Mundane Shell, which "is a vast concave earth, an immense hardened shadow
of all things upon our vegetated earth, enlarged into dimension and
deformed into indefinite space," we will take no more account here; nor of
the strife with Urizen, "one giving life, the other giving death, to his
adversary;" hardly even of the temptation by the sons and daughters of
Rahab and Tirzah, when
"The twofold Form Hermaphroditic, and the Double-sexed,
The Female-male and the Male-female, self-dividing stood
Before him in their beauty and in cruelties of holiness."
(Compare the beautiful song "To Tirzah," in the Songs of Experience.) This
Tirzah, daughter of Rahab the holy, is "Natural Religion" (Theism as
opposed to Pantheism), which would fain have the spiritual Jerusalem
offered in sacrifice to it.
"Let her be offered up to holiness: Tirzah numbers her:
She numbers with her fingers every fibre ere it grow:
Where is the Lamb of God? where is the promise of his coming?
Her shadowy sisters form the bones, even the bones of Horeb
Around the marrow; and the orbed scull around the brain;
She ties the knot of nervous fibres into a white brain;
She ties the knot of bloody veins into a red-hot heart;
She ties the knot of milky seed into two lovely heavens,
Two yet but one; each in the other sweet reflected; these
Are our Three Heavens beneath the shades of Beulah, land of rest."
Here and henceforward the clamour and glitter of the poem become more and
more confused; nevertheless every page is set about with jewels; as here,
in a more comprehensible form than usual:--
"God sent his two servants Whitfield and Wesley; were they prophets?
Or were they idiots and madmen? 'Show us Miracles'?
Can you have greater Miracles than these? Men who devote
Their life's whole comfort to entire scorn, injury, and death?"
Take also these scraps of explanation mercifully vouchsafed us:--
"Bowlahoola is named Law by Mortals: Tharmas founded it
Because of Satan: * * * *
But Golgonooza is named Art and Manufacture by mortal men.
In Bowlahoola Los's Anvils stand and his Furnaces rage.
Bowlahoola thro' all its porches feels, tho' too fast founded
Its pillars and porticoes to tremble at the force
Of mortal or immortal arm; * * *
The Bellows are the Animal Lungs; the Hammers the Animal Heart;
The Furnaces the Stomach for digestion;"
(Here we must condense instead of transcribing. While thousands labour at
this work of the Senses in the halls of Time, thousands "play on
instruments stringed or fluted" to lull the labourers and drown the
painful sound of the toiling members, and bring forgetfulness of this
slavery to the flesh: a myth of animal life not without beauty, and to
Blake one of great attraction.)
"Los is by mortals named Time, Enitharmon is named Space;
But they depict him bald and aged who is in eternal youth
All-powerful, and his locks flourish like the brows of morning;
He is the Spirit of Prophecy, the ever-apparent Elias.
Time is the mercy of Eternity; without Time's swiftness
Which is the swiftest of all things, all were eternal torment."
At least this last magnificent passage should in common charity and sense
have been cited in the biography, if only to explain the often-quoted
words Los and Enitharmon. Neither blindness to such splendour of symbol,
nor deafness to such music of thought, can excuse the omission of what is
so wholly necessary for the comprehension of extracts already given, and
given (as far as one can see) with no available purpose whatever.
The remainder of the first book of the _Milton_ is a vision of Nature and
prophecy of the gathering of the harvest of Time and treading of the
winepress of War; in which harvest and vintage work all living things have
their share for good or evil.
"How red the sons and daughters of Luvah! here they tread the grapes,
Laughing and shouting, drunk with odours; many fall o'erwearied,
Drowned in the wine is many a youth and maiden; those around
Lay them on skins of Tigers and of the spotted Leopard and the wild Ass
Till they revive, or bury them in cool grots, making lamentation.
This Winepress is called War on Earth; it is the printing-press
Of Los, there he lays his words in order above the mortal brain
As cogs are formed in a wheel to turn the cogs of the adverse wheel."
All kind of insects, of roots and seeds and creeping things--"all the
armies of disease visible or invisible"--are there;
"The slow slug; the grasshopper that sings and laughs and drinks
(Winter comes, he folds his slender bones without a murmur);"
wasp and hornet, toad and newt, spider and snake,
"They throw off their gorgeous raiment; they rejoice with loud jubilee
Around the winepresses of Luvah, naked and drunk with wine.
There is the nettle that stings with soft down; and there
The indignant thistle whose bitterness is bred in his milk;
Who feeds on contempt of his neighbour; there all the idle weeds
That creep around the obscure places show their various limbs
Naked in all their beauty, dancing round the winepresses.
But in the winepresses the human grapes sing not nor dance,
They howl and writhe in shoals of torment, in fierce flames consuming;"
tortured for the cruel joy and deadly sport of Luvah's sons and daughters;
"They dance around the dying and they drink the howl and groan;
They catch the shrieks in cups of gold, they hand them one to another;
These are the sports of love, and these the sweet delights of amorous
play;
Tears of the grape, the death-sweat of the cluster; the last sigh
Of the mild youth who listens to the luring songs of Luvah."
Take also this from the speech of Time to his reapers.
"You must bind the sheaves not by nations or families,
You shall bind them in three classes; according to their classes
So shall you bind them, separating what has been mixed
Since men began to be woven into nations. * *
* * * The Elect is one class; you
Shall bind them separate; they cannot believe in eternal life
Except by miracle and a new birth. The other two classes,
The Reprobate[60] who never cease to believe, and the Redeemed
Who live in doubts and fears, perpetually tormented by the Elect,
These you shall bind in a twin bundle for the consummation."
The constellations that rise in immortal order, that keep their course
upon mountain and valley, with sound of harp and song, "with cups and
measures filled with foaming wine;" that fill the streams with light of
many visions and leave in luminous traces upon the extreme sea the peace
of their passage; these too are sons of Los, and labour in the vintage.
The gorgeous flies on meadow or brook, that weave in mazes of music and
motion the delight of artful dances, and sound instruments of song as they
touch and cross and recede; the trees shaken by the wind into sound of
heavy thunder till they become preachers and prophets to men; these are
the sons of Los, these the visions of eternity; and we see but as it were
the hem of their garments.
A noble passage follows, in which are resumed the labours of the sons of
time in fashioning men and the stations of men. They make for doubts and
fears cabinets of ivory and gold; when two spectres "like lamps quivering"
between life and death stand ready for the blind malignity of combat, they
are taken and moulded instead into shapes fit for love, clothed with soft
raiment by softer hands, drawn after lines of sweet and perfect form. Some
"in the optic nerve" give to the poor infinite wealth of insight, power to
know and enjoy the invisible heaven, and to the rich scorn and ignorance
and thick darkness. Others build minutes and hours and days;
"And every moment has a couch of gold for soft repose
(A moment equals a pulsation of the artery)
And every minute has an azure tent with silken veils,
And every hour has a bright golden gate carved with skill,
And every day and night has walls of brass and gates of adamant
Shining like precious stones and ornamented with appropriate signs,
And every month a silver-paved terrace builded high,
And every year invulnerable barriers with high towers,
And every age is moated deep, with bridges of silver and gold,
And every Seven Ages are encircled with a flaming fire."
There is much more of the same mythic sort concerning the duration of
time, the offices of the nerves (_e.g._, in the optic nerve sleep was
transformed to death by Satan the father of sin and death, even as we have
seen sensual death re-transformed by Mercy into sleep), and such-like huge
matters; full, one need not now repeat, of subtle splendour and fanciful
intensity. But enough now of this over-careful dredging in such weedy
waters; where nevertheless, at risk of breaking our net, we may at every
dip fish up some pearl.
At the opening of the second book the pearls lie close and pure. From this
(without explanation or reference) has been taken the lovely and mutilated
extract at p. 197 of the _Life_. Thus it stands in Blake's text:--
"Thou hearest the nightingale begin the song of spring;
The lark, sitting upon his earthy bed, just as the morn
Appears, listens silent; then, springing from the waving corn-field, loud
He leads the choir of day: trill--trill--trill--trill--
Mounting upon the wings of light into the great expanse,
Re-echoing against the lovely blue and shining heavenly shell
His little throat labours with inspiration; every feather
On throat, and breast, and wing, vibrate with the effluence divine.
All nature listens to him silent; and the awful Sun
Stands still upon the mountains, looking on this little bird
With eyes of soft humility, and wonder, love, and awe.
Then loud, from their green covert, all the birds began their song,--
The thrush, the linnet and the goldfinch, robin and the wren,
Awake the Sun from his sweet reverie upon the mountains;
The nightingale again essays his song, and through the day
And through the night warbles luxuriant; every bird of song
Attending his loud harmony with admiration and love.
(This is a vision of the lamentation of Beulah over Ololon.)
Thou perceivest the flowers put forth their precious odours,
And none can tell how from so small a centre come such sweets,
Forgetting that within that centre eternity expands
Its ever-during doors that Og and Anak fiercely guard.[61]
First ere the morning breaks joy opens in the flowery bosoms,
Joy even to tears, which the sun rising dries; first the wild thyme
And meadow-sweet downy and soft waving among the reeds,
Light springing on the air, lead the sweet dance; they wake
The honeysuckle sleeping on the oak, the flaunting beauty
Revels along upon the wind; the white-thorn, lovely May,
Opens her many lovely eyes; listening, the rose still sleeps,
None dare to wake her: soon she bursts her crimson-curtained bed
And comes forth in the majesty of beauty; every flower,
The pink, the jessamine, the wallflower, the carnation,
The jonquil, the mild lily, opes her heavens; every tree
And flower and herb soon fill the air with an innumerable dance,
Yet all in order sweet and lovely; men are sick with love.
Such is a vision of the lamentation of Beulah over Ololon."
This Beulah is "a place where contrarieties are equally true;" "it is a
pleasant lovely shadow where no dispute can come because of those who
sleep:" made to shelter, before they "pass away in winter," the temporary
emanations "which trembled exceedingly neither could they live, because
the life of man was too exceeding unbounded." Of the incarnation and
descent of Ololon, of the wars and prophecies of Milton, and of all the
other Felpham visions here put on record, we shall say no more in this
place; but all these things are written in the Second Book. The
illustrative work is also noble and worth study in all ways. One page for
example is covered by a design among the grandest of Blake's. Two figures
lie half embraced, as in a deadly sleep without dawn of dream or shadow of
rest, along a bare slant ledge of rock washed against by wintry water.
Over these two stoops an eagle balanced on the heavy-laden air, with
stretching throat and sharpened wings, opening beak, and eyes full of a
fierce perplexity of pity. All round the greenish and black slope of moist
sea-cliff the weary tidal ripple plashes and laps, thrusting up as it were
faint tongues and listless fingers tipped with foam. On an earlier page,
part of the text of which we have given, crowd and glitter all shapes and
images of insect or reptile life, sprinkling between line and margin keen
points of jewel-coloured light and soft flashes as of starry or scaly
brilliance.
The same year 1804 saw the huge advent of _Jerusalem_. Of that terrible
"emanation," hitherto the main cornerstone of offence to all students of
Blake, what can be said within any decent limit? or where shall any
traveller find a rest for feet or eyes in that noisy and misty land? It
were a mere frenzy of discipleship that would undertake by force of words
to make straight these crooked ways or compel things incoherent to cohere.
_Supra hanc petram_--and such a rock it is to begin any church-building
upon! Many of the unwary have stumbled over it and broken their wits.
Seriously, one cannot imagine that people will ever read through this vast
poem with pleasure enough to warrant them in having patience with it.
[Illustration]
Several things, true in the main of all the prophetic books, are
especially true and memorable with regard to those written or designed
during the "three years' slumber" at Felpham. They are the results of
intense and active solitude working upon the capricious nerves and
tremulous brain of a man naturally the most excitable and receptive of
men. They are to be read by the light of his earlier work in the same
line; still more perhaps by the light of those invaluable ten letters
printed in Vol. II. of the _Life_, for which one can hardly give thanks
enough. The incredible fever of spirit under the sting and stress of which
he thought and laboured all his life through, has left marks of its hot
and restless presence as clearly on this short correspondence as on the
voluminous rolls of prophecy. The merit or demerit of the work done is
never in any degree the conscious or deliberate result of a purpose.
Possessed to the inmost nerve and core by a certain faith, consumed by the
desire to obey his instinct of right by preaching that faith, utterly
regardless of all matters lying outside of his own inspiration, he wrote
and engraved as it was given him to do, and no otherwise. As to matter and
argument, the enormous _Jerusalem_ is simply a fervent apocalyptic
discourse on the old subjects--love without law and against law, virtue
that stagnates into poisonous dead matter by moral isolation, sin that
must exist for the sake of being forgiven, forgiveness that must always
keep up with sin--must even maintain sin that it may have something to
keep up with and to live for. Without forgiveness of sins, the one thing
necessary, we lapse each man into separate self-righteousness and a cruel
worship of natural morality and religious law. For nature, oddly enough as
it seems at first sight, is assumed by this mystical code to be the
cruellest and narrowest of absolute moralists. Only by worship of
imaginative impulse, the grace of the Lamb of God, which admits infinite
indulgence in sin and infinite forgiveness of sin--only by some such faith
as this shall the world be renewed and redeemed. This may be taken as the
rough result, broadly set down, of the portentous book of revelation.
Never, one may suppose, did any Oriental heretic drive his deductions
further or set forth his conclusions in obscurer form. Never certainly did
a man fall to his work with keener faith and devotion. Sin itself is not
so evil--but the remembrance and punishment of sin! "Injury the Lord
heals; but vengeance cannot be healed." Next or equal in hatefulness to
the division of qualities into evil and good (see above, _Marriage of
Heaven and Hell_) is the separation of sexes into male and female: hence
jealous love and personal desire, that set itself against the mystical
frankness of fraternity: hence too (contradictory as it may seem till one
thinks it out) the hermaphroditic emblem is always used as a symbol
seemingly of duplicity and division, perplexity and restraint. The two
sexes should not combine and contend; they must finally amalgamate and be
annihilated.[62] All this is of course more or less symbolic, and not to
be taken in literal coarseness or folly of meaning. The whole stage is
elemental, the scheme one of patriarchal vapour, and the mythologic
actors mere Titans outlined in cloud. Reserving this always, we shall not
be far out in interpreting Blake's dim creed somewhat as above. One
distinction it is here possible to make, and desirable to keep in mind:
Blake at one time speaks of Nature as the source of moral law, "the harlot
virgin-mother," "Rahab," "the daughter of Babylon," origin of religious
restrictions and the worship of abstinence; mother of "the harlot
modesty," and spring of all hypocrisies and prohibitions; to whom the
religious and moral of this world would fain offer up in sacrifice the
spiritual Jerusalem, the virgin espoused, named among men Liberty,
forbidding nothing and enjoying all, but therefore clean and not unclean:
by whom comes indulgence, after whom follows redemption. At another time
this same prophet will plead for freedom on behalf of "natural" energies,
and set up the claims of nature to energetic enjoyment and gratification
of all desires, against the moral law and government of the creative and
restrictive Deity--"Urizen, mistaken Demon of Heaven." With a like
looseness of phrase he uses and transposes the words "God" and "Satan,"
even to an excess of laxity and consequent perplexity; not, it may be
suspected, without a grain of innocent if malign pleasure at the chance of
inflicting on men of conventional tempers bewilderment and offence. But as
to this question of the term "Nature" the case seems to lie thus: when, as
throughout the _Marriage of Heaven and Hell_, he uses it in the simple
sense of human or physical condition as opposed to some artificial state
of soul or belief, he takes it as the contrary of conventional ideas and
habits (of religion and morality as vulgarly conceived or practised); but
when, as throughout the _Milton_ and _Jerusalem_, he speaks of nature as
opposed to inspiration, it must be taken as the contrary of that higher
and subtler religious faith which he is bent on inculcating, and which
itself is the only perfect opposite and efficient antagonist to the
conventional faith and (to use another of his quasi-technical terms) the
"deistical virtue" which he is bent on denying. Blake, one should always
remember, was not infidel but heretic; his belief was peculiar enough, but
it was not unbelief; it was farther from that than most men's. To him,
though for quite personal reasons and in a quite especial sense, much of
what is called inspired writing was as sacred and infallible as to any
priest of any church. Only before reading he inverted the book.
"Both read the Bible day and night,
But thou read'st black where I read white."
(_Everlasting Gospel_, MS.)
Thus, by his own showing, in the recorded words of Christ he found
authority for his vision and sympathy with his faith; in the published
creed of reason or rationalism, he found negation of his belief and
antipathy to his aims. Hence in his later denunciation he brackets
together the Churches of Rome and England with the Churches of Ferney and
Lausanne; it was all uninspired--all "nature's cruel holiness--the deceits
of natural religion"; all irremediably involved, all inextricably
interwoven with the old fallacies and the old prohibitions.
[Illustration]
Such points as these do, above most others, deserve, demand, and reward
the trouble of clearing up; and these once understood, much that seemed
the aimless unreflecting jargon of crude or accidental rhetoric assumes a
distinct if unacceptable meaning. It is much otherwise with the external
scheme or literal shell of the _Jerusalem_. Let no man attempt to define
the post or expound the office of the "terrible sons and daughters."
These, with all their flock of emanations and spectrous or vegetating
shadows, let us leave to the discretion of Los; who has enough on his
hands among them all. Neither let any attempt to plant a human foot upon
the soil of the newly-divided shires and counties, partitioned though they
be into the mystic likeness of the twelve tribes of Israel. Nor let any
questioner of arithmetical mind apply his skill in numbers to the finding
of flaws or products in the twelves, twenty-fours, and twenty-sevens which
make up the sum of their male and female emanations. In earnest, the
externals of this poem are too incredibly grotesque--the mythologic plan
too incomparably tortuous--to be fit for any detailed coherence of remark.
Nor indeed were they meant to endure it. Such things, and the expression
of such things, as are here treated of, are not to be reasoned out; the
matter one may say is above reasoning; the manner (taken apart from the
matter) is below it: the spirit of the work is too strong and its form too
faulty for any rule or line. It will upon the whole suffice if this be
kept in mind; that to Blake, in a literal perhaps as well as a mystical
sense, Albion was as it were the cradle and centre of all created
existence; he even calls on the Jews to recognize it as the parent land of
their history and their faith. Its incarnate spirit is chief among the
ancient giant-gods, Titans of his mythology, who were lords of the old
simple world and its good things, its wise delights and strong sweet
instincts, full of the vigorous impulse of innocence; lords of an extinct
kingdom, superseded now and transformed by the advent of moral fear and
religious jealousy, of pallid faith and artificial abstinence. In this
manner Albion is changed and overthrown; hence at length he dies, stifled
and slain by his children under the new law. His one friend, not misled or
converted to the dispensations of bodily virtue and spiritual restraint,
but faithful from of old and even after his change and conversion to moral
law, is Time; whose Spectre, or mere outside husk and likeness, is indeed
(as it must needs be) fain to range itself on the transitory side of
things, fain to follow after the fugitive Emanation embodied in these new
forms of life and allied to the faith and habit of the day against the old
liberty;[63] but for all the desire of his despair and fierce entreaties
to be let go, he is yet kept to work, however afflicted and rebellious,
and compelled to labour with Time's self at the building up within every
man of that spiritual city which is redemption and freedom for all men
(ch. i.). All the myth of this building of "Golgonooza," (that is, we
know, inspired art by which salvation must come) is noticeable for sweet
intricacy of beauty; only after a little some maddening memory (surely not
pure inspiration this time, but rather memory?) of the latter chapters of
Ezekiel, with their interminable inexplicable structures and plans, seizes
on Blake's passionate fancy and sets him at work measuring and dividing
walls and gates in a style calculated to wear out a hecatomb of
scholiasts, for whole pages in which no subtilized mediaeval intellect,
though trained under seraphic or cherubic doctors, could possibly find one
satisfactory hair to split. For it merely trebles the roaring and rolling
confusion when some weak grain of symbolism is turned up for a glimpse of
time in the thick of a mass of choral prose consisting of absolute fancy
and mere naked sound.
Not that there is here less than elsewhere of the passion and beauty which
redeem so much of these confused and clamorous poems. The merits and
attractions of this book are not such as can be minced small and served up
in fragments. To do justice to its melodious eloquence and tender
subtlety, we should have to analyze or transcribe whole sections: to give
any fair notion of the grandeur and variety of its decorations would take
up twice the space we can allow to it. Let this brief prologue stand as a
sample of the former qualities.