“I have always found that Angels have the vanity to speak of themselves as the only wise; this they do with a confident insolence sprouting from systematic reasoning.“Thus Swedenborg boasts that what he writes is new, though it is only the Contents or Index of already published books.“A man carried a monkey about for a show, and because he was a little wiser than the monkey, grew vain, and conceived himself as much wiser than seven men. It is so with Swedenborg: he shows the folly of churches and exposes hypocrites, till he imagines that all are religious and himself the single one on earth that ever broke a net.“Now hear a plain fact: Swedenborg has not written one new truth.“Now hear another: He has written all the old falsehoods.“And now hear the reason: He conversed with Angels who are all religious and conversed not with Devils who all hate religion; for he was incapable, through his conceited notions.“Thus Swedenborg’s writings are a recapitulation of all superficial opinions, and an analysis of the more sublime, but no further.“Hear now another plain fact: Any man of mechanical talents may, from the writings of Paracelsus or Jacob Behmen, produce ten thousand volumes of equal value with Swedenborg’s; and from those of Dante or Shakespeare, an infinite number. But when he has done this, let him not say that he knows better than his master, for he only holds a candle in sunshine.”
“I have always found that Angels have the vanity to speak of themselves as the only wise; this they do with a confident insolence sprouting from systematic reasoning.
“Thus Swedenborg boasts that what he writes is new, though it is only the Contents or Index of already published books.
“A man carried a monkey about for a show, and because he was a little wiser than the monkey, grew vain, and conceived himself as much wiser than seven men. It is so with Swedenborg: he shows the folly of churches and exposes hypocrites, till he imagines that all are religious and himself the single one on earth that ever broke a net.
“Now hear a plain fact: Swedenborg has not written one new truth.
“Now hear another: He has written all the old falsehoods.
“And now hear the reason: He conversed with Angels who are all religious and conversed not with Devils who all hate religion; for he was incapable, through his conceited notions.
“Thus Swedenborg’s writings are a recapitulation of all superficial opinions, and an analysis of the more sublime, but no further.
“Hear now another plain fact: Any man of mechanical talents may, from the writings of Paracelsus or Jacob Behmen, produce ten thousand volumes of equal value with Swedenborg’s; and from those of Dante or Shakespeare, an infinite number. But when he has done this, let him not say that he knows better than his master, for he only holds a candle in sunshine.”
This also we will leave for those to decide who please, and attend to the next and final vision. That the fireof inspiration should absorb and convert to its own nature all denser and meaner elements of mind, was the prophet’s sole idea of redemption: the dead cloud of belief consumed becomes the vital flame of faith.
“A Memorable Fancy.“Once I saw a Devil in a flame of fire, who arose before an Angel that sat on a cloud, and the Devil uttered these words.“The worship of God is: Honouring his gifts in other men, each according to his genius, and loving the greatest men best; those who envy or calumniate great men hate God, for there is no other God.“The Angel hearing this became almost blue, but mastering himself, he grew yellow, and at last white, pink, and smiling; and then replied, Thou Idolator, is not God one? and is not he visible in Jesus Christ? and has not Jesus Christ given his sanction to the law of ten commandments? and are not all other men fools, sinners, and nothings?“The Devil answered; Bray a fool in a mortar with wheat, yet shall not his folly be beaten out of him: if Jesus Christ is the greatest man, you ought to love him in the greatest degree; now hear how he has given his sanction to the law of the ten commandments: did he not mock at the sabbath, and so mock the sabbath’s God? murder those who were murdered, because of him? turn away the law from the woman taken in adultery? steal the labour of others to support him? bear false witness when he omitted making a defence before Pilate? covet when he prayed for his disciples, and when he bid them shake off the dust of their feet against such as refused to lodge them? I tell you, no virtue can exist without breaking these ten commandments. Jesus was all virtue, and acted from impulse, not from rules.“When he had so spoken, I beheld the Angel who stretched out his arms embracing the flame of fire, and he was consumed, and arose as Elijah.“Note.This Angel, who is now become a Devil, is my particular friend: we often read the Bible together in its infernal or diabolical sense, which the world shall have if they behave well.“I have also the Bible of Hell, which the world shall have, whether they will or no.”
“A Memorable Fancy.
“Once I saw a Devil in a flame of fire, who arose before an Angel that sat on a cloud, and the Devil uttered these words.
“The worship of God is: Honouring his gifts in other men, each according to his genius, and loving the greatest men best; those who envy or calumniate great men hate God, for there is no other God.
“The Angel hearing this became almost blue, but mastering himself, he grew yellow, and at last white, pink, and smiling; and then replied, Thou Idolator, is not God one? and is not he visible in Jesus Christ? and has not Jesus Christ given his sanction to the law of ten commandments? and are not all other men fools, sinners, and nothings?
“The Devil answered; Bray a fool in a mortar with wheat, yet shall not his folly be beaten out of him: if Jesus Christ is the greatest man, you ought to love him in the greatest degree; now hear how he has given his sanction to the law of the ten commandments: did he not mock at the sabbath, and so mock the sabbath’s God? murder those who were murdered, because of him? turn away the law from the woman taken in adultery? steal the labour of others to support him? bear false witness when he omitted making a defence before Pilate? covet when he prayed for his disciples, and when he bid them shake off the dust of their feet against such as refused to lodge them? I tell you, no virtue can exist without breaking these ten commandments. Jesus was all virtue, and acted from impulse, not from rules.
“When he had so spoken, I beheld the Angel who stretched out his arms embracing the flame of fire, and he was consumed, and arose as Elijah.
“Note.This Angel, who is now become a Devil, is my particular friend: we often read the Bible together in its infernal or diabolical sense, which the world shall have if they behave well.
“I have also the Bible of Hell, which the world shall have, whether they will or no.”
Under this title at least the world was never favoured with it; but we may presumably taste some savour of that Bible in these pages. After this the book is woundup in a lyric rapture, not without some flutter and tumour of style, but full of clear high music and flame-like aspiration. Epilogue and prologue are both nearer in manner to the dubious hybrid language of the succeeding books of prophecy than to the choice and noble prose in which the rest of this book is written. The overture must be read by the light of its meaning; of the mysterious universal mother and her son, the latest birth of the world, we have already taken account. The date of 1790 must here be kept in mind, that all may remember what appearances of change were abroad, what manner of light and tempest was visible upon earth, when the hopes of such men as Blake made their stormy way into speech or song.
“A SONG OF LIBERTY.1. The Eternal Female groan’d! it was heard over all the Earth.2. Albion’s coast is sick silent; the American meadows faint!3. Shadows of Prophecy shiver along by the lakes and the rivers, and mutter across the ocean. France, rend down thy dungeon;4. Golden Spain, burst the barriers of old Rome;5. Cast thy keys, O Rome, into the deep down falling, even to eternity down falling;6. And weep.7. In her trembling hands she took the new-born terror howling:8. On those infinite mountains of light now barred out by the Atlantic sea, the new-born fire stood before the starry King!9. Flag’d with grey-browed snows and thunderous visages the jealous wings waved over the deep.10. The speary hand burned aloft, unbuckled was the shield, forth went the hand of jealousy among the flaming hair, and hurled the new-born wonder thro’ the starry night.11. The fire, the fire is falling!12. Look up! look up! O citizen of London, enlarge thy countenance: O Jew, leave counting gold! return to thy oil and wine; O African! black African! (go, winged thought, widen his forehead.)13. The fiery limbs, the flaming hair, shot like the sinking sun into the western sea.14. Waked from his eternal sleep, the hoary element roaring fled away.15. Down rushed, beating his wings in vain, the jealous King; his grey-browed councillors, thunderous warriors, curled veterans, among helms and shields, and chariots, horses, elephants; banners, castles, slings and rocks;16. Falling, rushing, ruining! buried in the ruins, on Urthona’s dens;17. All night beneath the ruins, then their sullen flames faded emerge round the gloomy King.18. With thunder and fire, leading his starry hosts thro’ the waste wilderness, he promulgates his ten commands, glancing his beamy eyelids over the deep in dark dismay;19. Where the son of fire in his eastern cloud, while the morning plumes her golden breast,20. Spurning the clouds written with curses, stamps the stony law to dust, loosing the eternal horses from the dens of night, crying, Empire is no more! and now the lion and the wolf shall cease.CHORUS.Let the Priests of the Raven of dawn no longer in deadly black with hoarse note curse the sons of joy; Nor his accepted brethren, whom, tyrant, he calls free, lay the bound or build the roof; Nor pale religious letchery call that virginity that wishes but acts not;For everything that lives is Holy.”
“A SONG OF LIBERTY.
1. The Eternal Female groan’d! it was heard over all the Earth.
2. Albion’s coast is sick silent; the American meadows faint!
3. Shadows of Prophecy shiver along by the lakes and the rivers, and mutter across the ocean. France, rend down thy dungeon;
4. Golden Spain, burst the barriers of old Rome;
5. Cast thy keys, O Rome, into the deep down falling, even to eternity down falling;
6. And weep.
7. In her trembling hands she took the new-born terror howling:
8. On those infinite mountains of light now barred out by the Atlantic sea, the new-born fire stood before the starry King!
9. Flag’d with grey-browed snows and thunderous visages the jealous wings waved over the deep.
10. The speary hand burned aloft, unbuckled was the shield, forth went the hand of jealousy among the flaming hair, and hurled the new-born wonder thro’ the starry night.
11. The fire, the fire is falling!
12. Look up! look up! O citizen of London, enlarge thy countenance: O Jew, leave counting gold! return to thy oil and wine; O African! black African! (go, winged thought, widen his forehead.)
13. The fiery limbs, the flaming hair, shot like the sinking sun into the western sea.
14. Waked from his eternal sleep, the hoary element roaring fled away.
15. Down rushed, beating his wings in vain, the jealous King; his grey-browed councillors, thunderous warriors, curled veterans, among helms and shields, and chariots, horses, elephants; banners, castles, slings and rocks;
16. Falling, rushing, ruining! buried in the ruins, on Urthona’s dens;
17. All night beneath the ruins, then their sullen flames faded emerge round the gloomy King.
18. With thunder and fire, leading his starry hosts thro’ the waste wilderness, he promulgates his ten commands, glancing his beamy eyelids over the deep in dark dismay;
19. Where the son of fire in his eastern cloud, while the morning plumes her golden breast,
20. Spurning the clouds written with curses, stamps the stony law to dust, loosing the eternal horses from the dens of night, crying, Empire is no more! and now the lion and the wolf shall cease.
CHORUS.
Let the Priests of the Raven of dawn no longer in deadly black with hoarse note curse the sons of joy; Nor his accepted brethren, whom, tyrant, he calls free, lay the bound or build the roof; Nor pale religious letchery call that virginity that wishes but acts not;
For everything that lives is Holy.”
And so, as with fire and thunder—“thunder of thought, and flames of fierce desire”—is thisMarriage of Heaven and Hellat length happily consummated; the prophet, as a fervent paranymph, standing by to invoke upon the wedded pair his most unclerical benediction. Those who are not bidden to the bridegroom’s supper may as well keep away, lest worse befall them, not having a wedding garment. For us there remains little to say, now that the torches are out, the nuts scattered, the songs silent, and the saffron faded from the veil. We will wish them a quiet life, and an heir who may combine the merits and capacities of either parent. It were pleasant enough, but too superfluous, todwell upon the beauty of this nuptial hymn; to bid men remark what eloquence, what subtlety, what ardour of wisdom, what splendour of thought, is here; how far it outruns, not in daring alone but in sufficiency, all sayings of minor mystics who were not also poets; how much of lofty love and of noble faith underlies and animates these rapid and fervent words; what greatness of spirit and of speech there was in the man who, living as Blake lived, could write as Blake has written. Those who cannot see what is implied may remain unable to tolerate what is expressed; and those who can read aright need no index of ours.[51]
Larger Image
The decorations of this great work, though less large and complete than those of the subsequent prophecies, are full of noble and subtle beauty. Over every page faint fibres and flickering threads of colour weave a net of intricate design. Skies cloven with flame and thunder,half-blasted trees round which huddled forms of women or men cower and cling, strange beasts and splendid flowers, alternate with the engraved text; and throughout all the sunbeams of heaven and fires of hell shed fiercer or softer light. In minute splendour and general effect the pages of Blake’s next work fall short of these; though in theVisions of the Daughters of Albionthe separate designs are fuller and more composed. This poem, written in a sort of regular though quasi-lyrical blank verse, is more direct and lucid in purpose than most of these books; but the style is already laxer, veers more swiftly from point to point, stands weaker on its feet, and speaks with more of a hurried and hysterical tone. With “formidable moral questions,” as the biographer has observed, it does assuredly deal; and in a way somewhat formidable. This, we are told, “the exemplary man had good right to do.” Exemplary or not, he in common with all men had undoubtedly such a right; and was not slow to use it. Nowhere else has the prophet so fully and vehemently set forth his doctrine of indulgence; too Albigensian or antinomian this time to be given out again in more decorous form. Of pure mythology there is happily little; of pure allegory even less. “The eye sees more than the heart knows;” these words are given on the title-page by way of motto or key-note. Above this inscription a single design fills the page; in it the title is written with characters of pale fire upon cloud and rainbow; the figure of the typical woman, held fast to earth but by one foot, seems to soar and yearn upwards with straining limbs that flutter like shaken flame: appealing in vain to the mournful and mercilessCreator, whose sad fierce face looks out beyond and over her, swathed and cradled in bloodlike fire and drifted rain. In the prologue we get a design expressive of plain and pure pleasure; a woman gathers a child from the heart of a blossom as it breaks, and the sky is full of the golden stains and widening roses of a sundawn. But elsewhere, from the frontispiece to the end, nothing meets us but emblems of restraint and error; figures rent by the beaks of eagles though lying but on mere cloud, chained to no solid rock by the fetters only of their own faiths or fancies; leafless trunks that rot where they fell; cold ripples of barren sea that break among caves of bondage. The perfect woman, Oothoon, is one with the spirit of the great western world; born for rebellion and freedom, but half a slave yet, and half a harlot. “Bromion,” the violent Titan, subject himself to ignorance and sorrow, has defiled her;[52]“Theotormon,” her lover, emblem of man held in bondage to creed or law, will not become one with her because of her shame; and she, who gathered in time of innocence the natural flower of delight, calls now for his eagles to rend her polluted flesh with cruel talons of remorse and ravenous beaks of shame: enjoys his infliction, accepts her agony, and reflects his severe smile in the mirrors of her purged spirit.[53]But he
“sits wearing the threshold hardWith secret tears; beneath him sound like waves on a desert shoreThe voice of slaves beneath the sun, and children bought with money.”
From her long melodious lamentation we give one continuous excerpt here. Sweet, and lucid asThel, it is more subtle and more strong; the allusions to American servitude and English aspiration, which elsewhere distract and distort the sense and scheme of the poem, are here well cleared away.
“I cry Arise, O Theotormon; for the village dogBarks at the breaking day; the nightingale has done lamenting;The lark does rustle in the green corn, and the eagle returnsFrom nightly prey and lifts his golden beak to the pure east;Shaking the dust from his immortal pinions, to awakeThe sun that sleeps too long. Arise my Theotormon, I am pureBecause the night is gone that closed me in its deadly black.They told me that the night and day were all that I could see;They told me that I had five senses to enclose me up,And they enclosed my infinite beam into a narrow circle,And sank my heart into the abyss, a red round globe hotburningTill all from life I was obliterated and erased.Instead of morn arises a bright shadow like an eyeIn the eastern cloud; instead of night a sickly charnel-house.But Theotormon hears me not: to him the night and mornAre both alike; a night of sighs, a morning of fresh tears.And none but Bromion can hear my lamentations.With what sense is it that the chicken shuns the ravenous hawk?With what sense does the tame pigeon measure out the expanse?With what sense does the bee form cells? have not the mouse and frogEyes and ears and sense of touch? yet are their habitationsAnd their pursuits as different as their forms and as their joy.Ask the wild ass why he refuses burdens, and the meek camelWhy he loves man: is it because of eye, ear, mouth or skin,Or breathing nostrils? no: for these the wolf and tiger have.Ask the blind worm the secrets of the grave and why her spiresLove to curl around the bones of death: and ask the ravenous snakeWhere she gets poison; and the winged eagle why he loves the sun;And then tell me the thoughts of man, that have been hid of old.Silent I hover all the night, and all day could be silent,If Theotormon once would turn his loved eyes upon me;How can I be defiled when I reflect thy image pure?Sweetest the fruit that the worm feeds on, and the soul prey’d on by woe;The new-washed lamb tinged with the village smoke, and the bright swanBy the red earth of our immortal river; I bathe my wingsAnd I am white and pure to hover round Theotormon’s breast.Then Theotormon broke his silence, and he answered;Tell me what is the night or day to one overflowed with woe?Tell me what is a thought? and of what substance is it made?Tell me what is joy? and in what gardens do joys grow?And in what rivers swim the sorrows? and upon what mountainsWave shadows of discontent? and in what houses dwell the wretchedDrunken with woe forgotten, and shut up from cold despair?Tell me where dwell the thoughts forgotten till thou call them forth?Tell me where dwell the joys of old? and where the ancient loves?And when will they renew again and the night of oblivion be past?That I might traverse times and spaces far remote and bringComfort into a present sorrow and a night of pain!Where goest thou, O thought? to what remote land is thy flight?If thou returnest to the present moment of afflictionWilt thou bring comforts on thy wings and dews and honey and balmOr poison from the desert wilds, from the eyes of the envier?”
After this Bromion, with less musical lamentation, askswhether for all things there be not one law established? “Thou knowest that the ancient trees seen by thine eyes have fruit; but knowest thou that trees and fruits flourish upon the earth to gratify senses unknown, in worlds over another kind of seas?” Are there other wars, other sorrows, and other joys than those of external life? But the one law surely does exist “for the lion and the ox,” for weak and strong, wise and foolish, gentle and fierce; and for all who rebel against it there are prepared from everlasting the fires and the chains of hell. So speaks the violent slave of heaven; and after a day and a night Oothoon lifts up her voice in sad rebellious answer and appeal.
“O Urizen, Creator of men! mistaken Demon of heaven!Thy joys are tears: thy labour vain, to form man to thine image;How can one joy absorb another? are not different joysHoly, eternal, infinite? and each joy is a Love.Does not the great mouth laugh at a gift? and the narrow eyelids mockAt the labour that is above payment? and wilt thou take the apeFor thy counsellor, or the dog for a schoolmaster to thy children?********Does the whale worship at thy footsteps as the hungry dog?Or does he scent the mountain prey, because his nostrils wideDraw in the ocean? does his eye discern the flying cloudAs the raven’s eye? or does he measure the expanse like the vulture?Does the still spider view the cliffs where eagles hide their young?Or does the fly rejoice because the harvest is brought in?Does not the eagle scorn the earth and despise the treasures beneath?But the mole knoweth what is there, and the worm shall tell it thee.”
Perhaps there is no loftier note of music and of thought struck anywhere throughout these prophecies. For the rest, we must tread carefully over the treacherous hot ashes strewn about the latter end of this book: which indeed speaks plainly enough for once, and with highequal eloquence; but to no generally acceptable effect. The one matter of marriage laws is still beaten upon, still hammered at with all the might of an insurgent prophet: to whom it is intolerable that for the sake of mere words and mere confusions of thought “she who burns with youth and knows no fixed lot” should be “bound by spells of law to one she loathes,” should “drag the chain of life in weary lust,” and “bear the wintry rage of a harsh terror driven to madness, bound to hold a rod over her shrinking shoulders all the day, and all the night to turn the wheel of false desire;” intolerable that she should be driven by “longings that wake her womb” to bring forth not men but some monstrous “abhorred birth of cherubs,” imperfect, artificial, abortive; counterfeits of holiness and mockeries of purity; things of barren or perverse nature, creatures inhuman or diseased, that live as a pestilence lives and pass away as a meteor passes; “till the child dwell with one he hates, and do the deed he loathes, and the impure scourge force his seed into its unripe birth ere yet his eyelids can behold the arrows of the day:” the day whose blinding beams had surely somewhat affected the prophet’s own eyesight, and left his eyelids lined with strange colours of fugitive red and green that fades into black. However, all these things shall be made plain by death; for “over the porch is written Take thy bliss, O man! and sweet shall be thy taste, and sweet thy infant joys renew.” On the one hand is innocence, on the other modesty; infancy is “fearless, lustful, happy;” who taught it modesty, “subtle modesty, child of night and sleep?” Once taught to dissemble, to call pure things impure, to “catch virgin joy, and brand it with the nameof whore and sell it in the night;” once corrupted and misled, “religious dreams and holy vespers light thy smoky fires: once were thy fires lighted by the eyes of honest morn.” Not pleasure but hypocrisy is the unclean thing; Oothoon is no harlot, but “a virgin filled with virgin fancies, open to joy and to delight wherever it appears; if in the morning sun I find it, there my eyes are fixed in happy copulation:” and so forth—further than we need follow.
“Is it because acts are not lovely that thou seekest solitudeWhere the horrible darkness is impressed with reflections of desire?—Father of Jealousy, be thou accursed from the earth!Why hast thou taught my Theotormon this accursed thing?Till beauty fades from off my shoulders, darkened and cast out,A solitary shadow wailing on the margin of non-entity;”
as in a later prophecy Ahania, cast out by the jealous God, being the type or embodiment of this sacred natural love “free as the mountain wind.”
“Can that be love which drinks another as a sponge drinks water?That clouds with jealousy his nights, with weepings all the days?********Such is self-love, that envies all; a creeping skeletonWith lamp-like eyes watching around the frozen marriage-bed.”
But instead of the dark-grey “web of age” spun around man by self-love, love spreads nets to catch for him all wandering and foreign pleasures, pale as mild silver or ruddy as flaming gold; beholds them without grudging drink deep of various delight, “red as the rosy morning, lustful as the first-born beam.” No single law for all things alike; the sun will not shine in the miser’s secret chamber, nor the brightest cloud drop fruitful rain on his stone threshold; for one thing nightis good and for another thing day: nothing is good and nothing evil to all at once.
“‘The sea-fowl takes the wintry blast for a covering to her limbs,And the wild snake the pestilence, to adorn him with gems and gold;And trees and birds and beasts and men behold their eternal joy.Arise, you little glancing wings, and sing your infant joy!Arise and drink your bliss! For everything that lives is holy.’Thus every morning wails Oothoon, but Theotormon sitsUpon the margined ocean, conversing with shadows dire.The daughters of Albion hear her woes, and echo back her sighs.”
It may be feared that Oothoon has yet to wait long beforeTheotormonwill leave off “conversing with shadows dire;” nor is it surprising that this poem won such small favour; for had it not seemed inexplicable it must have seemed unbearable. Blake, as evidently as Shelley, did in all innocence believe that ameliorated humanity would be soon qualified to start afresh on these new terms after the saving advent of French and American revolutions. “All good things are in the West;” thence in the teeth of “Urizen” shall human deliverance come at length. In the same year Blake’s prophecy ofAmericacame forth to proclaim this message over again. Upon this book we need not dwell so long; it has more of thunder and less of lightning than the former prophecies; more of sonorous cloud and less of explicit fire. The prelude, though windy enough, is among Blake’s nobler myths: the divine spirit of rebellious redemption, imprisoned as yet by the gods of night and chaos, is fed and sustained in secret by the “nameless” spirit of the great western continent; nameless and shadowy, a daughter of chaos, till the day of their fierce and fruitful union.
“Silent as despairing love and strong as jealousy,The hairy shoulders rend the links, free are the wrists of fire.”
At his embrace “she cast aside her clouds and smiled her first-born smile, as when a black cloud shows its lightnings to the silent deep.”
“Soon as she saw the terrible boy then burst the virgin’s cry;I love thee; I have found thee, and I will not let thee go.Thou art the image of God who dwells in darkness of Africa,And thou art fallen to give me life in regions of dark death.”
Then begins the agony of revolution, her frost and his fire mingling in pain; and the poem opens as with a sound and a light of storm. It is throughout in the main a mere expansion and dilution of the “Song of Liberty” which we have already heard; and in the interludes of the great fight between Urizen and Orc the human names of American or English leaders fall upon the ear with a sudden incongruous clash: not perhaps unfelt by the author’s ear also, but unheeded in his desire to make vital and vivid the message he came to deliver. The action is wholly swamped by the allegory; hardly is it related how the serpent-formed “hater of dignities, lover of wild rebellion and transgressor of God’s Law,” arose in red clouds, “a wonder, a human fire;” “heat but not light went from him;” “his terrible limbs were fire;” his voice shook the ancient Druid temple of tyranny and faith, proclaiming freedom and “the fiery joy that Urizen perverted to ten commands;” the “punishing demons” of the God of jealousy
“Crouch howling before their caverns deep like skins dried in the wind;They cannot smite the wheat nor quench the fatness of the earth;They cannot smite with sorrows nor subdue the plough and spade;For terrible men stand on the shores, and in their robes I seeChildren take refuge from the lightnings. * * * *Ah vision from afar! ah rebel form that rent the ancient heavens!* * * * Red flames the crest rebelliousAnd eyes of death; the harlot womb oft opened in vainHeaves in eternal circles, now the times are returned upon thee.”
“Thus wept the angel voice” of the guardian-angel of Albion; but the thirteen angels of the American provinces rent off their robes and threw down their sceptres and cast in their lot with the rebel; gathered together where on the hills
“called Atlantean hills,Because from their bright summits you may pass to the golden world,An ancient palace, archetype of mighty emperies,Rears its immortal pinnacles, built in the forest of GodBy Ariston the king of beauty for his stolen bride.”
A myth of which we are to hear no more, significant probably of the rebellion of natural beauty against the intolerable tyranny of God, from which she has to seek shelter in the darkest part of his creation with the angelic or dæmonic bridegroom (one of the descended “sons of God”) who has wedded her by stealth and built her a secret shelter from the strife of divine things; where at least nature may breathe freely and take pleasure; whither also in their time congregate all other rebellious forces and spirits at war with the Creator and his laws. But the speech of “Boston’s angel” we will at least transcribe: not without a wish that he had never since then spoken more incoherently and less musically.
“Must the generous tremble and leave his joy to the idle, to the pestilence,That mock him? who commanded this? what God? what Angel?To keep the generous from experience, till the ungenerousAre unrestrained performers of the energies of nature,Till pity is become a trade and generosity a scienceThat men get rich by; and the sandy desert is given to the strong?What God is he writes laws of peace and clothes him in a tempest?What pitying Angel lusts for tears and fans himself with sighs?What crawling villain preaches abstinence and wraps himselfIn fat of lambs? no more I follow, no more obedience pay.”
This is perhaps the finest and clearest passage in the book; and beyond this point there is not much extractable from the clamorous lyrical chaos. Here again besides the mere outward violence of battle, the visible plague and fire of war, we have sight of a subtler and wider revolution.
“For the female spirits of the dead pining in bonds of religionRun from their fetters reddening and in long-drawn arches sitting.They feel the nerves of youth renew, and desires of ancient times.”
Light and warmth and colour and life are shed from the flames of revolution not alone on city and valley and hill, but likewise
“Over their pale limbs, as a vine when the tender grape appears;********The heavens melted from north to south; and Urizen who satAbove all heavens in thunders wrapt, emerged his leprous headFrom out his holy shrine; his tears in deluge piteousFalling into the deep sublime.”
Notwithstanding for twelve years it was fated that “angels and weak men should govern o’er the strong, and then their end should come when France received the demon’s light:” and the ancient European guardians “slow advance to shut the five gates of their law-built heaven, filled with blasting fancies and with mildews of despair, with fierce disease and lust;” but these gates were consumed in the final fire of revolution that went forth upon the world. So ends the poem; and of the decorationwe have barely space to say enough. On one page are the visions of the renewed world, on another the emblems of oppression and war: children sleeping nestled in the fleece of a sleeping ram with heavy horns and quiet mouth pressing the soft ground, while overhead shapely branches droop and gracious birds are perched; or what seems the new-born body of Orc cast under the sea, enmeshed in a web of water whose waves are waves of corn when you come to look; maidens and infants that bridle a strong dragon, and behind them a flight of birds through the clouds of a starry moonlit night, where a wild swan with vast wings and stretching neck is bestridden by a spirit looking eagerly back as he clutches the rein; eagles that devour the dead on a stormy sea-beach, while underneath fierce pikes and sharks make towards a wrecked corpse that has sunk without drifting, and sea-snakes wind about it in soft loathsome coils; women and children embrace in bitter violence of loving passion among ripples of fruitful flame, out of which rise roots and grasses of the field and laden branches of the vine. Of all these we cannot hope to speak duly; nor can we hope to give more than a glimpse of the work they illustrate.
Throughout the Prophecy ofEuropethe fervent and intricate splendours of text and decoration are whirled as it were and woven into spreading webs or twining wheels of luminous confusion. The Museum copy, not equal in nobility of colour to some others, is crowded with MS. notes and mottos of some interest and significance. To the frontispiece a passage of Milton is appended; to the first page is prefixed atranscript of some verses by Mrs. Radcliffe concerning a murdered pilgrim, sufficiently execrable and explanatory; and so throughout. These notes will help us at least to measure the amount of connexion between the text and the designs; an amount easily measurable, being in effect about the smallest possible. Fierce fluctuating wind and the shaken light of meteors flutter or glitter upon the stormy ways of vision; serving rather for raiment than for symbol. The outcast gods of star and comet are driven through tempestuous air: “forms without body” leap or lurk under cloud or water; War, a man coated with scales of defiled and blackening bronze, handling a heavy sword-hilt, averts his face from appealing angels; Famine slays and eats her children; fire curls about the caldron in which their limbs are to be sodden for food; starved plague-stricken shapes of women and men fall shrieking or silent as the bell-ringer, a white-haired man with slouched hat drawn down and long straight cassock, passes them bell in hand; a daughter clings to her father in the dumb pain of fear, while he with arms thrust out in repulsion seems to plead against the gathering deluges that “sweep o’er the yellow year;” mildews are seen incarnate as foul flushed women with strenuous limbs contorted, blighting ears of corn with the violent breath of their inflated mouths; “Papal Superstition,” with the triple crown on a head broader across cheek and jowl than across the forehead, with bat’s wings and bloodlike garments dripping and rent, leers across the open book on his knees; behind his reptile face a decoration as of a cleft mitre, wrought in the shape of Gothic windows that straiten as it ascends, shows grey upon thedead black air; this is “Urizen seen on the Atlantic; and his brazen book that kings and priests had copied on earth, expanded from north to south;” all the creeping things of the prison-house, bloated leaf and dropping spider, crawl or curl above a writhing figure overgrown with horrible scurf of corruption as with network; the gaoler leaves his prisoner fast bound by the ankles, with limbs stained and discoloured; (the motto to this is from “The Two Noble Kinsmen,” Act ii., Sc. 1., “The vine shall grow, but we shall never see it,” &c.); snakes and caterpillars, birds and gnats, each after their own kind take their pleasure and their prey among the leaves and grasses they defile and devour; flames chase the naked or swooning fugitives from a blazing ruin. The prelude is set in the frame of two large designs; one of the assassin waiting for the pilgrim as he turns round a sharp corner of rock; one of hurricane and storm in which “Horror, Amazement and Despair” appear abroad upon the winds. A sketch of these violent and hideously impossible figures is pasted into the note-book on a stray slip of paper. The MS. mottos are mostly from Milton and Dryden; Shakespeare and Fletcher, Rowe and Mason, are also dragged into service. The prophecy itself is full of melody and mist; of music not wholly unrecognisable and vapour not wholly impermeable. In a lull of intermittent war, the gods of time and space awake with all their children; Time bids them “seize all the spirits of life and bind their warbling joys to our loud strings, bind all the nourishing sweets of earth to give us bliss.” Orc, the fiery spirit of revolution, first-born of Space, his father summons to arise; “and we will crown thy head withgarlands of the ruddy vine; for now thou art bound; and I may see thee in the hour of bliss, my eldest born.” Allegory, here as always, is interfused with myth in a manner at once violent and intricate; but in this book the mere mythologic fancy of Blake labours for the most part without curb or guide. Enitharmon, the universal or typical woman, desires that “woman may have dominion” for a space over all the souls upon earth; she descends and becomes visible in the red light of Orc; and she charges other spirits born of her and Los to “tell the human race that woman’s love is sin,” for thus the woman will have power to refuse or accede, to starve or satiate the perverted loves and lives of man; “that an eternal life awaits the worms of sixty winters, in an allegorical abode where existence hath never come; forbid all joy, and from her childhood shall the little female spread nets in every secret path.” To this end the goddess of Space calls forth her chosen children, the “horned priest” of animal nature, the “silver-bowed queen” of desolate places, the “prince of the sun” with his innumerable race “thick as the summer stars; each one, ramping, his golden mane shakes, and thine eyes rejoice because of strength, O Rintrah, furious King.” Moon and sun, spirit and flesh, all lovely jealous forces and mysteries of the natural world are gathered together under her law, that throughout the eighteen Christian centuries she may have her will of the world. For so long nature has sat silent, her harps out of tune; the goddess herself has slept out all those years, a dream among dreams, the ghostly regent of a ghostly generation. The angels of Albion, satellites once of the ancient Titan,are smitten now with their own plagues, crushed in their own council-house, and rise again but to follow after Rintrah, the fiery minister of his mother’s triumph. Him the chief “Angel” follows to “his ancient temple serpent-formed,” ringed round with Druid oaks, massive with pillar and porch built of precious stones; “such eternal in the heavens, of colours twelve, few known on earth, give light in the opaque.”
“Placed in the order of the stars, when the five senses whelmedIn deluge o’er the earth-born man: then bound the flexile eyesInto two stationary orbs concentrating all things:The ever-varying spiral ascents to the heaven of heavensWere bended downward, and the nostril’s golden gates shut,Turned outward, barred and petrified against the infinite.Thought changed the infinite to a serpent; that which pitiethTo a devouring flame; and man fled from its face and hidIn forests[54]of night; then all the eternal forests were dividedInto earths rolling in circles of space, that like an ocean rushedAnd overwhelmed all except this finite wall of flesh.Then was the serpent temple formed, image of (the) infiniteShut up in finite revolutions,[55]and man became an Angel;Heaven a mighty circle turning; God a tyrant crowned.”
Thus again recurs the doctrine that the one inlet left us for spiritual perception—that namely of the senses—is but one and the least of many inlets and channels of communication now destroyed or perverted by the creative demon; a tenet which once well grasped and digested by the disciple will further his understanding of Blake more than anything else can: will indeed, pushed to the full extreme of its logical results, elucidate and justify muchthat seems merely condemnable and chaotic. To resume our somewhat halting and bewildered fable: the southern porch of this temple, “planted thick with trees of blackest leaf, and in a vale obscure, enclosed the stone of night; oblique it stood, o’erhung with purple flowers and berries red;” image of the human intellect “once open to the heavens” as the south to the sun; now, as the head of fallen man, “overgrown with hair and covered with a stony roof;” sunk deep “beneath the attractive north,” where evil spirits are strongest, where the whirlpool of speculation sucks in the soul and entombs it. Standing on this, as on a watch-tower, the “Angel” beholds Religion enthroned over Europe, and the pale revolution of cloud and fire through the night of space and time; beholds “Albion,” the home once of ancient freedom and faith, trodden underfoot by laws and churches, that the God of religion may have wherewithal to “feed his soul with pity.” At last begins the era of rebellion and change; the fires of Orc lay hold upon law[56]and gospel; yet for a little while the ministers of his mother have power to fight against him, and she, allied now and making common cause with the God alien to her children, “laughs in her sleep,” seeing through the veil and vapour of dreams the subjection of male to female, the false attribute of unnatural power given to women by faith and fear. Not as yet can the Promethean fire utterly dissolve the clouds of Urizen, though the flesh of the ministering angel of religion is already consumed or consuming;nor as yet can the trumpet of revolution summon the dead to judgment. That first blast of summons must be blown by material science, which destroys the letter of the law and the text of the covenant. When the “mighty spirit” of Newton had seized the trumpet and blown it,
“Yellow as leaves of Autumn the myriads of Angelic hostsFell thro’ the wintry skies seeking their graves,Rattling their hollow bones in howling and lamentation;”
as to this day they do, and did in Blake’s time, throughout whole barrowfuls of controversial “apologies” and “evidences.” Then the mother-goddess awoke from her eighteen centuries of sleep, the “Christian era” being now wellnigh consummated, and all those years “fled as if they had not been;” she called her children around her, by many monstrous names and phrases of chaotic invocation; comfort and happiness here, there sweet pestilence and soft delusion; the “seven churches of Leutha” seek the love of “Antamon,” symbolic of Christian faith reconciled to “pagan” indulgence and divorced from Jewish prohibition; even as we find in the prophet himself equal faith in sensual innocence and spiritual truth. Of “the soft Oothoon” the great goddess asks now “Why wilt thou give up woman’s secrecy, my melancholy child? Between two moments bliss is ripe.” Last she calls upon Orc; “Smile, son of my afflictions; arise and give our mountains joy of thy red light.”
“She ceased; for all were forth at sport beneath the solemn moon,Waking the stars of Urizen with their immortal songs,That nature felt thro’ all her pores the enormous revelry.Till morning oped her eastern gate;Then every one fled to his station; and Enitharmon wept.”
But with the dawn of that morning Orc descended in fire, “and in the vineyards of red France appeared the light of his fury.” The revolution begins; all space groans; and lion and tiger are gathered together after their prey: the god of time arises as one out of a trance,
“And with a cry that shook all nature to the utmost poleCalled all his sons to the strife of blood.”
Our study of theEuropemight bring more profit if we could have genuine notes appended to the text as well as to the designs. Such worth or beauty as the poem has burns dim and looms distant by comparison; but there is in it more of either than we have here time or means to indicate. At least the prelude so strangely selected for citation and thrown loose upon the pages of the biography in so crude and inexplicable a manner, may now be seen to have some tangible or presumable sense. The spirit of Europe rises revealed in the advent of revolution, sick of time and travail; pleading with the mother-goddess, Cybele of this mythology; wrapping about her veils of water and garments of cloud, in vain; “the red sun and moon and all the overflowing stars rain down prolific pains.” Out of her overlaboured womb arise forms and forces of change, fugitive fires of wrath, sonorous shapes of fear; and they take substance in space, but bring to their mother no help or profit, no comfort or light; to the virgin daughter of America freedom has come and fruitful violence of love, but not to the European mother. She has no hope in all the infinity of space and time; “who shall bind the infinite with an eternal band, to compass it with swaddling bands?” By comparison ofthe two preludes the relations of the two kindred poems may be better understood: the one is plaintive as the voice of a world in pain, and decaying kingdom by kingdom; the other fierce and hopeful as the cry of a nation in travail, whose agony is not that of death, but rather that of birth.
The First Book of Urizenis perhaps more shapeless and chaotic at a first glimpse than any other of these prose poems. Clouds of blood, shadows of horror, worlds without form and void, rise and mingle and wane in indefinite ways, with no special purpose or appreciable result. The myth here is of an active but unprolific God, warring with shapes of the wilderness, and at variance with the eternals: beaten upon by Time, who figures always in all his various shapes and actions as the saviour and friend of man. “Earth was not, nor globes of attraction; the will of the Immortal expanded or contracted at will his all-flexible senses. Death was not; but eternal life sprang.” (1. Urizen, ii. 1.) Urizen, the God of restraint, creator of prohibition, whose laws are forbearance and abstinence, is for ages divided from Eternity and at war with Time; “long periods in burning fires labouring, till hoary, and age-broken, and aged, in despair and the shadows of death.” (1. Urizen, iii. 6.) In time the formless God takes form, creating and assuming feature by feature; bones, heart, eyes, ears, nostrils, throat with tongue, hands with feet; an age of agony being allotted to each of the seven created features; still toiling in fire and beset by snares, which the Time-Spirit kindles and weaves to avert and destroy in its birth the desolate influence of the Deity who forbids and restrains.These transformations of Urizen make up some of Blake’s grandest and strangest prophetic studies. First the spinal skeleton, with branchwork of rib and savage nudity of joint and clavicle, shaped mammoth-wise, in grovelling involution of limb. In one copy at least these bones are touched with dim green and gold colour; such a faint fierce tint as one might look for on the cast scales or flakes of dragons left astrand in the ebb of a deluge. Next a huge fettered figure with blind shut eyes overflowing into tears, with convulsed mouth and sodden stream of beard: then bones painfully gathering flesh, twisted forms round which flames break out fourfold, tortured elemental shapes that plunge and writhe and moan. Until Time, divided against himself, brings forth Space, the universal eternal female element, called Pity among the gods, who recoil in fear from the dawn of human creation and division. Of these two divinities, called in the mythology Los and Enitharmon, is born the man-child Orc. “The dead heard the voice of the child and began to awake from sleep; all things heard the voice of the child and began to awake to life.” (vii. 5.) Here again we may spare a word or two for that splendid figure (p. 20) of the new-born child falling aslant through cloven fire that curls and trembles into spiral blossoms of colour and petals of feverish light. And the children of Urizen were Thiriel, born from cloud; Utha, from water; Grodna, from earth; Fuzon, “first-begotten, last-born,” from fire—“and his daughters from green herbs and cattle, from monsters and worms of the pit. He cursed both sons and daughters; for he saw that no flesh nor spirit could keep his iron laws one moment.” (viii. 3, 4.)Then from his sorrows for these his children begotten on the material body of nature, the web of religion begins to unwind and expand, “throwing out from his sorrowing soul, the dungeon-like heaven dividing” (viii. 6)—and the knotted meshes of the web to involve all races and cities. “The Senses inward rushed shrinking beneath the dark net of infection: till the shrunken eyes, clouded over, discerned not the woven hypocrisy; but the streaky slime in their heavens, brought together by narrowing perceptions, appeared transparent air; for their eyes grew small like the eyes of a man. Six days they shrank up from existence, and the seventh day they rested, and they blessed the seventh day, in sick hope; and forgot their eternal life.” (1. Urizen, ix. 1, 2, 3.) Hence grows the animal tyranny of gravitation, and hence also the spiritual tyranny of law; “they lived a period of years, then left a noisome body to the jaws of devouring darkness; and their children wept, and built tombs in the desolate places; and formed laws of prudence and called them the eternal laws of God.” (ix. 4, 5.) Seeing these his brethren degraded into life and debased into flesh, the son of the fire, Fuzon, called together “the remaining children of Urizen; and they left the pendulous earth: they called it Egypt, and left it. And the salt ocean rolled englobed.” (ix. 8, 9.) The freer and stronger spirits left the world of men to the dominion of earth and water; air and fire were withdrawn from them, and there were left only the heaviness of imprisoning clay and the bitterness of violent sea.
This is a hurried and blotted sketch of the main myth, which is worth following up by those who would enteron any serious study of Blake’s work; all that is here indicated in dim hints being afterwards assumed as the admitted groundwork of later and larger myths. In this present book (and in it only) the illustrative work may be said almost to overweigh and stifle the idea illustrated. Strange semi-human figures, clad in sombre or in fiery flesh, racing through fire or sinking through water, allure and confuse the fancy of the student. Every page vibrates with light and colour; on none of his books has the artist lavished more noble profusion of decorative work. It is worth observing that while some copies are carefully numbered throughout “First Book,” in others the word “First” is erased from every leaf: as in effect the Second Book never was put forth under that title. Next year however theBook of Ahaniacame out—if one may say as much of a quarto of six leaves which has hardly yet emerged into sight of two or three readers. This we may take—or those may who please—to be theSecond Book of Urizen. It is among the choicer spoils of Blake, not as yet cast into the public treasury; for the Museum has no copy, though possessing (in its blind confused way) duplicates ofAmerica,Albion, andLos. Some day, one must hope, there will at least be a complete accessible collection of Blake’s written works arranged in rational order for reference. Till the dawn of that day people must make what shift they can in chaos.
InAhania, though a fine and sonorous piece of wind-music, we have not found many separate notes worth striking. Formless as these poems may seem, it is often the floating final impression of power which makes themmemorable and valuable, rather than any stray gleam of purple or glitter of pearl on the skirt. Thus the myth runs—to the best of its power; but the tether of it is but short.
Fuzon, born of the fiery part of the God of nature, in revolt against his father, divides him in twain as with a beam of fire; the desire of Urizen is separated from him; this divided soul, “his invisible lust,” he sees now as she is apart from himself, and calls Sin; seizes her on his mountains of jealousy; kisses and weeps over her, then casts her forth and hides her in cloud, in dumb distance of mysterious space; “jealous though she was invisible.” Divided from him, she turns to mere shadow “unseen, unbodied, unknown, the mother of Pestilence.” But the beam cast by Fuzon was light upon earth—light to “Egypt,” the house of bondage and place of captivity for the outcast human children of Urizen. Thus far the book floats between mere allegory and creative myth; not difficult however to trace to the root of its purport. From this point it grows, if not wilder in words, still mistier in build of limb and shape of feature. Fuzon, smitten by the bow of Urizen, seems to typify dimly the Christian or Promethean sacrifice; the revolted God or son of God, who giving to men some help or hope to enlighten them, is slain for an atonement to the wrath of his father: though except for the mythical sonship Prometheus would be much the nearer parallel. The bow, formed in secresy of the nerves of a slain dragon “scaled and poisonous-horned,” begotten of the contemplations of Urizen and destroyed by him in combat, must be another type, half conceived and hardly atall wrought out, of the secret and jealous law of introspective faith divided against itself and the god of its worship, but strong enough to smite the over-confident champion of men even in his time of triumph, when he “thought Urizen slain by his wrath: I am God, said he, eldest of things.” (II. 8.) Suddenly the judgment of the jealous wrath of God falls upon him; the rock hurled as an arrow “enters his bosom; his beautiful visage, his tresses that gave light to the mornings of heaven, were smitten with darkness.—But the rock fell upon the earth, Mount Sinai, in Arabia:” being indeed a type of the moral law of Moses, sent to destroy and suppress the native rebellious energies and active sins of men. Here one may catch fast hold of one thing—the identity of Blake’s “Urizen,” at least for this time, with the Deity of the earlier Hebrews; the God of the Law and Decalogue rather than of Job or the Prophets. “On the accursed tree of mystery” that shoots up under his heel from “tears and sparks of vegetation” fallen on the barren rock of separation, where “shrunk away from Eternals,” alienated from the ancient freedom of the first Gods or Titans, averse to their large and liberal laws of life, the jealous God sat secret—on the topmost stem of this tree Urizen “nailed the corpse of his first-begotten.” Thenceforward there fell upon the half-formed races of men sorrow only and pestilence, barren pain of unprofitable fruit and timeless burden of desire and disease. One need not sift the myth too closely; it would be like winnowing water and weighing cloud with scale or sieve. The two illustrations, it may here be said, are very slight—mere hints of a design, and merely touched with colour.In the frontispiece Ahania, divided from Urizen, floats upon a stream of wind between hill and cloud, with haggard limbs and straightened spectral hair; on the last leaf a dim Titan, wounded and bruised, lies among rocks flaked with leprous lichen and shaggy with bloodlike growths of weed and moss. One final glimpse we may take of Ahania after her division—the love of God, as it were, parted from God, impotent therefore and a shadow, if not rather a plague and blight; mercy severed from justice, and thus made a worse thing than useless. Such may be the hinted meaning, or at least some part of it; but the work, it must be said, holds by implication dim and great suggestions of something more than our analytic ingenuities can well unravel by this slow process of suggestion. Properly too Ahania seems rather to represent the divine generative desire or love, translated on earth into sexual expression; the female side of the creative power—mother of all things made.
“The lamenting voice of Ahania weeping upon the void and round the Tree of Fuzon. Distant in solitary night her voice was heard, but no form had she; but her tears from clouds eternal fell round the Tree. And the voice cried ‘Ah Urizen! Love! Flower of morning! I weep on the verge of non-entity: how wide the abyss between Ahania and thee! I lie on the verge of the deep, I see thy dark clouds ascend; I see thy black forests and floods, a horrible waste to my eyes. Weeping I walk over the rocks, over dens, and through valleys of death. Why dost thou despise Ahania, to cast me from thy bright presence into the world of loneness? I cannot touch his hand; nor weep on his knees; nor hear his voice and bow; nor see his eyes and joy; nor hear his footsteps, and my heart leap at the lovely sound; I cannot kiss the place where his bright feet have trod: but I wander on the rocks with hard necessity. Where is my golden palace? where my ivory bed? where the joy of my morning hour? where the sons of eternity singing to awake bright Urizen my king to arise to the mountain sport, to the bliss of eternal valleys, to awake my king in the morn, to embrace Ahania’s joy on the breath of his open bosom; from my soft cloud of dew to fall in showers of life on his harvest? When hegave my happy soul to the sons of eternal joy; when he took the daughters of life into my chambers of love; when I found babes of bliss on my beds and bosoms of milk in my chambers, filled with eternal seed. O! eternal births sung round Ahania in interchange sweet of their joys; swelled with ripeness and fat with fatness, bursting in clouds my odours, my ripe figs and rich pomegranates, in infant joy at thy feet, O Urizen, sported and sang: then thou with thy lap full of seed, with thy hand full of generous fire, walkedst forth from the clouds of morning, on the virgins of springing joy, on the human soul, to cast the seed of eternal science. The sweat poured down thy temples, to Ahania returned in evening; the moisture awoke to birth my mother’s joys sleeping in bliss. But now alone over rocks, mountains—cast out from thy lovely bosom—cruel jealousy! selfish fear! self-destroying! how can delight renew in these chains of darkness, where bones of beasts are strewn on the bleak and snowy mountains, where bones from the birth are buried before they see the light?’”—Ahania, ch. v., v. 1-14.
With the prolonged melody of this lament theBook of Ahaniawinds itself up; one of the most musical among this crowd of singing shadows. In the same year the last and briefest of this first prophetic series was engraved. TheSong of Los, broken into two divisions headedAfricaandAsia, has more affinity toUrizenandAhaniathan toEuropeandAmerica. The old themes of delusion and perversion are once again rehandled; not without vigorous harmonies of choral expression. The illustrations are of special splendour, as though designed to atone for the lean and denuded form in whichAhaniahad been sent forth. In the frontispiece a grey old giant, clothed from the waist only with heavy raiment of livid and lurid white, bows down upon a Druid altar before the likeness of a darkened sun low-hung in heaven, filled with sombre and fiery forms of things, and shooting out upon each quarter a broad reflected ray like the reflection struck by sunlight from a broad bare sword-blade, but touched also, as withstrange infection, with flakes of deadly colour that vibrate upon the starless solid ground of an intolerable night. Less of menace with more of sadness is in the landscape and sky on the title-page: a Titan, with one weighty hand lying on a gigantic skull, rests at the edge of a green sloping moor, himself seeming a grey fragment of moorland rock; brown fire of waste grass or rusted flower stains crag and bent all round him; the sky is all night and fire, bitter red and black. On the first page a serpent, splendid with blood-red specks and scales of greenish blue, darts the cloven flame of its tongue against a brilliant swarm of flies; and again throughout the divided lines a network of fair tortuous things, of flickering leaf and sinuous tendril and strenuous root, flashes and curls from margin to margin.
This song is the song of Time, sung to the four harps of the world, each continent a harp struck by Time as by a harper. In brief dim words it celebrates the end of the world of the patriarchs where faith and freedom were one, the advent of the iron laws and ages, when God the Accuser gave his laws to the nations by the hands of the children of time: when to the extreme east was given mere abstract philosophy for faith instead of clear pure belief, and man became slave to the elements, the slave and not the lord of the nature of things; but not yet was philosophy a mere matter of the five senses. Thus they fared in the east; meantime the spirits of the patriarchal world shrank beneath waters or fled in fires, Adam from Eden, Noah from Ararat; and “Moses beheld upon Mount Sinai forms of dark delusion.” Over each religion, Indian andJewish and Grecian, some special demon or god of the mythology is bidden preside; Christianity, the expression of human sorrow, human indulgence and forgiveness, was given as gospel to “a man of sorrows” by the two afflicted spirits who typify man and woman, in whom the bitter errors and the sore needs of either several sex upon earth are reproduced in vast vague reflection; to them therefore the gentler gospel belongs as of right. Next comes Mahometanism, to give some freedom and fair play to the controlled and abused senses; but northwards other spirits set on foot a code of war to satiate their violent delight. So on all sides is the world overgrown with kingdoms and churches, codes and creeds; inspiration is crushed and erased; the sons of Time and Space reign alone; Har and Heva, the spirits of loftier and purer kind who were not as the rest of the Titan brood that “lived in war and lust,” are fled and fallen, become as mere creeping things; and the world is ripe to bring forth for its cruel and mournful God the final fruit of reason debased and faith distorted.
“Thus the terrible race of Los and Enitharmon gaveLaws and Religions to the sons of Har, binding them moreAnd more to Earth, closing and restraining;Till a Philosophy of Five Senses was complete;Urizen wept, and gave it into the hands of Newton and Locke.”
These “terrible sons” of time and space are the presiding demons of each creed or code; the sons of men are in their hands now, for the father and mother of men are fallen gods, oblivious and transformed: and these minor demons are all subservient to the Creator, whose soul,sorrowful but not merciful, animates the whole pained world. So, with cloud of menace and fire of wrath shed out about the deceased gods and the new philosophies, the first part ends. In the second part the clouds have broken and the fire has come forth; revolution has begun in Europe; the ancient lords of Asia are startled from their dens and cry in bitterness of soul for help of the old oppressions; for councillors and for taxes, for plagues and for priests, “to turn man from his path; to restrain the child from the womb; to cut off the bread from the city, that the remnant may learn to obey: that the pride of the heart may fail; that the lust of the eye may be quenched; that the delicate ear in its infancy may be dulled, and the nostrils closed up; to teach mortal worms the path that leads from the gates of the grave.” At their cry Urizen arose, the lord of Asia from of old, ever since he cast down the patriarchal law and set up the Mosaic code; “his shuddering waving wings went enormous above the red flames,” to contend with the rekindled revolution, “the thick-flaming thought-creating fires of Orc;”
“His books of brass, iron, and goldMelted over the land as he flew,Heavy-waving, howling, weeping.And he stood over Judea,And stayed in his ancient places,And stretched his clouds over Jerusalem.For Adam, a mouldering skeleton,Lay bleached on the garden of Eden;And Noah, as white as snow,On the mountains of Ararat.”
Thus, with thunder from eastward and fire fromwestward, the God of jealousy and the Spirit of freedom met together; earth shrank at the meeting of them.
“Forth from the dead dust rattling bones to bonesCame; shaking, convulsed, the shivering clay breathes;And all flesh naked stands; Fathers and Friends;Mothers and Infants; Kings and Warriors;The Grave shrieks with delight, and shakesHer hollow womb, and clasps the solid stem;Her bosom swells with wild desire;And milk and blood and glandous wineIn rivers rush and shout and danceOn mountain, dale and plain.The Song of Los is ended.Urizen wept.”
So much for the text; which has throughout a contagious power of excitement in the musical passion of its speech. For these books, above all, it is impossible to read continuously and not imbibe a certain half-nervous enjoyment from their long cadences and tempestuous undulations of melody. Such passion went to the writing of them that some savour of that strong emotion infects us also in reading pages which seem still hot from the violent touch of the poet. The design of Har and Heva flying from their lustful and warlike brethren across green waste land before a late and thunder-coloured sky, he grasping her with convulsive fear, she looking back as she runs with lifted arm and flame-like hair and fiery flow of raiment; and that succeeding where they reappear fallen to mere king and queen of the vegetable world, themselves half things of vegetable life; are both noble if somewhat vehement and reckless. In this latter, the deep green-blue heaven full of stars like flowers is set with sweet and deep effect against the darkening green of the vast lily-leaves supporting the fiery pallor of thoseshapely chalices which enclose as the heart of either blossom the queen lying at her length, and the king sitting with bright plucked-out pistil in hand by way of sceptre or sword; and below them the dim walls of the world alone are wholly black: his robes of soft shot purple and red, her long chrysalid shell or husk of tarnished gold, are but signs of their bondage and fall from deity; they are fallen to be mere flowers. More might be said of the remaining designs; the fierce glory of sweeping branches and driven leaves in a strong wind, the fervent sky and glimmering hill, the crouching figures above and under, the divine insane luxuriance of cloudy and flowery colour which makes twice luminous the last page of the poem; the strange final design where a spirit with huge childlike limbs and lifted hair seems to smite with glittering mallet the outer rim of a huger blood-red sun; but for this book we have no more space; and much laborious travel lies ahead of us yet.