up; one of the most musical among this crowd of singing shadows. In the
same year the last and briefest of this first prophetic series was
engraved. The _Song of Los_, broken into two divisions headed _Africa_ and
_Asia_, has more affinity to _Urizen_ and _Ahania_ than to _Europe_ and
_America_. The old themes of delusion and perversion are once again
rehandled; not without vigorous harmonies of choral expression. The
illustrations are of special splendour, as though designed to atone for
the lean and denuded form in which _Ahania_ had been sent forth. In the
frontispiece a grey old giant, clothed from the waist only with heavy
raiment of livid and lurid white, bows down upon a Druid altar before the
likeness of a darkened sun low-hung in heaven, filled with sombre and
fiery forms of things, and shooting out upon each quarter a broad
reflected ray like the reflection struck by sunlight from a broad bare
sword-blade, but touched also, as with strange infection, with flakes of
deadly colour that vibrate upon the starless solid ground of an
intolerable night. Less of menace with more of sadness is in the landscape
and sky on the title-page: a Titan, with one weighty hand lying on a
gigantic skull, rests at the edge of a green sloping moor, himself seeming
a grey fragment of moorland rock; brown fire of waste grass or rusted
flower stains crag and bent all round him; the sky is all night and fire,
bitter red and black. On the first page a serpent, splendid with blood-red
specks and scales of greenish blue, darts the cloven flame of its tongue
against a brilliant swarm of flies; and again throughout the divided lines
a network of fair tortuous things, of flickering leaf and sinuous tendril
and strenuous root, flashes and curls from margin to margin.
This song is the song of Time, sung to the four harps of the world, each
continent a harp struck by Time as by a harper. In brief dim words it
celebrates the end of the world of the patriarchs where faith and freedom
were one, the advent of the iron laws and ages, when God the Accuser gave
his laws to the nations by the hands of the children of time: when to the
extreme east was given mere abstract philosophy for faith instead of clear
pure belief, and man became slave to the elements, the slave and not the
lord of the nature of things; but not yet was philosophy a mere matter of
the five senses. Thus they fared in the east; meantime the spirits of the
patriarchal world shrank beneath waters or fled in fires, Adam from Eden,
Noah from Ararat; and "Moses beheld upon Mount Sinai forms of dark
delusion." Over each religion, Indian and Jewish and Grecian, some
special demon or god of the mythology is bidden preside; Christianity, the
expression of human sorrow, human indulgence and forgiveness, was given as
gospel to "a man of sorrows" by the two afflicted spirits who typify man
and woman, in whom the bitter errors and the sore needs of either several
sex upon earth are reproduced in vast vague reflection; to them therefore
the gentler gospel belongs as of right. Next comes Mahometanism, to give
some freedom and fair play to the controlled and abused senses; but
northwards other spirits set on foot a code of war to satiate their
violent delight. So on all sides is the world overgrown with kingdoms and
churches, codes and creeds; inspiration is crushed and erased; the sons of
Time and Space reign alone; Har and Heva, the spirits of loftier and purer
kind who were not as the rest of the Titan brood that "lived in war and
lust," are fled and fallen, become as mere creeping things; and the world
is ripe to bring forth for its cruel and mournful God the final fruit of
reason debased and faith distorted.
"Thus the terrible race of Los and Enitharmon gave
Laws and Religions to the sons of Har, binding them more
And more to Earth, closing and restraining;
Till a Philosophy of Five Senses was complete;
Urizen wept, and gave it into the hands of Newton and Locke."
These "terrible sons" of time and space are the presiding demons of each
creed or code; the sons of men are in their hands now, for the father and
mother of men are fallen gods, oblivious and transformed: and these minor
demons are all subservient to the Creator, whose soul, sorrowful but not
merciful, animates the whole pained world. So, with cloud of menace and
fire of wrath shed out about the deceased gods and the new philosophies,
the first part ends. In the second part the clouds have broken and the
fire has come forth; revolution has begun in Europe; the ancient lords of
Asia are startled from their dens and cry in bitterness of soul for help
of the old oppressions; for councillors and for taxes, for plagues and for
priests, "to turn man from his path; to restrain the child from the womb;
to cut off the bread from the city, that the remnant may learn to obey:
that the pride of the heart may fail; that the lust of the eye may be
quenched; that the delicate ear in its infancy may be dulled, and the
nostrils closed up; to teach mortal worms the path that leads from the
gates of the grave." At their cry Urizen arose, the lord of Asia from of
old, ever since he cast down the patriarchal law and set up the Mosaic
code; "his shuddering waving wings went enormous above the red flames," to
contend with the rekindled revolution, "the thick-flaming thought-creating
fires of Orc;"
"His books of brass, iron, and gold
Melted over the land as he flew,
Heavy-waving, howling, weeping.
And he stood over Judea,
And stayed in his ancient places,
And stretched his clouds over Jerusalem.
For Adam, a mouldering skeleton,
Lay bleached on the garden of Eden;
And Noah, as white as snow,
On the mountains of Ararat."
Thus, with thunder from eastward and fire from westward, the God of
jealousy and the Spirit of freedom met together; earth shrank at the
meeting of them.
"Forth from the dead dust rattling bones to bones
Came; shaking, convulsed, the shivering clay breathes;
And all flesh naked stands; Fathers and Friends;
Mothers and Infants; Kings and Warriors;
The Grave shrieks with delight, and shakes
Her hollow womb, and clasps the solid stem;
Her bosom swells with wild desire;
And milk and blood and glandous wine
In rivers rush and shout and dance
On mountain, dale and plain.
The Song of Los is ended.
Urizen wept."
So much for the text; which has throughout a contagious power of
excitement in the musical passion of its speech. For these books, above
all, it is impossible to read continuously and not imbibe a certain
half-nervous enjoyment from their long cadences and tempestuous
undulations of melody. Such passion went to the writing of them that some
savour of that strong emotion infects us also in reading pages which seem
still hot from the violent touch of the poet. The design of Har and Heva
flying from their lustful and warlike brethren across green waste land
before a late and thunder-coloured sky, he grasping her with convulsive
fear, she looking back as she runs with lifted arm and flame-like hair and
fiery flow of raiment; and that succeeding where they reappear fallen to
mere king and queen of the vegetable world, themselves half things of
vegetable life; are both noble if somewhat vehement and reckless. In this
latter, the deep green-blue heaven full of stars like flowers is set with
sweet and deep effect against the darkening green of the vast lily-leaves
supporting the fiery pallor of those shapely chalices which enclose as
the heart of either blossom the queen lying at her length, and the king
sitting with bright plucked-out pistil in hand by way of sceptre or sword;
and below them the dim walls of the world alone are wholly black: his
robes of soft shot purple and red, her long chrysalid shell or husk of
tarnished gold, are but signs of their bondage and fall from deity; they
are fallen to be mere flowers. More might be said of the remaining
designs; the fierce glory of sweeping branches and driven leaves in a
strong wind, the fervent sky and glimmering hill, the crouching figures
above and under, the divine insane luxuriance of cloudy and flowery colour
which makes twice luminous the last page of the poem; the strange final
design where a spirit with huge childlike limbs and lifted hair seems to
smite with glittering mallet the outer rim of a huger blood-red sun; but
for this book we have no more space; and much laborious travel lies ahead
of us yet.
[Illustration]
With the _Song of Los_ the first or London series of prophecies came to a
close not unfit or unmelodious. As their first word had been Revelation,
their last was Revolution. We have now to deal with the two later and
larger books written at Felpham, but not put forth till 1804. To one of
these at least we must allow some tolerably full notice. The _Milton_
shall here take precedence. This poem, though sufficiently vexatious to
the human sense at first sight, is worth some care and some admiration.
Its preface must here be read in full.
"The stolen and perverted writings of Homer and Ovid, of Plato and
Cicero, which all men ought to contemn, are set up by artifice
against the sublime of the Bible; but when the New Age is at leisure
to pronounce, all will be set right, and those grand works of the
more ancient and consciously and professedly inspired men, will
hold their proper rank; and the daughters of memory shall become the
daughters of inspiration. Shakespeare and Milton were both curbed by
the general malady and infection from the silly Greek and Latin
slaves of the sword. Rouse up, O young men of the New Age! set your
foreheads against the ignorant hirelings! For we have hirelings in
the camp, the court, and the university; who would, if they could,
for ever depress mental and prolong corporeal war. Painters! on you I
call! Sculptors! Architects! suffer not the fashionable fools to
depress your powers by the prices they pretend to give for
contemptible works or the expensive advertising boasts that they make
of such works: believe Christ and his Apostles, that there is a class
of men whose whole delight is in destroying. We do not want either
Greek or Roman models if we are but just and true to our own
imaginations, those worlds of eternity in which we shall live for
ever, in Jesus our Lord.
And did those feet in ancient time
Walk over England's mountains green?
And was the holy Lamb of God
On England's pleasant pastures seen?
And did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic mills?
Bring me my bow of burning gold;
Bring me my arrows of desire;
Bring me my spear: O clouds, unfold;
Bring me my chariot of fire.
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.
'Would to God that all the Lord's people were prophets.'--Numbers xi.
29."
After this strange and grand prelude, which, though taken in the letter it
may read like foolishness, is in the spirit of it certainty and truth for
all time, we pass again under the shadow and into the land that shifts and
slips under our feet. Something however out of the chaos of fire and wind
and stormy colour may be caught at by fits and stored up for such as can
like it. Thus the poem opens, with not less fervour and splendour of sound
than usual.
"Daughters of Beulah! Muses who inspire the Poet's Song!
Record the journey of immortal Milton thro' your realms
Of terror and mild moony lustre, in soft sexual delusions
Of varied beauty, to delight the wanderer and repose
His burning thirst and freezing hunger! Come into my hand,
By your mild power descending down the Nerves of my right arm
From out the Portals of my Brain, where by your ministry
The Eternal Great Humanity Divine planted his Paradise
And in it caused the Spectres of the Dead to take sweet forms
In likeness of himself."
(Observe here the answer by anticipation to the old foolish charge of
madness and belief in mere material visions; a charge indeed refuted and
confuted at every turn we take. Thus, and no otherwise, did Blake believe
in his dead visitors and models: as spectres formed into new and
significant shape by God, after his own likeness; _not_ called up as by
some witch of Endor and reclothed with the rags and rottenness of their
dead old bodies; creatures existing within the brain and imagination of
the workman, not as they were once externally and by accident, but as they
will be for ever by the essence and substance of their nature. For the
"vegetated shadow" or "human vegetable" no mystic ever had deeper or
subtler contempt than Blake; nor was ever a man less likely to care about
raising or laying it after death.)
"Tell also of the False Tongue! vegetated
Beneath your land of shadows; of its sacrifices, and
Its offerings: even till Jesus, the image of the Invisible God,
Became its prey; a curse, an offering, and an atonement
For Death Eternal, in the heavens of Albion, and before the gates
Of Jerusalem his Emanation, in the heavens beneath Beulah."
Let the Sufis of the West make what construction they can of that
doctrine. We will help them, before passing on, with another view of the
Atonement, taken from _The Everlasting Gospel_.
"But when Jesus was crucified,
Then was perfected his galling pride.
In three days he devoured his prey,
_And still he devours the body of clay_;
For dust and clay is the serpent's meat,
Which never was meant for man to eat."
That is, the spirit must be eternally at work consuming and destroying the
likeness of things material and the religions made out of them. This
over-fervent prophet of freedom for the senses as well as the soul would
have them free, one may say, only for the soul's sake: talking as we see
he did of redemption from the body and salvation by the spirit at war with
it, in words which literally taken would hardly have misbecome a monk of
Nitria.
Returning to the _Milton_, we are caught again in the mythologic
whirlpools and cross-currents of symbol and doctrine; our ears rung deaf
and dazed by the hammers of Los (Time) and our eyes bewildered by the
wheels and woofs of Enitharmon (Space): "her looms vibrate with soft
affections, weaving the Web of Life out from the ashes of the Dead." This
is a fragment of the main myth, whose details Los and Enitharmon
themselves for the present forbid our following out.
"The Three Classes of men regulated by Los's hammer, and woven
By Enitharmon's Looms, and spun beneath the Spindle of Tirzah:
The first: The Elect from before the foundation of the World;
The second: The Redeemed. The Third: the Reprobate and formed
To destruction from the mother's womb."
Into the myth of the harrow and horses of Palamabron, more Asiatic in tone
than any other of Blake's, and full of the vast proportion and formless
fervour of Hindoo legends, we will not haul any reluctant reader. Let him
only take enough by way of extract to understand how thoroughly one vein
of fiery faith runs through all the prophetic books, and one passionate
form of doctrine is enforced and beaten in upon the disciple again and
again; not hitherto with much material effect.
"And in the midst of the Great Assembly Palamabron prayed;
O God, protect me from my friends that they have not power over me;
Thou hast given me power to protect myself from my bitterest enemies."
Then the wrath of Rintrah, the most fiery of the spirits who are children
of Time, having entered by lot into Satan, who was of the Elect from the
first, "seeming a brother, being a tyrant, even thinking himself a brother
while he is murdering the just," "with incomparable mildness," believing
"that he had not oppressed"--a symbolic point much insisted on--
"He created Seven deadly Sins, drawing out his infernal scroll
Of moral laws and cruel punishments upon the clouds of Jehovah,
To pervert the divine voice in its entrance to the earth
With thunders of war and trumpet's sound, with armies of disease;
Punishments and deaths mustered and numbered; saying, I am God alone,
There is no other; let all obey my principles of moral individuality
I have brought them from the uppermost innermost recesses
Of my Eternal Mind; transgressors I will rend off for ever;
As now I rend this accursed Family from my covering."
This is the Satan of Blake, sufficiently unlike the Miltonic. Of himself
he cannot conceive evil and bring forth destruction; the absolute Spirit
of Evil is alien from this mythology; he must enter into the body of a
law or system and put on the qualities of spirits strange to himself
(Rintrah); he is divided, inconsistent, a mystery and error to himself; he
represents Monotheism with its stringent law and sacerdotal creed, Jewish
or Christian, as opposed to Pantheism whereby man and God are one, and by
culture and perfection of humanity man makes himself God. The point of
difference here between Blake and many other western Pantheists is that in
his creed self-abnegation (in the mystic sense, not the ascetic--the
Oriental, not the Catholic) is the highest and only perfect form of
self-culture: and as Satan (under "names divine"--see the Epilogue to the
_Gates of Paradise_) is the incarnate type of Monotheism, so is Jesus the
incarnate type of Pantheism. To return to our myth; the stronger spirit
rears walls of rocks and forms rivers of fire round them;
"And Satan, _not having the Science of Wrath but only of Pity_,[57]
Rent them asunder; and Wrath was left to Wrath, and Pity to Pity."
This is Blake's ultimate conception of active evil; not wilful wrong-doing
by force of arm or of spirit; but mild error, tender falsehood innocent of
a purpose, embodied in an external law of moral action and restrictive
faith, and clothed with a covering of cruelty which adheres to and grows
into it (Decalogue and Law). A subtle and rather noble conception,
developing easily and rapidly into what was once called the Manichean
doctrine as to the Old Testament.
"If the guilty should be condemned, he must be an Eternal Death,
And one must die for another throughout all Eternity;
Satan is fallen from his station and can never be redeemed,
But must be new-created continually moment by moment,
And therefore the class of Satan shall be called the Elect, and those
Of Rintrah the Reprobate, and those of Palamabron the Redeemed;
For he is redeemed from Satan's law, the wrath falling on Rintrah.
And therefore Palamabron cared not to call a solemn Assembly
Till Satan had assumed Rintrah's wrath in the day of mourning,
In a feminine delusion[58] of false pride self-deceived."
The words of the text recur not unfrequently in the prophetic books. A
single final act of redemption by sacrifice and oblation of one for
another is not admitted as sufficient, or even possible. The favourite
dogma is this, of the eternity of sacrifice; endless redemption to be
bought at no less a price than endless self-devotion. To this plea of "an
Eternal" before the assembly succeeds the myth of Leutha "offering herself
a ransom for Satan:"[59] a myth, not an allegory; for of allegory pure
and simple there is scarcely a trace in Blake.
"I formed the Serpent
Of precious stones and gold turned poison on the sultry waste.
To do unkind things with kindness; with power armed, to say
The most irritating things in the midst of tears and love;
These are the stings of the Serpent."
This whole myth of Leutha is splendid for colour, and not too subtle to be
thought out: the imaginative action of the poem plays like fire and
palpitates like blood upon every line, as the lips of caressing flame and
the tongues of cleaving light in which the text is set fold and flash
about the margins.
"The Elect shall meet the Redeemed, on Albion's rocks they shall meet,
Astonished at the Transgressor, in him beholding the Saviour.
And the Elect shall say to the Redeemed; We behold it is of Divine
Mercy alone, of free gift and Election, that we live;
Our Virtues and cruel Goodnesses have deserved Eternal Death."
Forgiveness of sin and indulgence, the disciple perceives, is not enough
for this mythology; it must include forgiveness of virtue and abstinence,
the hypocritic holiness made perfect in the body of death for six thousand
years under the repressive and restrictive law called after the name of
the God of the Jews, who "was leprous." Thus prophesies Blake, in a fury
of supra-Christian dogmatism.
Here ends the "Song of the Bard" in the First Book. "Many condemned the
high-toned song, saying, Pity and Love are too venerable for the
imputation of guilt. Others said, If it is true!" Let us say the same, and
pass on: listening only to the Bard's answer:--
"I am inspired! I know it is Truth! for I sing
According to the Inspiration of the Poetic Genius
Who is the Eternal all-protecting divine Humanity
To whom be Glory and Power and Dominion evermore. Amen."
Then follows the incarnation and descent into earth and hell of Milton,
who represents here the redemption by inspiration, working in pain and
difficulty before the expiration of the six thousand Satanic years. His
words are worth quoting:--
"When will the Resurrection come, to deliver the sleeping body
From corruptibility? O when, Lord Jesus, wilt thou come?
Tarry no longer; for my soul lies at the gates of death:
I will arise and look forth for the morning of the grave:
I will go down to the sepulchre and see if morning breaks.
I will go down to self-annihilation and eternal death
Lest the Last Judgment come and find me unannihilate
And I be seized and given into the hands of my own selfhood."
This grand dogma, that personal love and selfishness make up the sin which
defies redemption, is in a manner involved in that former one of the
necessary "eternity of sacrifice," for
"I in my selfhood am that Satan; I am that Evil One;
He is my Spectre."
Now by the light of these extracts let any student examine the great
figure at p. 13, where "he beheld his own Shadow--and entered into it."
Clothed in the colours of pain, crowned with the rays of suffering, it
stands between world and world in a great anguish of transformation and
change: Passion included by Incarnation. Erect on a globe of opaque
shadow, backed by a sphere of aching light that opens flower-wise into
beams of shifting colour and bitter radiance as of fire, it appeals with a
doubtful tortured face and straining limbs to the flat black wall and roof
of heaven. All over the head is a darkness not of transitory cloud or
night that will some time melt into day; recalling that great verse:
"Neither could the bright flames of the stars endure to lighten that
horrible night."
"As when a man dreams he reflects not that his body sleeps,
Else he would wake; so seemed he entering his Shadow; but
With him the Spirits of the Seven Angels of the Presence
Entering, they gave him still perceptions of his Sleeping Body
Which now arose and walked with them in Eden, as an Eighth
Image, Divine tho' darkened, and tho' walking as one walks
In Sleep; and the Seven comforted and supported him."
The whole passage is full of a deep and dim beauty which grows clearer and
takes form of feature to those only who bring with them eyes to see and
patience to desire it. Take next this piece of cosmography, worth
comparing with Dante's vision of the worlds:--
"The nature of infinity is this; That everything has its
Own vortex: and when once a traveller thro' Eternity
Has passed that vortex, he perceives it roll backward behind
His path into a globe itself enfolding, like a sun
Or like a moon or like a universe of starry majesty,
While he keeps onward in his wondrous journey thro' the earth,
Or like a human form, a friend with whom he lived benevolent:
As the eye of man views both the east and west encompassing
Its vortex, and the north and south, with all their starry host;
Also the rising and setting moon he views surrounding
His cornfields and his valleys of five hundred acres square;
Thus is the earth one infinite plane, and not as apparent
To the weak traveller confined beneath the moony shade;
Thus is the heaven a vortex passed already, and the earth
A vortex not yet passed by the traveller thro' Eternity."
One curious piece of symbolism may be extracted from the myth, as the one
reference to anything actual:--
"Then Milton knew that the Three Heavens of Beulah were beheld
By him on earth in his bright pilgrimage of sixty years
In those three Females whom his Wives, and those three whom his Daughters
Had represented and contained, that they might be resumed
By giving up of Selfhood."