Part 24

[45] The words "female" and "reflex" are synonymous in all Blake's writings. What is feminine in its material symbol is derivative in its spiritual significance; "there is no such thing in eternity as a female will;" for in eternity substances lose their shadows, and essence puts off accident. The "frowning babe" of the last stanzas is of course the same or such another as the one whose birth is first spoken of; not the latter female growth born in the earthly house of art, but genius itself, whose likeness is terrible and unlovely at first sight to the run of men, filling them with affright and scandal, with wonder and the repellent sense that a new and strange thing is brought into the world.

[46] It seems not impossible that this series may have been intended, in its complete form, to bear the title of _Ideas of Good and Evil_, which we find loosely attached to the general MS. When the designer broke it up into different sets, this name would naturally have been abandoned.

[47] Of Blake's prose other samples are extant besides the notes on art published in the second volume of the _Life and Selections_. These strays are for the most part, as far as I have seen, mere waifs of weed and barren drift. One fragment, not without some grace and thoughtfulness curiously used up and thrown away, is an allegory of "the Gods which came from Fear," of Shame born of the "poisonous seed" of pride, and such things; written much in the manner of those early Ossianic studies which dilate and deform the volume of _Poetical Sketches_: perhaps composed (though properly never composed at all) about the same time. Another, a sort of satire on critics and "philosophers," seems to emulate the style of Sterne in his intervals of lax and dull writing; in execution it is some depths below the baby stories of little Malkin, whose ghost might well have blushed rejection of the authorship. The fragment on _Laocoon_ is a mere cento of stray notes on art which reaffirm in a chaotic and spluttering manner Blake's theories that the only real prayer is study of art, the only real praise, its practice; that excellence of art, not moral virtue, is the aim and the essence of Christianity; and much more of the same sort. These notes, crammed into every blank space and corner of the engraved page, burst out as it were and boil over, disconnected but irrepressible, in a feverish watery style. All really good or even passable prose of Blake's seems to be given in the volume of _Selections_.

[48] It should not be overlooked that this part of his work was left unfinished, all but untouched, by the author of the _Life_. Without as long a study and as deep a sympathy as his, it would seem to any follower, however able and zealous, the most toilsome as well as the most sterile part of the task in hand. The fault therefore lies with chance or fate alone. Less than I have said above could not here be said; and more need not be. I was bound at starting to register my protest against the contempt and condemnation which these books have incurred, thinking them as I do not unworthy the trouble of commentary; but no word was designed to depreciate the careful and admirable labour which has completed a monument cut short with the life of the sculptor, joined now in death to the dead whom he honoured.

[49] Something like this may be found in a passage of Werner translated by Mr. Carlyle, but mixed with much of meaner matter, and debased by a feebleness and a certain spiritual petulance proper to a man so much inferior. The German mystic, though ingenious and laborious, is also tepid, pretentious, insecure; half terrified at his own timid audacities, half choked by the fumes of his own alembic. He labours within a limit, not fixed indeed, but never expansive; narrowing always at one point as it widens at another: his work is weak in the head and the spine; he ventures with half a heart and strikes with half a hand; throughout his myth of Phosphorus he goes halting and hinting; not ungracefully, nay with a real sense of beauty, but never like a man braced up for the work requisite; he labours under a dull devotion and a cloudy capacity. Above all, he can neither speak nor do well, being no artist or prophet; and so makes but a poor preacher or essayist. The light he shows is thick and weak; Blake's light, be it meteor or star, rises with the heat and radiance of fire or the morning.

[50] A word in passing may here be spared to the singular MS. of _Tiriel_. This little poem or mythical episode is evidently a growth of the crude Ossianic period; in style it is somewhat weak and inadequate to any grave or subtle expression of thought: a few noticeable lines intervene, but the general execution is heavy, faint, and rough even for a sketch. Here however (if I am not incorrect in referring it to a date earlier than the earliest of the prophetic books) we may see the dull dawn of a day full of fiery presage, of the light and vapour of tempestuous revelation. The name of Tiriel king of the West, father of a rebellious race of children who perish by his curse, hardly reappears once as "Thiriel" the cloud-born son of Urizen; Har and Heva, the gentler father and mother of the great eastern family, who in the _Song of Los_ are seen flying before the windy flames of a broad-blown sunset, chased over Asia with fire and sword by the divine tyrant and his tributary kings, are here seen forsaken of their sons in extreme and childish age, but tended by "Mutha" their mother; "they are holy and forgiving, filled with loving mercy, forgetting the offences of their most rebellious children." Into the story or subject-matter we need not go far; but it is worth notice that the series of twelve designs classified in the catalogue, section B., No. 156, pp. 253-4 of vol. 2, must evidently (as is there half suggested) be a set of illustrations to this _Tiriel_. In one of these any reader will recognize the serpentine hair which at her father's imprecation rose and hissed around the brows of "Hela" (_Tiriel_, ch. 6); but these designs have as evidently fallen out of order; thus the one lettered (_k_) appears to illustrate the very first lines of the poem; and others seem equally misarranged. In this faint allegory of the blind discrowned king with his two brothers, the mad invulnerable giant of the woods and the fettered dotard dwelling in caves, some fresh incomplete symbol is discernible of tyranny and error, of strength made insane or perverse and weakness made cruel or imbecile by oppression of the spirit or the flesh; the "eloquent" outcast oppressor might then be the uninspired intellect, against whose errors and tyrannies its own children revolt, and perish by the curse of their perishing father and mother, blind reason and powerless faith: but from such shallow and sandy soil the conjectural Muse of commentary can reap little worth her pains to garner, and at every sweep of her sickle must risk being blinded by the sand blown into her eyes. Some stray verses might be gathered up, perhaps worth a place in the gleaner's loose sheaf; such as these:

"And aged Tiriel stood and said: Where does the thunder sleep? Where doth he hide his terrible head? and his swift and fiery daughters, Where do they shroud their fiery wings and the terrors of their hair?"

Anything better worth citation than such crude sonorous snatches of lyric style I have not found here, except in chap. vii., where the dying Tiriel lays his final curse on Har--"weak mistaken father of a lawless race," whose "laws and Tiriel's wisdom end together in a curse." Here, in words afterwards variously repeated and enlarged, he appeals against the laws of mere animal life, the narrowed senses and material bondage of men upon earth; against unnatural training and abstinence through which "milk is cut off from the weeping mouth with difficulty and pain," when first "the little lids are lifted and the little nostrils opened;" against "hypocrisy, the idiot's wisdom and the wise man's folly," by which men are "compelled to pray repugnant and to handle the immortal spirit" till like Tiriel they become as subtle serpents in a paradise which they consume fruit by fruit and flower by flower till at its fall they themselves are left desolate. Thus too he inveighs against faith in matter and "respect of persons" under their perishable and finite forms: "Can wisdom be put in a silver rod or love in a golden bowl? is the son of a king warmed without wool? or does he cry with a voice of thunder? does he look upon the sun and laugh, or stretch his little hands into the depths of the sea?" Much of this has been half erased, probably with a view to remoulding the whole: for here alone does anything in tone or thought recall the nobler mysticism of Blake's later writings.

[51] Before we dismiss the matter from view, it may be permissible to cast up in a rough and rapid way the sum of Blake's teaching in these books, if only because this was also the doctrine or moral of his entire life and life's work. I will therefore, as leave has been given, append a note extracted from a manuscript now before me, which attempts to embody and enforce, if only by dint of pure and simple exposition, the pantheistic evangel here set forth in so strange a fashion. Thus at least I read the passage; if misinterpreted, my correspondent has to thank his own laxity of expression. "These poems or essays at prophecy" (he says) "seem to me to represent in an obscure and forcible manner the real naked question to which all theologies and all philosophies must in the end be pared down. Strained and filtered clear of extraneous matter, pruned of foreign fruit and artificial foliage, this radical question lies between Theism and Pantheism. When the battles of the creeds have been all fought out, this battle will remain to fight. I do not see much likelihood on either hand of success or defeat. Faith and reason, evidence and report, are alike inadequate to decide the day. This prophet or that prophet, this God or that God, is not here under debate. Histories, religions, all things born of rumour or circumstance, accident or change, are out of court; are, for the moment, of necessity set aside. Gentile or Jew, Christian or Pagan, Eastern or Western, can but be equal to us--for the moment. No single figure, no single book, stands out for special judgment or special belief. On the right hand, let us say (employing the old figure of speech), is the Theist--the 'man of God,' if you may take his own word for it; the believer in a separate or divisible deity, capable or conceivably capable of existence apart from ours who conceive of it; a conscious and absolute Creator. On the left hand is the Pantheist; to whom such a creed is mainly incredible and wholly insufficient His creed is or should be much like that of your prophet here;" (I must observe in passing that my correspondent seems so unable to conceive of a comment apart from the text, an exponent who is not an evangelist,--so inclined to confuse the various functions of critic and of disciple, and assume that you must mean to preach or teach whatever doctrine you may have to explain--in a word, so obtuse or perverse on this point that he might be taken for a professional man-of-letters or sworn juryman of the press; but I will hope better things of him, though anonymous;) "and that creed, as I take it, is simply enough expressible in Blake's own words, or deducible from them; that 'all deities reside in the human breast'; that except humanity there is no divine thing or person. Clearly therefore, in the eyes of a Theist, he lies open to the charge of atheism or antitheism. The real difference is perhaps this; God appears to a Theist as the root, to a Pantheist as the flower of things. It does not follow logically or actually that to this latter all things are alike. For us (he might say), for us, within the boundaries of time and space, evil and good do really exist, and live no empirical life--for a certain time, and within a certain range. 'There is no God unless man can become God.' That is no saying for an Atheist. 'There is no man unless the child can become a man'; is that equivalent to a denial of manhood? But if a man is to be born into the world, the mother must abstain from the drugs that produce abortion, the child from strong meats and drinks, the man from poisons. So it is in the spiritual world; tyranny and treachery, indolence and dulness, cannot but impede and impair the immutable law of nature and necessary growth. These and their like must be and must pass away; the eternal body of things must change. As the fanatic abstains through fear of God or of hell, the free-thinker abstains from what he sees or thinks to be evil (_i. e._, adverse or alien to his nature at its best) through respect for what he is and reverence for what he may be. Pantheism therefore is no immoral creed, and cannot be, if only because it is based upon faith in nature and rooted in respect for it. By faith in sight it attains to sight through faith. It follows that pure Theism is more immediately the contrary of this belief, more unacceptable and more delusive in the eyes of its followers, than any scheme of doctrine or code of revelation. These, as we see by your Blake" (again), "the Pantheist may seize and recast in the mould of his own faith. But Theism, but the naked distinct figure of God, whether or not he assume the nature of man, so long as this is mere assumption and not the essence of his being--the clothes and not the body, the body and not the soul--this is to him incredible, the source of all evil and error. Grant such a God his chance of existence, what reason has the Theist to suppose or what right to assume his wisdom or his goodness? why this and not that? whence his acceptance and whence his rejection of anything that is? 'Shall the clay demand of the potter, why hast thou made me thus?' Shall it not? and why? Of whom else should a man ask? and if sure of his God, what better should he do? Theism is not expansive, but exclusive: and the creeds begotten or misbegotten on this lean body of belief are 'Satanic' in the eyes of a Pantheist, as his faith is in the eyes of their followers." There is much more, but it were superfluous to mix a narcotic over strong: and in pursuit of his flying "faith" my friend's ideal "Pantheist" is apt to become heretical.

[52] That is, woman has become subject to oppression of customs; suffers violence at the hands of marriage laws and other such condemnable things. "Emancipation" and the cognate creeds of which later days have heard so much never had a more violent and vehement preacher. Not love, not the plucking of the flower, but error, fear, submission to custom and law, is that which "defiles" a woman in the sight of our prophet.

[53] Even thus told, the myth is plain enough; a word or two of briefer translation may serve also to light up future allusions. "I plucked Leutha's flower," says Oothoon in the prelude of this poem, "and I was not ashamed;" the flower that brings forth a child, which nature permits and desires her to gather; Leutha is the spirit emblematic of physical pleasure, of sensual impulse and indulgence, from whom comes the "loose Bible" of Mahomet (_Song of Los_). But crossing the seas eastward to find her lover, the strong enslaved spirit of Europe, she, type of womanhood and freedom, is caught and chained as he by the force of conventional error and tyrannous habit, which makes her seem impure in his eyes; so they sit bound back to back, afraid to love; the eagles that tear her flesh are emblems of her lover's scorn; vainly, a virgin at heart, she appeals to all the fair and fearless face of nature against her rival, the prurient modesty of custom, a virgin in face, a harlot at heart; against unnatural laws of restraint upon youths and maidens, whose inevitable outcome is in the licentious alternative not less unnatural; he will not answer but with vain and vague lamentation, will not turn himself and love her for all her crying: the mystery of things and thoughts, the tyranny of times and laws, is heavy upon them to the end. All forms of life but these are free to be fair and happy: only from east to west the prison-houses are full of the wailing of women.

[54] Night, or the darkness of worlds yet undivided and chaotic, is always typified by Blake as a "forest" dark with involved and implicated leaf or branch. Compare "The Tiger."

[55] Along this page a serpent of imperious build rears the strong and sinuous length of his dusky glittering body, and spits forth keen undulating fire.

[56] It is possible that Blake intended here some grotesque emblematic reference to the riots witnessed by himself, in which Lord Mansfield's house and MSS. were destroyed by fire. At all events, here alone is there any visible allusion to a matter of recent history.

[57] That is, being unable to reconcile qualities, to pass beyond the legal and logical grounds of good and evil into the secret places where they are not. The whole argument hinges on this difference between Pantheism, which can, and Theism, which cannot, and is therefore no surer or saner than a mere religion based on Church or Bible, nor less incompetent to include, to expound, to redeem the world.

[58] Compare, for the doctrine as to delusion and jealousy being _feminine_ principles (destructive by their weakness, not by their strength), this strange expostulation with God, recalling the tone of earlier prophets:--

"Why art thou silent and invisible, Father of Jealousy? Why dost thou hide thyself in clouds From every searching eye?

Why darkness and obscurity In all thy words and laws, That none dare eat the fruit but from The wily serpent's jaws? Or is it because Jealousy[A] Gives feminine applause?"

[A](This word, half rubbed off in the MS., may be "secrecy"; and the point would remain the same.)

[59] Leutha, the spirit or guardian goddess of natural pleasure and physical beauty, is sacrificed as a ransom to redeem the spirit or guardian god of prohibitive law or judicial faith; to him she is sacrificed that through her he may be saved. Thus, in the _Visions of the Daughters of Albion_, the maiden who "plucks Leutha's flower," who trusts and indulges Nature, has her "virgin mantle torn in twain by the terrible thunders" of religious and moral law: woman was sacrificed and man "fast bound in misery" during the eighteen centuries--through which the mother goddess lay asleep, to weep over her children at her waking; as in the Prophecy of _Europe_ Time the father and Space the mother of men are afflicted and spellbound until the sleep of faith be slept out. There again the emblematic name of Leutha recurs in passing.

[60] That is of course the reprobate according to theology, such as the heretical prophet himself: the class of men upon which is laid the burden of the sins of the elect, as Satan's upon Rintrah in the myth.

[61] This line appears to have been too much for the writer in the _Life_, who here breaks his quotation short off by the head, annihilating with a quite ingenious violence at once grammar, sense, and sound. It is but a small nut to have broken his critical tooth upon; the evident meaning being simply this: that within the centre of everything living by animal or vegetative life there is by way of kernel something imperishable; the fleshly or material life of form contains the infinite spiritual life, lurking under leaf or latent under limb: man and flower and beast have each the separate secret of a soul or divisible indestructible spirit (compare even the _Songs of Innocence_); but while the earthly and fleshly form remains there stand as wardens of the ways the two material giants, Strength and Force, binding the soul in the body with chains of flesh and sex, the spirit in the petals with bonds of vegetable form, fashioned fastenings of chalice and anther, sprinklings of dusty gold on leaf or pistil; always, without hammer or rivet of Vulcanic forging, able to hold fast Prometheus in blind bondage to the flesh and form of things; so that except by inspiration there can be no chance of seeing what does exist and work in man or beast or flower; only by vision or by death shall one be brought safe past the watch guarded by the sentinels of material form and bodily life, the crude tributary "Afrites" (as in the Aeschylean myth) of the governing power which fashions and fetters life in men and things. And thus this, the singing of birds and dancing of flowers, the springing of colour and kindling of music at each day's dawn, is a symbol--"a vision of the lamentation of Beulah over Ololon"--of the dwellers in that milder and moonlight-coloured world of reflex mortal spirits over the imperishable influences of a higher spiritual world, which descending upon earth must be clothed with material mystery and become subject to sensuous form and likeness in the body of the shadow of death. This glorious passage, almost to be matched for wealth of sound, for growth and gradation of floral and musical splendour, for mastery of imperial colour, even against the great interlude or symphony of flowers in _Maud_, was not cast at random into the poem, but has also a "soul" or meaning in it--though the ways of seeing and understanding are somewhat too closely guarded by "Og and Anak." Reading it as an excerpt indeed one need hardly wish to see beyond the form or material figure. That "innumerable dance" of tree and flower and herb is not unfit for comparison with the old [Greek: anerithmon gelasma] of the waves of the sea.

[62] One may fear that some such symbolic stuff as this is really at the root of the admirable poem christened by its editor with the name of _Broken Love_: which I gravely suspect was meant for insertion in some fresh instalment of prophetic rhapsody by way of complement or sequel to _Jerusalem_. The whole tone of it, and especially that of some rejected stanzas, is exactly in the elemental manner of the scenes (where scene is none) between Albion, Jerusalem, and Vala the Spectre of Jerusalem (books 1st and 2nd):--

"Thou hast parted from my side-- Once thou wast a virgin bride: Never shalt thou a true love find-- My Spectre follows thee behind.

"When my love did first begin, Thou didst call that love a sin; Secret trembling, night and day, Driving all my loves away."

These two stanzas (recalling so many other passages where Blake has enforced his doctrines as to the fatal tendency of the fears and jealousies, the abstinence and doubt, produced by theoretic virtue and hatched by artificial chastity) stood originally as third and fourth in the poem. They are cancelled in Blake's own MS.; but in that MS. the poem ends as follows, in a way (I fear) conclusive as to the justice of my suggestion; I mark them conjecturally, as I suppose the dialogue to stand, by way of helping the reader to some glimpse of the point here and there.

"When wilt thou return and view My loves and them to life renew? When wilt thou return and live? When wilt thou pity as I forgive?"

"Never, never, I return; Still for victory I burn. Living, thee alone I'll have; And when dead I'll be thy grave.

"Through the heaven and earth and hell Thou shalt never, never quell: I will fly and thou pursue; Night and morn the flight renew."

(This I take to be the jealous lust of power and exclusive love speaking through the incarnate "female will." See _Jerusalem_ again.)

"And I, to end thy cruel mocks, Annihilate thee on the rocks, And another form create To be subservient to my fate.

"Till I turn from female love And root up the infernal grove, I shall never worthy be To step into eternity."