Singing and dancing merrily;
I said, 'Thou thing of patches, rings,
Pins, necklaces, and such-like things,
Disgracer of the female form,
Thou paltry gilded poisonous worm!'
Weeping, he fell upon my thigh,
And thus in tears did soft reply:
'Knowest thou not, O fairies' lord,
How much by us contemned, abhorred,
Whatever hides the female form
That cannot bear the mortal storm?
Therefore in pity still we give
Our lives to make the female live;
And what would turn into disease
We turn to what will joy and please.'"
Even so dim and slight a sketch as this may be of worth as indicating
Blake's views of the apparent and the substantial form of things, the
primary and the derivative life; also as a sample of his roughest and
readiest work.
[31] Lest the kingdom of love left under the type of a woman should be
over powerful for a nation of hard fighters and reasoners, such as Blake
conceived the "ancients" to be. Compare for his general style of fancies
on classic matters the prologue to "Milton" and the Sibylline Leaves on
Homer and Virgil. To his half-trained apprehension Rome seemed mere
violence and Greece mere philosophy.
[32] Let the reader take another instance of the culture given to these
songs--a gift which has happily been bequeathed by Blake to his editor.
This one was at first divided into five equal stanzas; the last two
running thus:--
"'And pity no more would be
If all were happy as we;'
At his curse the sun went down,
And the heavens gave a frown.
"Down poured the heavy rain
Over the new-reaped grain;
And Misery's increase
Is Mercy, Pity, Peace."
Thus one might say is the curse confuted; for if, as the "grievous devil"
will have it, the root of the sweetest goodness is in material evil, then
may the other side answer that even by his own showing the flower or
"increase" from that root is not evil, but good: a soft final point of
comfort missed by the change which gives otherwise fresher colour to this
poem.
[33] But as above shewn the vision of the wise man or poet is wider than
both; sees beyond the angel's blind innocent enjoyment to a deeper faith
than his simple nature can grasp or include; sees also past the truth of
the devil's sad ingenious "analytics" to the broader sense of things, seen
by which, "Good and Evil are no more."
[34] Query "Putting?" This whole poem is jotted down in a close rough
handwriting, not often easy to follow with confidence.
[35] In the line "A God or else a Pharisee," Blake with a pencil-scratch
has turned "a God" to "a devil"; as if the words were admittedly or
admissibly interchangeable! A prophet so wonderfully loose-tongued may
well be the despair of his faithfullest commentators: but as it happens
the pencil-scratch should here be of some help and significance to us:
following this small clue, we may come to distinguish the God of his
belief from this demon-god of the created "mundane shell"--the God of
Pharisaic religion and moral law.
[36] The creator by division, father of men and women, fashioner of evil
and good; literally in the deepest sense "the God of this world," who
"does not know the garment from the man;" cannot see beyond the two halves
which he has made by violence of separation; would have the body
perishable, yet the qualities of the bodily life permanent: thus inverting
order and reversing fact. Parallel passages might be brought in by the
dozen on all hands, after a little dipping into mystic books; but I want
to make no more room here for all this than is matter of bare necessity.
[37] We shall see this presently. I conceive however that Blake, to save
time and contract the space of his preaching, uses the consecrated Hebrew
name to design now the giver of the Mosaic law, now that other and
opposite Divinity which after the "body of clay" had been "devoured" was
the residue or disembodied victorious spirit of the human Saviour.
Mysticism need not of necessity be either inaccurate or incoherent:
neither need it give offence by its forms and expressions of faith: but a
mystic is but human after all, and with the best intentions may slip
somewhere, especially a mystic so little in _training_ as Blake, and so
much of a poet or artist; who is not accustomed to any careful feeling of
his way among words, except with an eye to the perfection of their bodily
beauty. Indeed, as appears by Mr. Crabb Robinson's notes of his
conversation, Blake affirmed that according to scripture itself the world
was created by "the Elohim," not by Jehovah; whose covenant he elsewhere
asserted was simply "forgiveness of sins." Thus even according to this
heretical creed the God of the Jews would seem to be ranged on the same
side with Christ against "the God of this world."
[38] Compare this fragment of a paraphrase or "excursus" on a lay sermon
by a modern pagan philosopher of more material tendencies; but given to
such tragic indulgence in huge Titanic dithyrambs. "Nature averse to
crime? I tell you, nature lives and breathes by it; hungers at all her
pores for bloodshed, aches in all her nerves for the help of sin, yearns
with all her heart for the furtherance of cruelty. Nature forbid that
thing or this? Nay, the best or worst of you will never go so far as she
would have you; no criminal will come up to the measure of her crimes, no
destruction seem to her destructive enough. We, when we would do evil, can
disorganise a little matter, shed a little blood, quench a little breath
at the door, of a perishable body; this we can do, and can call it crime.
Unnatural is it? Good friend, it is by criminal things and deeds unnatural
that nature works and moves and has her being; what subsides through inert
virtue, she quickens through active crime; out of death she kindles life;
she uses the dust of man to strike her light upon; she feeds with fresh
blood the innumerable insatiable mouths suckled at her milkless breast;
she takes the pain of the whole world to sharpen the sense of vital
pleasure in her limitless veins: she stabs and poisons, crushes and
corrodes, yet cannot live and sin fast enough for the cruelty of her great
desire. Behold, the ages of men are dead at her feet; the blood of the
world is on her hands; and her desire is continually toward evil, that she
may see the end of things which she hath made. Friends, if we would be one
with nature, let us continually do evil with our might. But what evil is
here for us to do, where the whole body of things is evil? The day's
spider kills the day's fly, and calls it a crime? Nay, could we thwart
nature, then might crime become possible and sin an actual thing. Could
but a man do this; could he cross the courses of the stars, and put back
the times of the sea; could he change the ways of the world and find out
the house of life to destroy it; could he go into heaven to defile it and
into hell to deliver it from subjection; could he draw down the sun to
consume the earth, and bid the moon shed poison or fire upon the air;
could he kill the fruit in the seed and corrode the child's mouth with the
mother's milk; then had he sinned and done evil against nature. Nay, and
not then: for nature would fain have it so, that she might create a world
of new things; for she is weary of the ancient life: her eyes are sick of
seeing and her ears are heavy with hearing; with the lust of creation she
is burnt up, and rent in twain with travail until she bring forth change;
she would fain create afresh, and cannot, except it be by destroying: in
all her energies she is athirst for mortal food, and with all her forces
she labours in desire of death. And what are the worst sins we can do--we
who live for a day and die in a night? a few murders, a few"--we need not
run over the not so wholly insignificant roll-call; but it is curious to
observe how the mystical evangelist and the material humourist meet in the
reading of mere nature and join hands in their interpretation of the laws
ruling the outer body of life: a vision of ghastly glory, without pity or
help possible.
[39] Blake had first written "the creeping," then cancelled "the" and
interlined the word "Antichrist": I have no doubt intending some such
alteration as that in the text of "creeping" to "aping"; but as far as we
can now know the day for rewriting his fair copy never came.
[40] There are (says the mystic) two forms of "humility": detestable both,
and condemnable. By one, the extrinsic form, a man cringes and submits,
doubts himself and gives in to others; becomes in effect impotent, a
sceptic and a coward; by the other or intrinsic form, he conceives too
meanly of his own soul, and comes to believe himself less than God--of
course, to a pure Pantheist, the one radical and ruinous error which
throws up on all sides a crop of lies and misconceptions, rank and ready;
as base a thing to believe as an act of bodily "humility" were base to do:
consequently any mere external worship is by this law heathenish,
heretical and idolatrous. This heathenish or idolatrous heresy of
spiritual humility comes merely of too much reliance on the reasoning
power; man is undivine as to his mere understanding, and by using that as
an eye instead of an eyeglass "distorts" all which he does not obliterate.
"Pride of reason" is a foolish thing for any clerical defender of the
"faith" to impugn; such pride is essentially humility. To be proud of
having an empty eye-socket implies that you would be ashamed of having
eyesight; then you are proud on the wrong side, and humble there exactly
where humility is a mere blundering suicide's cut at his own throat; if
you are _not_ of your nature heavenly, how shall any alien celestial
quality be sewn or stuck on to you? in whose cast clothes will you crawl
into heaven by rational or religious cross-roads? "Imputed righteousness"
will not much help your case; if you "impute" a wrong quality to any
imaginable substance, does your imputation change the substance? What it
had not before, it has not now; your tongue has not the power of turning
truth to a lie or a lie to truth; the fact gives your assertion a straight
blow in the face. The mystic who says that man is God has some logical
cause for pride; but the sceptic has no more than the cleric--he who
asserts that reason, which is finite, can be final, is essentially as
"humble" as he who admits that he can be "saved" by accepting as a gift
some "imputed" goodness which is not in any sense his. For reason--the
"spectre" of the _Jerusalem_--is no matter for pride; if you make out that
to be the best faculty about you, you give proof of the stupidest modesty
and hatefullest humility. Look across the lower animal reason, and over
the dim lying limit of tangible and changeable flesh; and be humble if you
can or dare, then; for if what you apprehend of yourself beyond is not
God, there is none--except in that sad sense of a daemon or natural force,
strong only to create and to divide and to destroy and to govern by reason
or religion the material scheme of things. _Extra hominem nulla salus._
"God is no more than man; _because_ man is no less than God:" there is
Blake's Pantheistic Iliad in a nutshell.
[41] An ugly specimen of ready-writing; meaning of course "with the
sacrifice of bloody prey:" but doubtless even Blake would not have let
this stand, though we cannot safely alter it: and the passage did upon the
whole appear worth citing.
[42] This is so like Blake's style of design that one can scarcely help
fancying he must somewhere have translated it into colours perhaps more
comprehensible than his words: have given somewhere in painter's types the
likeness of that bodily appetite, serpentine food of the serpent, a lithe
and strenuous body of clay, fair with luminous flakes of eruptive poison,
foul with cold and coloured scales as the scales of a leper in grain; with
green pallor of straining mouth and bloodlike expansion of fiery throat;
teeth and claws convulsed with the painful lust of pain, eyelids cloven in
sunder with a dull flame of desire, the visible venom of its breath shot
sharp against the face and eyes of the divine human soul: he, disembodied
yet incarnate in the eternal body, stripped of accidental and clothed with
essential flesh, naked of attribute that he may be girdled with substance,
wrestling silent with fair great limbs, but with calm hair and brows
blanched as in fire, with light of lordship in the "sunclear joyful eyes"
that already absorb and devour by sweet strength of radiance the relapsing
reluctant bulk of body, that foulest ravenous birth begotten of accident
or error upon time; eyes beautiful with the after-light of ancient tears,
that shall not weep again for ever: "for the former things are passed
away": and by that light of theirs shall all men see light. Behind these
two, an intense and tremulous night stricken through with stars and fire;
and overhead the dividing roof and underfoot the sundering floor-work of
the grave; a waste place beyond, full of risen bones that gather flesh and
springing roots that strike out or catch at light flying flames of life.
Decidedly the design must exist somewhere; and presumably in "Golgonooza."
We have the artist's prophetic authority for believing that his works
written and painted before he came upon earth do in effect fill whole
chambers in heaven, and are "the delight and study of archangels:" an
apocalyptic fact not unnaturally unacceptable and inconceivable to the
cleverest of Scotch stonemasons.
[43] Compare Hugo's admirable poem in the _Chatiments_ (vii. 11. p.
319-321)--"Paroles d'un conservateur a propos d'un perturbateur:"--where,
speaking through the mouth of "Elizab, a scribe," the chief poet of our
time gives in his great swift manner a dramatic summary of the view taken
by priests and elders of Christ. It is worth looking to trace out how
nearly the same historical points of objection are selected and the same
lines of inference struck into by the two poets; one aiming straight at
present politics, one indirectly at mystic doctrine.
"Cet homme etait de ceux qui n'ont rien de sacre,
Il ne respectait rien de tout ce qu'on respecte.
Pour leur inoculer sa doctrine suspecte,
Il allait ramassant dans les plus mechants lieux
Des bouviers, des pecheurs, des droles bilieux,
D'immondes va-nu-pieds n'ayant ni sou ni maille:
Il faisait son cenacle avec cette canaille.
* * * * *
L'honnete homme indigne rentrait dans sa maison
Quand ce jongleur passait avec cette sequelle.
* * * * *
Il trainait a sa suite une espece de fille.
Il allait perorant, ebranlant la famille,
Et la religion et la societe.
Il sapait la morale et la propriete.
* * * * *
Quant aux pretres,
Il les dechirait; bref, il blasphemait. Cela
Dans la rue. Il contait toutes ces horreurs-la
Aux premiers gueux venus, sans cape et sans semelles.
Il fallait en finir, les lois etaient formelles,
On l'a crucifie."
[44] In a briefer and less important fragment of verse Blake as earnestly
inculcates this faith of his: that all mere virtues and vices were known
before Christ; of right and wrong Plato and Cicero, men uninspired, were
competent to speak as well as he; but until his advent "the moral virtues
in their pride" held rule over the world, and among them as they rode
clothed with war and sacrifice, driving souls to hell before them, shone
"upon the rivers and the streams" the face of the Accuser, holy God of
this Pharisaic world. Then arose Christ and said to man "Thy sins are all
forgiven thee;" and the "moral virtues," in terror lest their reign of war
and accusation should now draw to an end, cried out "Crucify him," and
formed with their own hands the cross and the nails and the spear: and the
Accuser spoke to them saying:--
"Am I not Lucifer the great
And ye my daughters, in great state,
The fruit of my mysterious tree
Of Good and Evil and Misery?"
If, the preacher adds, moral virtue was Christianity, Christ's pretensions
were madness, "and Caiaphas and Pilate men praiseworthy;" and the lion's
den a fitter emblem of heaven than the sheepfold. "The moral Christian is
the cause of the unbeliever;" and Antichrist is incarnate in those who
close heaven against sinners
"With iron bars in virtuous state
And Rhadamanthus at the gate."
But men have so long allowed the heathen virtues, whose element is war and
whose essence retaliation, to "take Jesus' and Jehovah's name" that the
Accuser, Antichrist and Lucifer though he be, is now worshipped by those
holy names over all the world: and the era called Christian is the era of
his reign. For the rest, this new relic has no special merit, although it
may be allowed some share of interest as a supplement or illustration to
the larger poem or sermon.
[45] The words "female" and "reflex" are synonymous in all Blake's
writings. What is feminine in its material symbol is derivative in its
spiritual significance; "there is no such thing in eternity as a female
will;" for in eternity substances lose their shadows, and essence puts off
accident. The "frowning babe" of the last stanzas is of course the same or
such another as the one whose birth is first spoken of; not the latter
female growth born in the earthly house of art, but genius itself, whose
likeness is terrible and unlovely at first sight to the run of men,
filling them with affright and scandal, with wonder and the repellent
sense that a new and strange thing is brought into the world.
[46] It seems not impossible that this series may have been intended, in
its complete form, to bear the title of _Ideas of Good and Evil_, which we
find loosely attached to the general MS. When the designer broke it up
into different sets, this name would naturally have been abandoned.
[47] Of Blake's prose other samples are extant besides the notes on art
published in the second volume of the _Life and Selections_. These strays
are for the most part, as far as I have seen, mere waifs of weed and
barren drift. One fragment, not without some grace and thoughtfulness
curiously used up and thrown away, is an allegory of "the Gods which came
from Fear," of Shame born of the "poisonous seed" of pride, and such
things; written much in the manner of those early Ossianic studies which
dilate and deform the volume of _Poetical Sketches_: perhaps composed
(though properly never composed at all) about the same time. Another, a
sort of satire on critics and "philosophers," seems to emulate the style
of Sterne in his intervals of lax and dull writing; in execution it is
some depths below the baby stories of little Malkin, whose ghost might
well have blushed rejection of the authorship. The fragment on _Laocoon_
is a mere cento of stray notes on art which reaffirm in a chaotic and
spluttering manner Blake's theories that the only real prayer is study of
art, the only real praise, its practice; that excellence of art, not moral
virtue, is the aim and the essence of Christianity; and much more of the
same sort. These notes, crammed into every blank space and corner of the
engraved page, burst out as it were and boil over, disconnected but
irrepressible, in a feverish watery style. All really good or even
passable prose of Blake's seems to be given in the volume of _Selections_.
[48] It should not be overlooked that this part of his work was left
unfinished, all but untouched, by the author of the _Life_. Without as
long a study and as deep a sympathy as his, it would seem to any follower,
however able and zealous, the most toilsome as well as the most sterile
part of the task in hand. The fault therefore lies with chance or fate
alone. Less than I have said above could not here be said; and more need
not be. I was bound at starting to register my protest against the
contempt and condemnation which these books have incurred, thinking them
as I do not unworthy the trouble of commentary; but no word was designed
to depreciate the careful and admirable labour which has completed a
monument cut short with the life of the sculptor, joined now in death to
the dead whom he honoured.
[49] Something like this may be found in a passage of Werner translated by
Mr. Carlyle, but mixed with much of meaner matter, and debased by a
feebleness and a certain spiritual petulance proper to a man so much
inferior. The German mystic, though ingenious and laborious, is also
tepid, pretentious, insecure; half terrified at his own timid audacities,
half choked by the fumes of his own alembic. He labours within a limit,
not fixed indeed, but never expansive; narrowing always at one point as it
widens at another: his work is weak in the head and the spine; he ventures
with half a heart and strikes with half a hand; throughout his myth of
Phosphorus he goes halting and hinting; not ungracefully, nay with a real
sense of beauty, but never like a man braced up for the work requisite; he
labours under a dull devotion and a cloudy capacity. Above all, he can
neither speak nor do well, being no artist or prophet; and so makes but a
poor preacher or essayist. The light he shows is thick and weak; Blake's
light, be it meteor or star, rises with the heat and radiance of fire or
the morning.
[50] A word in passing may here be spared to the singular MS. of _Tiriel_.
This little poem or mythical episode is evidently a growth of the crude
Ossianic period; in style it is somewhat weak and inadequate to any grave
or subtle expression of thought: a few noticeable lines intervene, but the
general execution is heavy, faint, and rough even for a sketch. Here
however (if I am not incorrect in referring it to a date earlier than the
earliest of the prophetic books) we may see the dull dawn of a day full of
fiery presage, of the light and vapour of tempestuous revelation. The name
of Tiriel king of the West, father of a rebellious race of children who
perish by his curse, hardly reappears once as "Thiriel" the cloud-born son
of Urizen; Har and Heva, the gentler father and mother of the great
eastern family, who in the _Song of Los_ are seen flying before the windy
flames of a broad-blown sunset, chased over Asia with fire and sword by
the divine tyrant and his tributary kings, are here seen forsaken of their
sons in extreme and childish age, but tended by "Mutha" their mother;
"they are holy and forgiving, filled with loving mercy, forgetting the
offences of their most rebellious children." Into the story or
subject-matter we need not go far; but it is worth notice that the series
of twelve designs classified in the catalogue, section B., No. 156, pp.
253-4 of vol. 2, must evidently (as is there half suggested) be a set of
illustrations to this _Tiriel_. In one of these any reader will recognize
the serpentine hair which at her father's imprecation rose and hissed
around the brows of "Hela" (_Tiriel_, ch. 6); but these designs have as
evidently fallen out of order; thus the one lettered (_k_) appears to
illustrate the very first lines of the poem; and others seem equally
misarranged. In this faint allegory of the blind discrowned king with his
two brothers, the mad invulnerable giant of the woods and the fettered
dotard dwelling in caves, some fresh incomplete symbol is discernible of
tyranny and error, of strength made insane or perverse and weakness made
cruel or imbecile by oppression of the spirit or the flesh; the "eloquent"
outcast oppressor might then be the uninspired intellect, against whose
errors and tyrannies its own children revolt, and perish by the curse of
their perishing father and mother, blind reason and powerless faith: but
from such shallow and sandy soil the conjectural Muse of commentary can
reap little worth her pains to garner, and at every sweep of her sickle
must risk being blinded by the sand blown into her eyes. Some stray verses
might be gathered up, perhaps worth a place in the gleaner's loose sheaf;
such as these:
"And aged Tiriel stood and said: Where does the thunder sleep?
Where doth he hide his terrible head? and his swift and fiery daughters,
Where do they shroud their fiery wings and the terrors of their hair?"