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With theSong of Losthe first or London series of prophecies came to a close not unfit or unmelodious. As their first word had been Revelation, their last was Revolution. We have now to deal with the two later and larger books written at Felpham, but not put forth till 1804. To one of these at least we must allow some tolerably full notice. TheMiltonshall here take precedence. This poem, though sufficiently vexatious to the human sense at first sight, is worth some care and some admiration. Its preface must here be read in full.
“The stolen and perverted writings of Homer and Ovid, of Plato and Cicero, which all men ought to contemn, are set up by artifice against the sublime of the Bible; but when the New Age is at leisure to pronounce, all will be set right, and those grand works of the more ancient andconsciously and professedly inspired men, will hold their proper rank; and the daughters of memory shall become the daughters of inspiration. Shakespeare and Milton were both curbed by the general malady and infection from the silly Greek and Latin slaves of the sword. Rouse up, O young men of the New Age! set your foreheads against the ignorant hirelings! For we have hirelings in the camp, the court, and the university; who would, if they could, for ever depress mental and prolong corporeal war. Painters! on you I call! Sculptors! Architects! suffer not the fashionable fools to depress your powers by the prices they pretend to give for contemptible works or the expensive advertising boasts that they make of such works: believe Christ and his Apostles, that there is a class of men whose whole delight is in destroying. We do not want either Greek or Roman models if we are but just and true to our own imaginations, those worlds of eternity in which we shall live for ever, in Jesus our Lord.And did those feet in ancient timeWalk over England’s mountains green?And was the holy Lamb of GodOn England’s pleasant pastures seen?And did the Countenance DivineShine forth upon our clouded hills?And was Jerusalem builded here,Among these dark Satanic mills?Bring me my bow of burning gold;Bring me my arrows of desire;Bring me my spear: O clouds, unfold;Bring me my chariot of fire.I will not cease from mental fight,Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,Till we have built JerusalemIn England’s green and pleasant land.‘Would to God that all the Lord’s people were prophets.’—Numbers xi. 29.”
“The stolen and perverted writings of Homer and Ovid, of Plato and Cicero, which all men ought to contemn, are set up by artifice against the sublime of the Bible; but when the New Age is at leisure to pronounce, all will be set right, and those grand works of the more ancient andconsciously and professedly inspired men, will hold their proper rank; and the daughters of memory shall become the daughters of inspiration. Shakespeare and Milton were both curbed by the general malady and infection from the silly Greek and Latin slaves of the sword. Rouse up, O young men of the New Age! set your foreheads against the ignorant hirelings! For we have hirelings in the camp, the court, and the university; who would, if they could, for ever depress mental and prolong corporeal war. Painters! on you I call! Sculptors! Architects! suffer not the fashionable fools to depress your powers by the prices they pretend to give for contemptible works or the expensive advertising boasts that they make of such works: believe Christ and his Apostles, that there is a class of men whose whole delight is in destroying. We do not want either Greek or Roman models if we are but just and true to our own imaginations, those worlds of eternity in which we shall live for ever, in Jesus our Lord.
And did those feet in ancient timeWalk over England’s mountains green?And was the holy Lamb of GodOn England’s pleasant pastures seen?And did the Countenance DivineShine forth upon our clouded hills?And was Jerusalem builded here,Among these dark Satanic mills?Bring me my bow of burning gold;Bring me my arrows of desire;Bring me my spear: O clouds, unfold;Bring me my chariot of fire.I will not cease from mental fight,Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,Till we have built JerusalemIn England’s green and pleasant land.
‘Would to God that all the Lord’s people were prophets.’—Numbers xi. 29.”
After this strange and grand prelude, which, though taken in the letter it may read like foolishness, is in the spirit of it certainty and truth for all time, we pass again under the shadow and into the land that shifts and slips under our feet. Something however out of the chaos of fire and wind and stormy colour may be caught at byfits and stored up for such as can like it. Thus the poem opens, with not less fervour and splendour of sound than usual.
“Daughters of Beulah! Muses who inspire the Poet’s Song!Record the journey of immortal Milton thro’ your realmsOf terror and mild moony lustre, in soft sexual delusionsOf varied beauty, to delight the wanderer and reposeHis burning thirst and freezing hunger! Come into my hand,By your mild power descending down the Nerves of my right armFrom out the Portals of my Brain, where by your ministryThe Eternal Great Humanity Divine planted his ParadiseAnd in it caused the Spectres of the Dead to take sweet formsIn likeness of himself.”
(Observe here the answer by anticipation to the old foolish charge of madness and belief in mere material visions; a charge indeed refuted and confuted at every turn we take. Thus, and no otherwise, did Blake believe in his dead visitors and models: as spectres formed into new and significant shape by God, after his own likeness;notcalled up as by some witch of Endor and reclothed with the rags and rottenness of their dead old bodies; creatures existing within the brain and imagination of the workman, not as they were once externally and by accident, but as they will be for ever by the essence and substance of their nature. For the “vegetated shadow” or “human vegetable” no mystic ever had deeper or subtler contempt than Blake; nor was ever a man less likely to care about raising or laying it after death.)
“Tell also of the False Tongue! vegetatedBeneath your land of shadows; of its sacrifices, andIts offerings: even till Jesus, the image of the Invisible God,Became its prey; a curse, an offering, and an atonementFor Death Eternal, in the heavens of Albion, and before the gatesOf Jerusalem his Emanation, in the heavens beneath Beulah.”
Let the Súfis of the West make what construction they can of that doctrine. We will help them, before passing on, with another view of the Atonement, taken fromThe Everlasting Gospel.
“But when Jesus was crucified,Then was perfected his galling pride.In three days he devoured his prey,And still he devours the body of clay;For dust and clay is the serpent’s meat,Which never was meant for man to eat.”
That is, the spirit must be eternally at work consuming and destroying the likeness of things material and the religions made out of them. This over-fervent prophet of freedom for the senses as well as the soul would have them free, one may say, only for the soul’s sake: talking as we see he did of redemption from the body and salvation by the spirit at war with it, in words which literally taken would hardly have misbecome a monk of Nitria.
Returning to theMilton, we are caught again in the mythologic whirlpools and cross-currents of symbol and doctrine; our ears rung deaf and dazed by the hammers of Los (Time) and our eyes bewildered by the wheels and woofs of Enitharmon (Space): “her looms vibrate with soft affections, weaving the Web of Life out from the ashes of the Dead.” This is a fragment of the main myth, whose details Los and Enitharmon themselves for the present forbid our following out.
“The Three Classes of men regulated by Los’s hammer, and wovenBy Enitharmon’s Looms, and spun beneath the Spindle of Tirzah:The first: The Elect from before the foundation of the World;The second: The Redeemed. The Third: the Reprobate and formedTo destruction from the mother’s womb.”
Into the myth of the harrow and horses of Palamabron, more Asiatic in tone than any other of Blake’s, and full of the vast proportion and formless fervour of Hindoo legends, we will not haul any reluctant reader. Let him only take enough by way of extract to understand how thoroughly one vein of fiery faith runs through all the prophetic books, and one passionate form of doctrine is enforced and beaten in upon the disciple again and again; not hitherto with much material effect.
“And in the midst of the Great Assembly Palamabron prayed;O God, protect me from my friends that they have not power over me;Thou hast given me power to protect myself from my bitterest enemies.”
Then the wrath of Rintrah, the most fiery of the spirits who are children of Time, having entered by lot into Satan, who was of the Elect from the first, “seeming a brother, being a tyrant, even thinking himself a brother while he is murdering the just,” “with incomparable mildness,” believing “that he had not oppressed”—a symbolic point much insisted on—
“He created Seven deadly Sins, drawing out his infernal scrollOf moral laws and cruel punishments upon the clouds of Jehovah,To pervert the divine voice in its entrance to the earthWith thunders of war and trumpet’s sound, with armies of disease;Punishments and deaths mustered and numbered; saying, I am God alone,There is no other; let all obey my principles of moral individualityI have brought them from the uppermost innermost recessesOf my Eternal Mind; transgressors I will rend off for ever;As now I rend this accursed Family from my covering.”
This is the Satan of Blake, sufficiently unlike the Miltonic. Of himself he cannot conceive evil and bring forth destruction; the absolute Spirit of Evil is alienfrom this mythology; he must enter into the body of a law or system and put on the qualities of spirits strange to himself (Rintrah); he is divided, inconsistent, a mystery and error to himself; he represents Monotheism with its stringent law and sacerdotal creed, Jewish or Christian, as opposed to Pantheism whereby man and God are one, and by culture and perfection of humanity man makes himself God. The point of difference here between Blake and many other western Pantheists is that in his creed self-abnegation (in the mystic sense, not the ascetic—the Oriental, not the Catholic) is the highest and only perfect form of self-culture: and as Satan (under “names divine”—see the Epilogue to theGates of Paradise) is the incarnate type of Monotheism, so is Jesus the incarnate type of Pantheism. To return to our myth; the stronger spirit rears walls of rocks and forms rivers of fire round them;
“And Satan,not having the Science of Wrath but only of Pity,[57]Rent them asunder; and Wrath was left to Wrath, and Pity to Pity.”
This is Blake’s ultimate conception of active evil; not wilful wrong-doing by force of arm or of spirit; but mild error, tender falsehood innocent of a purpose, embodied in an external law of moral action and restrictive faith, and clothed with a covering of cruelty which adheres to and grows into it (Decalogue and Law). A subtle and rathernoble conception, developing easily and rapidly into what was once called the Manichean doctrine as to the Old Testament.
“If the guilty should be condemned, he must be an Eternal Death,And one must die for another throughout all Eternity;Satan is fallen from his station and can never be redeemed,But must be new-created continually moment by moment,And therefore the class of Satan shall be called the Elect, and thoseOf Rintrah the Reprobate, and those of Palamabron the Redeemed;For he is redeemed from Satan’s law, the wrath falling on Rintrah.And therefore Palamabron cared not to call a solemn AssemblyTill Satan had assumed Rintrah’s wrath in the day of mourning,In a feminine delusion[58]of false pride self-deceived.”
The words of the text recur not unfrequently in the prophetic books. A single final act of redemption by sacrifice and oblation of one for another is not admitted as sufficient, or even possible. The favourite dogma is this, of the eternity of sacrifice; endless redemption to be bought at no less a price than endless self-devotion. To this plea of “an Eternal” before the assembly succeeds the myth of Leutha “offering herself a ransom forSatan:”[59]a myth, not an allegory; for of allegory pure and simple there is scarcely a trace in Blake.
“I formed the SerpentOf precious stones and gold turned poison on the sultry waste.To do unkind things with kindness; with power armed, to sayThe most irritating things in the midst of tears and love;These are the stings of the Serpent.”
This whole myth of Leutha is splendid for colour, and not too subtle to be thought out: the imaginative action of the poem plays like fire and palpitates like blood upon every line, as the lips of caressing flame and the tongues of cleaving light in which the text is set fold and flash about the margins.
“The Elect shall meet the Redeemed, on Albion’s rocks they shall meet,Astonished at the Transgressor, in him beholding the Saviour.And the Elect shall say to the Redeemed; We behold it is of DivineMercy alone, of free gift and Election, that we live;Our Virtues and cruel Goodnesses have deserved Eternal Death.”
Forgiveness of sin and indulgence, the disciple perceives, is not enough for this mythology; it must include forgiveness of virtue and abstinence, the hypocritic holiness made perfect in the body of death for six thousand years under the repressive and restrictive law called after the name of the God of the Jews, who “was leprous.”Thus prophesies Blake, in a fury of supra-Christian dogmatism.
Here ends the “Song of the Bard” in the First Book. “Many condemned the high-toned song, saying, Pity and Love are too venerable for the imputation of guilt. Others said, If it is true!” Let us say the same, and pass on: listening only to the Bard’s answer:—
“I am inspired! I know it is Truth! for I singAccording to the Inspiration of the Poetic GeniusWho is the Eternal all-protecting divine HumanityTo whom be Glory and Power and Dominion evermore. Amen.”
Then follows the incarnation and descent into earth and hell of Milton, who represents here the redemption by inspiration, working in pain and difficulty before the expiration of the six thousand Satanic years. His words are worth quoting:—
“When will the Resurrection come, to deliver the sleeping bodyFrom corruptibility? O when, Lord Jesus, wilt thou come?Tarry no longer; for my soul lies at the gates of death:I will arise and look forth for the morning of the grave:I will go down to the sepulchre and see if morning breaks.I will go down to self-annihilation and eternal deathLest the Last Judgment come and find me unannihilateAnd I be seized and given into the hands of my own selfhood.”
This grand dogma, that personal love and selfishness make up the sin which defies redemption, is in a manner involved in that former one of the necessary “eternity of sacrifice,” for
“I in my selfhood am that Satan; I am that Evil One;He is my Spectre.”
Now by the light of these extracts let any student examine the great figure at p. 13, where “he beheld his ownShadow—and entered into it.” Clothed in the colours of pain, crowned with the rays of suffering, it stands between world and world in a great anguish of transformation and change: Passion included by Incarnation. Erect on a globe of opaque shadow, backed by a sphere of aching light that opens flower-wise into beams of shifting colour and bitter radiance as of fire, it appeals with a doubtful tortured face and straining limbs to the flat black wall and roof of heaven. All over the head is a darkness not of transitory cloud or night that will some time melt into day; recalling that great verse: “Neither could the bright flames of the stars endure to lighten that horrible night.”
“As when a man dreams he reflects not that his body sleeps,Else he would wake; so seemed he entering his Shadow; butWith him the Spirits of the Seven Angels of the PresenceEntering, they gave him still perceptions of his Sleeping BodyWhich now arose and walked with them in Eden, as an EighthImage, Divine tho’ darkened, and tho’ walking as one walksIn Sleep; and the Seven comforted and supported him.”
The whole passage is full of a deep and dim beauty which grows clearer and takes form of feature to those only who bring with them eyes to see and patience to desire it. Take next this piece of cosmography, worth comparing with Dante’s vision of the worlds:—
“The nature of infinity is this; That everything has itsOwn vortex: and when once a traveller thro’ EternityHas passed that vortex, he perceives it roll backward behindHis path into a globe itself enfolding, like a sunOr like a moon or like a universe of starry majesty,While he keeps onward in his wondrous journey thro’ the earth,Or like a human form, a friend with whom he lived benevolent:As the eye of man views both the east and west encompassingIts vortex, and the north and south, with all their starry host;Also the rising and setting moon he views surroundingHis cornfields and his valleys of five hundred acres square;Thus is the earth one infinite plane, and not as apparentTo the weak traveller confined beneath the moony shade;Thus is the heaven a vortex passed already, and the earthA vortex not yet passed by the traveller thro’ Eternity.”
One curious piece of symbolism may be extracted from the myth, as the one reference to anything actual:—
“Then Milton knew that the Three Heavens of Beulah were beheldBy him on earth in his bright pilgrimage of sixty yearsIn those three Females whom his Wives, and those three whom his DaughtersHad represented and contained, that they might be resumedBy giving up of Selfhood.”
But of Milton’s flight, of the cruelties of Ulro, of his journey above the Mundane Shell, which “is a vast concave earth, an immense hardened shadow of all things upon our vegetated earth, enlarged into dimension and deformed into indefinite space,” we will take no more account here; nor of the strife with Urizen, “one giving life, the other giving death, to his adversary;” hardly even of the temptation by the sons and daughters of Rahab and Tirzah, when
“The twofold Form Hermaphroditic, and the Double-sexed,The Female-male and the Male-female, self-dividing stoodBefore him in their beauty and in cruelties of holiness.”
(Compare the beautiful song “To Tirzah,” in the Songs of Experience.) This Tirzah, daughter of Rahab the holy, is “Natural Religion” (Theism as opposed to Pantheism), which would fain have the spiritual Jerusalem offered in sacrifice to it.
“Let her be offered up to holiness: Tirzah numbers her:She numbers with her fingers every fibre ere it grow:Where is the Lamb of God? where is the promise of his coming?Her shadowy sisters form the bones, even the bones of HorebAround the marrow; and the orbed scull around the brain;She ties the knot of nervous fibres into a white brain;She ties the knot of bloody veins into a red-hot heart;She ties the knot of milky seed into two lovely heavens,Two yet but one; each in the other sweet reflected; theseAre our Three Heavens beneath the shades of Beulah, land of rest.”
Here and henceforward the clamour and glitter of the poem become more and more confused; nevertheless every page is set about with jewels; as here, in a more comprehensible form than usual:—
“God sent his two servants Whitfield and Wesley; were they prophets?Or were they idiots and madmen? ‘Show us Miracles’?Can you have greater Miracles than these? Men who devoteTheir life’s whole comfort to entire scorn, injury, and death?”
Take also these scraps of explanation mercifully vouchsafed us:—
“Bowlahoola is named Law by Mortals: Tharmas founded itBecause of Satan: * * * *But Golgonooza is named Art and Manufacture by mortal men.In Bowlahoola Los’s Anvils stand and his Furnaces rage.Bowlahoola thro’ all its porches feels, tho’ too fast foundedIts pillars and porticoes to tremble at the forceOf mortal or immortal arm; * * *The Bellows are the Animal Lungs; the Hammers the Animal Heart;The Furnaces the Stomach for digestion;”
(Here we must condense instead of transcribing. While thousands labour at this work of the Senses in the halls of Time, thousands “play on instruments stringed or fluted” to lull the labourers and drown the painful sound of the toiling members, and bring forgetfulness of thisslavery to the flesh: a myth of animal life not without beauty, and to Blake one of great attraction.)
“Los is by mortals named Time, Enitharmon is named Space;But they depict him bald and aged who is in eternal youthAll-powerful, and his locks flourish like the brows of morning;He is the Spirit of Prophecy, the ever-apparent Elias.Time is the mercy of Eternity; without Time’s swiftnessWhich is the swiftest of all things, all were eternal torment.”
At least this last magnificent passage should in common charity and sense have been cited in the biography, if only to explain the often-quoted words Los and Enitharmon. Neither blindness to such splendour of symbol, nor deafness to such music of thought, can excuse the omission of what is so wholly necessary for the comprehension of extracts already given, and given (as far as one can see) with no available purpose whatever.
The remainder of the first book of theMiltonis a vision of Nature and prophecy of the gathering of the harvest of Time and treading of the winepress of War; in which harvest and vintage work all living things have their share for good or evil.
“How red the sons and daughters of Luvah! here they tread the grapes,Laughing and shouting, drunk with odours; many fall o’erwearied,Drowned in the wine is many a youth and maiden; those aroundLay them on skins of Tigers and of the spotted Leopard and the wild AssTill they revive, or bury them in cool grots, making lamentation.This Winepress is called War on Earth; it is the printing-pressOf Los, there he lays his words in order above the mortal brainAs cogs are formed in a wheel to turn the cogs of the adverse wheel.”
All kind of insects, of roots and seeds and creeping things—“all the armies of disease visible or invisible”—are there;
“The slow slug; the grasshopper that sings and laughs and drinks(Winter comes, he folds his slender bones without a murmur);”
wasp and hornet, toad and newt, spider and snake,
“They throw off their gorgeous raiment; they rejoice with loud jubileeAround the winepresses of Luvah, naked and drunk with wine.There is the nettle that stings with soft down; and thereThe indignant thistle whose bitterness is bred in his milk;Who feeds on contempt of his neighbour; there all the idle weedsThat creep around the obscure places show their various limbsNaked in all their beauty, dancing round the winepresses.But in the winepresses the human grapes sing not nor dance,They howl and writhe in shoals of torment, in fierce flames consuming;”
tortured for the cruel joy and deadly sport of Luvah’s sons and daughters;
“They dance around the dying and they drink the howl and groan;They catch the shrieks in cups of gold, they hand them one to another;These are the sports of love, and these the sweet delights of amorous play;Tears of the grape, the death-sweat of the cluster; the last sighOf the mild youth who listens to the luring songs of Luvah.”
Take also this from the speech of Time to his reapers.
“You must bind the sheaves not by nations or families,You shall bind them in three classes; according to their classesSo shall you bind them, separating what has been mixedSince men began to be woven into nations. * ** * * The Elect is one class; youShall bind them separate; they cannot believe in eternal lifeExcept by miracle and a new birth. The other two classes,The Reprobate[60]who never cease to believe, and the RedeemedWho live in doubts and fears, perpetually tormented by the Elect,These you shall bind in a twin bundle for the consummation.”
The constellations that rise in immortal order, that keep their course upon mountain and valley, with sound of harpand song, “with cups and measures filled with foaming wine;” that fill the streams with light of many visions and leave in luminous traces upon the extreme sea the peace of their passage; these too are sons of Los, and labour in the vintage. The gorgeous flies on meadow or brook, that weave in mazes of music and motion the delight of artful dances, and sound instruments of song as they touch and cross and recede; the trees shaken by the wind into sound of heavy thunder till they become preachers and prophets to men; these are the sons of Los, these the visions of eternity; and we see but as it were the hem of their garments.
A noble passage follows, in which are resumed the labours of the sons of time in fashioning men and the stations of men. They make for doubts and fears cabinets of ivory and gold; when two spectres “like lamps quivering” between life and death stand ready for the blind malignity of combat, they are taken and moulded instead into shapes fit for love, clothed with soft raiment by softer hands, drawn after lines of sweet and perfect form. Some “in the optic nerve” give to the poor infinite wealth of insight, power to know and enjoy the invisible heaven, and to the rich scorn and ignorance and thick darkness. Others build minutes and hours and days;
“And every moment has a couch of gold for soft repose(A moment equals a pulsation of the artery)And every minute has an azure tent with silken veils,And every hour has a bright golden gate carved with skill,And every day and night has walls of brass and gates of adamantShining like precious stones and ornamented with appropriate signs,And every month a silver-paved terrace builded high,And every year invulnerable barriers with high towers,And every age is moated deep, with bridges of silver and gold,And every Seven Ages are encircled with a flaming fire.”
There is much more of the same mythic sort concerning the duration of time, the offices of the nerves (e.g., in the optic nerve sleep was transformed to death by Satan the father of sin and death, even as we have seen sensual death re-transformed by Mercy into sleep), and such-like huge matters; full, one need not now repeat, of subtle splendour and fanciful intensity. But enough now of this over-careful dredging in such weedy waters; where nevertheless, at risk of breaking our net, we may at every dip fish up some pearl.
At the opening of the second book the pearls lie close and pure. From this (without explanation or reference) has been taken the lovely and mutilated extract at p. 197 of theLife. Thus it stands in Blake’s text:—
“Thou hearest the nightingale begin the song of spring;The lark, sitting upon his earthy bed, just as the mornAppears, listens silent; then, springing from the waving corn-field, loudHe leads the choir of day: trill—trill—trill—trill—Mounting upon the wings of light into the great expanse,Re-echoing against the lovely blue and shining heavenly shellHis little throat labours with inspiration; every featherOn throat, and breast, and wing, vibrate with the effluence divine.All nature listens to him silent; and the awful SunStands still upon the mountains, looking on this little birdWith eyes of soft humility, and wonder, love, and awe.Then loud, from their green covert, all the birds began their song,—The thrush, the linnet and the goldfinch, robin and the wren,Awake the Sun from his sweet reverie upon the mountains;The nightingale again essays his song, and through the dayAnd through the night warbles luxuriant; every bird of songAttending his loud harmony with admiration and love.(This is a vision of the lamentation of Beulah over Ololon.)Thou perceivest the flowers put forth their precious odours,And none can tell how from so small a centre come such sweets,Forgetting that within that centre eternity expandsIts ever-during doors that Og and Anak fiercely guard.[61]First ere the morning breaks joy opens in the flowery bosoms,Joy even to tears, which the sun rising dries; first the wild thymeAnd meadow-sweet downy and soft waving among the reeds,Light springing on the air, lead the sweet dance; they wakeThe honeysuckle sleeping on the oak, the flaunting beautyRevels along upon the wind; the white-thorn, lovely May,Opens her many lovely eyes; listening, the rose still sleeps,None dare to wake her: soon she bursts her crimson-curtained bedAnd comes forth in the majesty of beauty; every flower,The pink, the jessamine, the wallflower, the carnation,The jonquil, the mild lily, opes her heavens; every treeAnd flower and herb soon fill the air with an innumerable dance,Yet all in order sweet and lovely; men are sick with love.Such is a vision of the lamentation of Beulah over Ololon.”
This Beulah is “a place where contrarieties are equally true;” “it is a pleasant lovely shadow where no disputecan come because of those who sleep:” made to shelter, before they “pass away in winter,” the temporary emanations “which trembled exceedingly neither could they live, because the life of man was too exceeding unbounded.” Of the incarnation and descent of Ololon, of the wars and prophecies of Milton, and of all the other Felpham visions here put on record, we shall say no more in this place; but all these things are written in the Second Book. The illustrative work is also noble and worth study in all ways. One page for example is covered by a design among the grandest of Blake’s. Two figures lie half embraced, as in a deadly sleep without dawn of dream or shadow of rest, along a bare slant ledge of rock washed against by wintry water. Over these two stoops an eagle balanced on the heavy-laden air, with stretching throat and sharpened wings, opening beak, and eyes full of a fierce perplexity of pity. All round the greenish and black slope of moist sea-cliff the weary tidal ripple plashes and laps, thrusting up as it were faint tongues and listless fingers tipped with foam. On an earlier page, part of the text of which we have given, crowd and glitter all shapes and images of insect or reptile life, sprinkling between line and margin keen points ofjewel-coloured light and soft flashes as of starry or scaly brilliance.
The same year 1804 saw the huge advent ofJerusalem. Of that terrible “emanation,” hitherto the main cornerstone of offence to all students of Blake, what can be said within any decent limit? or where shall any traveller find a rest for feet or eyes in that noisy and misty land? It were a mere frenzy of discipleship that would undertake by force of words to make straight these crooked ways or compel things incoherent to cohere.Supra hanc petram—and such a rock it is to begin any church-building upon! Many of the unwary have stumbled over it and broken their wits. Seriously, one cannot imagine that people will ever read through this vast poem with pleasure enough to warrant them in having patience with it.
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Several things, true in the main of all the prophetic books, are especially true and memorable with regard to those written or designed during the “three years’ slumber” at Felpham. They are the results of intense and active solitude working upon the capricious nerves and tremulous brain of a man naturally the most excitable and receptive of men. They are to be read by the light of his earlier work in the same line; still more perhaps by the light of those invaluable ten letters printed in Vol. II. of theLife, for which one can hardly give thanks enough. The incredible fever of spirit under the sting and stress of which he thought and laboured all his life through, has left marks of its hot and restless presence as clearly on this short correspondence as on the voluminous rolls of prophecy. The merit or demerit of thework done is never in any degree the conscious or deliberate result of a purpose. Possessed to the inmost nerve and core by a certain faith, consumed by the desire to obey his instinct of right by preaching that faith, utterly regardless of all matters lying outside of his own inspiration, he wrote and engraved as it was given him to do, and no otherwise. As to matter and argument, the enormousJerusalemis simply a fervent apocalyptic discourse on the old subjects—love without law and against law, virtue that stagnates into poisonous dead matter by moral isolation, sin that must exist for the sake of being forgiven, forgiveness that must always keep up with sin—must even maintain sin that it may have something to keep up with and to live for. Without forgiveness of sins, the one thing necessary, we lapse each man into separate self-righteousness and a cruel worship of natural morality and religious law. For nature, oddly enough as it seems at first sight, is assumed by this mystical code to be the cruellest and narrowest of absolute moralists. Only by worship of imaginative impulse, the grace of the Lamb of God, which admits infinite indulgence in sin and infinite forgiveness of sin—only by some such faith as this shall the world be renewed and redeemed. This may be taken as the rough result, broadly set down, of the portentous book of revelation. Never, one may suppose, did any Oriental heretic drive his deductions further or set forth his conclusions in obscurer form. Never certainly did a man fall to his work with keener faith and devotion. Sin itself is not so evil—but the remembrance and punishment of sin! “Injury the Lord heals; but vengeance cannot behealed.” Next or equal in hatefulness to the division of qualities into evil and good (see above,Marriage of Heaven and Hell) is the separation of sexes into male and female: hence jealous love and personal desire, that set itself against the mystical frankness of fraternity: hence too (contradictory as it may seem till one thinks it out) the hermaphroditic emblem is always used as a symbol seemingly of duplicity and division, perplexity and restraint. The two sexes should not combine and contend; they must finally amalgamate and be annihilated.[62]All this is of course more or less symbolic, andnot to be taken in literal coarseness or folly of meaning. The whole stage is elemental, the scheme one of patriarchal vapour, and the mythologic actors mere Titans outlined in cloud. Reserving this always, we shall not be far out in interpreting Blake’s dim creed somewhat as above. One distinction it is here possible to make, and desirable to keep in mind: Blake at one time speaks of Nature as the source of moral law, “the harlot virgin-mother,” “Rahab,” “the daughter of Babylon,” origin of religious restrictions and the worship of abstinence; mother of “the harlot modesty,” and spring of all hypocrisies and prohibitions; to whom the religious and moral of this world would fain offer up in sacrifice the spiritual Jerusalem, the virgin espoused, named among men Liberty, forbidding nothing and enjoying all, but therefore clean and not unclean: by whom comes indulgence, after whom follows redemption. At another time this same prophet will plead for freedom on behalf of “natural” energies, and set up the claims of nature to energetic enjoyment and gratification of all desires, against the moral law and government of the creative and restrictive Deity—“Urizen, mistaken Demon of Heaven.” With a like looseness of phrase he uses and transposes the words “God” and “Satan,” even to an excess of laxity and consequent perplexity; not, it may be suspected, without a grain of innocent if malign pleasure at the chance of inflicting on men of conventional tempers bewilderment and offence. But as to this question of the term “Nature” the case seems to lie thus: when, as throughout theMarriage of Heaven and Hell, he uses it in the simple sense of human or physical condition as opposed to some artificial state of soul or belief, he takes it as the contrary of conventional ideas and habits (of religion andmorality as vulgarly conceived or practised); but when, as throughout theMiltonandJerusalem, he speaks of nature as opposed to inspiration, it must be taken as the contrary of that higher and subtler religious faith which he is bent on inculcating, and which itself is the only perfect opposite and efficient antagonist to the conventional faith and (to use another of his quasi-technical terms) the “deistical virtue” which he is bent on denying. Blake, one should always remember, was not infidel but heretic; his belief was peculiar enough, but it was not unbelief; it was farther from that than most men’s. To him, though for quite personal reasons and in a quite especial sense, much of what is called inspired writing was as sacred and infallible as to any priest of any church. Only before reading he inverted the book.
“Both read the Bible day and night,But thou read’st black where I read white.”(Everlasting Gospel, MS.)
Thus, by his own showing, in the recorded words of Christ he found authority for his vision and sympathy with his faith; in the published creed of reason or rationalism, he found negation of his belief and antipathy to his aims. Hence in his later denunciation he brackets together the Churches of Rome and England with the Churches of Ferney and Lausanne; it was all uninspired—all “nature’s cruel holiness—the deceits of natural religion”; all irremediably involved, all inextricably interwoven with the old fallacies and the old prohibitions.
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Such points as these do, above most others, deserve, demand, and reward the trouble of clearing up; andthese once understood, much that seemed the aimless unreflecting jargon of crude or accidental rhetoric assumes a distinct if unacceptable meaning. It is much otherwise with the external scheme or literal shell of theJerusalem. Let no man attempt to define the post or expound the office of the “terrible sons and daughters.” These, with all their flock of emanations and spectrous or vegetating shadows, let us leave to the discretion of Los; who has enough on his hands among them all. Neither let any attempt to plant a human foot upon the soil of the newly-divided shires and counties, partitioned though they be into the mystic likeness of the twelve tribes of Israel. Nor let any questioner of arithmetical mind apply his skill in numbers to the finding of flaws or products in the twelves, twenty-fours, and twenty-sevens which make up the sum of their male and female emanations. In earnest, the externals of this poem are too incredibly grotesque—the mythologic plan too incomparably tortuous—to be fit for any detailed coherence of remark. Nor indeed were they meant to endure it. Such things, and the expression of such things, as are here treated of, are not to be reasoned out; the matter one may say is above reasoning; the manner (taken apart from the matter) is below it: the spirit of the work is too strong and its form too faulty for any rule or line. It will upon the whole suffice if this be kept in mind; that to Blake, in a literal perhaps as well as a mystical sense, Albion was as it were the cradle and centre of all created existence; he even calls on the Jews to recognize it as the parent land of their history and their faith. Its incarnatespirit is chief among the ancient giant-gods, Titans of his mythology, who were lords of the old simple world and its good things, its wise delights and strong sweet instincts, full of the vigorous impulse of innocence; lords of an extinct kingdom, superseded now and transformed by the advent of moral fear and religious jealousy, of pallid faith and artificial abstinence. In this manner Albion is changed and overthrown; hence at length he dies, stifled and slain by his children under the new law. His one friend, not misled or converted to the dispensations of bodily virtue and spiritual restraint, but faithful from of old and even after his change and conversion to moral law, is Time; whose Spectre, or mere outside husk and likeness, is indeed (as it must needs be) fain to range itself on the transitory side of things, fain to follow after the fugitive Emanation embodied in these new forms of life and allied to the faith and habit of the day against the old liberty;[63]but for all the desire of his despair and fierce entreaties to be let go, he is yet kept to work, however afflicted and rebellious, and compelled to labour with Time’s self at the building up within every man of that spiritual city which is redemption and freedom for all men (ch. i.). All the myth of this building of “Golgonooza,” (that is,we know, inspired art by which salvation must come) is noticeable for sweet intricacy of beauty; only after a little some maddening memory (surely not pure inspiration this time, but rather memory?) of the latter chapters of Ezekiel, with their interminable inexplicable structures and plans, seizes on Blake’s passionate fancy and sets him at work measuring and dividing walls and gates in a style calculated to wear out a hecatomb of scholiasts, for whole pages in which no subtilized mediæval intellect, though trained under seraphic or cherubic doctors, could possibly find one satisfactory hair to split. For it merely trebles the roaring and rolling confusion when some weak grain of symbolism is turned up for a glimpse of time in the thick of a mass of choral prose consisting of absolute fancy and mere naked sound.
Not that there is here less than elsewhere of the passion and beauty which redeem so much of these confused and clamorous poems. The merits and attractions of this book are not such as can be minced small and served up in fragments. To do justice to its melodious eloquence and tender subtlety, we should have to analyze or transcribe whole sections: to give any fair notion of the grandeur and variety of its decorations would take up twice the space we can allow to it. Let this brief prologue stand as a sample of the former qualities.
“Reader! lover of books! lover of heavenAnd of that God from whom all things are given;Who in mysterious Sinai’s awful caveTo Man the wondrous art of writing gave;Again he speaks in thunder and in fire,Thunder of thought and flames of fierce desire;Even from the depths of Hell his voice I hearWithin the unfathomed caverns of my ear;Therefore I print; nor vain my types shall be;Heaven, Earth, and Hell henceforth shall live in harmony.”
“We who dwell on earth,” adds the prophet, speaking of the measure and outward fashion of his poem, “can do nothing of ourselves; everything is conducted by Spirits no less than digestion or sleep.” It is to be wished then that the spirits had on this occasion spoken less like somnambulists and uttered less indigested verse. For metrical oratory the plea that follows against ordinary metre may be allowed to have some effective significance; however futile if applied to purer and more essential forms of poetry.
It will be enough to understand well and bear well in mind once for all that the gist of this poem, regarded either as a scheme of ethics or as a mythological evangel, is simply this: to preach, as in the Saviour’s opening invocation, the union of man with God:—(“I am not a God afar off;—Lo! we are One; forgiving all evil; not seeking recompense”): to confute the dull mournful insanity of disbelief which compels “the perturbed man” to avert his ear and reject the divine counsellor as a “Phantom of the over-heated brain.” This perverted humanity is incarnate in Albion, the fallen Titan, imprisoned by his children; the “sons of Albion” are dæmonic qualities of force and faith, the “daughters” are reflex qualities or conditions which emanate from these. As thus; reason supplants faith, and law, moral or religious, grows out of reason; Jerusalem, symbol of imaginative liberty, emanation of his unfallen days, is the faith cast out by the “sons” or spirits who substitute reason forfaith, the freedom trodden under by the “daughters” who substitute moral law for moral impulse: “Vala,” her Spectre, called “Tirzah” among men, is the personified form in which “Jerusalem” becomes revealed, the perverted incarnation, the wrested medium or condition in which she exists among men. Thus much for the scheme of allegory with which the prophet sets out; but when once he has got his theogony well under way and thrown it well into types, the antitypes all but vanish: every condition or quality has a god or goddess of its own; every obscure state and allegorical gradation becomes a personal agent: and all these fierce dim figures threaten and complain, mingle and divide, struggle and embrace as human friends or foes. The main symbols are even of a monotonous consistency; but no accurate sequence of symbolic detail is to be looked for in the doings and sayings of these contending giants and gods. To those who will remember this distinction and will make allowance for the peculiar dialect and manner of which some account has already been taken, this poem will not seem so wholly devoid of reason or of charm.
For its great qualities are much the same in text as in design: plenteous, delicate, vigorous. There is a certain real if rough and lax power of dramatic insight and invention shown even in the singular divisions of adverse symbol against symbol; in such allegories as that which opposes the “human imagination in which all things exist”—do actually exist to all eternity—and the reflex fancy or belief which men confound with this; nay, which they prefer to dwell in and ask comfort from. These two the poet calls the “states” of Beulah and Jerusalem.As the souls of men are attracted towards that “mild heaven” of dreams and shadows where only the reflected image of their own hopes and errors can abide, the imagination, most divine and human, most actual and absolute, of all things, recedes ever further and further among the clouds of smoke, vapours of “abstract philosophy,” and is caught among the “starry wheels” of religion and law, whose restless and magnetic revolution attracts and absorbs her.
“O what avail the loves and tears of Beulah’s lovely daughters?They hold the immortal form in gentle bands and tender tears,But all within is opened into the deeps”—
the deeps of “a dark and unknown night” in which “philosophy wars against imagination.” Here also the main myth of theEuropeis once more rehandled; to “create a female will,” jealous, curious, cunning, full of tender tyranny and confusion, this is “to hide the most evident God in a hidden covert, even in the shadows of a woman and a secluded holy place, that we may pry after him as after a stolen treasure, hidden among the dead and mured up from the paths of life.” Thus is it with the Titan Albion and all his race of mythologic men, when for them “Vala supplants Jerusalem,” the husk replaces the fruit, the mutable form eclipses the immutable substance.
But into these darker parts of the book we will not go too deep. Time, patience, and insight on the part of writer and reader might perhaps clear up all details and lay bare much worth sight and study; but only at the expense of much labour and space. It is feasible, and would be worth doing; but not here. If the singularamalgam called Blake’s works should ever get published, and edited to any purpose, this will have to be done by an energetic editor with time enough on his hands and wits enough for the work. We meantime will gather up a few strays that even under these circumstances appear worth hiving. In the address (p. 27) to the Jews, &c., Blake affirms that “Britain was the primitive seat of the patriarchal religion”: therefore, in a literal as well as in a mystical sense, Jerusalem was the emanation of the giant Albion. (This it should seem was, according to the mythology, before the visible world was created; in the time when all things were in the divine undivided world of the gods.) “Ye are united, O ye inhabitants of Earth, in one Religion: the most Ancient, the Eternal, and the Everlasting Gospel. The Wicked will turn it to Wickedness; the Righteous, to Righteousness.” If there be truth in the Jewish tradition, he adds further on, that man anciently contained in his mighty limbs all things in heaven and earth, “and they were separated from him by cruel sacrifices; and when compulsory cruel sacrifices had brought Humanity into a feminine tabernacle in the loins of Abraham and David, the Lamb of God, the Saviour, became apparent on earth as the prophets had foretold: the return of Israel is a return to mental sacrifice and war,” to noble spiritual freedom and labour, which alone can supplant “corporeal war” and violence of error.
The second address (p. 52) “to the Deists” is more singular and more eloquent. Take a few extracts given not quite at random. “He,” says Blake, “who preaches natural religion or morality is a flatterer who means tobetray, and to perpetuate tyrant pride and the laws of that Babylon which he foresees shall shortly be destroyed with the spiritual and not the natural sword; he is in the state named Rahab.” The prophet then enforces his law that “man is born a spectre or Satan and is altogether an Evil,” and “must continually be changed into his direct contrary.” Those who persuade him otherwise are his enemies. For “man must and will have some religion; if he has not the religion of Jesus he will have the religion of Satan.” Again, “Will any one say, Where are those who worship Satan under the name of God?—where are they? Listen. Every religion that preaches vengeance for sin is the religion of the enemy and avenger, and not of the forgiver of sin: and their God is Satan named by the Divine Name.” This, he says, must be at root the religion of all who deny revelation and adore nature;[64]for mere nature is Satanic. Adam the first man was created at the same time with Satan, when the earth-giant Albion was cast into a trance of sleep: the first man was a part of the universal fluent nature made opaque; the first fiend, a part contracted; and only by these qualities of opacity and contraction can man or devil have separate natural existence. Those, the prophet adds in his perverse manner, who profess belief in natural virtue are hypocrites; which those cannot be who “pretend to be holier than others, but confess their sins before all the world.”Thereforethere was never a religious hypocrite! “Rousseau thoughtmen good by nature; he found them evil, and found no friend. Friendship cannot exist without forgiveness of sins continually.” And so forth.
At p. 66 is a passage recalling the myth of the “Mental Traveller,” and which seems to bear out the interpretation we gave to that misty and tempestuous poem. This part of the prophecy, describing the blind pitiful cruelty of divided qualities set against each other, is full of brilliant and noble passages. Even the faint symbolic shapes of Tirzah and all her kind assume now and then a splendour of pathos, utter words of stately sound, complain and appeal even to some recognizable purpose. So much might here be cited that we will prefer to cite nothing but this slight touch of myth. In the world of time “they refuse liberty to the male: not like Beulah,
Where every female delights to give her maiden to her husband.”
The female searches sea and land for gratification to the male genius, who in return clothes her in gems and gold and feeds her with the food of Eden: hence all her beauty beams. But this is only in the “land of dreams,” where dwell things “stolen from the human imagination by secret amorous theft:” and when the spectres of the dead awake in that land, “all the jealousies become murderous:—forming a commerce to sell loves with moral law; an equal balance, not going down with decision: therefore—mutual hate returns and mutual deceit and mutual fear.” In fact, the divorce batteries are here open again.
The third address “to the Christians” is too long to transcribe here; and should in fairness have been givenin the biography. Its devout passion and beauty of words might have won notice, and earned tolerance for the more erratic matter in which it lies embedded. “What is the joy of heaven but improvement in the things of the spirit? What are the pains of hell but ignorance, bodily lust, idleness, and devastation of the things of the spirit?” Mental gifts, given of Christ, “always appear to the ignorance-loving hypocrite as sins; but that which is a sin in the sight of cruel man is not so in the sight of our kind God.” Every Christian after his ability should openly engage in some mental pursuit; for “to labour in knowledge is to build up Jerusalem; and to despise knowledge is to despise Jerusalem and her builders.” A little before he has said: “I know of no other Christianity and no other Gospel than the liberty both of body and mind to exercise the divine arts of imagination.” God being a spirit, and to be worshipped in spirit and in truth, are not all his gifts spiritual gifts? “The Christians then must give up the religion of Caiaphas, the dark preacher of death, of sin, of sorrow, and of punishment, typified as a revolving wheel, a devouring sword; and recognize that the labours of Art and Science alone are the labours of the Gospel.” As to religion, “Jesus died because he strove against the current of this wheel—opposing nature; it is natural religion. But Jesus is the bright preacher of life, creating nature from this fiery law, by self-denial and forgiveness of sin.” So speaks to the prophet “a Watcher and a Holy One;” bidding him
“Go therefore, cast out devils in Christ’s name,Heal thou the sick of spiritual disease;Pity the evil; for thou art not sentTo smite with terror and with punishmentsThose that are sick. * * * *But to the publicans and harlots go:Teach them true happiness; but let no curseGo forth out of thy mouth to blight their peace.For hell is opened to heaven; thine eyes beholdThe dungeons burst, the prisoners set free.England, awake! awake! awake!Jerusalem thy sister calls;Why wilt thou sleep the sleep of deathAnd chase her from thy ancient walls?Thy hills and valleys felt her feetGently upon their bosoms move;Thy gates beheld sweet Zion’s ways;Then was a time of joy and love.And now the time returns again;Our souls exult; and London’s towersReceive the Lamb of God to dwellIn England’s green and pleasant bowers.”
Much might also be said, had one leave of time, of the last chapter; of the death of the earth-giant through jealousy, and his resurrection when the Saviour appeared to him revealed in the likeness and similitude of Time: of the ultimate deliverance of all things, chanted in a psalm of high and tidal melody; a resurrection wherein all things, even “Tree, Metal, Earth and Stone,” become all
“Human forms identified; living, going forth, and returning weariedInto the planetary lives of years, months, days, and hours: reposingAnd then awaking into his bosom in the life of immortality.And I heard the name of their emanations: they are named Jerusalem.”
We will add one reference, to pp. 61-62, where God shows to Jerusalem in a vision “Joseph the carpenter in Nazareth, and Mary his espoused wife.” Through the vision of their story the forgiveness of Jerusalem also, when she has gone astray from her Lord, is made manifest to her.
“And I heard a voice among the reapers saying, ‘Am I Jerusalem the lost adulteress? or am I Babylon come up to Jerusalem?’ And another voice answered saying, ‘Does the voice of my Lord call me again? am I pure through his mercy and pity? am I become lovely as a virgin in his sight, who am indeed a harlot drunken with the sacrifice of idols?—O mercy, O divine humanity, O forgiveness and pity and compassion, if I were pure I should never have known thee: if I were unpolluted I should never have glorified thy holiness, or rejoiced in thy great salvation.’” The whole passage—and such are not so unfrequent as at first glimpse they seem—is, if seen with equal eyes, whether its purport be right or wrong, “full of wisdom and perfect in beauty.” But we will dive after no more pearls at present in this huge oyster-bed; and of the illustrations we can but speak in a rough swift way. These are all generally noble: that at p. 70 is great among the greatest of Blake’s. Spires of serpentine cloud are seen before a strong wind below a crescent moon; Druid pillars enclose as with a frame this stormy division of sky; outside them again the vapour twists and thickens; and men standing on desolate broken ground look heavenward or earthward between the pillars. Of others a brief and admirable account is given in theLife, more final and sufficient than we can again give; but all in fact should be well seen into by those who would judge fitly of Blake’s singular and supreme gift for purely imaginative work. Flowers sprung of earth and lit from heaven, with chalices of floral fire and with flower-like women or men growing up out of their centre; fair large forms full of labour orof rest; sudden starry strands and reaches of breathless heaven washed by drifts of rapid wind and cloud; serrated array of iron rocks and glorious growth of weedy lands or flowering fields; reflected light of bows bent and arrows drawn in heaven, dividing cloud from starlit cloud; stately shapes of infinite sorrow or exuberant joy; all beautiful things and all things terrible, all changes of shadow and of light, all mysteries of the darkness and the day, find place and likeness here: deep waters made glad and sad with heavy light that comes and goes; vast expansion of star-shaped blossom and swift aspiration of laborious flame; strong and sweet figures made subject to strange torture in dim lands of bondage; mystic emblems of plumeless bird and semi-human beast; women like the daughters of giants, with immense shapeliness and vigour of lithe large limbs, clothed about with anguish and crowned upon with triumph; their deep bosoms pressed against the scales of strong dragons, their bodies and faces strained together in the delight of monstrous caresses; similitudes of all between angel and reptile that divide illimitable spaces of air or defile the overlaboured furrows upon earth.
It is easier to do complete justice to the minor prophecies than to give any not inadequate conception of this great book, so vast in reach, so repellent in style, so rich, vehement, and subtle beyond all other works of Blake; the chosen crown and treasured fruit of his strange labours. Extracts of admirable beauty might be gathered up on all hands, more eligible it may be than any here given; none I think more serviceable by way of sample and exposition, as far as such can at all be attained.That the book contains much of a personal kind referring in a wild dim manner to his own spiritual actions and passions, is evident: but even by the new light of the Felpham correspondence one can hardly see where to lay finger on these passages and separate them decisively from the loose floating context. Not without regret, yet not with any sense of wilful or scornful oversight, we must be content now to pass on, and put up with this insufficient notice.
The only other engraved work of a prophetic kind did not appear for eighteen years more. This last and least in size, but not in worth, of the whole set is so brief that it may here be read in full.