of text and decoration are whirled as it were and woven into spreading
webs or twining wheels of luminous confusion. The Museum copy, not equal
in nobility of colour to some others, is crowded with MS. notes and mottos
of some interest and significance. To the frontispiece a passage of Milton
is appended; to the first page is prefixed a transcript of some verses by
Mrs. Radcliffe concerning a murdered pilgrim, sufficiently execrable and
explanatory; and so throughout. These notes will help us at least to
measure the amount of connexion between the text and the designs; an
amount easily measurable, being in effect about the smallest possible.
Fierce fluctuating wind and the shaken light of meteors flutter or glitter
upon the stormy ways of vision; serving rather for raiment than for
symbol. The outcast gods of star and comet are driven through tempestuous
air: "forms without body" leap or lurk under cloud or water; War, a man
coated with scales of defiled and blackening bronze, handling a heavy
sword-hilt, averts his face from appealing angels; Famine slays and eats
her children; fire curls about the caldron in which their limbs are to be
sodden for food; starved plague-stricken shapes of women and men fall
shrieking or silent as the bell-ringer, a white-haired man with slouched
hat drawn down and long straight cassock, passes them bell in hand; a
daughter clings to her father in the dumb pain of fear, while he with arms
thrust out in repulsion seems to plead against the gathering deluges that
"sweep o'er the yellow year;" mildews are seen incarnate as foul flushed
women with strenuous limbs contorted, blighting ears of corn with the
violent breath of their inflated mouths; "Papal Superstition," with the
triple crown on a head broader across cheek and jowl than across the
forehead, with bat's wings and bloodlike garments dripping and rent, leers
across the open book on his knees; behind his reptile face a decoration as
of a cleft mitre, wrought in the shape of Gothic windows that straiten as
it ascends, shows grey upon the dead black air; this is "Urizen seen on
the Atlantic; and his brazen book that kings and priests had copied on
earth, expanded from north to south;" all the creeping things of the
prison-house, bloated leaf and dropping spider, crawl or curl above a
writhing figure overgrown with horrible scurf of corruption as with
network; the gaoler leaves his prisoner fast bound by the ankles, with
limbs stained and discoloured; (the motto to this is from "The Two Noble
Kinsmen," Act ii., Sc. 1., "The vine shall grow, but we shall never see
it," &c.); snakes and caterpillars, birds and gnats, each after their own
kind take their pleasure and their prey among the leaves and grasses they
defile and devour; flames chase the naked or swooning fugitives from a
blazing ruin. The prelude is set in the frame of two large designs; one of
the assassin waiting for the pilgrim as he turns round a sharp corner of
rock; one of hurricane and storm in which "Horror, Amazement and Despair"
appear abroad upon the winds. A sketch of these violent and hideously
impossible figures is pasted into the note-book on a stray slip of paper.
The MS. mottos are mostly from Milton and Dryden; Shakespeare and
Fletcher, Rowe and Mason, are also dragged into service. The prophecy
itself is full of melody and mist; of music not wholly unrecognisable and
vapour not wholly impermeable. In a lull of intermittent war, the gods of
time and space awake with all their children; Time bids them "seize all
the spirits of life and bind their warbling joys to our loud strings, bind
all the nourishing sweets of earth to give us bliss." Orc, the fiery
spirit of revolution, first-born of Space, his father summons to arise;
"and we will crown thy head with garlands of the ruddy vine; for now thou
art bound; and I may see thee in the hour of bliss, my eldest born."
Allegory, here as always, is interfused with myth in a manner at once
violent and intricate; but in this book the mere mythologic fancy of Blake
labours for the most part without curb or guide. Enitharmon, the universal
or typical woman, desires that "woman may have dominion" for a space over
all the souls upon earth; she descends and becomes visible in the red
light of Orc; and she charges other spirits born of her and Los to "tell
the human race that woman's love is sin," for thus the woman will have
power to refuse or accede, to starve or satiate the perverted loves and
lives of man; "that an eternal life awaits the worms of sixty winters, in
an allegorical abode where existence hath never come; forbid all joy, and
from her childhood shall the little female spread nets in every secret
path." To this end the goddess of Space calls forth her chosen children,
the "horned priest" of animal nature, the "silver-bowed queen" of desolate
places, the "prince of the sun" with his innumerable race "thick as the
summer stars; each one, ramping, his golden mane shakes, and thine eyes
rejoice because of strength, O Rintrah, furious King." Moon and sun,
spirit and flesh, all lovely jealous forces and mysteries of the natural
world are gathered together under her law, that throughout the eighteen
Christian centuries she may have her will of the world. For so long nature
has sat silent, her harps out of tune; the goddess herself has slept out
all those years, a dream among dreams, the ghostly regent of a ghostly
generation. The angels of Albion, satellites once of the ancient Titan,
are smitten now with their own plagues, crushed in their own
council-house, and rise again but to follow after Rintrah, the fiery
minister of his mother's triumph. Him the chief "Angel" follows to "his
ancient temple serpent-formed," ringed round with Druid oaks, massive with
pillar and porch built of precious stones; "such eternal in the heavens,
of colours twelve, few known on earth, give light in the opaque."
"Placed in the order of the stars, when the five senses whelmed
In deluge o'er the earth-born man: then bound the flexile eyes
Into two stationary orbs concentrating all things:
The ever-varying spiral ascents to the heaven of heavens
Were bended downward, and the nostril's golden gates shut,
Turned outward, barred and petrified against the infinite.
Thought changed the infinite to a serpent; that which pitieth
To a devouring flame; and man fled from its face and hid
In forests[54] of night; then all the eternal forests were divided
Into earths rolling in circles of space, that like an ocean rushed
And overwhelmed all except this finite wall of flesh.
Then was the serpent temple formed, image of (the) infinite
Shut up in finite revolutions,[55] and man became an Angel;
Heaven a mighty circle turning; God a tyrant crowned."
Thus again recurs the doctrine that the one inlet left us for spiritual
perception--that namely of the senses--is but one and the least of many
inlets and channels of communication now destroyed or perverted by the
creative demon; a tenet which once well grasped and digested by the
disciple will further his understanding of Blake more than anything else
can: will indeed, pushed to the full extreme of its logical results,
elucidate and justify much that seems merely condemnable and chaotic. To
resume our somewhat halting and bewildered fable: the southern porch of
this temple, "planted thick with trees of blackest leaf, and in a vale
obscure, enclosed the stone of night; oblique it stood, o'erhung with
purple flowers and berries red;" image of the human intellect "once open
to the heavens" as the south to the sun; now, as the head of fallen man,
"overgrown with hair and covered with a stony roof;" sunk deep "beneath
the attractive north," where evil spirits are strongest, where the
whirlpool of speculation sucks in the soul and entombs it. Standing on
this, as on a watch-tower, the "Angel" beholds Religion enthroned over
Europe, and the pale revolution of cloud and fire through the night of
space and time; beholds "Albion," the home once of ancient freedom and
faith, trodden underfoot by laws and churches, that the God of religion
may have wherewithal to "feed his soul with pity." At last begins the era
of rebellion and change; the fires of Orc lay hold upon law[56] and
gospel; yet for a little while the ministers of his mother have power to
fight against him, and she, allied now and making common cause with the
God alien to her children, "laughs in her sleep," seeing through the veil
and vapour of dreams the subjection of male to female, the false attribute
of unnatural power given to women by faith and fear. Not as yet can the
Promethean fire utterly dissolve the clouds of Urizen, though the flesh of
the ministering angel of religion is already consumed or consuming; nor
as yet can the trumpet of revolution summon the dead to judgment. That
first blast of summons must be blown by material science, which destroys
the letter of the law and the text of the covenant. When the "mighty
spirit" of Newton had seized the trumpet and blown it,
"Yellow as leaves of Autumn the myriads of Angelic hosts
Fell thro' the wintry skies seeking their graves,
Rattling their hollow bones in howling and lamentation;"
as to this day they do, and did in Blake's time, throughout whole
barrowfuls of controversial "apologies" and "evidences." Then the
mother-goddess awoke from her eighteen centuries of sleep, the "Christian
era" being now wellnigh consummated, and all those years "fled as if they
had not been;" she called her children around her, by many monstrous names
and phrases of chaotic invocation; comfort and happiness here, there sweet
pestilence and soft delusion; the "seven churches of Leutha" seek the love
of "Antamon," symbolic of Christian faith reconciled to "pagan" indulgence
and divorced from Jewish prohibition; even as we find in the prophet
himself equal faith in sensual innocence and spiritual truth. Of "the soft
Oothoon" the great goddess asks now "Why wilt thou give up woman's
secrecy, my melancholy child? Between two moments bliss is ripe." Last she
calls upon Orc; "Smile, son of my afflictions; arise and give our
mountains joy of thy red light."
"She ceased; for all were forth at sport beneath the solemn moon,
Waking the stars of Urizen with their immortal songs,
That nature felt thro' all her pores the enormous revelry.
Till morning oped her eastern gate;
Then every one fled to his station; and Enitharmon wept."
But with the dawn of that morning Orc descended in fire, "and in the
vineyards of red France appeared the light of his fury." The revolution
begins; all space groans; and lion and tiger are gathered together after
their prey: the god of time arises as one out of a trance,
"And with a cry that shook all nature to the utmost pole
Called all his sons to the strife of blood."
Our study of the _Europe_ might bring more profit if we could have genuine
notes appended to the text as well as to the designs. Such worth or beauty
as the poem has burns dim and looms distant by comparison; but there is in
it more of either than we have here time or means to indicate. At least
the prelude so strangely selected for citation and thrown loose upon the
pages of the biography in so crude and inexplicable a manner, may now be
seen to have some tangible or presumable sense. The spirit of Europe rises
revealed in the advent of revolution, sick of time and travail; pleading
with the mother-goddess, Cybele of this mythology; wrapping about her
veils of water and garments of cloud, in vain; "the red sun and moon and
all the overflowing stars rain down prolific pains." Out of her
overlaboured womb arise forms and forces of change, fugitive fires of
wrath, sonorous shapes of fear; and they take substance in space, but
bring to their mother no help or profit, no comfort or light; to the
virgin daughter of America freedom has come and fruitful violence of love,
but not to the European mother. She has no hope in all the infinity of
space and time; "who shall bind the infinite with an eternal band, to
compass it with swaddling bands?" By comparison of the two preludes the
relations of the two kindred poems may be better understood: the one is
plaintive as the voice of a world in pain, and decaying kingdom by
kingdom; the other fierce and hopeful as the cry of a nation in travail,
whose agony is not that of death, but rather that of birth.
_The First Book of Urizen_ is perhaps more shapeless and chaotic at a
first glimpse than any other of these prose poems. Clouds of blood,
shadows of horror, worlds without form and void, rise and mingle and wane
in indefinite ways, with no special purpose or appreciable result. The
myth here is of an active but unprolific God, warring with shapes of the
wilderness, and at variance with the eternals: beaten upon by Time, who
figures always in all his various shapes and actions as the saviour and
friend of man. "Earth was not, nor globes of attraction; the will of the
Immortal expanded or contracted at will his all-flexible senses. Death was
not; but eternal life sprang." (1. Urizen, ii. 1.) Urizen, the God of
restraint, creator of prohibition, whose laws are forbearance and
abstinence, is for ages divided from Eternity and at war with Time; "long
periods in burning fires labouring, till hoary, and age-broken, and aged,
in despair and the shadows of death." (1. Urizen, iii. 6.) In time the
formless God takes form, creating and assuming feature by feature; bones,
heart, eyes, ears, nostrils, throat with tongue, hands with feet; an age
of agony being allotted to each of the seven created features; still
toiling in fire and beset by snares, which the Time-Spirit kindles and
weaves to avert and destroy in its birth the desolate influence of the
Deity who forbids and restrains. These transformations of Urizen make up
some of Blake's grandest and strangest prophetic studies. First the spinal
skeleton, with branchwork of rib and savage nudity of joint and clavicle,
shaped mammoth-wise, in grovelling involution of limb. In one copy at
least these bones are touched with dim green and gold colour; such a faint
fierce tint as one might look for on the cast scales or flakes of dragons
left astrand in the ebb of a deluge. Next a huge fettered figure with
blind shut eyes overflowing into tears, with convulsed mouth and sodden
stream of beard: then bones painfully gathering flesh, twisted forms round
which flames break out fourfold, tortured elemental shapes that plunge and
writhe and moan. Until Time, divided against himself, brings forth Space,
the universal eternal female element, called Pity among the gods, who
recoil in fear from the dawn of human creation and division. Of these two
divinities, called in the mythology Los and Enitharmon, is born the
man-child Orc. "The dead heard the voice of the child and began to awake
from sleep; all things heard the voice of the child and began to awake to
life." (vii. 5.) Here again we may spare a word or two for that splendid
figure (p. 20) of the new-born child falling aslant through cloven fire
that curls and trembles into spiral blossoms of colour and petals of
feverish light. And the children of Urizen were Thiriel, born from cloud;
Utha, from water; Grodna, from earth; Fuzon, "first-begotten, last-born,"
from fire--"and his daughters from green herbs and cattle, from monsters
and worms of the pit. He cursed both sons and daughters; for he saw that
no flesh nor spirit could keep his iron laws one moment." (viii. 3, 4.)
Then from his sorrows for these his children begotten on the material body
of nature, the web of religion begins to unwind and expand, "throwing out
from his sorrowing soul, the dungeon-like heaven dividing" (viii. 6)--and
the knotted meshes of the web to involve all races and cities. "The Senses
inward rushed shrinking beneath the dark net of infection: till the
shrunken eyes, clouded over, discerned not the woven hypocrisy; but the
streaky slime in their heavens, brought together by narrowing perceptions,
appeared transparent air; for their eyes grew small like the eyes of a
man. Six days they shrank up from existence, and the seventh day they
rested, and they blessed the seventh day, in sick hope; and forgot their
eternal life." (1. Urizen, ix. 1, 2, 3.) Hence grows the animal tyranny of
gravitation, and hence also the spiritual tyranny of law; "they lived a
period of years, then left a noisome body to the jaws of devouring
darkness; and their children wept, and built tombs in the desolate places;
and formed laws of prudence and called them the eternal laws of God." (ix.
4, 5.) Seeing these his brethren degraded into life and debased into
flesh, the son of the fire, Fuzon, called together "the remaining children
of Urizen; and they left the pendulous earth: they called it Egypt, and
left it. And the salt ocean rolled englobed." (ix. 8, 9.) The freer and
stronger spirits left the world of men to the dominion of earth and water;
air and fire were withdrawn from them, and there were left only the
heaviness of imprisoning clay and the bitterness of violent sea.
This is a hurried and blotted sketch of the main myth, which is worth
following up by those who would enter on any serious study of Blake's
work; all that is here indicated in dim hints being afterwards assumed as
the admitted groundwork of later and larger myths. In this present book
(and in it only) the illustrative work may be said almost to overweigh and
stifle the idea illustrated. Strange semi-human figures, clad in sombre or
in fiery flesh, racing through fire or sinking through water, allure and
confuse the fancy of the student. Every page vibrates with light and
colour; on none of his books has the artist lavished more noble profusion
of decorative work. It is worth observing that while some copies are
carefully numbered throughout "First Book," in others the word "First" is
erased from every leaf: as in effect the Second Book never was put forth
under that title. Next year however the _Book of Ahania_ came out--if one
may say as much of a quarto of six leaves which has hardly yet emerged
into sight of two or three readers. This we may take--or those may who
please--to be the _Second Book of Urizen_. It is among the choicer spoils
of Blake, not as yet cast into the public treasury; for the Museum has no
copy, though possessing (in its blind confused way) duplicates of
_America_, _Albion_, and _Los_. Some day, one must hope, there will at
least be a complete accessible collection of Blake's written works
arranged in rational order for reference. Till the dawn of that day people
must make what shift they can in chaos.
In _Ahania_, though a fine and sonorous piece of wind-music, we have not
found many separate notes worth striking. Formless as these poems may
seem, it is often the floating final impression of power which makes them
memorable and valuable, rather than any stray gleam of purple or glitter
of pearl on the skirt. Thus the myth runs--to the best of its power; but
the tether of it is but short.
Fuzon, born of the fiery part of the God of nature, in revolt against his
father, divides him in twain as with a beam of fire; the desire of Urizen
is separated from him; this divided soul, "his invisible lust," he sees
now as she is apart from himself, and calls Sin; seizes her on his
mountains of jealousy; kisses and weeps over her, then casts her forth and
hides her in cloud, in dumb distance of mysterious space; "jealous though
she was invisible." Divided from him, she turns to mere shadow "unseen,
unbodied, unknown, the mother of Pestilence." But the beam cast by Fuzon
was light upon earth--light to "Egypt," the house of bondage and place of
captivity for the outcast human children of Urizen. Thus far the book
floats between mere allegory and creative myth; not difficult however to
trace to the root of its purport. From this point it grows, if not wilder
in words, still mistier in build of limb and shape of feature. Fuzon,
smitten by the bow of Urizen, seems to typify dimly the Christian or
Promethean sacrifice; the revolted God or son of God, who giving to men
some help or hope to enlighten them, is slain for an atonement to the
wrath of his father: though except for the mythical sonship Prometheus
would be much the nearer parallel. The bow, formed in secresy of the
nerves of a slain dragon "scaled and poisonous-horned," begotten of the
contemplations of Urizen and destroyed by him in combat, must be another
type, half conceived and hardly at all wrought out, of the secret and
jealous law of introspective faith divided against itself and the god of
its worship, but strong enough to smite the over-confident champion of men
even in his time of triumph, when he "thought Urizen slain by his wrath: I
am God, said he, eldest of things." (II. 8.) Suddenly the judgment of the
jealous wrath of God falls upon him; the rock hurled as an arrow "enters
his bosom; his beautiful visage, his tresses that gave light to the
mornings of heaven, were smitten with darkness.--But the rock fell upon
the earth, Mount Sinai, in Arabia:" being indeed a type of the moral law
of Moses, sent to destroy and suppress the native rebellious energies and
active sins of men. Here one may catch fast hold of one thing--the
identity of Blake's "Urizen," at least for this time, with the Deity of
the earlier Hebrews; the God of the Law and Decalogue rather than of Job
or the Prophets. "On the accursed tree of mystery" that shoots up under
his heel from "tears and sparks of vegetation" fallen on the barren rock
of separation, where "shrunk away from Eternals," alienated from the
ancient freedom of the first Gods or Titans, averse to their large and
liberal laws of life, the jealous God sat secret--on the topmost stem of
this tree Urizen "nailed the corpse of his first-begotten." Thenceforward
there fell upon the half-formed races of men sorrow only and pestilence,
barren pain of unprofitable fruit and timeless burden of desire and
disease. One need not sift the myth too closely; it would be like
winnowing water and weighing cloud with scale or sieve. The two
illustrations, it may here be said, are very slight--mere hints of a
design, and merely touched with colour. In the frontispiece Ahania,
divided from Urizen, floats upon a stream of wind between hill and cloud,
with haggard limbs and straightened spectral hair; on the last leaf a dim
Titan, wounded and bruised, lies among rocks flaked with leprous lichen
and shaggy with bloodlike growths of weed and moss. One final glimpse we
may take of Ahania after her division--the love of God, as it were, parted
from God, impotent therefore and a shadow, if not rather a plague and
blight; mercy severed from justice, and thus made a worse thing than
useless. Such may be the hinted meaning, or at least some part of it; but
the work, it must be said, holds by implication dim and great suggestions
of something more than our analytic ingenuities can well unravel by this
slow process of suggestion. Properly too Ahania seems rather to represent
the divine generative desire or love, translated on earth into sexual
expression; the female side of the creative power--mother of all things
made.
"The lamenting voice of Ahania weeping upon the void and round the
Tree of Fuzon. Distant in solitary night her voice was heard, but no
form had she; but her tears from clouds eternal fell round the Tree.
And the voice cried 'Ah Urizen! Love! Flower of morning! I weep on
the verge of non-entity: how wide the abyss between Ahania and thee!
I lie on the verge of the deep, I see thy dark clouds ascend; I see
thy black forests and floods, a horrible waste to my eyes. Weeping I
walk over the rocks, over dens, and through valleys of death. Why
dost thou despise Ahania, to cast me from thy bright presence into
the world of loneness? I cannot touch his hand; nor weep on his
knees; nor hear his voice and bow; nor see his eyes and joy; nor hear
his footsteps, and my heart leap at the lovely sound; I cannot kiss
the place where his bright feet have trod: but I wander on the rocks
with hard necessity. Where is my golden palace? where my ivory bed?
where the joy of my morning hour? where the sons of eternity singing
to awake bright Urizen my king to arise to the mountain sport, to the
bliss of eternal valleys, to awake my king in the morn, to embrace
Ahania's joy on the breath of his open bosom; from my soft cloud of
dew to fall in showers of life on his harvest? When he gave my happy
soul to the sons of eternal joy; when he took the daughters of life
into my chambers of love; when I found babes of bliss on my beds and
bosoms of milk in my chambers, filled with eternal seed. O! eternal
births sung round Ahania in interchange sweet of their joys; swelled
with ripeness and fat with fatness, bursting in clouds my odours, my
ripe figs and rich pomegranates, in infant joy at thy feet, O Urizen,
sported and sang: then thou with thy lap full of seed, with thy hand
full of generous fire, walkedst forth from the clouds of morning, on
the virgins of springing joy, on the human soul, to cast the seed of
eternal science. The sweat poured down thy temples, to Ahania
returned in evening; the moisture awoke to birth my mother's joys
sleeping in bliss. But now alone over rocks, mountains--cast out from
thy lovely bosom--cruel jealousy! selfish fear! self-destroying! how
can delight renew in these chains of darkness, where bones of beasts
are strewn on the bleak and snowy mountains, where bones from the
birth are buried before they see the light?'"--_Ahania_, ch. v., v.
1-14.