style I have not found here, except in chap. vii., where the dying Tiriel
lays his final curse on Har--"weak mistaken father of a lawless race,"
whose "laws and Tiriel's wisdom end together in a curse." Here, in words
afterwards variously repeated and enlarged, he appeals against the laws of
mere animal life, the narrowed senses and material bondage of men upon
earth; against unnatural training and abstinence through which "milk is
cut off from the weeping mouth with difficulty and pain," when first "the
little lids are lifted and the little nostrils opened;" against
"hypocrisy, the idiot's wisdom and the wise man's folly," by which men are
"compelled to pray repugnant and to handle the immortal spirit" till like
Tiriel they become as subtle serpents in a paradise which they consume
fruit by fruit and flower by flower till at its fall they themselves are
left desolate. Thus too he inveighs against faith in matter and "respect
of persons" under their perishable and finite forms: "Can wisdom be put in
a silver rod or love in a golden bowl? is the son of a king warmed without
wool? or does he cry with a voice of thunder? does he look upon the sun
and laugh, or stretch his little hands into the depths of the sea?" Much
of this has been half erased, probably with a view to remoulding the
whole: for here alone does anything in tone or thought recall the nobler
mysticism of Blake's later writings.
[51] Before we dismiss the matter from view, it may be permissible to cast
up in a rough and rapid way the sum of Blake's teaching in these books, if
only because this was also the doctrine or moral of his entire life and
life's work. I will therefore, as leave has been given, append a note
extracted from a manuscript now before me, which attempts to embody and
enforce, if only by dint of pure and simple exposition, the pantheistic
evangel here set forth in so strange a fashion. Thus at least I read the
passage; if misinterpreted, my correspondent has to thank his own laxity
of expression. "These poems or essays at prophecy" (he says) "seem to me
to represent in an obscure and forcible manner the real naked question to
which all theologies and all philosophies must in the end be pared down.
Strained and filtered clear of extraneous matter, pruned of foreign fruit
and artificial foliage, this radical question lies between Theism and
Pantheism. When the battles of the creeds have been all fought out, this
battle will remain to fight. I do not see much likelihood on either hand
of success or defeat. Faith and reason, evidence and report, are alike
inadequate to decide the day. This prophet or that prophet, this God or
that God, is not here under debate. Histories, religions, all things born
of rumour or circumstance, accident or change, are out of court; are, for
the moment, of necessity set aside. Gentile or Jew, Christian or Pagan,
Eastern or Western, can but be equal to us--for the moment. No single
figure, no single book, stands out for special judgment or special belief.
On the right hand, let us say (employing the old figure of speech), is the
Theist--the 'man of God,' if you may take his own word for it; the
believer in a separate or divisible deity, capable or conceivably capable
of existence apart from ours who conceive of it; a conscious and absolute
Creator. On the left hand is the Pantheist; to whom such a creed is mainly
incredible and wholly insufficient His creed is or should be much like
that of your prophet here;" (I must observe in passing that my
correspondent seems so unable to conceive of a comment apart from the
text, an exponent who is not an evangelist,--so inclined to confuse the
various functions of critic and of disciple, and assume that you must mean
to preach or teach whatever doctrine you may have to explain--in a word,
so obtuse or perverse on this point that he might be taken for a
professional man-of-letters or sworn juryman of the press; but I will hope
better things of him, though anonymous;) "and that creed, as I take it, is
simply enough expressible in Blake's own words, or deducible from them;
that 'all deities reside in the human breast'; that except humanity there
is no divine thing or person. Clearly therefore, in the eyes of a Theist,
he lies open to the charge of atheism or antitheism. The real difference
is perhaps this; God appears to a Theist as the root, to a Pantheist as
the flower of things. It does not follow logically or actually that to
this latter all things are alike. For us (he might say), for us, within
the boundaries of time and space, evil and good do really exist, and live
no empirical life--for a certain time, and within a certain range. 'There
is no God unless man can become God.' That is no saying for an Atheist.
'There is no man unless the child can become a man'; is that equivalent to
a denial of manhood? But if a man is to be born into the world, the mother
must abstain from the drugs that produce abortion, the child from strong
meats and drinks, the man from poisons. So it is in the spiritual world;
tyranny and treachery, indolence and dulness, cannot but impede and impair
the immutable law of nature and necessary growth. These and their like
must be and must pass away; the eternal body of things must change. As the
fanatic abstains through fear of God or of hell, the free-thinker abstains
from what he sees or thinks to be evil (_i. e._, adverse or alien to his
nature at its best) through respect for what he is and reverence for what
he may be. Pantheism therefore is no immoral creed, and cannot be, if only
because it is based upon faith in nature and rooted in respect for it. By
faith in sight it attains to sight through faith. It follows that pure
Theism is more immediately the contrary of this belief, more unacceptable
and more delusive in the eyes of its followers, than any scheme of
doctrine or code of revelation. These, as we see by your Blake" (again),
"the Pantheist may seize and recast in the mould of his own faith. But
Theism, but the naked distinct figure of God, whether or not he assume the
nature of man, so long as this is mere assumption and not the essence of
his being--the clothes and not the body, the body and not the soul--this
is to him incredible, the source of all evil and error. Grant such a God
his chance of existence, what reason has the Theist to suppose or what
right to assume his wisdom or his goodness? why this and not that? whence
his acceptance and whence his rejection of anything that is? 'Shall the
clay demand of the potter, why hast thou made me thus?' Shall it not? and
why? Of whom else should a man ask? and if sure of his God, what better
should he do? Theism is not expansive, but exclusive: and the creeds
begotten or misbegotten on this lean body of belief are 'Satanic' in the
eyes of a Pantheist, as his faith is in the eyes of their followers."
There is much more, but it were superfluous to mix a narcotic over strong:
and in pursuit of his flying "faith" my friend's ideal "Pantheist" is apt
to become heretical.
[52] That is, woman has become subject to oppression of customs; suffers
violence at the hands of marriage laws and other such condemnable things.
"Emancipation" and the cognate creeds of which later days have heard so
much never had a more violent and vehement preacher. Not love, not the
plucking of the flower, but error, fear, submission to custom and law, is
that which "defiles" a woman in the sight of our prophet.
[53] Even thus told, the myth is plain enough; a word or two of briefer
translation may serve also to light up future allusions. "I plucked
Leutha's flower," says Oothoon in the prelude of this poem, "and I was not
ashamed;" the flower that brings forth a child, which nature permits and
desires her to gather; Leutha is the spirit emblematic of physical
pleasure, of sensual impulse and indulgence, from whom comes the "loose
Bible" of Mahomet (_Song of Los_). But crossing the seas eastward to find
her lover, the strong enslaved spirit of Europe, she, type of womanhood
and freedom, is caught and chained as he by the force of conventional
error and tyrannous habit, which makes her seem impure in his eyes; so
they sit bound back to back, afraid to love; the eagles that tear her
flesh are emblems of her lover's scorn; vainly, a virgin at heart, she
appeals to all the fair and fearless face of nature against her rival, the
prurient modesty of custom, a virgin in face, a harlot at heart; against
unnatural laws of restraint upon youths and maidens, whose inevitable
outcome is in the licentious alternative not less unnatural; he will not
answer but with vain and vague lamentation, will not turn himself and love
her for all her crying: the mystery of things and thoughts, the tyranny of
times and laws, is heavy upon them to the end. All forms of life but these
are free to be fair and happy: only from east to west the prison-houses
are full of the wailing of women.
[54] Night, or the darkness of worlds yet undivided and chaotic, is always
typified by Blake as a "forest" dark with involved and implicated leaf or
branch. Compare "The Tiger."
[55] Along this page a serpent of imperious build rears the strong and
sinuous length of his dusky glittering body, and spits forth keen
undulating fire.
[56] It is possible that Blake intended here some grotesque emblematic
reference to the riots witnessed by himself, in which Lord Mansfield's
house and MSS. were destroyed by fire. At all events, here alone is there
any visible allusion to a matter of recent history.
[57] That is, being unable to reconcile qualities, to pass beyond the
legal and logical grounds of good and evil into the secret places where
they are not. The whole argument hinges on this difference between
Pantheism, which can, and Theism, which cannot, and is therefore no surer
or saner than a mere religion based on Church or Bible, nor less
incompetent to include, to expound, to redeem the world.
[58] Compare, for the doctrine as to delusion and jealousy being
_feminine_ principles (destructive by their weakness, not by their
strength), this strange expostulation with God, recalling the tone of
earlier prophets:--
"Why art thou silent and invisible,
Father of Jealousy?
Why dost thou hide thyself in clouds
From every searching eye?
Why darkness and obscurity
In all thy words and laws,
That none dare eat the fruit but from
The wily serpent's jaws?
Or is it because Jealousy[A]
Gives feminine applause?"
[A](This word, half rubbed off in the MS., may be "secrecy"; and the
point would remain the same.)
[59] Leutha, the spirit or guardian goddess of natural pleasure and
physical beauty, is sacrificed as a ransom to redeem the spirit or
guardian god of prohibitive law or judicial faith; to him she is
sacrificed that through her he may be saved. Thus, in the _Visions of the
Daughters of Albion_, the maiden who "plucks Leutha's flower," who trusts
and indulges Nature, has her "virgin mantle torn in twain by the terrible
thunders" of religious and moral law: woman was sacrificed and man "fast
bound in misery" during the eighteen centuries--through which the mother
goddess lay asleep, to weep over her children at her waking; as in the
Prophecy of _Europe_ Time the father and Space the mother of men are
afflicted and spellbound until the sleep of faith be slept out. There
again the emblematic name of Leutha recurs in passing.
[60] That is of course the reprobate according to theology, such as the
heretical prophet himself: the class of men upon which is laid the burden
of the sins of the elect, as Satan's upon Rintrah in the myth.
[61] This line appears to have been too much for the writer in the _Life_,
who here breaks his quotation short off by the head, annihilating with a
quite ingenious violence at once grammar, sense, and sound. It is but a
small nut to have broken his critical tooth upon; the evident meaning
being simply this: that within the centre of everything living by animal
or vegetative life there is by way of kernel something imperishable; the
fleshly or material life of form contains the infinite spiritual life,
lurking under leaf or latent under limb: man and flower and beast have
each the separate secret of a soul or divisible indestructible spirit
(compare even the _Songs of Innocence_); but while the earthly and fleshly
form remains there stand as wardens of the ways the two material giants,
Strength and Force, binding the soul in the body with chains of flesh and
sex, the spirit in the petals with bonds of vegetable form, fashioned
fastenings of chalice and anther, sprinklings of dusty gold on leaf or
pistil; always, without hammer or rivet of Vulcanic forging, able to hold
fast Prometheus in blind bondage to the flesh and form of things; so that
except by inspiration there can be no chance of seeing what does exist and
work in man or beast or flower; only by vision or by death shall one be
brought safe past the watch guarded by the sentinels of material form and
bodily life, the crude tributary "Afrites" (as in the Aeschylean myth) of
the governing power which fashions and fetters life in men and things. And
thus this, the singing of birds and dancing of flowers, the springing of
colour and kindling of music at each day's dawn, is a symbol--"a vision of
the lamentation of Beulah over Ololon"--of the dwellers in that milder and
moonlight-coloured world of reflex mortal spirits over the imperishable
influences of a higher spiritual world, which descending upon earth must
be clothed with material mystery and become subject to sensuous form and
likeness in the body of the shadow of death. This glorious passage, almost
to be matched for wealth of sound, for growth and gradation of floral and
musical splendour, for mastery of imperial colour, even against the great
interlude or symphony of flowers in _Maud_, was not cast at random into
the poem, but has also a "soul" or meaning in it--though the ways of
seeing and understanding are somewhat too closely guarded by "Og and
Anak." Reading it as an excerpt indeed one need hardly wish to see beyond
the form or material figure. That "innumerable dance" of tree and flower
and herb is not unfit for comparison with the old [Greek: anerithmon
gelasma] of the waves of the sea.
[62] One may fear that some such symbolic stuff as this is really at the
root of the admirable poem christened by its editor with the name of
_Broken Love_: which I gravely suspect was meant for insertion in some
fresh instalment of prophetic rhapsody by way of complement or sequel to
_Jerusalem_. The whole tone of it, and especially that of some rejected
stanzas, is exactly in the elemental manner of the scenes (where scene is
none) between Albion, Jerusalem, and Vala the Spectre of Jerusalem (books
1st and 2nd):--
"Thou hast parted from my side--
Once thou wast a virgin bride:
Never shalt thou a true love find--
My Spectre follows thee behind.
"When my love did first begin,
Thou didst call that love a sin;
Secret trembling, night and day,
Driving all my loves away."
These two stanzas (recalling so many other passages where Blake has
enforced his doctrines as to the fatal tendency of the fears and
jealousies, the abstinence and doubt, produced by theoretic virtue and
hatched by artificial chastity) stood originally as third and fourth in
the poem. They are cancelled in Blake's own MS.; but in that MS. the poem
ends as follows, in a way (I fear) conclusive as to the justice of my
suggestion; I mark them conjecturally, as I suppose the dialogue to stand,
by way of helping the reader to some glimpse of the point here and there.
"When wilt thou return and view
My loves and them to life renew?
When wilt thou return and live?
When wilt thou pity as I forgive?"
"Never, never, I return;
Still for victory I burn.
Living, thee alone I'll have;
And when dead I'll be thy grave.
"Through the heaven and earth and hell
Thou shalt never, never quell:
I will fly and thou pursue;
Night and morn the flight renew."
(This I take to be the jealous lust of power and exclusive love speaking
through the incarnate "female will." See _Jerusalem_ again.)
"And I, to end thy cruel mocks,
Annihilate thee on the rocks,
And another form create
To be subservient to my fate.
"Till I turn from female love
And root up the infernal grove,
I shall never worthy be
To step into eternity."
(This stanza ought probably to be omitted; but I retain it as being
carefully numbered for insertion by Blake: though he by some evident slip
of mind or pen has put it before the preceding one.)
"Let us agree to give up love
And root up the infernal grove,
Then shall we return and see
The worlds of happy eternity.
"And throughout all eternity
I forgive you, you forgive me;
As our dear Redeemer said,
This the wine and this the bread."
That is perfect _Jerusalem_ both for style and matter. The struggle of
either side for supremacy--the flight and pursuit--the vehemence and
perversion--the menace and the persuasion--the separate Spectre or
incarnation of sex "annihilated on the rocks" of rough law or stony
circumstance and necessity--the final vision of an eternity where the
jealous divided loves and personal affections "born of shame and pride"
shall be destroyed or absorbed in resignation of individual office and
quality--all this belongs but too clearly to the huge prophetic roll. Few
however will be desirous, and none will be wise, to resign for these
gigantic shadows of formless and baseless fancy the splendid exposition
given by the editor (p. 76 of vol. ii). Seen by that new external
illumination, though it be none of the author's kindling, his poem stands
on firmer feet and is clothed with a nearer light.
[63] In the mythologic scheme, also, Los god of time and Albion father of
the races of men are rival powers; and the "Spectre" or satellite deity
reproaches his lord with resignation of the world and all its ways and
generations (which should have been subject only to the Time-Spirit) to
the guidance of the nations sprung from the patriarch Albion (called in
Biblical records after Jewish names, here spoken of by their English or
other titles, more or less burlesque and barbaric) who have taken upon
themselves to subdue even Time himself to this work and divide his spoils.
So closely is the bare mythical construction enwound with the symbolic or
doctrinal passages which are meant to give it such vitality and such
coherence as they may.
[64] Who adore nature as she appears to the Deist, who select this and
reject that, assume and presume according to moral law and custom, instead
of accepting the Pantheistic revelation which consecrates all things and
absorbs all contraries.
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