huge windy mythology of elemental daemons, and the capricious passion for
catalogues of random names, which make obscure and hideous so much of
these books. Akin to these is the habit of seeing or assuming in things
inanimate or in the several limbs and divisions of one thing, separate
forms of active and symbolic life. This, like many other of Blake's
habits, grows and swells enormously by progressive indulgence. At first,
as in _Thel_, clouds and flowers, clods and creeping things, are given
speech and sense; the degree of symbolism is already excessive, owing to
the strength of expression and directness of dramatic vision peculiar to
Blake; but in later books everything is given a soul to feel and a tongue
to speak; the very members of the body become spirits, each a type of some
spiritual state. Again, in the prophecies of _Europe_ and _America_, there
is more fable and less allegory, more overflow of lyrical invention, more
of the divine babble which sometimes takes the place of earthly speech or
sense, more vague emotion with less of reducible and amenable quality than
in almost any of these poems. In others, a habit of mapping out and
marking down the lines of his chaotic and Titanic scenery has added to
Blake's other singularities of manner this above all, that side by side
with the jumbled worlds of Tharmas and Urthona, the whirling skies and
plunging planets of Ololon and Beulah, the breathless student of prophecy
encounters places and names absurdly familiar; London streets and suburbs
make up part of the mystic antediluvian world; Fulham and Lambeth, Kentish
Town and Poland Street, cross the courses and break the metres of the
stars. This apparent madness of final absurdity has also its root in the
deepest and soundest part of Blake's mind and faith. In the meanest place
as in the meanest man he beheld the hidden spirit and significance of
which the flesh or the building is but a type. If continents have a soul,
shall suburbs or lanes have less? where life is, shall not the spirit of
life be there also? Europe and America are vital and significant; we mean
by all names somewhat more than we know of; for where there is anything
visible or conceivable, there is also some invisible and inconceivable
thing. This is but the rough grotesque result of the tenet that matter
apart from spirit is non-existent. Launched once upon that theory, Blake
never thought it worth while to shorten sail or tack about for fear of any
rock or shoal. It is inadequate and even inaccurate to say that he
allotted to each place as to each world a presiding daemon or deity. He
averred implicitly or directly, that each had a soul or spirit, the
quintessence of its natural life, capable of change but not of death; and
that of this soul the visible externals, though a native and actual part,
were only a part, inseparable as yet but incomplete. Thus whenever, to his
misfortune and ours, he stumbles upon the proper names of terrene men and
things, he uses these names as signifying not the sensual form or body but
the spirit which he supposed to animate these, to speak in them and work
through them. In _America_ the names of liberators, in _Jerusalem_ the
names of provinces, have no separate local or mundane sense whatever;
throughout the prophecies "Albion" is the mythical and typical fatherland
of human life, much what the East might seem to other men: and by way of
making this type actual and prominent enough, Blake seizes upon all
possible divisions of the modern visible England in town or country, and
turns them in his loose symbolic way into minor powers and serving
spirits. That he was wholly unconscious of the intolerably laughable
effect we need not believe. He had all the delight in laying snares and
giving offence, which is proper to his kind. He had all the confidence in
his own power and right to do such things and to get over the doing of
them which accompanies in such men the subtle humour of scandalizing. And
unfortunately he had not by training, perhaps not by nature, the
conscience which would have reminded him that whether or not an artist may
allowably play with all other things in heaven and earth, one thing he
must certainly not play with; the material forms of art: that levity and
violence are here prohibited under grave penalties. Allowing however for
this, we may notice that in the wildest passages of these books Blake
merely carries into strange places or throws into strange shapes such
final theories as in the dialect of calmer and smaller men have been
accounted not unreasonable.
Further preface or help, however loudly the subject might seem to call for
it, we have not in this place to give; and indeed more words would
possibly not bring with them more light. What was explicable we have
endeavoured to explain; to suggest where a hint was profitable; to prepare
where preparation was feasible: but many voices might be heard crying in
this wilderness before the paths were made straight. The pursuivant would
grow hoarse and the outrider saddle-sick long before the great man's
advent; and for these offices we have no further taste or ability. Those
who will may now, with what furtherance they have here, follow us through
some brief revision of each book in its order.[50]
[Illustration: THE BOOK of THEL
The Author & Printer Will{m} Blake. 1789.]
_The Book of Thel_, first in date and simplest in tone of the prophecies,
requires less comment than the others. This poem is as the one sister,
feeblest if also fairest, among that Titanic brotherhood of books. It has
the clearness and sweetness of spring-water; they have in their lips the
speech, in their limbs the pulses of the sea. In this book, as in the
illustrations to Blair, the poet attempts to comfort life through death;
to assuage by spiritual hope the fleshly fear of man. The "shining woman,"
youngest and mortal daughter of the angels of God, leaving her sisters to
tend the flocks and close the folds of the stars, fills herself with the
images of perishable things; she feeds upon the sorrow that comes of
beauty, the heathen weariness of heart, that is sick of life because death
will come, seeing how "our little life is rounded with a sleep." Let all
these things go, for they are mortal; but if I die with the flowers, let
me also die as they die. This is the end of all things, to sleep; but let
me fall asleep softly, not without the lulling sound of God's voice
audible in my ears. The flower makes answer; does God not care for the
least of these? they shall not die, they shall all be changed. She answers
again; the flower is serviceable to God's creatures, giving food to the
pasturing lambs and flavour to the honey of the gleaning bees: but her
beauty is barren as a lighted cloud's; wherefore should she live? She is
bidden to seek counsel then of the cloud; and of him she asks the secret
of his glad ephemeral life; for she, not less ephemeral, has no such joy
of her life. Here again she is shown that life and permanence are twain;
the cloud has drunk at the springs of the sun, whence all hours are
renewed; and shall not die though he pass away; for his falling drops find
out the living flowers, and are wedded to the dew in these; and they are
made one before the sun, and kept alive to feed other flowers: and all
these are as women and men, having souls and senses, capable of love and
prayer. But she answers, that of her fair body no cloud or bird gets food,
but the worm only; why should anything survive of her who has been helpful
to nothing? The worm therefore is called to witness; and appears in an
infant's likeness, inarticulate, naked, weeping; but upon it too the
divine earth has mercy, and the clay finds a voice to speak for it; this
likewise is not the sad unprofitable thing it seems; for the very earth,
baser and liker death than the least thing bred of it, is the bride of
God, a fruitful mother of all his children. "We live not for ourselves;"
else indeed were earth and the worm of earth things mournful and
fruitless. The secret of creation is sacrifice; the very act of growth is
a sacrament: and through this eternal generation in which one life is
given for another and shed into new veins of existence, each thing is
redeemed from perpetual death by perpetual change. This secret once made
evident to Thel, her fear is in a measure removed; for the very deathbed
of earth in which she must lie is now revealed as a mother's bosom, warm
and giving warmth, living and prodigal of life. That God would care for
the least thing he made she knew always; but now knows also that in the
least thing there is something of God's life infused, which makes it
substantially imperishable. So far one may say the poem is as fluent and
translucent as the merest sermon on faith, hope, and charity could well
be: and not less inoffensive. The earth, who has overheard and gathered up
all the flitting sighs of this unwedded Eve, now unveils to her the
mysteries of the body, bred in the grave whither all sorrows tend and
whence all tears arise. The forces of material nature give way before her;
passing to her own grave, she hears thence a voice lamenting over the
nature of all the senses, their sweet perilous gifts and strange limits,
and all their offices which fill and discolour the days of mortal life. To
this, the question lying at the root of life and under the shadow of
death, nothing makes answer; as though no word spoken upon earth or under
could explain the marvel of the flesh, the infinite beauty and delight of
it, the infinite subtlety and danger; its prodigalities and powers, its
wide capacity and utter weakness. Set face to face with this bodily
mystery, and affrighted at the sudden nakedness of natural life, the soul
recoils; and Thel regains the common air and quiet light of earth. Such,
cut short and melted down, is the purport of this poem: a prophecy as
literally as any other of Blake's, being professedly an inspired
exposition of material things; for none of course pretend to be prophecies
in the inaccurate and vulgar sense of prediction. It is full of small
sweet details, bright and soft as summer grass, regular to monotony in its
cadence until the last division, where the tone suddenly strengthens and
deepens. There and not for the last time the strong imagination of Blake
wrestles with the great questions of physical life, constraining the mute
rebellious flesh as in a fervent and strenuous grasp of spirit, if
perchance it will yield up the heart of its mystery. Throughout the book
his extreme and feminine tenderness of faith speaks more softly and shows
a simpler face than elsewhere. One might almost say that _Thel_ had
overmuch of this gracious and delicate beauty; that the intense faith and
compassion which thus animate all matter give a touch of almost dubious
and effeminate sweetness to the thought and style. Not however justly; for
there is a firm body of significance in the poem, and the soft light
leaves in which the fruit lies wrapped are solid as well as sweet.
It is well worth while to compare any average copy of _Thel_ with the
smaller volume of designs now in the British Museum, which reproduces
among others the main illustrations of this book. The clear, sweet, pallid
colour of the fainter version will then serve to throw into full effect
the splendour of the more finished work. Especially in the separate copy
of the frontispiece, the sovereignty of colour and glorious grace of
workmanship double and treble its original beauty; give new light and new
charm to the fervent heaven, to the bowing figure of the girl, to the
broad cloven blossoms whose flickering and sundering petals release the
bright leaping forms of loving spirits, raindrop and dewdrop wedded before
the sun; and again, where Thel sees the worm in likeness of a new-born
child, the colours of tree and leaf and sky are of a more excellent and
lordly beauty than in any copy known to me of the book itself; though in
all good copies these designs appear full of great and gracious qualities.
Of the book of designs here referred to more must not now be said; not
even of the twelfth plate where the mother-goddess and her fiery
first-born child exult with flying wingless limbs through splendid spaces
of the infinite morning, coloured here like opening flowers and there like
climbing fire, where all the light and all the wind of heaven seem to
unite in fierce gladness as of a supreme embrace and exultation; for to
these better praise than ours has been already given at p. 374 of the
_Life_, in words of choice and incomparable sufficiency, not less bright
and sweet, significant and subtle, than the most tender or perfect of the
designs described.
[Illustration: THE MARRIAGE of HEAVEN and HELL.]
In 1790 Blake produced the greatest of all his books; a work indeed which
we rank as about the greatest produced by the eighteenth century in the
line of high poetry and spiritual speculation. _The Marriage of Heaven and
Hell_ gives us the high-water mark of his intellect. None of his lyrical
writings show the same sustained strength and radiance of mind; none of
his other works in verse or prose give more than a hint here and a trace
there of the same harmonious and humorous power, of the same choice of
eloquent words, the same noble command and liberal music of thought; small
things he could often do perfectly, and great things often
imperfectly; here for once he has written a book as perfect as his most
faultless song, as great as his most imperfect rhapsody. His fire of
spirit fills it from end to end; but never deforms the body, never singes
the surface of the work, as too often in the still noble books of his
later life. Across the flicker of flame, under the roll and roar of water,
which seem to flash and to resound throughout the poem, a stately music,
shrill now as laughter and now again sonorous as a psalm, is audible
through shifting notes and fitful metres of sound. The book swarms with
heresies and eccentricities; every sentence bristles with some paradox,
every page seethes with blind foam and surf of stormy doctrine; the humour
is of that fierce grave sort, whose cool insanity of manner is more
horrible and more obscure to the Philistine than any sharp edge of
burlesque or glitter of irony; it is huge, swift, inexplicable; hardly
laughable through its enormity of laughter, hardly significant through its
condensation of meaning; but as true and thoughtful as the greatest
humourist's. The variety and audacity of thoughts and words are
incomparable: not less so their fervour and beauty. "No bird soars too
high if he soars with his own wings." This proverb might serve as motto to
the book: it is one of many "Proverbs of Hell," as forcible and as
finished.
It was part of Blake's humour to challenge misconception, conscious as he
was of power to grapple with it: to blow dust in their eyes who were
already sandblind, to strew thorns under their feet who were already lame.
Those whom the book in its present shape would perplex and repel he knew
it would not in any form have attracted; and how such readers may fare is
no concern of such writers; nor in effect need it be. Aware that he must
at best offend a little, he did not fear to offend much. To measure the
exact space of safety, to lay down the precise limits of offence, was an
office neither to his taste nor within his power. Those who try to clip or
melt themselves down to the standard of current feeling, to sauce and
spice their natural fruits of mind with such condiments as may take the
palate of common opinion, deserve to disgust themselves and others alike.
It is hopeless to reckon how far the timid, the perverse, or the malignant
irrelevance of human remarks will go; to set bounds to the incompetence or
devise landmarks for the imbecility of men. Blake's way was not the worst;
to indulge his impulse to the full and write what fell to his hand, making
sure at least of his own genius and natural instinct. In this his greatest
book he has at once given himself freer play and set himself to harder
labour than elsewhere: the two secrets of great work. Passion and humour
are mixed in his writing like mist and light; whom the light may scorch or
the mist confuse it is not his part to consider.
In the prologue Blake puts forth, not without grandeur if also with an
admixture of rant and wind, a chief tenet of his moral creed. Once the
ways of good and evil were clear, not yet confused by laws and religions;
then humility and benevolence, the endurance of peril and the fruitful
labour of love, were the just man's proper apanage; behind his feet the
desert blossomed; by his toil and danger, by his sweat and blood, the
desolate places were made rich and the dead bones clothed with flesh as
the flesh of Adam. Now the hypocrite has come to reap the fruits, to
divide and gather and eat; to drive forth the just man and to dwell in the
paths which he found perilous and barren, but left safe and fertile.
Churches have cast out apostles; creeds have rooted out faith. Henceforth
anger and loneliness, the divine indignation of spiritual exile, the salt
bread of scorn and the bitter wine of wrath, are the portion of the just
man; he walks with lions in the waste places, not worth making fertile
that others may reap and feed. "Rintrah," the spirit presiding over this
period, is a spirit of fire and storm; darkness and famine, wrath and
want, divide the kingdoms of the world. "Prisons are built with stones of
Law; brothels with bricks of Religion." "As the caterpillar chooses the
fairest leaves to lay her eggs on, so the priest lays his curse on the
fairest joys." In a third proverb the view given of prayer is no less
heretical; "As the plough follows words, so God rewards prayers." This was
but the outcome or corollary of his main doctrine; as what we have called
his "evangel of bodily liberty" was but the fruit of his belief in the
identity of body with soul. The fear which restrains and the faith which
refuses were things as ignoble as the hypocrisy which assumes or the
humility which resigns. Veils and chains must be lifted and broken. "Folly
is the cloak of knavery; shame is pride's cloak." Again; "He who desires
but acts not breeds pestilence." "Sooner murder an infant in its cradle
than nurse unacted desires." The doctrine of freedom could hardly run
further or faster. Translated into rough practice, and planted in a less
pure soil than that of the writer's mind, this philosophy might bring
forth a strange harvest. Together with such width of moral pantheism as
will hardly admit a "tender curb," leave "a little curtain of flesh on the
bed of our desire," there is a vehemence of faith in divine wrath, in the
excellence of righteous anger and revenge, to be outdone by no prophet or
Puritan. "A dead body revenges not injuries." Sincerity and plain dealing
at least are virtues not to be thrown over; Blake indeed could not
conceive an impulse to mendacity, a tortuous habit of mind, a soul born
crooked. This one quality of falsehood remains damnable in his sight, to
be consumed with all that comes of it. In man or beast or any other part
of God he found no native taint or birthmark of this. Upon all else the
divine breath and the divine hand are sensible and visible.
"The pride of the peacock is the glory of God;
The lust of the goat is the bounty of God;
The wrath of the lion is the wisdom of God;
The nakedness of woman is the work of God."
All form and all instinct is sacred; but no invention or device of man's.
All crafts and creeds of theirs are "the serpent's meat:" and that a man
should be born cruel and false is barely imaginable. "If the lion was
advised by the fox he would be cunning." Such counsel was always wasted on
the high clear spirit and stainless intellect of Blake.
[Illustration: Proverbs of Hell]
We have given some of the most subtle and venturous "Proverbs of
Hell"--samples of their depth of doctrine and plainness of speech. But
even here Blake rarely indulges in such excess and exposure. There are
jewels in this treasure-house neither set so roughly nor so sharply
cut as these; they may be seen in the _Life_, taken out and reset, so
as to offend no customer. And these sayings must themselves be read by the
light of Blake's life and weighed against others of his words not less
weighty than they. Apology shall now and always remain as far from us as
it was in life from Blake himself; to excuse and to explain are different
offices. To plead for his acquittal on the base and foolish ground that he
meant no harm, knew not what he did, had no design or desire to afflict or
offend, is no office for his counsel; who must strive at least to speak
not less frankly and clearly than did Blake when he could speak in his own
cause. Neither have we to approve or condemn; but only to endeavour that
we may see the right and deliver the truth as to this man and his life.
"That I cannot live," he says, in the Butts correspondence, "without doing
my duty to lay up treasures in heaven, is certain and determined, and to
this I have long made up my mind. And why this should be made an objection
to me, while drunkenness, lewdness, gluttony, and even idleness itself
does not hurt other men, let Satan himself explain. The thing I have most
at heart--more than life, or all that seems to make life comfortable
without (it)--is the interest of true religion and science." His one fear
is to "omit any duty to my station as a soldier of Christ;" a fear that
"gives him the greatest torments;" for "if our footsteps slide in clay,
how can we do otherwise than fear and tremble?" And such books as these
were part of his spiritual taskwork. From whencesoever the inspiration of
them came, inspiration it was and no invention. He is content with that
knowledge; and if it please the hearer to call it diabolic, diabolic it
shall be. If he has a devil, he will make the most and the best of him. If
these things come from hell, let us look to it and hold them fast, that we
may see what it is that divides hell from heaven.
"As a new heaven is begun, and it is now thirty-three years since its
advent: the Eternal Hell revives. And lo! Swedenborg is the Angel
sitting at the tomb: his writings are the linen clothes folded up.
Now is the dominion of Edom, and the return of Adam into Paradise;
see Isaiah xxxiv. and xxxv. chap.
"Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion,
Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence.
"From these Contraries spring what the religious call Good and Evil.
Good is the passive that obeys Reason.
"Evil is the active springing from Energy.
"_Good is Heaven. Evil is Hell._
"THE VOICE OF THE DEVIL.
"All Bibles or sacred codes have been the causes of the following
Errors.
"1. That man has two real existing principles--viz., a Body and a
Soul.
"2. That Energy, called Evil, is alone from the Body; and that
Reason, called Good, is alone from the Soul.
"3. That God will torment Man in Eternity for following his Energies.
"But the following contraries to these are True.
"1. Man has no Body distinct from his Soul, for that called Body is a
portion of Soul discerned by the five Senses, the chief inlets of
Soul in this age.
"2. Energy is the only life, and is from the Body; and Reason is the
bound or outward circumference of Energy.
"3. Energy is Eternal Delight.
"Those who restrain desire to do so because theirs is weak enough to
be restrained; and the restrainer, or reason, usurps its place and
governs the unwilling.
"And being restrained it by degrees becomes passive, till it is only
the shadow of desire.
"The history of this is written in 'Paradise Lost,' and the Governor,
or Reason, is called Messiah.
"And the original Archangel, or possessor of the command of the
heavenly host, is called the Devil or Satan, and his children are
called Sin and Death.
"But in the Book of Job Milton's Messiah is called Satan.
"For this history has been adopted by both parties.
"It indeed appeared to Reason as if Desire was cast out; but the
Devil's account is, that the Messiah fell, and formed a heaven of
what he stole from the Abyss.
"This is shewn in the Gospel, where he prays to the Father to send
the comforter or Desire, that Reason may have Ideas to build on, the
Jehovah of the Bible being no other than he who dwells in flaming
fire. Know that after Christ's death, he became Jehovah.
"But in Milton the Father is Destiny, the Son a Ratio of the five
Senses, and the Holy Ghost, Vacuum.
"NOTE.--The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels
and God, and at liberty when of Devils and Hell, is because he was a
true Poet, and of the Devil's party without knowing it."