of love as that taken in the last lines of "William Bond;" a poem full of
strange and soft hints, of mist that allures and music that lulls; typical
in the main of the embodied struggle between selfish and sacrificial
passion, between the immediate impulse that brings at least the direct
profit of delight, and the law of religious or rational submission that
reaps mere loss and late regret after a life of blind prudence and
sorrowful forbearance--the "black cloud" of sickness, malady of spirit and
body inflicted by the church-keeping "angels of Providence" who have
driven away the loving train of spirits that live by innate impulse: not
the bulk of Caliban but the soul of Angelo being the deadliest direct
enemy of Ariel. "Providence" divine or human, prepense moral or spiritual
"foresight," was a thing in the excellence of which our prophet of divine
instinct and inspired flesh could not consistently believe. His evangel
could dispense with that, in favour of such faith in good things as came
naturally to him.
"I thought Love lived in the hot sunshine,
But oh, he lives in the moony light;
I thought to find Love in the heat of day,
But sweet Love is the comforter of night.
"Seek Love in the pity of others' woe,
In the gentle relief of another's care;
In the darkness of night and the winter's snow,
In the naked and outcast, seek Love there."
The infinite and most tender beauty of such words is but one among many
evidences how thoroughly and delicately the lawless fervour and passionate
liberty of desire were tempered in Blake by an exquisite goodness, of
sense rather than of thought, which as it were made the pain or pleasure,
the well-being or the suffering, of another press naturally and sharply on
his own nerves of feeling. Deeply as his thought and fancy had struck
into strange paths and veins of spiritual life, he had never found or
felt out any way to the debateable land where simple and tender pleasures
become complex and cruel, and the roses gathered are redder at root than
in leaf.
Another poem, slight of texture and dim of feature, but full of a cloudy
beauty, is _The Angel_: a new allegory of love, blindly rejected or
blindly accepted as a thing of course; foiled and made profitless in
either case: then lost, with all the sorrow it brings and all the comfort
it gives: and the ways are barred against it by armed mistrust and
jealousy, and its place knows it no more: but this immunity from the joys
and sorrows of love is bought at the bitter price of untimely age. (I
offer these somewhat verbose and wiredrawn attempts at commentary, only
where the poem seems at once to require analysis and to admit such as I
give; how difficult it is to make such notes clear and full, yet not to
stumble into confusion or slide into prolixity, those can estimate who
will try their hand at such work.)
Frequent slips and hitches of grammar, it may be added, are common to
Blake's rough studies and finished writings, and are therefore not always
things to be weeded out. Little learning and much reading of old books
made him more really inaccurate than were their writers, whose apparent
liberties he might perhaps have pleaded in defence of his own hardly
defensible licences.
None of these poems are worthier, for the delight they give, of the
selected praise and most thankful study than _The Two Songs_ and _The
Golden Net_: a pair of perfect things, their feet taken in the deep places
of thought, and their heads made lovely with the open light of lyric
speech. Between the former of these[32] and _The Human Abstract_ there is
a certain difference: here, the moral point of the poem is, that innocence
is wholly ignorant, and sees no deeper than the shell of form; experience
is mainly malignant, and sees the root of evil and seed of pain under the
leaf of good and blossom of pleasant things:[33] there, the vision is the
poet's own, and deals with that evil neither actually nor seemingly
inherent in the system or scheme of created nature, but watered into life
by the error and fed into luxuriance by the act of "the human brain"
alone; two widely unlike themes for verse. As to execution, here doubtless
there is more of that swift fresh quality peculiar to Blake's simpler
style; but the _Abstract_ again has more weight of verse and magnificence
of symbol.
Akin to _The Golden Net_ is the form and manner of _Broken Love_; which,
whatever taste may lie in the actual kernel of it, is visibly one of the
poet's noblest studies of language. The grandeur of the growing metre and
heat of passionate pulses felt through the throbbing body of its verse can
escape no ear. In our notes on _Jerusalem_ we shall have, like the "devil"
of _The Two Songs_, to look at it from the inverse side and pass upon it a
more laborious and less thankworthy comment.
Of the longest and gravest poem in the "Ideas of Good and Evil" we are
bound to take some careful account. This is _The Everlasting Gospel_, a
semi-dramatic exposition of faith on the writer's part; full of subtleties
and paradoxes which might well straighten the stiffest hairs of orthodoxy
and bewilder the sharpest brain of speculation. Blake has here stated once
for all the why and the how of his Christian faith; for Christian he
averred that it was, and we may let his word pass for it. Readers must be
recommended for the present to look at these things as much as possible
from what we will call their artistic or poetic side, and bring no pulpit
logic to get chopped or minced on the altar of this prophet's vision. His
worst heresy, they may be assured, "will not bite." In effect one may hope
(or fear, as the case may be) that there is much less of heresy underlying
these daring forms of speech than seems to overlay their outer skirt:
schism or division of body rather than of spirit from less wilful and
outspoken forms of faith.
Let the student of this "Gospel" of inverted belief and intensified
paradox lay hold of and cling fast to the clue given by the "Vision of the
Last Judgment." There for one thing the prophet has laid down this rule:
"Moral virtues do not exist; they are allegories and dissimulations." For
"moral allegory" we are therefore not to look here; we are in the house of
pure vision, outside of which allegory halts blindly across the shifting
sand of moral qualities, her right hand leaning on the staff of virtue,
her left hand propped on the crutch of vice. Conscious unimpulsive
"virtue," measured by the praise or judged by the laws of men, was to
Blake always Pharisaic: a legal God none other than a magnified and divine
Pharisee. Thus far have other (even European) mystics often enough pushed
their inference; but this time the mystic was a poet; and therefore
always, where it was possible, prone to prefer tangible form and given to
beat out into human shape even the most indefinite features of his vision.
Assuming Christ as the direct and absolute divine type (divine in the
essential not in the clerical sense--divine to the spiritual not the
technical reason) he was therefore obliged to set to work and strip that
type of the incongruous garment of "moral virtues" cast over it by the law
of religious form: to prove, as he elsewhere said, that Christ "was all
virtue," not by the possession of these "allegoric" qualities called human
virtues or abstinence from those others called human sins or vices: such
abstinence or such possession cannot conceivably suffice for the final
type of goodness or absolute incarnation of a thing unalterably divine.
Virtues are no more predicable of the perfect virtue than vices of the
perfect vice. As the supreme sin cannot be said to commit human faults, so
neither can the supreme holiness obey the principles of human sanctity.
"Deistical virtue" is as the embroidery on the ephod of Caiaphas or the
stain left upon the water by the purified hands of Pilate. It is the
property of "the heathen schools"; a bitted and bridled virtue, led by the
nose and tied by the neck; made of men's hands and subject to men's laws.
Can you make a God worth worship out of that? To say that God is wise,
chaste, humble, philanthropic, gentle, or just; in one word, that he is
"good" after the human sense; is to lower your image of God not less than
if you had predicated of him the exactly reverse qualities, by reason of
which these exist, even as they by reason of these. How much of all this
Blake had fished up out of his studies of Behmen, Swedenborg, or such
others, his present critic has not the means of deciding; but is assured
of one thing; that where others dealt by inductive rule and law, Blake
dealt by assumptive preaching and intuition; that he found form of his own
for the body of thought, and body of his own for the spirit of
speculation, supplied by others; playing Prometheus to their Epimetheus,
doing poet's or evangelist's work where they did philosophic business; not
fumbling in the box of Pandora for things flown or fugitive, but bringing
from extreme heaven the immediate fire in the hollow of his reed or pen.
Such is the radical "idea" of the poem; and as to details, we are to
remember that "modesty" with Blake means a timid and tacit prurience, and
"humility" a mistrustful and mendacious cowardice: he puts these terms to
such uses in his swift fierce way, just as, in his detestation of deism
and its "impersonal God," he must needs embody his vision of a deity or
more perfect humanity in the personal Christian type: a purely poetical
tendency, which if justly apprehended will serve to account for the
wildest bodily forms in which he drew forth his visions from the mould of
prophecy.
Thus much by way of prologue may suffice for the moral side of this
"Gospel"; the mythological or technically religious side is not much
easier to deal with, and indeed cannot well be made out except by such
misty light as may be won from the prophetic books. It seems evident that
Blake, at least for purposes of evangelism, was content to regard the
"Creator" of the mere bodily man as one with the "legal" or "Pharisaic"
God of the churches: even as the "mother of his mortal part"--of the flesh
taken for the moment simply, and separated (for reasoning purposes) from
the inseparable spirit--is "Tirzah." This vision of a creator divided
against his own creation and having to be subdued by his own creatures
will appear more directly and demand more distinct remark when we come to
deal with its symbolic form in the great myth of "Urizen;" where also it
will be possible to follow it out with less likelihood of offensive
misconstruction. One is compelled here to desire from those who care to
follow Blake at all, the keenest ardour of attention possible; they will
blunder helplessly if they once fail to connect this present minute of his
work with the past and the future of it: if they once let slip the
thinnest thread of analogy, the whole prophetic or evangelic web collapses
for them into a chaos of gossamer, a tangle of unclean and flaccid fibres,
the ravelled woof of an insane and impotent Arachne, who should be
retransmuted with all haste into a palpable spider by the spell of
reason. Here, as in all swift "inspired" writing, there are on the
outside infinite and indefinable anomalies, contradictions,
incompatibilities enough of all sorts; open for any Paine or Paley to
impugn or to defend. But let no one dream that there is here either
madness or mendacity: the heart or sense thus hidden away is sound enough
for a mystic.
The greatest passage of this poem is also the simplest; that division
which deals with the virtue of "chastity," and uses for its text the story
of "the woman taken in adultery:" who is identified with Mary Magdalene.
We give it here in full; hoping it may now be comprehensible to all who
care to understand, and may bear fruit of its noble and almost faultless
verse for all but those who prefer to take the sterility of their fig-tree
on trust rather than be at the pains of lifting a single leaf.
"Was Jesus _chaste_? or did he
Give any lessons of chastity?
The morning blushed fiery red;
Mary was found in adulterous bed.
Earth groaned beneath, and heaven above
Trembled at discovery of love.
Jesus was sitting in Moses' chair;
They brought the trembling woman there.
Moses commands she be stoned to death:
What was the sound of Jesus' breath?
He laid his hand on Moses' law;
The ancient heavens, in silent awe,
Writ with curses from pole to pole,
All away began to roll;
The earth trembling and naked lay
In secret bed of mortal clay--
On Sinai felt the hand Divine
Pulling[34] back the bloody shrine--
And she heard the breath of God
As she heard by Eden's flood:
'Good and Evil are no more;
Sinai's trumpets, cease to roar;
Cease, finger of God, to write
The heavens are not clean in thy sight.
Thou art good, and thou alone;
Nor may the sinner cast one stone.
To be good only, is to be
A God, or else a Pharisee.
Thou Angel of the Presence Divine,
That didst create this body of mine,
Wherefore hast thou writ these laws
And created hell's dark jaws?
_My_ Presence I will take from thee;
A cold leper thou shalt be.
Though thou wast so pure and bright
That heaven was impure in thy sight,
Though thine oath turned heaven pale,
Though thy covenant built hell's gaol,
Though thou didst all to chaos roll
With the serpent for its soul,
Still the breath Divine does move--
And the breath Divine is love.
Mary, fear not. Let me see
The seven devils that torment thee.
Hide not from my sight thy sin,
That forgiveness thou mayst win.
Hath no man condemned thee?'
'No man, Lord.' 'Then what is he
Who shall accuse thee? Come ye forth,
Fallen fiends of heavenly birth
That have forgot your ancient love
And driven away my trembling dove;
You shall bow before her feet;
You shall lick the dust for meat;
And though you cannot love, but hate,
Shall be beggars at love's gate.
--What was thy love? Let me see't;
Was it love or dark deceit?'
'Love too long from me has fled;
'Twas dark deceit, to earn my bread;
'Twas covet, or 'twas custom, or
Some trifle not worth caring for:
That they may call a shame and sin
Love's temple that God dwelleth in,
And hide in secret hidden shrine
The naked human form divine,
And render that a lawless thing
On which the soul expands her wing.
But this, O Lord, this was my sin--
When first I let these devils in,
In dark pretence to chastity
Blaspheming love, blaspheming thee.
Thence rose secret adulteries,
And thence did covet also rise.
My sin thou hast forgiven me;
Canst thou forgive my blasphemy?
Canst thou return to this dark hell
And in my burning bosom dwell?
And canst thou die that I may live?
And canst thou pity and forgive?'"
In no second poem shall we find such a sustained passage as that; such
light of thought and thunder of verse; such sudden splendour of fire seen
across a strange land and among waste places beyond the receded landmarks
of the day or above the glimmering lintels of the night. The passionate
glory of its rapid and profound music fills the sense with too deep and
sharp a delight to leave breathing-space for any thought of analytic or
apologetic work. But the spirit of the verse is not less great than the
body of it is beautiful. "Divide from the divine glory the softness and
warmth of human colour--subtract from the divine the human
presence--subdue all refraction to the white absolute light--and that
light is no longer as the sun's is, warm with sweet heat of life and
liberal of good gifts; but foul with overmuch purity, sick with disease of
excellence, unclean through exceeding cleanness, like the skin of a leper
'as white as snow.'" For the divine nature is not greater than the human;
(they are one from eternity, sundered by the separative creation or fall,
severed into type and antitype by bodily generation, but to be made one
again when life and death shall both have died;) not greater than the
human nature, but greater than the qualities which the human nature
assumes upon earth. God is man, and man God; as neither of himself the
greater, so neither of himself the less: but as God is the unfallen part
of man, man the fallen part of God, God must needs be (not more than
man, but assuredly) more than the qualities of man. Thus the mystic
can consistently deny that man's moral goodness or badness can be
predicable of God, while at the same time he affirms man's intrinsic
divinity and God's intrinsic humanity. Man can only possess abstract
qualities--"allegoric virtues"--by reason of that side of his nature which
he has _not_ in common with God: God, not partaking of the "generative
nature," cannot partake of qualities which exist only by right of that
nature. The other "God"[35] or "Angel of the Presence" who created the
sexual and separate body of man did but cleave in twain the "divine
humanity," which becoming reunited shall redeem man without price and
without covenant and without law; he meantime, the Creator,[36] is a
divine daemon, liable to error, subduable by and through this very created
nature of his invention, which he for the present imprisons and torments.
_His_ law is the law of Moses, which according to the Manichean heresy
Christ came to reverse as diabolic. This singular (and presumably
"Pantheistic") creed of Blake's has a sort of Asiatic flavour about it,
but seems harder and more personal in its mythology than an eastern
philosopher's; has also a distinct western type and Christian touch in it;
being wrought as it were of Persian lotus-leaves hardened into the
consistency of English oak-timber. The most wonderful part of his belief
or theory is this: "That after Christ's death he became Jehovah:"[37]
which may mean simply that through Christ the law of liberty came to
supplant the bondage of law, so that where Jehovah was Christ is; or may
typify the change of evangel into law, of full-grown Christianity into a
fresh type of "Judaism," of the Gospel or good news of freedom into the
Church or dogmatic body of faith; or may imply that the two forces, after
that supreme sacrifice, coalesced and became one, all absolute Deity,
being absorbed into the Divine Humanity; or, as a practical public would
suggest, may mean or typify nothing. It is certain that Blake appears so
far to have accepted the "Catholic tradition" as to regard this death or
sacrifice as tending somehow not merely to the redemption of man (which
would be no more than the sequel or outcome of his mystic faith in the
salvation of man by man, the deliverance or redemption of the accident
through the essence), but also to the union of the divine crucified man
with the creative governing power. Somehow; but the prophet must explain
for himself the exact means. We are now fairly up to the ears in
mysticism, and cannot afford to strike out at random, for fear of being
carried right off our feet by the ground-swell and drifted into waters
where swimming will be yet tougher work.
The belief in "holy insurrection" must be almost as old as the oldest
religions or philosophies afloat or articulate. In the most various creeds
this feature of faith stands out sharply with a sort of tangible human
appeal. Earlier heretics than the author of _Jerusalem_ have taken this to
be the radical significance of Christianity; a divine revolt against
divine law; an evidence that man must become as God only by resistance to
God--"the God of this world;" that if Prometheus cannot, Zeus will not
deliver us: and that man, if saved at all, must indeed be saved "so as by
fire"--by ardour of rebellion and strenuous battle against the God of
nature: who as of old must yet feed upon his children, and will no longer
take stone for flesh though never so well wrapped up; who must have the
organ of destruction and division, by which alone he lives[38] and has
ability to beget, cut off from him with the sharpest edge of flint that
rebellious hands can whet. In these galliambics of Blake's we see the
flint of Atys whetted for such work; made ready against the priests of
Nature and her God, though by an alien hand that will cast no incense upon
the altar of Cybele; no Phrygian's, who would spend his own blood to
moisten and brighten the high places of her worship: but one ready, with
what fire he can get, to burn down the groves and melt down the cymbals of
Dindymus.
Returning now to the residue of the immediate matter in hand, we may duly
notice in this excursive and all but shapeless poem many of Blake's strong
points put forth with all his strength: curiously crossed and intermixed
with rough skirmishing attacks on the opposite faction, clerical or
sceptical, by way of interlude. "You would have Christ act according to
what you call a rational or a philanthropic habit of mind--set the actual
God to reason, to elevate, to convince or convert after the fashion in
which you would set about it? redeem, not the spiritual man by inspiration
of his spirit, but the bodily man by application of his arguments? make
him as 'Bacon and Newton'" (Blake's usual types of the mere
understanding)?
"For thus the Gospel St. Isaac confutes:
'God can only be known by his attributes;
And as to the indwelling of the Holy Ghost
Or of Christ and the Father, it's all a boast
And pride and vanity of imagination
That did wrong to follow this world's fashion.'
To teach doubt and experiment
Certainly was not what Christ meant."
Certainly also no doggrel can be rougher, looser, heavier-weighted about
the wrists and ankles, than this; which indeed it was perhaps hardly fair
to transcribe; for take out the one great excerpt already given, and the
whole poem is a mass of huddled notes jotted down in a series of hints, on
stray sides and corners of leaves, crammed into holes and byways out of
sight or reach. So perfect a poet is not to be judged by the scrawls and
sketches of his note-book; but as we cannot have his revision of the
present piece of work, and are not here to make any revision of our own,
we must either let drop the chance of insight thus afforded, or make shift
with the rough and ragged remnants allowed us by the sparing fingers of a
close-handed fate. And this chance of insight is not to be lightly let go,
if we mean to look at all into Blake's creed and mind. "Experiment" to the
mystic seems not insufficient merely, but irrational. "Reason says
_miracle_; Newton says _doubt_;" as Blake in another place expounds to
such disciples as he may get. On this point also his "Vision of Christ" is
other than the Christian public's.
"Thine is the friend of all mankind;
Mine speaks in parables to the blind."
_His_ Christ cared no more to convince "the blind" by plain speech than to
save "the world"--the form or flesh of the world, not that imperishable
body or complement of the soul which if a man "keep under and bring into
subjection" he transgresses against himself; but the mere "sexual" shell
which only exists (as we said) by error and by division and by right of
temporal appearance.
Keeping in mind the utter roughness and formal incompletion of these
notes--which in effect are the mere broken shell or bruised husk of a poem
yet unfledged and unembodied--we may put to some present use the ensuing
crude and loose fragments.
"What was he doing all that time
From twelve years old to manly prime?
Was he then idle, or the less
About his Father's business?
If he had been Antichrist aping[39] Jesus,
He'd have done anything to please us;
Gone sneaking into synagogues
And not used the elders and priests like dogs;
But humble as a lamb or ass
Obeyed himself to Caiaphas.
God wants not man to humble himself.
That is the trick of the ancient Elf.
This is the race that Jesus ran:
Humble to God, haughty to man;
Cursing the rulers before the people
Even to the temple's highest steeple;
And when he humbled himself to God,
Then descended the cruel rod."
(This noticeable heresy is elsewhere insisted on. Its root seems to be in
that doctrine that nothing is divine which is not human--has not in it the
essence of completed manhood, clear of accident or attribute; servility
therefore to a divine ruler is one with servility to a human ruler. More
orthodox men have registered as fervent a protest against the degradation
involved in base forms of worship; but this singular mythological form
seems peculiar to Blake, who was bent on finding in the sacred text
warrant or illustration for all his creed.)
"'If thou humblest thyself thou humblest me:
Thou also dwell'st in eternity.
Thou art a man; God is no more;
Thine own humanity learn to adore,
For that is my spirit of life.
Awake: arise to spiritual strife;
And thy revenge abroad display
In terror at the Last Judgment Day.'"