CHAPTER IX

THE BIG PROPHETIC BOOKS

Blake's "three years' slumber," as he called it, hypnotized, I presume, by Hayley's lulling kindness, were amongst the most important in his life. If he slumbered, yet his dreams were unusually active; and, since feelings are more intense in dreams than when wide-awake, it is not surprising that Blake's inner life was in a violent commotion. Any stirring of his feeling immediately set his supersensual faculty vigorously to work. Visible persons and things were tracked back to invisible principalities and powers, his cosmic consciousness quickened, the need to create possessed him, and he found relief only in giving rhythmic expression to his spiritual reading of mundane things.

This was the mental process that we saw at work in his _French Revolution_ and _America_. Now it was moving among the persons and things connected with his own life; but it is not less important, for the same mighty agencies govern individuals and nations alike, and link them up together, so that they are interchangeable manifestations of eternal laws and states.

The practical outcome was _Milton_, _Jerusalem_, and a revision of _The Four Zoas_, begun some time about 1795. These claim our close attention, for they contain, for those who have patience to probe their forbidding exterior, the treasure of one who had run the road of excess, not of profligacy but rebellion, and now reached the palace of wisdom.

On April 25th, 1803, Blake wrote to Thomas Butts: "I have written this poem (_Milton_) from immediate dictation." Later in the same year (July 6th), he writes: "I can praise it, since I dare not pretend to be any other than the secretary; the authors are in Eternity. I consider it the grandest Poem that this world contains. Allegory addressed to the intellectual powers, while it is altogether hidden from the corporeal understanding, is my definition of the most sublime Poetry." In the Preface to _Milton_ Blake asserts, in effect, that Shakespeare and Milton were shackled by the Daughters of Memory, who must become the Daughters of Inspiration before work of the highest creative order can be produced. Here he regards Memory as a hindrance, and comparing the Preface with the above quotations, we learn that he strove to put Memory aside while the authors in Eternity were dictating to him.

But in the _Jerusalem_ there are, scattered throughout, references to what he calls the Halls of Los, familiar to readers of mystical literature as the Akashic or Etheric records, and called by Yeats the great Memory.

"All things acted on Earth are seen in the bright Sculptures of Los's Halls, and every Age renews its powers from these Works."[4]

Here Memory serves to renew an age, and then becomes the recipient of the age's inspired works.

These passages, taken together, open up again the great questions of Inspiration, Memory, Creation, Mechanism, and since each one of these words is now made to stand for differing conceptions, they are ambiguous, and we may not use them without first defining sharply what we mean. We speak of the true poet like Shakespeare, the true mystic like Blake, the true saint like Catherine of Siena, and the true Book like the Bible as all being inspired, yet in each case the inspiration is of a different order. The common element which justifies the one word is originality. Shakespeare's inspiration depends on the great Memory, on his own complex nature, and his consuming spirit of observation; but at the moment of his inspiration, all these things seem in abeyance, and the words well up as if a spirit not himself had given them to him. His originality consists in the unique impression that his rich understanding gives of the elements supplied by the Past and Present, but not in the creation of a new element. The same may be said of Dante, Milton, Shelley.

The inspiration of the Bible contains all these elements, which constitute its purely human side, but there is something else which has given it its supreme power in all ages. The writers of the Bible remember and observe and think, but they also utter themselves as they are moved by the Holy Ghost. It is this last mysterious happening that inspires the creative element. The inspired poet has aided his observation and experience by drawing on the great Memory, the inspired Bible has added to the great Memory something that was not in it before. The poet can renew us, yet keeps us within the circle of the cosmic consciousness. The Bible can inspire us and lift us out of the circle far above the seven heavens of the cosmos. And that is our rescue from that nightmare of eternal recurrence which set Nietzsche's fine brain tottering down to its foundations.

The inspiration of the poet is general, and that of the Bible unique; but there still remains a special kind to which Blake, like many other mystics, laid claim.

When Blake was perplexed at Felpham, he referred to his spiritual guides, who were in their turn subject to God. They, according to him, were the real authors and inspirers of his prophetic books. This sort of language was rare in the eighteenth century, but is quite familiar to readers of theosophical books, ancient or modern.

They teach that there are seven planes of consciousness from the physical to the mahaparanirvanic, which together make up the cosmos. The two highest planes are beyond the reach of human conception; but there are not a few to-day who claim to have attained to the fifth nirvanic plane. Here the consciousness is so finely developed, and its vibrations respond so readily, that the subject comes into touch with other intelligences, and often submits to them entirely for guidance.

In St Paul's day this teaching was familiar at Ephesus in the form of gnosticism. He did not disbelieve in the reality of the seven planes, but he disagreed with the gnostics in their blind faith in the trustworthiness of the guides. He believed that many of them were so evil that when Christians became conscious of them, they needed the whole armour of God to protect them against their wiles. Here is the difference between the Christian and pantheistic teaching. The pantheist thinks that because a thing is spiritual it is therefore holy and good; Christianity believes in fallen spiritual beings. The pantheist believes that to reach the nirvanic plane is to attain to holiness; Christianity says that all the planes of the cosmos are tainted, and if one reached even the seventh, one would still have need of cleansing. Theosophy keeps one for ever within the cosmic circle; Christianity lifts one beyond the circle into the ascended Christ, and teaches that one is safe on the different subtle planes of consciousness only while one abides in Him. Doubtless there are good guides, but the danger is great because it is so difficult to try the spirits.

Blake here as elsewhere wavers between the two views. With certain reservations he dips on the Christian side. He travels round the cosmos, but in a spiral; and the top of his spiral--his Jacob's Ladder--reaches not to the seventh plane but to the Throne of God, which is far above the charmed circle. Hence man is able to climb beyond the defiled cosmos into the pure heaven of God. That is his redemption.

Blake's vision, then, ranging freely among the planes of consciousness, gives him access to the great Memory which is within the cosmos; and at rare moments he goes beyond the cosmos, and then his words proceed from the highest inspiration.

In appraising the value of Blake's defamation of the Greeks' inspiration, one must remember that he was not a profound Grecian. His studies with Hayley cannot have carried him into the heart of the Greek genius. When he limits its inspiration to Memory, there is no scholar, I imagine, that would agree with him. The Greeks did make an invaluable contribution to the world's memory; and while one source of their inspiration came from the past, we must further admit that it was the past wedded to the present which actually produced something new, that is, of the creative order.

Blake's own inspiration when it came from his spiritual guides is not of such a high order as the Greek's at his highest. The so-called guides, if we may trust St Paul, are inside of the cosmos, like the great Memory, and their source of wisdom is from this world, which is the arena of the Church in her militant course. It is only by watching her that they are able to get glimpses of the manifold wisdom of God. Hence to place oneself under their guidance is a hindrance to receiving that highest inspiration that comes direct from the Spirit of God.

Blake was wrong, too, in his efforts to shut off Memory. Of course he could not succeed. Every page of _Jerusalem_ shows that Memory was at work though shackled. Memory alone could have made it coherent and a luminous whole, as it had made _Paradise Lost_; but it was not free enough to keep its different scenes, often very beautiful, from flying far apart, and the imagination grows weary in trying to capture the complete picture.

The one thing in these poems that we can positively affirm to be new is their symbolism, and that cannot be defended. Symbolism is beautiful only as it is universal, or can become so. It should be one language against many tongues. But Blake's is not even the tongue of a nation or a tribe. It is his own private invention, and, incidentally, uncouth, forbidding, unintelligible, and in actual fact a little insane. It is true that we can learn his symbolism after much labour; but a beautiful and catholic symbolism is the one thing that we have a right to understand, without learning, through the imagination, which Blake always affirmed to be divine.

Blake could not afford to indulge these idiosyncrasies. Like all mystics, he found it difficult to adjust the inner things that were real to him to the outer that were but a shadow. Since most people find the outer things are the substantial reality, they are not only moving in a different world from that of the mystic, but they are puzzled to know when the letter of his statements is to be taken.

Ezekiel says that he ate his meat baked with cow's dung; Blake, that Hayley, when he could not act upon his wife, hired a villain to bereave his life. We know sufficient of Blake's relation to Hayley to understand that Hayley's murderous purpose was towards Blake's spiritual life, not his corporeal, and that he tried to prevail on Blake through his wife. We may hope also that Ezekiel did not really eat "abominable flesh," or lie for a preposterously long time on his left side. We mention the mystic's hazy treatment of external actions, to explain Blake; but we hope the mystic of the future will be more considerate of what his words are likely to convey to others, and then clear them of all ambiguity.

Blake should have guarded himself perpetually here, but was too proud or wilful to do so. Hence with his merging of inward and outward things, and using the same language for both, added to his private symbolism, what should have been his greatest poems have become submerged continents in which you may discover endless treasures only if you dare to dive, and can hold your breath under water.

Let us dive for the sake of understanding the growth of Blake's mind.

I will take _Milton_ separately, and _The Four Zoas_ and _Jerusalem_ together.

Blake's feelings towards Milton had always been divided. He saw in him the highest order of poetic genius, but also, ominously present, the spirit of reason (Urizen) enthroned in the wrong place, and a servile love of the classics that placed him under the heel of the Daughters of Memory. To change the metaphor, Milton's Pegasus was ridden by Urizen.

Blake's final criticism of Swedenborg was that he drew the line in the wrong place between heaven and hell; and his amendment was to take his two contraries and marry them. From that time forward his first question in trying a man's religion was, Where do you draw the line? Popular religion always draws it in the wrong place. Good things are reckoned evil and evil things good. But as Blake continued to put his question to the world's great spirits, he counted twenty-seven different answers that had produced twenty-seven different churches, each church having its own particular heaven and corresponding hell. He had hoped to unite all these contraries as successfully as he had Swedenborg's; but when he came to Christ's division, finding that nothing would unite His sheep and goats, and His wheat and tares, he henceforth took Christ's dividing line as absolute, and the line of any other as right only when it coincided with Christ's.

Applying this test to Milton, Blake saw that he wrongly divided heaven and hell, and that this fatal mistake necessarily affected the characters of his Messiah and Satan. Messiah, who should have stood for the supreme poetic genius, was the embodiment of restrictive reason, and Satan, who by immemorial tradition is absolute evil, was endowed with a marvellous imagination that inevitably brought with it certain virtues. When Blake inquired for the root cause of this perversion in Milton, he traced it to the fact that Reason had largely usurped the place of Imagination. He then took one more customary step. He set Milton in his imagination in the light of the eternal order. Seen in this perspective, the prime fact about him appeared that he had fallen in his encounter with Urizen and come under his dominion, and the last was that his redemption would be effected only by going down into self-annihilation and death with Christ, and then rising again with the life of pure imagination. Once imagination (Los) is supreme, then reason (Urizen) falls into his proper place, and the return into the eternal order is accomplished.

During Blake's stay at Felpham, Milton was continually present in the minds of both himself and Hayley. Hence he was for Blake an actual person in the Felpham drama, Mr and Mrs Blake and Hayley being with him the chief characters, and Skofield and his confederates the rabble. Then passing, as in _The French Revolution_, from actual persons and events to the unseen things of which they were the temporal manifestation, Blake saw each person in his eternal state, and as a symbol of that state, and he lost sight of the earthly puppets, as they were merged into their monstrous and eternal counterparts. The transition made, the poem is no longer intelligible to the corporeal understanding, and Hayley might read it a hundred times without suspecting that he was the villain of the piece.

The characters are Los, Urizen, Palamabron and Rintrah, sons of Los, Satan, and Skofield, who keeps his own name. Satan for a time is Hayley, Palamabron by turns Blake and Wesley, Rintrah, Whitefield. This is a seemingly harsh judgment of poor Hayley, akin to Michael Angelo's treatment of Biagio da Cesena; but the harshness is humorously softened when Satan is discovered decked with half the graces. He is kind, meek, humble, and complains gently when his kindness fails to call forth gratitude. He is the personification of Hayley's virtues, which together make up (hypocritic) holiness.

Blake had made the startling discovery, which Nietzsche has popularized in our time, that the graces in wrong places are vices. Nietzsche went on to make the absurd assertions that humility and pity are the virtues of the herd and are never right in any place. Blake believed that the graces coupled with insight and understanding took on a new quality which made them divine.

To give examples: Blake, while submissive to Hayley, was humble, but at the risk of his birthright.

Hayley, exerting himself to find rich neighbours to sit for Blake to paint in miniature, was kind, but he was suffocating his genius.

To the scribes and Pharisees, Christ meek would have been Christ weak.

Modesty in one who does not know that all things that live are holy is prudery.

To pity oneself or another for the troubles that come through slackness is effeminacy. The true virtue here is to damn. Hence the right place for a man clothed from head to foot in hypocritic graces is hell, his right name is Satan.

But when a man has stripped himself of his virtues, and annihilating himself goes down with Christ into death, then he rises again into newness of life and vision, and the graces of the new life, still called by their old names, but now in their right places, are flaming, beautiful, irresistible.

Once Blake saw his man in his setting in eternity, he escaped from his initial resentment, and he could write calmly to Hayley and subscribe himself, "Your devoted Will Blake."

I may remark that Blake did not think he had invented new values, like Nietzsche, in his indictment of the virtues. His language was his own, but his conclusions were precisely the same as those of Wesley, Whitefield, Bunyan, St Paul, when they, in effect, speak of man's righteousness as filthy rags, and of his need to be clothed with the _living_ righteousness of Christ before his garment can be reckoned beautiful and clean.

A few quotations from _Milton_ may be given as Blake's final word on Hayley. I will write Hayley for Satan, and Blake for Palamabron.

"Blake, reddening like the Moon in an eclipse, Spoke, saying, You know Hayley's mildness and his self-imposition; Seeming a brother, being a tyrant, even thinking himself a brother While he is murdering the just."

"How should Hayley know the duties of another?"

"Hayley wept, And mildly cursing Blake, him accused of crimes himself had wrought."

"So Los said: Henceforth, Blake, let each his own station Keep; nor in pity false, nor in officious brotherhood, where None needs be active."

"But Hayley, returning to his Mills (for Blake had served The Mills of Hayley as the easier task), found all confusion, And back returned to Los, not filled with vengeance, but with tears. Himself convinced of Blake's turpitude."

"Blake prayed: O God protect me from my friends."

"For Hayley, flaming with Rintrah's fury hidden beneath his own mildness, Accused Blake before the Assembly of ingratitude and malice."

"When Hayley, making to himself Laws from his own identity, Compelled others to serve him in moral gratitude and submission."

"Leutha said: 'Entering the doors of Hayley's brain night after night, Like sweet perfumes, I stupefied the masculine perceptions, And kept only the feminine awake; hence rose his soft Delusory love to Blake.'"

"The Gnomes cursed Hayley bitterly, To do unkind thinks in kindness, with power armed; to say The most irritating things in the midst of tears and love-- These are the stings of the Serpent!"

These are enough to show Blake's method, and his remorseless understanding of Hayley. There is present an irresistible touch of humour which preserves them from being too bitter.

For the rest, the poem narrates Milton's encounter with Urizen; his going down into self-annihilation and death; his judgment, and final redemption as he ascends to the heaven of the imagination. Milton's heaven is then the heaven of Jesus, and his hell remains its irreconcilable contrary.

In this poem Blake's full-grown mythology appears. The mythical persons, places, states are ominously present; but since they appear with much more particularity in _The Four Zoas_ and _Jerusalem_, I may pass to them to extract what is necessary for understanding the mature Blake.

_Jerusalem_ and _The Four Zoas_ should be studied together. The latter was begun about 1795, and rewritten at Felpham. The early prophetic books--_Urizen_, _Los_--stand as preliminary sketches to this large poem. They are woven into it with scarcely a change of word.

Blake's great scheme is mainly in line with historical Christianity, which of course is catholicism. He starts with the eternal order and unity. Without attempting to explain the origin of evil, he narrates the fall out of unity and order into diversity and disorder, and how as a consequence of the fall creation appears. He is obliged to use the word "creation," but there is no real creation in his cosmogony. There are only three possible theories of creation. Creation from within God, which is pantheism, and makes the universe an emanation; creation from something outside of God, which is dualism, and not likely to be accepted in the West; and creation out of nothing, which is catholicism. Blake learnt from Swedenborg the emanative theory. Swedenborg tried to avoid the pantheistic conclusion of his foundation principle, and believed that he had succeeded. His doctrine of the human God was certainly fine, and nearly catholic. Blake sways between the two. His doctrine of creation is pantheistic, but his affirmation that "God doth a human form display to those that dwell in realms of day" is splendidly catholic, and so, on the whole, is his doctrine of the fall. Since Blake's day the problem has become enormously complicated, because we have to take account of the vestiges in man's body of an animal ancestry, and the still more infallible signs in his soul of a divine origin. Perhaps we shall eventually all come to believe in both evolution and a special creation to account for man's unique place in the universe. At any rate a denial of the fall involves a definite departure from historical Christianity, and it is important to see that it was an integral part of Blake's scheme and without it that scheme falls to pieces. Not that he pressed the letter of the Adam and Eve story. It stood for him as a divinely simple witness of an ancient simplicity and unity from which man has departed by disobedience and the assertion of a life and a self independent of God. His way back into unity is by the cross of Jesus Christ, where the self-hood dies, and the day of judgment, which finally separates in him the gold from the dross, and presents him in his divine humanity perfect before the human-divine God.

Between these two stupendous facts--the fall and the redemption--Blake finds a place to say all that he wishes about the manifold things of heaven and earth and hell.

The unity from which man departs is made up of four mighty ones--the Four Zoas--who are the four beasts of the Apocalypse, taken from the four beasts of Ezekiel, who probably appropriated four of the many monstrous symbolical beasts of Assyria.

Blake invented names for them. Of these--Urizen, Urthona-Los, Luvah, and Tharmas--Urizen and Los are by far the clearest conceived figures. Perfect unity is maintained so long as Los is supreme. Reason is important in its right place. It becomes an evil when it usurps the place of imagination and thinks it can see as far. The essence of the fall is disorder. Redemption restores order, which is unity. Science alone breaks down because it is built up on observation and induction. Its observation is insufficient, for it is the observation of a shrunk universe. It gathers its materials through the five senses. But there are other avenues in regenerated man. If science were built up on the observation or vision of the whole instead of a very small part, it would become divine science and coincident with religion.

Religion breaks down whether built on nature or experience. If on nature, it is nature only as seen through limited vision; if on experience, it is the experience of fallen man, and therefore it is of vital force only when it transcends nature and becomes super-natural, and rests on a revelation not from man's experience, however deep, but from God.

Deism was the particular time-heresy of Blake's day. He came into direct contact with it through his friend Tom Paine. Deistic religion, to be adequate for man's need, must rest on perfect nature and perfect experience. Paine, Voltaire, and Rousseau, in order to provide these conditions which they saw to be necessary, were driven to make the wild statement, contrary to all experience, that man is naturally holy and good, and if he is not so as we know him, it is because he is everywhere perverted by artificial civilization. Having swallowed this baseless assumption, the rest was easy. They had only like Godwin to manufacture some scheme of political justice, or like Rousseau to arrange a social contract, and then the Millennium would come.

Against all this Blake protested, but without personal heat. He was well aware of Paine's deism, when he helped him to escape to France; and of Voltaire he wrote justly: "He has sinned against the Son of man, and it shall be forgiven him." He protested and he affirmed: "Man is born a Spectre, or Satan, and is altogether an Evil." In this uncompromising affirmation, taken out of the heart of _Jerusalem_, written at the mature age of forty-seven, he cuts himself off sharply, not only from the humanitarian deism of his time, but from the pantheism that invaded so many phases of his thought; he goes beyond the kindly catholic dogma which allows a residuum of original righteousness in fallen man; and, with Whitefield and the Calvinists, denies that he has any righteousness left at all. Hence the utter failure of all empiricism, and the absolute need of Revelation and a supernatural religion. How near he was getting to Dr Johnson! Super-nature, of course, presupposes nature. Blake was obliged to contemplate Nature, and meditate on the ancient difficulties that she still presents.

There are many passages in _The Four Zoas_ to show how alive he was to Nature's loveliness and cruelty. Her cruelty alone convinced him that she could not be taken as a basis for religion. A natural man building his character on a natural religion must be as cruel as his mother. The cruelty finds periodic vent in the lust of war.

Yet why there is so much cruelty in Nature remains a mystery, even to the man who has been driven by her to supernaturalism. Blake maintained that there were two ways of regarding Nature. The natural man, with only five senses to inform him, looks at her and sees a very small portion of the infinite, without ever suspecting the infinite. If he sees her loveliness it will arrest him and hold him fast. The spiritual man, on the contrary, looks not at but through Nature, to the spiritual world of which it is a vegetable mirror.

Here a difficulty presents itself. If Nature be a vegetable mirror of the eternal world, then her cruelties must reflect eternal cruelties. The spiritual man may see Nature far differently from the natural man, but that does not mean that she is merely the picture thrown by man's subjective self on the great abyss. If man were altogether exterminated her cruelties would still continue. Since Blake did not deny all existence to Nature, he was finally obliged to accept the old Christian explanation so finely summed up by St Paul in the eighth chapter of his Epistle to the Romans. Sin and disorder originate in the unseen heavens of the cosmos, where the principalities and powers dwell. Man repeats their sins, and Nature reflects the disorder of their cosmos. Hence there is no redemption in the cosmic heavens. Man enters on his redemption only when he bows the knee to Him who was raised above all heavens. And though "the whole creation groaneth and travaileth together until now," yet at the great manifestation of the sons of God she also "shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God."

If the fall be denied, then the sufferings of nature and man must be referred to evolution, which taken alone solves something, but not the whole, of the ancient and baffling mystery.

All this explains finally why the great Memory to which Blake refers so often in _Jerusalem_ cannot redeem a man. It is shut up in the cosmos. Memory would keep man in the cosmos even though he were reincarnated a million times. Memory's real work, whether for creative art or man's redemption, is in the fact that she gives man standing ground amid the horrors of infinity, until he takes strong hold of Him who overcame the world, and is lifted by Him into His ascension glory beyond the maddening whir of the cosmic wheels.

In these poems we get Blake's final attitude towards sex and passion.

Passion is always fire, and as such it is energy. To-day we are apt to use the word only for sex. In the eighteenth century passion was of any kind, and appetite stood for sex. With Blake, passion is man's vital worth. It may flame along many forbidden avenues, but once it has mounted to the imagination, and is controlled by spirit, then it is the driving force that makes man's works beautiful and his character spontaneous.

The passion of sex is, no doubt, the strongest of all. In the early prophetic books, when Blake was in a fever of rebellion, he affirmed that the sex passion was holy and should be free. Now in these later "prophecies" he still maintains, without wavering, the holiness of sex, but he no longer insists on free-love. He has no place for perversions. He steadily contemplates the normal impulse, and sees it as the principle of life impelling to love and children.

Each man has to solve his own sex problem. Blake's nature was exceptionally full and passionate. We caught a glimpse of him in his early married life panting in the whirlwind of sexual desire. It is probably true that he even contemplated following the patriarchal custom. But inconveniently for man's theories he has it brought home to him sooner or later that no man can live to himself alone. Mrs Blake had her feelings; and though she was the most submissive and loyal of wives, yet she had the instinctive and normal objection to sharing her husband with others. Blake might argue that her objection was unreasonable, and that a truly unselfish woman should rise above such appropriation. But the stubborn fact remains that the woman who does so rise is either indifferent to her husband or abnormal, and Mrs. Blake, at any rate, both loving and unselfish to a heroic degree, was just here inflexible. King Solomon has sung the praises of a virtuous wife. We may take it as granted that her price is far above rubies. But the man who imperils his treasure by putting into practice some theory of free-love, however good that theory may seem in his own eyes, is worse than a fool; and if he cannot endure some inconvenience for the sake of keeping the best gift that Heaven can bestow, he is unworthy to receive it.

Besides these facts, which must have forced their full attention on Blake as the years went by, time was modifying his early notions in other ways. He was an indefatigable worker. When one realizes the immense energy expended in creative work, and that Blake carried this on day after day, one sees that much of the sex energy must pass into another channel to supply the necessary power.

And lastly Blake's own spiritual life worked the change. As he learnt to see through Nature to her antetype, so he learnt to see through physical beauty. A beautiful face was a very transitory manifestation of eternal beauty. When Blake with Plato had pierced through to the unseen fount of beauty, then he was no longer a slave to externals. The passion remained, but transmuted, and legitimate relief was found in the continuous creation of beautiful things. Doubtless many will be disappointed that Blake's experience brought him back to traditional morality; but after all the terms on which he held it--a clean conception of sex, and faithfulness to a woman worthy of all faith--were not so very narrow and rigorous. They are terms that every man ought at once to accept, if ever he should be so fortunate as to have them proposed to him.

The above ideas are culled from _The Four Zoas_ and _Jerusalem_. I do not propose any detailed analysis here. This I have done at some length in _Vision and Vesture_. I will merely point out in conclusion that although these poems seem to ramble all over the universe inside and outside without plan or order, there is, in fact, a connecting link in the figure of Albion.

Albion is the personification of the divine humanity; but regarded individually he is fallen man, bound with "the pale limbs of his Eternal Individuality upon the Rock of Ages." His inward eyes are closed from the Divine Vision, and so he may be reckoned dead in trespasses and sin. Blake pronounced the natural man altogether an evil. But Albion is not an image of total depravity. Within him are all the divine faculties in addition to the five senses without, but they are closed. If he is to be redeemed, there is no need to create new spiritual faculties, but to re-create and make operative those that are already there. Hence Blake drives back of regeneration to the first generation, when man was made in the image and likeness of God. Regeneration is the renewal of the ancient image and likeness through the cross of Christ and the breath of the Divine Spirit.

Albion, like Lazarus, is sick. "He whom Thou lovest is sick. He wanders from his house of Eternity." His "exteriors are become indefinite, opened to pain, in a fierce, hungry void, and none can visit his regions."

Pained and impotent, he laments like Job:

"Oh I am nothing if I enter into judgment with Thee. If Thou withdraw Thy breath I die, and vanish into Hades; If Thou dost lay Thy hand upon me, behold I am silent; If Thou withhold Thy hand I perish like a leaf; Oh I am nothing, and to nothing must return again. If Thou withdraw Thy breath, behold I am oblivion."

"Eternal death haunts all my expectations. Rent from Eternal Brotherhood we die and are no more."

And so Man like a corse

"lay on the Rock. The Sea of Time and Space Beat round the rocks in mighty waves."

Even his limbs "vegetated in monstrous forms of death."

He is opaque and contracted. Yet mercifully there is a limit to his opacity and contraction, named by Blake Satan and Adam; else he would sleep eternally. The capacity remains to hear the Voice of the Son of God and live, and until that moment he is guarded in tender care by the "mild and gentle" Saviour.

It is Heaven's purpose to awake him.

"Then all in great Eternity, which is called the Council of God, Met as one Man, even Jesus--to awake the fallen Man. The fallen Man stretched like a corse upon the oozy rock, Washed with the tide, pale, overgrown with the waves, Just moved with horrible dreams."

Albion like Milton must tread the difficult way of self-annihilation and judgment.

His Day of Judgment is given with marvellous wealth of detail in _The Four Zoas_, Night IX. But there are still finer passages in _Jerusalem_ which lead Albion to his final beatitude.

"Albion said: O Lord, what can I do? my selfhood cruel Marches against Thee ... I behold the visions of my deadly sleep of six thousand years, Dazzling around Thy skirts like a serpent of precious stones and gold; I know it is my self, O my Divine Creator and Redeemer.

Jesus replied: Fear not, Albion; unless I die thou canst not live, But if I die I shall arise again and thou with Me. This is Friendship and Brotherhood, without it Man Is Not.

Jesus said: Thus do Men in Eternity, One for another, to put off by forgiveness every sin.

Albion replied: Cannot Man exist without mysterious Offering of Self for Another? is this Friendship and Brotherhood?

Jesus said: Wouldest thou love one who never died For thee, or ever die for one who had not died for thee? And if God dieth not for Man, and giveth not Himself Eternally for Man, Man could not exist, for Man is Love As God is Love; every kindness to another is a little Death In the Divine Image, nor can Man exist but by Brotherhood.

So saying, the Cloud overshadowing divided them asunder; Albion stood in terror, not for himself but for his Friend Divine, and Self was lost in the contemplation of faith And wonder at the Divine Mercy, and at Los's sublime honour."

Thus Blake leads man back into his ancient simplicity and unity. Order is restored; and the four mighty ones that warred within to man's distraction, led captive by Los, are content each to perform his proper function, and so to prevent any further disturbance of the peace.

That is a fine consummation, but it is not Blake's last word. Perfect man must have a perfect City to dwell in. Albion redeemed must build Jerusalem. Blake began _Milton_ with the fond contemplation of England's fields and meadows that he had loved in his youth. Calling for his weapons of war, he sang:

"I will not cease from Mental Fight, Nor shall my Sword sleep in my Hand, Till we have built Jerusalem In England's green and pleasant Land."

That vision may seem as far off as the vision of the prophet who declared, "The earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea." But the world's master-spirits have never been content that a man here and there should save his soul.

Plato imagined his Republic, Christ His Kingdom of God on earth, St John his Holy City, St Augustine his City of God. And Blake, whose first dreams had been in London's great city, still dreamed that man would return to his ancient simplicity, and build Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land.