when the winds their airy quarrel try,Jostling from every quarter of the sky,This way and that the mountain oak they bear,His boughs they scatter and his branches tear;With leaves and falling mast they spread the ground;The hollow valleys echo to the sound;Unmoved, the royal plant their fury mocks,Or, shaken, clings more closely to the rocks:For as he shoots his towering head on high,So deep in earth his fixed foundations lie.’—Dryden’s Virgil.”
“South Molton Street.
“Sunday, August, 1807.—My wife was told by a spirit to look for her fortune by opening by chance a book which she had in her hand; it was Bysshe’s ‘Art of Poetry.’ She opened the following:—
‘I saw ’em kindle with desire,While with soft sighs they blew the fire;Saw the approaches of their joy,He growing more fierce and she less coy;Saw how they mingled melting rays,Exchanging love a thousand ways.Kind was the force on every side;Her new desire she could not hide,Nor would the shepherd be denied.The blessed minute he pursued,Till she, transported in his arms,Yields to the conqueror all her charms.His panting breast to hers now joined,They feast on raptures unconfined,Vast and luxuriant; such as proveThe immortality of love.For who but a DivinityCould mingle souls to that degreeAnd melt them into ecstasy?Now like the Phœnix both expire,While from the ashes of their fireSprings up a new and soft desire.Like charmers, thrice they did invokeThe God, and thrice new vigour took.’—Behn.
“I was so well pleased with her luck that I thought I would try my own, and opened the following:—
‘As when the winds their airy quarrel try,Jostling from every quarter of the sky,This way and that the mountain oak they bear,His boughs they scatter and his branches tear;With leaves and falling mast they spread the ground;The hollow valleys echo to the sound;Unmoved, the royal plant their fury mocks,Or, shaken, clings more closely to the rocks:For as he shoots his towering head on high,So deep in earth his fixed foundations lie.’—Dryden’s Virgil.”
Nothing is ever so cynical as innocence, whether it be a child’s or a mystic’s. As a poet, Blake had some reason to be “well pleased” with his wife’s curious windfall; for those verses of the illustrious Aphra’s have some real energy and beauty of form, visible to those who care to make allowance, first for the conventional English of the time, and secondly for the naked violence of manner natural to that she-satyr, whose really great lyrical gifts are hopelessly overlaid and encrusted by the rough repulsive husk of her incredible style of speech. Even “Astræa” must however have fair play and fair praise; and the simple truth is that, when writing her best, this “unmentionable” poetess has a vigorous grace and a noble sense of metre to be found in no other song-writer of her time. One song, fished up by Mr. Dyce out of the weltering sewerage of Aphra’s unreadable and unutterable plays, has a splendid quality of verse, and even some degree of sentiment not wholly porcine. Take four lines as a sample, and Blake’s implied approval will hardly seem unjustifiable:—
“From thy bright eyes he took those firesWhich round about in sport he hurled;But ’twas from mine he took desiresEnough to undo the amorous world.”
The strong and subtle cadence of that magnificent fourth verse gives evidence of so delicate an ear and such dexterous power of hand as no other poet between the Restoration date and Blake’s own time has left proof of in serious or tragic song. Great as is Dryden’s lyrical work in more ways than one, its main quality is mere strength of intellect and solidity of handling—the forcible and imperial manner of his satires; and in pure literal song-writing, which (rather than any ‘ode’ or such-like mixed poem) may be taken as the absolute and final test of a poet’s lyrical nature, he never came near this mark. François Villon and Aphra Behn, the two most inexpressibly non-respectable of male or female Bohemians and poets, were alike in this as well; that the supreme gift of each, in a time sufficiently barren of lyrical merit, was the gift of writing admirable songs; and this, after all, has perhaps borne better fruit for us than any gift of moral excellence.
[25]Another version of this line, with less of pungent and brilliant effect, has yet a touch of sound in it worth preserving: some may even prefer it in point of simple lyrical sweetness:
“She played and she melted in all her prime:Ah! that sweet love should be thought a crime.”
[26]On closer inspection of Blake’s rapid autograph I suspect that in the second line those who please may read “the ruddy limbs and flowering hair,” or perhaps “flowery;” but the type of flame is more familiar to Blake. Compare further on “A Song of Liberty.”
[27]Other readings are “soothed” and “smiled”—readings adopted after the insertion of the preceding stanza. As the subject is a child not yet grown to standing and walking age, these readings are perhaps better, though less simple in sound, than the one I have retained.
[28]Here and throughout to the end, duly altering metre and grammar with a quite laudable care, Blake has substituted “my father” for the “priests;” not I think to the improvement of the poem, though probably with an eye to making the end cohere rather more closely with the beginning. This and the “Myrtle” are shoots of the same stock, and differ only in the second grafting. In the last-named poem the father’s office was originally thus;
“Oft my myrtle sighed in vainTo behold my heavy chain:Oft my father saw us sigh,And laughed at our simplicity.”
Here too Blake had at first written, “Oft the priest beheld us sigh;” he afterwards cancelled the whole passage, perhaps on first remarking the rather too grotesque confusion of a symbolic myrtle with a literal wife; and the last stanza in either form is identical. The simple subtle grace of both poems, and the singular care of revision bestowed on them, are equally worth notice.
[29]Those who insist on the tight lacing of grammatical stays upon the “painèd loveliness” of a muse’s over-pliant body may use if they please Blake’s own amended reading; in which otherwise the main salt of the poem is considerably diluted as by tepid water: the angel (one might say) has his sting blunted and the best quill of his pinion pulled out.
“And without one word saidHad a peach from the tree;And still as a maid,” &c.
[30]We may find place here for another fairy song, quaint in shape and faint in colour, but with the signet of Blake upon it; copied from a loose scrap of paper on the back of which is a pencilled sketch of Hercules throttling the serpents, whose twisted limbs make a sort of spiral cradle around and above the child’s triumphant figure: an attendant, naked, falls back in terror with sharp recoil of drawn-up limbs; Alcmena and Amphitryon watch the struggle in silence, he grasping her hand.
“A fairy leapt upon my kneeSinging and dancing merrily;I said, ‘Thou thing of patches, rings,Pins, necklaces, and such-like things,Disgracer of the female form,Thou paltry gilded poisonous worm!’Weeping, he fell upon my thigh,And thus in tears did soft reply:‘Knowest thou not, O fairies’ lord,How much by us contemned, abhorred,Whatever hides the female formThat cannot bear the mortal storm?Therefore in pity still we giveOur lives to make the female live;And what would turn into diseaseWe turn to what will joy and please.’”
Even so dim and slight a sketch as this may be of worth as indicating Blake’s views of the apparent and the substantial form of things, the primary and the derivative life; also as a sample of his roughest and readiest work.
[31]Lest the kingdom of love left under the type of a woman should be over powerful for a nation of hard fighters and reasoners, such as Blake conceived the “ancients” to be. Compare for his general style of fancies on classic matters the prologue to “Milton” and the Sibylline Leaves on Homer and Virgil. To his half-trained apprehension Rome seemed mere violence and Greece mere philosophy.
[32]Let the reader take another instance of the culture given to these songs—a gift which has happily been bequeathed by Blake to his editor. This one was at first divided into five equal stanzas; the last two running thus:—
“‘And pity no more would beIf all were happy as we;’At his curse the sun went down,And the heavens gave a frown.“Down poured the heavy rainOver the new-reaped grain;And Misery’s increaseIs Mercy, Pity, Peace.”
Thus one might say is the curse confuted; for if, as the “grievous devil” will have it, the root of the sweetest goodness is in material evil, then may the other side answer that even by his own showing the flower or “increase” from that root is not evil, but good: a soft final point of comfort missed by the change which gives otherwise fresher colour to this poem.
[33]But as above shewn the vision of the wise man or poet is wider than both; sees beyond the angel’s blind innocent enjoyment to a deeper faith than his simple nature can grasp or include; sees also past the truth of the devil’s sad ingenious “analytics” to the broader sense of things, seen by which, “Good and Evil are no more.”
[34]Query “Putting?” This whole poem is jotted down in a close rough handwriting, not often easy to follow with confidence.
[35]In the line “A God or else a Pharisee,” Blake with a pencil-scratch has turned “a God” to “a devil”; as if the words were admittedly or admissibly interchangeable! A prophet so wonderfully loose-tongued may well be the despair of his faithfullest commentators: but as it happens the pencil-scratch should here be of some help and significance to us: following this small clue, we may come to distinguish the God of his belief from this demon-god of the created “mundane shell”—the God of Pharisaic religion and moral law.
[36]The creator by division, father of men and women, fashioner of evil and good; literally in the deepest sense “the God of this world,” who “does not know the garment from the man;” cannot see beyond the two halves which he has made by violence of separation; would have the body perishable, yet the qualities of the bodily life permanent: thus inverting order and reversing fact. Parallel passages might be brought in by the dozen on all hands, after a little dipping into mystic books; but I want to make no more room here for all this than is matter of bare necessity.
[37]We shall see this presently. I conceive however that Blake, to save time and contract the space of his preaching, uses the consecrated Hebrew name to design now the giver of the Mosaic law, now that other and opposite Divinity which after the “body of clay” had been “devoured” was the residue or disembodied victorious spirit of the human Saviour. Mysticism need not of necessity be either inaccurate or incoherent: neither need it give offence by its forms and expressions of faith: but a mystic is but human after all, and with the best intentions may slip somewhere, especially a mystic so little intrainingas Blake, and so much of a poet or artist; who is not accustomed to any careful feeling of his way among words, except with an eye to the perfection of their bodily beauty. Indeed, as appears by Mr. Crabb Robinson’s notes of his conversation, Blake affirmed that according to scripture itself the world was created by “the Elohim,” not by Jehovah; whose covenant he elsewhere asserted was simply “forgiveness of sins.” Thus even according to this heretical creed the God of the Jews would seem to be ranged on the same side with Christ against “the God of this world.”
[38]Compare this fragment of a paraphrase or “excursus” on a lay sermon by a modern pagan philosopher of more material tendencies; but given to such tragic indulgence in huge Titanic dithyrambs. “Nature averse to crime? I tell you, nature lives and breathes by it; hungers at all her pores for bloodshed, aches in all her nerves for the help of sin, yearns with all her heart for the furtherance of cruelty. Nature forbid that thing or this? Nay, the best or worst of you will never go so far as she would have you; no criminal will come up to the measure of her crimes, no destruction seem to her destructive enough. We, when we would do evil, can disorganise a little matter, shed a little blood, quench a little breath at the door, of a perishable body; this we can do, and can call it crime. Unnatural is it? Good friend, it is by criminal things and deeds unnatural that nature works and moves and has her being; what subsides through inert virtue, she quickens through active crime; out of death she kindles life; she uses the dust of man to strike her light upon; she feeds with fresh blood the innumerable insatiable mouths suckled at her milkless breast; she takes the pain of the whole world to sharpen the sense of vital pleasure in her limitless veins: she stabs and poisons, crushes and corrodes, yet cannot live and sin fast enough for the cruelty of her great desire. Behold, the ages of men are dead at her feet; the blood of the world is on her hands; and her desire is continually toward evil, that she may see the end of things which she hath made. Friends, if we would be one with nature, let us continually do evil with our might. But what evil is here for us to do, where the whole body of things is evil? The day’s spider kills the day’s fly, and calls it a crime? Nay, could we thwart nature, then might crime become possible and sin an actual thing. Could but a man do this; could he cross the courses of the stars, and put back the times of the sea; could he change the ways of the world and find out the house of life to destroy it; could he go into heaven to defile it and into hell to deliver it from subjection; could he draw down the sun to consume the earth, and bid the moon shed poison or fire upon the air; could he kill the fruit in the seed and corrode the child’s mouth with the mother’s milk; then had he sinned and done evil against nature. Nay, and not then: for nature would fain have it so, that she might create a world of new things; for she is weary of the ancient life: her eyes are sick of seeing and her ears are heavy with hearing; with the lust of creation she is burnt up, and rent in twain with travail until she bring forth change; she would fain create afresh, and cannot, except it be by destroying: in all her energies she is athirst for mortal food, and with all her forces she labours in desire of death. And what are the worst sins we can do—we who live for a day and die in a night? a few murders, a few”—we need not run over the not so wholly insignificant roll-call; but it is curious to observe how the mystical evangelist and the material humourist meet in the reading of mere nature and join hands in their interpretation of the laws ruling the outer body of life: a vision of ghastly glory, without pity or help possible.
[39]Blake had first written “the creeping,” then cancelled “the” and interlined the word “Antichrist”: I have no doubt intending some such alteration as that in the text of “creeping” to “aping”; but as far as we can now know the day for rewriting his fair copy never came.
[40]There are (says the mystic) two forms of “humility”: detestable both, and condemnable. By one, the extrinsic form, a man cringes and submits, doubts himself and gives in to others; becomes in effect impotent, a sceptic and a coward; by the other or intrinsic form, he conceives too meanly of his own soul, and comes to believe himself less than God—of course, to a pure Pantheist, the one radical and ruinous error which throws up on all sides a crop of lies and misconceptions, rank and ready; as base a thing to believe as an act of bodily “humility” were base to do: consequently any mere external worship is by this law heathenish, heretical and idolatrous. This heathenish or idolatrous heresy of spiritual humility comes merely of too much reliance on the reasoning power; man is undivine as to his mere understanding, and by using that as an eye instead of an eyeglass “distorts” all which he does not obliterate. “Pride of reason” is a foolish thing for any clerical defender of the “faith” to impugn; such pride is essentially humility. To be proud of having an empty eye-socket implies that you would be ashamed of having eyesight; then you are proud on the wrong side, and humble there exactly where humility is a mere blundering suicide’s cut at his own throat; if you arenotof your nature heavenly, how shall any alien celestial quality be sewn or stuck on to you? in whose cast clothes will you crawl into heaven by rational or religious cross-roads? “Imputed righteousness” will not much help your case; if you “impute” a wrong quality to any imaginable substance, does your imputation change the substance? What it had not before, it has not now; your tongue has not the power of turning truth to a lie or a lie to truth; the fact gives your assertion a straight blow in the face. The mystic who says that man is God has some logical cause for pride; but the sceptic has no more than the cleric—he who asserts that reason, which is finite, can be final, is essentially as “humble” as he who admits that he can be “saved” by accepting as a gift some “imputed” goodness which is not in any sense his. For reason—the “spectre” of theJerusalem—is no matter for pride; if you make out that to be the best faculty about you, you give proof of the stupidest modesty and hatefullest humility. Look across the lower animal reason, and over the dim lying limit of tangible and changeable flesh; and be humble if you can or dare, then; for if what you apprehend of yourself beyond is not God, there is none—except in that sad sense of a dæmon or natural force, strong only to create and to divide and to destroy and to govern by reason or religion the material scheme of things.Extra hominem nulla salus.“God is no more than man;becauseman is no less than God:” there is Blake’s Pantheistic Iliad in a nutshell.
[41]An ugly specimen of ready-writing; meaning of course “with the sacrifice of bloody prey:” but doubtless even Blake would not have let this stand, though we cannot safely alter it: and the passage did upon the whole appear worth citing.
[42]This is so like Blake’s style of design that one can scarcely help fancying he must somewhere have translated it into colours perhaps more comprehensible than his words: have given somewhere in painter’s types the likeness of that bodily appetite, serpentine food of the serpent, a lithe and strenuous body of clay, fair with luminous flakes of eruptive poison, foul with cold and coloured scales as the scales of a leper in grain; with green pallor of straining mouth and bloodlike expansion of fiery throat; teeth and claws convulsed with the painful lust of pain, eyelids cloven in sunder with a dull flame of desire, the visible venom of its breath shot sharp against the face and eyes of the divine human soul: he, disembodied yet incarnate in the eternal body, stripped of accidental and clothed with essential flesh, naked of attribute that he may be girdled with substance, wrestling silent with fair great limbs, but with calm hair and brows blanched as in fire, with light of lordship in the “sunclear joyful eyes” that already absorb and devour by sweet strength of radiance the relapsing reluctant bulk of body, that foulest ravenous birth begotten of accident or error upon time; eyes beautiful with the after-light of ancient tears, that shall not weep again for ever: “for the former things are passed away”: and by that light of theirs shall all men see light. Behind these two, an intense and tremulous night stricken through with stars and fire; and overhead the dividing roof and underfoot the sundering floor-work of the grave; a waste place beyond, full of risen bones that gather flesh and springing roots that strike out or catch at light flying flames of life. Decidedly the design must exist somewhere; and presumably in “Golgonooza.” We have the artist’s prophetic authority for believing that his works written and painted before he came upon earth do in effect fill whole chambers in heaven, and are “the delight and study of archangels:” an apocalyptic fact not unnaturally unacceptable and inconceivable to the cleverest of Scotch stonemasons.
[43]Compare Hugo’s admirable poem in theChâtiments(vii. 11. p. 319-321)—“Paroles d’un conservateur à propos d’un perturbateur:”—where, speaking through the mouth of “Elizab, a scribe,” the chief poet of our time gives in his great swift manner a dramatic summary of the view taken by priests and elders of Christ. It is worth looking to trace out how nearly the same historical points of objection are selected and the same lines of inference struck into by the two poets; one aiming straight at present politics, one indirectly at mystic doctrine.
“Cet homme était de ceux qui n’ont rien de sacré,Il ne respectait rien de tout ce qu’on respecte.Pour leur inoculer sa doctrine suspecte,Il allait ramassant dans les plus méchants lieuxDes bouviers, des pêcheurs, des drôles bilieux,D’immondes va-nu-pieds n’ayant ni sou ni maille:Il faisait son cénacle avec cette canaille.******L’honnête homme indigné rentrait dans sa maisonQuand ce jongleur passait avec cette sequelle.******Il traînait à sa suite une espèce de fille.Il allait pérorant, ébranlant la famille,Et la religion et la société.Il sapait la morale et la propriété.******Quant aux prêtres,Il les déchirait; bref, il blasphémait. CelaDans la rue. Il contait toutes ces horreurs-làAux premiers gueux venus, sans cape et sans semelles.Il fallait en finir, les lois étaient formelles,On l’a crucifié.”
[44]In a briefer and less important fragment of verse Blake as earnestly inculcates this faith of his: that all mere virtues and vices were known before Christ; of right and wrong Plato and Cicero, men uninspired, were competent to speak as well as he; but until his advent “the moral virtues in their pride” held rule over the world, and among them as they rode clothed with war and sacrifice, driving souls to hell before them, shone “upon the rivers and the streams” the face of the Accuser, holy God of this Pharisaic world. Then arose Christ and said to man “Thy sins are all forgiven thee;” and the “moral virtues,” in terror lest their reign of war and accusation should now draw to an end, cried out “Crucify him,” and formed with their own hands the cross and the nails and the spear: and the Accuser spoke to them saying:—
“Am I not Lucifer the greatAnd ye my daughters, in great state,The fruit of my mysterious treeOf Good and Evil and Misery?”
If, the preacher adds, moral virtue was Christianity, Christ’s pretensions were madness, “and Caiaphas and Pilate men praiseworthy;” and the lion’s den a fitter emblem of heaven than the sheepfold. “The moral Christian is the cause of the unbeliever;” and Antichrist is incarnate in those who close heaven against sinners
“With iron bars in virtuous stateAnd Rhadamanthus at the gate.”
But men have so long allowed the heathen virtues, whose element is war and whose essence retaliation, to “take Jesus’ and Jehovah’s name” that the Accuser, Antichrist and Lucifer though he be, is now worshipped by those holy names over all the world: and the era called Christian is the era of his reign. For the rest, this new relic has no special merit, although it may be allowed some share of interest as a supplement or illustration to the larger poem or sermon.
[45]The words “female” and “reflex” are synonymous in all Blake’s writings. What is feminine in its material symbol is derivative in its spiritual significance; “there is no such thing in eternity as a female will;” for in eternity substances lose their shadows, and essence puts off accident. The “frowning babe” of the last stanzas is of course the same or such another as the one whose birth is first spoken of; not the latter female growth born in the earthly house of art, but genius itself, whose likeness is terrible and unlovely at first sight to the run of men, filling them with affright and scandal, with wonder and the repellent sense that a new and strange thing is brought into the world.
[46]It seems not impossible that this series may have been intended, in its complete form, to bear the title ofIdeas of Good and Evil, which we find loosely attached to the general MS. When the designer broke it up into different sets, this name would naturally have been abandoned.
[47]Of Blake’s prose other samples are extant besides the notes on art published in the second volume of theLife and Selections. These strays are for the most part, as far as I have seen, mere waifs of weed and barren drift. One fragment, not without some grace and thoughtfulness curiously used up and thrown away, is an allegory of “the Gods which came from Fear,” of Shame born of the “poisonous seed” of pride, and such things; written much in the manner of those early Ossianic studies which dilate and deform the volume ofPoetical Sketches: perhaps composed (though properly never composed at all) about the same time. Another, a sort of satire on critics and “philosophers,” seems to emulate the style of Sterne in his intervals of lax and dull writing; in execution it is some depths below the baby stories of little Malkin, whose ghost might well have blushed rejection of the authorship. The fragment onLaocoonis a mere cento of stray notes on art which reaffirm in a chaotic and spluttering manner Blake’s theories that the only real prayer is study of art, the only real praise, its practice; that excellence of art, not moral virtue, is the aim and the essence of Christianity; and much more of the same sort. These notes, crammed into every blank space and corner of the engraved page, burst out as it were and boil over, disconnected but irrepressible, in a feverish watery style. All really good or even passable prose of Blake’s seems to be given in the volume ofSelections.
[48]It should not be overlooked that this part of his work was left unfinished, all but untouched, by the author of theLife. Without as long a study and as deep a sympathy as his, it would seem to any follower, however able and zealous, the most toilsome as well as the most sterile part of the task in hand. The fault therefore lies with chance or fate alone. Less than I have said above could not here be said; and more need not be. I was bound at starting to register my protest against the contempt and condemnation which these books have incurred, thinking them as I do not unworthy the trouble of commentary; but no word was designed to depreciate the careful and admirable labour which has completed a monument cut short with the life of the sculptor, joined now in death to the dead whom he honoured.
[49]Something like this may be found in a passage of Werner translated by Mr. Carlyle, but mixed with much of meaner matter, and debased by a feebleness and a certain spiritual petulance proper to a man so much inferior. The German mystic, though ingenious and laborious, is also tepid, pretentious, insecure; half terrified at his own timid audacities, half choked by the fumes of his own alembic. He labours within a limit, not fixed indeed, but never expansive; narrowing always at one point as it widens at another: his work is weak in the head and the spine; he ventures with half a heart and strikes with half a hand; throughout his myth of Phosphorus he goes halting and hinting; not ungracefully, nay with a real sense of beauty, but never like a man braced up for the work requisite; he labours under a dull devotion and a cloudy capacity. Above all, he can neither speak nor do well, being no artist or prophet; and so makes but a poor preacher or essayist. The light he shows is thick and weak; Blake’s light, be it meteor or star, rises with the heat and radiance of fire or the morning.
[50]A word in passing may here be spared to the singular MS. ofTiriel. This little poem or mythical episode is evidently a growth of the crude Ossianic period; in style it is somewhat weak and inadequate to any grave or subtle expression of thought: a few noticeable lines intervene, but the general execution is heavy, faint, and rough even for a sketch. Here however (if I am not incorrect in referring it to a date earlier than the earliest of the prophetic books) we may see the dull dawn of a day full of fiery presage, of the light and vapour of tempestuous revelation. The name of Tiriel king of the West, father of a rebellious race of children who perish by his curse, hardly reappears once as “Thiriel” the cloud-born son of Urizen; Har and Heva, the gentler father and mother of the great eastern family, who in theSong of Losare seen flying before the windy flames of a broad-blown sunset, chased over Asia with fire and sword by the divine tyrant and his tributary kings, are here seen forsaken of their sons in extreme and childish age, but tended by “Mutha” their mother; “they are holy and forgiving, filled with loving mercy, forgetting the offences of their most rebellious children.” Into the story or subject-matter we need not go far; but it is worth notice that the series of twelve designs classified in the catalogue, section B., No. 156, pp. 253-4 of vol. 2, must evidently (as is there half suggested) be a set of illustrations to thisTiriel. In one of these any reader will recognize the serpentine hair which at her father’s imprecation rose and hissed around the brows of “Hela” (Tiriel, ch. 6); but these designs have as evidently fallen out of order; thus the one lettered (k) appears to illustrate the very first lines of the poem; and others seem equally misarranged. In this faint allegory of the blind discrowned king with his two brothers, the mad invulnerable giant of the woods and the fettered dotard dwelling in caves, some fresh incomplete symbol is discernible of tyranny and error, of strength made insane or perverse and weakness made cruel or imbecile by oppression of the spirit or the flesh; the “eloquent” outcast oppressor might then be the uninspired intellect, against whose errors and tyrannies its own children revolt, and perish by the curse of their perishing father and mother, blind reason and powerless faith: but from such shallow and sandy soil the conjectural Muse of commentary can reap little worth her pains to garner, and at every sweep of her sickle must risk being blinded by the sand blown into her eyes. Some stray verses might be gathered up, perhaps worth a place in the gleaner’s loose sheaf; such as these:
“And aged Tiriel stood and said: Where does the thunder sleep?Where doth he hide his terrible head? and his swift and fiery daughters,Where do they shroud their fiery wings and the terrors of their hair?”
Anything better worth citation than such crude sonorous snatches of lyric style I have not found here, except in chap. vii., where the dying Tiriel lays his final curse on Har—“weak mistaken father of a lawless race,” whose “laws and Tiriel’s wisdom end together in a curse.” Here, in words afterwards variously repeated and enlarged, he appeals against the laws of mere animal life, the narrowed senses and material bondage of men upon earth; against unnatural training and abstinence through which “milk is cut off from the weeping mouth with difficulty and pain,” when first “the little lids are lifted and the little nostrils opened;” against “hypocrisy, the idiot’s wisdom and the wise man’s folly,” by which men are “compelled to pray repugnant and to handle the immortal spirit” till like Tiriel they become as subtle serpents in a paradise which they consume fruit by fruit and flower by flower till at its fall they themselves are left desolate. Thus too he inveighs against faith in matter and “respect of persons” under their perishable and finite forms: “Can wisdom be put in a silver rod or love in a golden bowl? is the son of a king warmed without wool? or does he cry with a voice of thunder? does he look upon the sun and laugh, or stretch his little hands into the depths of the sea?” Much of this has been half erased, probably with a view to remoulding the whole: for here alone does anything in tone or thought recall the nobler mysticism of Blake’s later writings.
[51]Before we dismiss the matter from view, it may be permissible to cast up in a rough and rapid way the sum of Blake’s teaching in these books, if only because this was also the doctrine or moral of his entire life and life’s work. I will therefore, as leave has been given, append a note extracted from a manuscript now before me, which attempts to embody and enforce, if only by dint of pure and simple exposition, the pantheistic evangel here set forth in so strange a fashion. Thus at least I read the passage; if misinterpreted, my correspondent has to thank his own laxity of expression. “These poems or essays at prophecy” (he says) “seem to me to represent in an obscure and forcible manner the real naked question to which all theologies and all philosophies must in the end be pared down. Strained and filtered clear of extraneous matter, pruned of foreign fruit and artificial foliage, this radical question lies between Theism and Pantheism. When the battles of the creeds have been all fought out, this battle will remain to fight. I do not see much likelihood on either hand of success or defeat. Faith and reason, evidence and report, are alike inadequate to decide the day. This prophet or that prophet, this God or that God, is not here under debate. Histories, religions, all things born of rumour or circumstance, accident or change, are out of court; are, for the moment, of necessity set aside. Gentile or Jew, Christian or Pagan, Eastern or Western, can but be equal to us—for the moment. No single figure, no single book, stands out for special judgment or special belief. On the right hand, let us say (employing the old figure of speech), is the Theist—the ‘man of God,’ if you may take his own word for it; the believer in a separate or divisible deity, capable or conceivably capable of existence apart from ours who conceive of it; a conscious and absolute Creator. On the left hand is the Pantheist; to whom such a creed is mainly incredible and wholly insufficient His creed is or should be much like that of your prophet here;” (I must observe in passing that my correspondent seems so unable to conceive of a comment apart from the text, an exponent who is not an evangelist,—so inclined to confuse the various functions of critic and of disciple, and assume that you must mean to preach or teach whatever doctrine you may have to explain—in a word, so obtuse or perverse on this point that he might be taken for a professional man-of-letters or sworn juryman of the press; but I will hope better things of him, though anonymous;) “and that creed, as I take it, is simply enough expressible in Blake’s own words, or deducible from them; that ‘all deities reside in the human breast’; that except humanity there is no divine thing or person. Clearly therefore, in the eyes of a Theist, he lies open to the charge of atheism or antitheism. The real difference is perhaps this; God appears to a Theist as the root, to a Pantheist as the flower of things. It does not follow logically or actually that to this latter all things are alike. For us (he might say), for us, within the boundaries of time and space, evil and good do really exist, and live no empirical life—for a certain time, and within a certain range. ‘There is no God unless man can become God.’ That is no saying for an Atheist. ‘There is no man unless the child can become a man’; is that equivalent to a denial of manhood? But if a man is to be born into the world, the mother must abstain from the drugs that produce abortion, the child from strong meats and drinks, the man from poisons. So it is in the spiritual world; tyranny and treachery, indolence and dulness, cannot but impede and impair the immutable law of nature and necessary growth. These and their like must be and must pass away; the eternal body of things must change. As the fanatic abstains through fear of God or of hell, the free-thinker abstains from what he sees or thinks to be evil (i. e., adverse or alien to his nature at its best) through respect for what he is and reverence for what he may be. Pantheism therefore is no immoral creed, and cannot be, if only because it is based upon faith in nature and rooted in respect for it. By faith in sight it attains to sight through faith. It follows that pure Theism is more immediately the contrary of this belief, more unacceptable and more delusive in the eyes of its followers, than any scheme of doctrine or code of revelation. These, as we see by your Blake” (again), “the Pantheist may seize and recast in the mould of his own faith. But Theism, but the naked distinct figure of God, whether or not he assume the nature of man, so long as this is mere assumption and not the essence of his being—the clothes and not the body, the body and not the soul—this is to him incredible, the source of all evil and error. Grant such a God his chance of existence, what reason has the Theist to suppose or what right to assume his wisdom or his goodness? why this and not that? whence his acceptance and whence his rejection of anything that is? ‘Shall the clay demand of the potter, why hast thou made me thus?’ Shall it not? and why? Of whom else should a man ask? and if sure of his God, what better should he do? Theism is not expansive, but exclusive: and the creeds begotten or misbegotten on this lean body of belief are ‘Satanic’ in the eyes of a Pantheist, as his faith is in the eyes of their followers.” There is much more, but it were superfluous to mix a narcotic over strong: and in pursuit of his flying “faith” my friend’s ideal “Pantheist” is apt to become heretical.