Chapter IX (1)

So I smote them, and their gore
Stained the roots my myrtle bore;
But the time of youth is fled,
And grey hairs are on my head."

Now not even the spilt blood of those who forbid and betray shall quicken the dried root or flush the faded leaf of love; the myrtle being past all comfort of soft rain or helpful sun. So in the _Rose-Tree_ (vol. ii. p. 60), when for the sake of a barren material fidelity to his "rose" of marriage, he has passed over the offered flower "such as May never bore," the rose herself "turns away with jealousy," and gives him thorns for thanks: nothing left of it for hand or lip but collapsed blossom and implacable edges of brier. Blake might have kept in mind the end of his actual wild vine (vol. i. p. 100 of the _Life_), which ran all to leaf and never brought a grape worth eating, for fault of pruning-hooks and vine-dressers.

In all this there is a certain unmistakeable innocence which accounts for the practical modesty and peaceable forbearance of the man's way of living. The material shape of his speculations never goes beyond a sort of boyish defiant complaint, a half-humorous revolt of the will. Inconstancy with him is not rooted in satiety, but in the freshness of pure pleasure; he would never cast off the old to put on the new. The chain once broken, against which between sleeping and waking he chafes and wrestles, he would lie for most hours of the day with content enough in the old shade of wedded rose or myrtle tree. Nor in leaping or reaching after the new flower would he wilfully bruise or break the least bud of the old. His desire is towards the freedom of the dawn of things--not towards the "dark secret hour" that walks under coverings of cloud.

"Are not the joys of morning sweeter
Than the joys of night?"

The sinless likeness of his seeming "sins"--mere fancies as it appears they mostly were, mere soft light aspirations of theory without body or flesh on them--has something of the innocent immodesty of a birds' or babies' paradise--of a fools' paradise, too, translated into the practice and language of the untheoretic world. Shelley's "Epipsychidion" scarcely preaches a more bodiless evangel of bodily liberty. That famous and exquisitely written passage beginning, "True love in this differs from gold and clay," delivers in more daringly definite words the exact message of Blake's belief.

Nowhere has the note of pity been more strongly and sweetly struck than in those lovely opening verses of the "Garden of Love," which must here be read once again:--

"I laid me down upon a bank
Where Love lay sleeping:
I heard among the rushes dank
Weeping, weeping.

Then I went to the heath and the wild,
To the thistles and thorns of the waste;
And they told me how they were beguiled,
Driven out, and compelled to be chaste."

The sharp and subtle change of metre here and at the end of the poem has an audacity of beauty and a justice of impulse proper only to the leaders of lyrical verse: unfit alike for definition and for imitation, if any copyist were to try his hand at it. The next song we transcribe from the "Ideas" is lighter in tone than usual, and admirable for humorous imagination; a light of laughter shines and sounds through the words.

THE WILL AND THE WAY.

"I asked a thief to steal me a peach;
He turned up his eyes;
I asked a lithe lady to lie her down
Holy and meek, she cries.

As soon as I went
An angel came;
He winked at the thief
And smiled at the dame;

And without one word spoke
Had a peach from the tree;
And 'twixt earnest and joke
Enjoyed the lady."[29]

A much better and more solid version of the same fancy than the one given in the "Selections" under the head of "Love's Secret;" which is rather weakly and lax in manner. Our present poem has on the other hand an exquisite "lithe" grace of limb and suppleness of step, suiting deliciously with the "light high laugh" in its tone: while for sweet and rapid daring, for angelically puerile impudence as it were, it may be matched against any song of its fantastic sort.

Less complete in a small way, but worth taking some care of, is this carol of a fairy, emblem of a man's light hard tyranny of will, calling upon the birds in the harness of Venus and the shafts in the hand of her son for help in setting up the kingdom of established and legal love: but caught himself in the very setting of his net.

THE MARRIAGE RING.

"'Come hither, my sparrows,
My little arrows.
If a tear or a smile
Will a man beguile,
If an amorous delay
Clouds a sunshiny day,
If the step of a foot
Smites the heart to its root,
'Tis the marriage ring
Makes each fairy a king.'
So a fairy sang.
From the leaves I sprang;
He leaped from his spray
To flee away:
But in my hat caught,
He soon shall be taught,
Let him laugh, let him cry,
He's my butterfly:
For I've pulled out the sting
Of the marriage ring."

It is not so easy to turn wasps to butterflies in the world of average things; but, as far as verses go, there are few of more supple sweetness than some of these. They recall the light lapse of measure found in the beautiful older germs of nursery rhyme;[30] and the seeming retributive triumph of married lovers over unmarried, of wedlock over courtship, could not well be more gracefully translated than in the "Fairy's" call to his winged and feathered "arrows"--the lover's swift birds of prey, not without beak and claw. "If they do for a minute or so darken our days, dupe our fancies, prevail upon our nerves and blood, once well married we are kings of them at least." Pull out that sting of jealous reflective egotism, and your tamed "fairy"--the love that is in a man once set right--has no point or poison left it, but only rapid grace of wing and natural charm of colour.

Throughout the "Ideas" one or two other favourite points of faith and feeling are incessantly thrown out in new fugitive forms; such as the last (rejected) stanza of "Cupid," which, though the song may well dispense with it and even gain by such a loss in the qualities of shape or sound, must be saved if only as a specimen of the persistent way in which Blake assumed the Greek and Roman habits of mind or art to be typical of "war" and restraint; an iron frame of mind good to fight in and not good for love to grow under.

"'Twas the Greek love of war
That turned Love into a boy[31]
And woman into a statue of stone;
And away fled every joy."

More frequent and more delightful is the recurrence of such loving views of love as that taken in the last lines of "William Bond;" a poem full of strange and soft hints, of mist that allures and music that lulls; typical in the main of the embodied struggle between selfish and sacrificial passion, between the immediate impulse that brings at least the direct profit of delight, and the law of religious or rational submission that reaps mere loss and late regret after a life of blind prudence and sorrowful forbearance--the "black cloud" of sickness, malady of spirit and body inflicted by the church-keeping "angels of Providence" who have driven away the loving train of spirits that live by innate impulse: not the bulk of Caliban but the soul of Angelo being the deadliest direct enemy of Ariel. "Providence" divine or human, prepense moral or spiritual "foresight," was a thing in the excellence of which our prophet of divine instinct and inspired flesh could not consistently believe. His evangel could dispense with that, in favour of such faith in good things as came naturally to him.

"I thought Love lived in the hot sunshine,
But oh, he lives in the moony light;
I thought to find Love in the heat of day,
But sweet Love is the comforter of night.

"Seek Love in the pity of others' woe,
In the gentle relief of another's care;
In the darkness of night and the winter's snow,
In the naked and outcast, seek Love there."

The infinite and most tender beauty of such words is but one among many evidences how thoroughly and delicately the lawless fervour and passionate liberty of desire were tempered in Blake by an exquisite goodness, of sense rather than of thought, which as it were made the pain or pleasure, the well-being or the suffering, of another press naturally and sharply on his own nerves of feeling. Deeply as his thought and fancy had struck into strange paths and veins of spiritual life, he had never found or felt out any way to the debateable land where simple and tender pleasures become complex and cruel, and the roses gathered are redder at root than in leaf.

Another poem, slight of texture and dim of feature, but full of a cloudy beauty, is _The Angel_: a new allegory of love, blindly rejected or blindly accepted as a thing of course; foiled and made profitless in either case: then lost, with all the sorrow it brings and all the comfort it gives: and the ways are barred against it by armed mistrust and jealousy, and its place knows it no more: but this immunity from the joys and sorrows of love is bought at the bitter price of untimely age. (I offer these somewhat verbose and wiredrawn attempts at commentary, only where the poem seems at once to require analysis and to admit such as I give; how difficult it is to make such notes clear and full, yet not to stumble into confusion or slide into prolixity, those can estimate who will try their hand at such work.)

Frequent slips and hitches of grammar, it may be added, are common to Blake's rough studies and finished writings, and are therefore not always things to be weeded out. Little learning and much reading of old books made him more really inaccurate than were their writers, whose apparent liberties he might perhaps have pleaded in defence of his own hardly defensible licences.

None of these poems are worthier, for the delight they give, of the selected praise and most thankful study than _The Two Songs_ and _The Golden Net_: a pair of perfect things, their feet taken in the deep places of thought, and their heads made lovely with the open light of lyric speech. Between the former of these[32] and _The Human Abstract_ there is a certain difference: here, the moral point of the poem is, that innocence is wholly ignorant, and sees no deeper than the shell of form; experience is mainly malignant, and sees the root of evil and seed of pain under the leaf of good and blossom of pleasant things:[33] there, the vision is the poet's own, and deals with that evil neither actually nor seemingly inherent in the system or scheme of created nature, but watered into life by the error and fed into luxuriance by the act of "the human brain" alone; two widely unlike themes for verse. As to execution, here doubtless there is more of that swift fresh quality peculiar to Blake's simpler style; but the _Abstract_ again has more weight of verse and magnificence of symbol.

Akin to _The Golden Net_ is the form and manner of _Broken Love_; which, whatever taste may lie in the actual kernel of it, is visibly one of the poet's noblest studies of language. The grandeur of the growing metre and heat of passionate pulses felt through the throbbing body of its verse can escape no ear. In our notes on _Jerusalem_ we shall have, like the "devil" of _The Two Songs_, to look at it from the inverse side and pass upon it a more laborious and less thankworthy comment.

Of the longest and gravest poem in the "Ideas of Good and Evil" we are bound to take some careful account. This is _The Everlasting Gospel_, a semi-dramatic exposition of faith on the writer's part; full of subtleties and paradoxes which might well straighten the stiffest hairs of orthodoxy and bewilder the sharpest brain of speculation. Blake has here stated once for all the why and the how of his Christian faith; for Christian he averred that it was, and we may let his word pass for it. Readers must be recommended for the present to look at these things as much as possible from what we will call their artistic or poetic side, and bring no pulpit logic to get chopped or minced on the altar of this prophet's vision. His worst heresy, they may be assured, "will not bite." In effect one may hope (or fear, as the case may be) that there is much less of heresy underlying these daring forms of speech than seems to overlay their outer skirt: schism or division of body rather than of spirit from less wilful and outspoken forms of faith.

Let the student of this "Gospel" of inverted belief and intensified paradox lay hold of and cling fast to the clue given by the "Vision of the Last Judgment." There for one thing the prophet has laid down this rule: "Moral virtues do not exist; they are allegories and dissimulations." For "moral allegory" we are therefore not to look here; we are in the house of pure vision, outside of which allegory halts blindly across the shifting sand of moral qualities, her right hand leaning on the staff of virtue, her left hand propped on the crutch of vice. Conscious unimpulsive "virtue," measured by the praise or judged by the laws of men, was to Blake always Pharisaic: a legal God none other than a magnified and divine Pharisee. Thus far have other (even European) mystics often enough pushed their inference; but this time the mystic was a poet; and therefore always, where it was possible, prone to prefer tangible form and given to beat out into human shape even the most indefinite features of his vision. Assuming Christ as the direct and absolute divine type (divine in the essential not in the clerical sense--divine to the spiritual not the technical reason) he was therefore obliged to set to work and strip that type of the incongruous garment of "moral virtues" cast over it by the law of religious form: to prove, as he elsewhere said, that Christ "was all virtue," not by the possession of these "allegoric" qualities called human virtues or abstinence from those others called human sins or vices: such abstinence or such possession cannot conceivably suffice for the final type of goodness or absolute incarnation of a thing unalterably divine. Virtues are no more predicable of the perfect virtue than vices of the perfect vice. As the supreme sin cannot be said to commit human faults, so neither can the supreme holiness obey the principles of human sanctity. "Deistical virtue" is as the embroidery on the ephod of Caiaphas or the stain left upon the water by the purified hands of Pilate. It is the property of "the heathen schools"; a bitted and bridled virtue, led by the nose and tied by the neck; made of men's hands and subject to men's laws. Can you make a God worth worship out of that? To say that God is wise, chaste, humble, philanthropic, gentle, or just; in one word, that he is "good" after the human sense; is to lower your image of God not less than if you had predicated of him the exactly reverse qualities, by reason of which these exist, even as they by reason of these. How much of all this Blake had fished up out of his studies of Behmen, Swedenborg, or such others, his present critic has not the means of deciding; but is assured of one thing; that where others dealt by inductive rule and law, Blake dealt by assumptive preaching and intuition; that he found form of his own for the body of thought, and body of his own for the spirit of speculation, supplied by others; playing Prometheus to their Epimetheus, doing poet's or evangelist's work where they did philosophic business; not fumbling in the box of Pandora for things flown or fugitive, but bringing from extreme heaven the immediate fire in the hollow of his reed or pen.

Such is the radical "idea" of the poem; and as to details, we are to remember that "modesty" with Blake means a timid and tacit prurience, and "humility" a mistrustful and mendacious cowardice: he puts these terms to such uses in his swift fierce way, just as, in his detestation of deism and its "impersonal God," he must needs embody his vision of a deity or more perfect humanity in the personal Christian type: a purely poetical tendency, which if justly apprehended will serve to account for the wildest bodily forms in which he drew forth his visions from the mould of prophecy.

Thus much by way of prologue may suffice for the moral side of this "Gospel"; the mythological or technically religious side is not much easier to deal with, and indeed cannot well be made out except by such misty light as may be won from the prophetic books. It seems evident that Blake, at least for purposes of evangelism, was content to regard the "Creator" of the mere bodily man as one with the "legal" or "Pharisaic" God of the churches: even as the "mother of his mortal part"--of the flesh taken for the moment simply, and separated (for reasoning purposes) from the inseparable spirit--is "Tirzah." This vision of a creator divided against his own creation and having to be subdued by his own creatures will appear more directly and demand more distinct remark when we come to deal with its symbolic form in the great myth of "Urizen;" where also it will be possible to follow it out with less likelihood of offensive misconstruction. One is compelled here to desire from those who care to follow Blake at all, the keenest ardour of attention possible; they will blunder helplessly if they once fail to connect this present minute of his work with the past and the future of it: if they once let slip the thinnest thread of analogy, the whole prophetic or evangelic web collapses for them into a chaos of gossamer, a tangle of unclean and flaccid fibres, the ravelled woof of an insane and impotent Arachne, who should be retransmuted with all haste into a palpable spider by the spell of reason. Here, as in all swift "inspired" writing, there are on the outside infinite and indefinable anomalies, contradictions, incompatibilities enough of all sorts; open for any Paine or Paley to impugn or to defend. But let no one dream that there is here either madness or mendacity: the heart or sense thus hidden away is sound enough for a mystic.

The greatest passage of this poem is also the simplest; that division which deals with the virtue of "chastity," and uses for its text the story of "the woman taken in adultery:" who is identified with Mary Magdalene. We give it here in full; hoping it may now be comprehensible to all who care to understand, and may bear fruit of its noble and almost faultless verse for all but those who prefer to take the sterility of their fig-tree on trust rather than be at the pains of lifting a single leaf.

"Was Jesus _chaste_? or did he
Give any lessons of chastity?
The morning blushed fiery red;
Mary was found in adulterous bed.
Earth groaned beneath, and heaven above
Trembled at discovery of love.
Jesus was sitting in Moses' chair;
They brought the trembling woman there.
Moses commands she be stoned to death:
What was the sound of Jesus' breath?
He laid his hand on Moses' law;
The ancient heavens, in silent awe,
Writ with curses from pole to pole,
All away began to roll;
The earth trembling and naked lay
In secret bed of mortal clay--
On Sinai felt the hand Divine
Pulling[34] back the bloody shrine--
And she heard the breath of God
As she heard by Eden's flood:
'Good and Evil are no more;
Sinai's trumpets, cease to roar;
Cease, finger of God, to write
The heavens are not clean in thy sight.
Thou art good, and thou alone;
Nor may the sinner cast one stone.
To be good only, is to be
A God, or else a Pharisee.
Thou Angel of the Presence Divine,
That didst create this body of mine,
Wherefore hast thou writ these laws
And created hell's dark jaws?
_My_ Presence I will take from thee;
A cold leper thou shalt be.
Though thou wast so pure and bright
That heaven was impure in thy sight,
Though thine oath turned heaven pale,
Though thy covenant built hell's gaol,
Though thou didst all to chaos roll
With the serpent for its soul,
Still the breath Divine does move--
And the breath Divine is love.
Mary, fear not. Let me see
The seven devils that torment thee.
Hide not from my sight thy sin,
That forgiveness thou mayst win.
Hath no man condemned thee?'
'No man, Lord.' 'Then what is he
Who shall accuse thee? Come ye forth,
Fallen fiends of heavenly birth
That have forgot your ancient love
And driven away my trembling dove;
You shall bow before her feet;
You shall lick the dust for meat;
And though you cannot love, but hate,
Shall be beggars at love's gate.
--What was thy love? Let me see't;
Was it love or dark deceit?'
'Love too long from me has fled;
'Twas dark deceit, to earn my bread;
'Twas covet, or 'twas custom, or
Some trifle not worth caring for:
That they may call a shame and sin
Love's temple that God dwelleth in,
And hide in secret hidden shrine
The naked human form divine,
And render that a lawless thing
On which the soul expands her wing.
But this, O Lord, this was my sin--
When first I let these devils in,
In dark pretence to chastity
Blaspheming love, blaspheming thee.
Thence rose secret adulteries,
And thence did covet also rise.
My sin thou hast forgiven me;
Canst thou forgive my blasphemy?
Canst thou return to this dark hell
And in my burning bosom dwell?
And canst thou die that I may live?
And canst thou pity and forgive?'"

In no second poem shall we find such a sustained passage as that; such light of thought and thunder of verse; such sudden splendour of fire seen across a strange land and among waste places beyond the receded landmarks of the day or above the glimmering lintels of the night. The passionate glory of its rapid and profound music fills the sense with too deep and sharp a delight to leave breathing-space for any thought of analytic or apologetic work. But the spirit of the verse is not less great than the body of it is beautiful. "Divide from the divine glory the softness and warmth of human colour--subtract from the divine the human presence--subdue all refraction to the white absolute light--and that light is no longer as the sun's is, warm with sweet heat of life and liberal of good gifts; but foul with overmuch purity, sick with disease of excellence, unclean through exceeding cleanness, like the skin of a leper 'as white as snow.'" For the divine nature is not greater than the human; (they are one from eternity, sundered by the separative creation or fall, severed into type and antitype by bodily generation, but to be made one again when life and death shall both have died;) not greater than the human nature, but greater than the qualities which the human nature assumes upon earth. God is man, and man God; as neither of himself the greater, so neither of himself the less: but as God is the unfallen part of man, man the fallen part of God, God must needs be (not more than man, but assuredly) more than the qualities of man. Thus the mystic can consistently deny that man's moral goodness or badness can be predicable of God, while at the same time he affirms man's intrinsic divinity and God's intrinsic humanity. Man can only possess abstract qualities--"allegoric virtues"--by reason of that side of his nature which he has _not_ in common with God: God, not partaking of the "generative nature," cannot partake of qualities which exist only by right of that nature. The other "God"[35] or "Angel of the Presence" who created the sexual and separate body of man did but cleave in twain the "divine humanity," which becoming reunited shall redeem man without price and without covenant and without law; he meantime, the Creator,[36] is a divine daemon, liable to error, subduable by and through this very created nature of his invention, which he for the present imprisons and torments. _His_ law is the law of Moses, which according to the Manichean heresy Christ came to reverse as diabolic. This singular (and presumably "Pantheistic") creed of Blake's has a sort of Asiatic flavour about it, but seems harder and more personal in its mythology than an eastern philosopher's; has also a distinct western type and Christian touch in it; being wrought as it were of Persian lotus-leaves hardened into the consistency of English oak-timber. The most wonderful part of his belief or theory is this: "That after Christ's death he became Jehovah:"[37] which may mean simply that through Christ the law of liberty came to supplant the bondage of law, so that where Jehovah was Christ is; or may typify the change of evangel into law, of full-grown Christianity into a fresh type of "Judaism," of the Gospel or good news of freedom into the Church or dogmatic body of faith; or may imply that the two forces, after that supreme sacrifice, coalesced and became one, all absolute Deity, being absorbed into the Divine Humanity; or, as a practical public would suggest, may mean or typify nothing. It is certain that Blake appears so far to have accepted the "Catholic tradition" as to regard this death or sacrifice as tending somehow not merely to the redemption of man (which would be no more than the sequel or outcome of his mystic faith in the salvation of man by man, the deliverance or redemption of the accident through the essence), but also to the union of the divine crucified man with the creative governing power. Somehow; but the prophet must explain for himself the exact means. We are now fairly up to the ears in mysticism, and cannot afford to strike out at random, for fear of being carried right off our feet by the ground-swell and drifted into waters where swimming will be yet tougher work.

The belief in "holy insurrection" must be almost as old as the oldest religions or philosophies afloat or articulate. In the most various creeds this feature of faith stands out sharply with a sort of tangible human appeal. Earlier heretics than the author of _Jerusalem_ have taken this to be the radical significance of Christianity; a divine revolt against divine law; an evidence that man must become as God only by resistance to God--"the God of this world;" that if Prometheus cannot, Zeus will not deliver us: and that man, if saved at all, must indeed be saved "so as by fire"--by ardour of rebellion and strenuous battle against the God of nature: who as of old must yet feed upon his children, and will no longer take stone for flesh though never so well wrapped up; who must have the organ of destruction and division, by which alone he lives[38] and has ability to beget, cut off from him with the sharpest edge of flint that rebellious hands can whet. In these galliambics of Blake's we see the flint of Atys whetted for such work; made ready against the priests of Nature and her God, though by an alien hand that will cast no incense upon the altar of Cybele; no Phrygian's, who would spend his own blood to moisten and brighten the high places of her worship: but one ready, with what fire he can get, to burn down the groves and melt down the cymbals of Dindymus.

Returning now to the residue of the immediate matter in hand, we may duly notice in this excursive and all but shapeless poem many of Blake's strong points put forth with all his strength: curiously crossed and intermixed with rough skirmishing attacks on the opposite faction, clerical or sceptical, by way of interlude. "You would have Christ act according to what you call a rational or a philanthropic habit of mind--set the actual God to reason, to elevate, to convince or convert after the fashion in which you would set about it? redeem, not the spiritual man by inspiration of his spirit, but the bodily man by application of his arguments? make him as 'Bacon and Newton'" (Blake's usual types of the mere understanding)?

"For thus the Gospel St. Isaac confutes:
'God can only be known by his attributes;
And as to the indwelling of the Holy Ghost
Or of Christ and the Father, it's all a boast
And pride and vanity of imagination
That did wrong to follow this world's fashion.'
To teach doubt and experiment
Certainly was not what Christ meant."

Certainly also no doggrel can be rougher, looser, heavier-weighted about the wrists and ankles, than this; which indeed it was perhaps hardly fair to transcribe; for take out the one great excerpt already given, and the whole poem is a mass of huddled notes jotted down in a series of hints, on stray sides and corners of leaves, crammed into holes and byways out of sight or reach. So perfect a poet is not to be judged by the scrawls and sketches of his note-book; but as we cannot have his revision of the present piece of work, and are not here to make any revision of our own, we must either let drop the chance of insight thus afforded, or make shift with the rough and ragged remnants allowed us by the sparing fingers of a close-handed fate. And this chance of insight is not to be lightly let go, if we mean to look at all into Blake's creed and mind. "Experiment" to the mystic seems not insufficient merely, but irrational. "Reason says _miracle_; Newton says _doubt_;" as Blake in another place expounds to such disciples as he may get. On this point also his "Vision of Christ" is other than the Christian public's.

"Thine is the friend of all mankind;
Mine speaks in parables to the blind."

_His_ Christ cared no more to convince "the blind" by plain speech than to save "the world"--the form or flesh of the world, not that imperishable body or complement of the soul which if a man "keep under and bring into subjection" he transgresses against himself; but the mere "sexual" shell which only exists (as we said) by error and by division and by right of temporal appearance.

Keeping in mind the utter roughness and formal incompletion of these notes--which in effect are the mere broken shell or bruised husk of a poem yet unfledged and unembodied--we may put to some present use the ensuing crude and loose fragments.

"What was he doing all that time
From twelve years old to manly prime?
Was he then idle, or the less
About his Father's business?
If he had been Antichrist aping[39] Jesus,
He'd have done anything to please us;
Gone sneaking into synagogues
And not used the elders and priests like dogs;
But humble as a lamb or ass
Obeyed himself to Caiaphas.
God wants not man to humble himself.
That is the trick of the ancient Elf.
This is the race that Jesus ran:
Humble to God, haughty to man;
Cursing the rulers before the people
Even to the temple's highest steeple;
And when he humbled himself to God,
Then descended the cruel rod."

(This noticeable heresy is elsewhere insisted on. Its root seems to be in that doctrine that nothing is divine which is not human--has not in it the essence of completed manhood, clear of accident or attribute; servility therefore to a divine ruler is one with servility to a human ruler. More orthodox men have registered as fervent a protest against the degradation involved in base forms of worship; but this singular mythological form seems peculiar to Blake, who was bent on finding in the sacred text warrant or illustration for all his creed.)

"'If thou humblest thyself thou humblest me:
Thou also dwell'st in eternity.
Thou art a man; God is no more;
Thine own humanity learn to adore,
For that is my spirit of life.
Awake: arise to spiritual strife;
And thy revenge abroad display
In terror at the Last Judgment Day.'"

(Another special point of faith. "Redemption by forgiveness of sins? yes: but the power of redeeming or forgiving must come by strife. A gospel is no mere spiritual essence of boiled milk and rose-water. There are the energies of nature to fight and beat--unforgivable enemies, embodied in Melitus or Annas, Caiaphas or Lycon. Sin is pardonable; but these things, in the body or out of it, are not pardonable. Revenge also is divine; whatever you may think or say while in the body, there is a part of nature not forgivable, an element in the world not redeemable, which in the end must be cast out and tormented." To the priests of Pharisaic morals or Satanic religion--those who crucify the great "human" nature and "scourge sin instead of forgiving it"--to these the Redeemer must be the tormentor.)

"'God's mercy and long-suffering
Are but the sinner to justice to bring.
Thou on the cross for them shalt pray--
And take revenge at the last day.'
Jesus replied, and thunders hurled:
'I never will pray for the world.
Once I did so when I prayed in the garden;
I wished to take with me a bodily pardon.'"

These few lines, interpolated by way of comfortable exposition, are more likely to increase the offence and perplexity: but assuredly no irreverent brutality of paradox was here in the man's mind. Even the "divine humanity" of his quasi-Pantheistic worship must give up (he says) the desire of redeeming the unredeemable "world"--the quality subject to law and technical religion. No "bodily pardon" for that, whatever the divine pity may have hoped, while as yet full-grown in love only, not in knowledge--seraphic fire without cherubic light; before, that is, it had perfect insight into the brute nature or sham body of things. That must be put off--changed as a vesture--by the risen and reunited body and soul. What is it that has to be saved? What is it that can be?

"Can that which was of woman born
In the absence of the morn,
While the soul fell into sleep
And (? heard) archangels round it weep,
Shooting out against the light
Fibres of a deadly night,
Reasoning upon its own dark fiction,
In doubt which is self-contradiction,"

can that reason itself into redemption? The absolute body and essential soul, as we have said, are with all their energies, passive and active powers and pleasures, natural properties and liberties, of an imperishable and vital holiness; but their appended qualities, their form and law, their morals and philosophies, their reason and religion, these are perishable and damnable. The "holy reasoning power," in whose "holiness is closed the abomination of desolation," must be annihilated. "Rational Truth, root of Evil and Good," must be plucked up and burnt with fire. You cannot, save in an empirical sense, walk by sight and not by faith: you cannot "walk by faith and not by sight," for there is no sight except faith. (Compare generally the _Gates of Paradise_, for illustrations of all these intricate and intense conceptions.) Doubt then, being one of the perishable qualities which depend on externals, is mere impotence and error: now let us hear further:--

"Humility is only doubt
And does the sun and moon blot out,
Roofing over with thorns and stems
The buried soul and all its gems.
This life's dim window of the soul
Distorts the heavens from pole to pole
And leads you to believe a lie
When you see with, not through, the eye,
That was born in a night, to perish in a night,
When the soul slept in the beams of light."

Part of this reappears with no less vigour of evangelic assertion in the _Auguries of Innocence_, but stripped of the repellent haze of mythological form. That poem, full as it is of delicate power and clear sweetness of thought, does not however reproduce in full the emblematic beauty of our last extract: nor does it throw so much light of a fitful flame-like sort upon or over the subtlest profundities of Blake's faith.

Elsewhere, reverting with fresh spirit to the same charge, he demands (or his spectre for him--"This was spoken by my spectre to Voltaire, Bacon, &c."):--

"Did Jesus teach doubt? or did he
Give any lessons of philosophy?
Charge visionaries with deceiving?
Or call men wise for not believing?"

Unhappily the respective answers from Verulam and Cirey have not been registered by a too contemptuous prophet; they would have been worth reading.

The dogma of "Christian humility" is totally indigestible to Blake; he batters upon it with the heaviest artillery of his "gospel."

"Was Jesus humble? or did he
Give any proofs of humility?
Boast of high things with humble tone,
And give with charity a stone?"

Again;

"When the rich learned Pharisee
Came to consult him secretly,
Upon his heart with iron pen
He wrote 'Ye must be born again.'
He was too proud to take a bribe:
He spoke with authority, not like a Scribe."

Nor can the love of enemies be accepted literally as an endurable doctrine; for "he who loves his enemies hates his friends," in the mind of the too ardent and candid poet, who proceeds to insist that the divine teacher "must mean the mere _love_ of civility" (_amour de convenance_); "and so he must mean concerning humility": for the willing acceptance of death cannot humiliate, and is therefore no test of "humility"[40] in Blake's sense; self-sacrifice in effect implies an "honest triumphant pride." (Here of course the writer drops for a moment the religious view and divine meaning of the Passion, and looks towards Calvary from the simply human side as it appeared to casual bystanders; for here he has only to deal with what he conceives to be errors in the human conception of Christ's human character. "You the orthodox, and you the reasoners, assert through the mouths of your churches or philosophies that purely human virtues are actually predicable of Christ, and appeal for evidence to his life and death. Well and good; we will, to gain ground for argument with you, forget that the Passion is not, and admit that it is, what you would call a purely human transaction. Are then these virtues predicable of it even as such?") A good man who incurs risk of death by his goodness, is too "proud" to abjure that goodness and live; here is none of that you call "humility." Such a man need not have died; "Caiaphas would forgive" if one "died with Christian ease asking pardon" after your "humble" fashion:--

"He had only to say that God was the devil
And the devil was God, like a Christian civil;
Mild Christian regrets to the devil confess
For affronting him thrice in the wilderness;"

and such an one might have become a very Caesar's minion, or Caesar himself. Though of course mainly made up of violent quibbling and perversities of passionate humour, which falls to work in this vehement way upon words as some personal relief (a relief easily conceivable in Blake's case by any student of his life), all this has also its value in helping us to measure according to what light we may have in us the stronger and weaker, the worse and better, the graver and lighter sides of the man. It belongs evidently to the period when he painted portraits of the dead and transcribed _Jerusalem_ from spiritual dictation. "This," he lets us know by way of prelude or opening note, "is what Joseph of Arimathaea said to my Fairy," or natural spiritual part by which he conversed with spirits. Next in his defiant doggrel he calls on "Pliny and Trajan"--heathen learning and heathen power or goodness--to "come before Joseph of Arimathaea" and "listen patient." "What, are you here?" he asks as if in the direct surprise of vision. (I will not give these roughest notes in the perfection of their pure doggrel. As verse, serious or humorous, they are irreclaimable and intolerable; what empirical value they may have must be wrung out of them with all haste.)

We may now as well look into a later division of the poem, where Christ is tempted of Satan to obey.

"'John for disobedience bled;
But you can turn the stones to bread.
God's high king and God's high priest
Shall plant their glories in your breast
If Caiaphas you will obey,
If Herod you with bloody prey
Feed with the sacrifice[41] and be
Obedient, fall down, worship me.'
Thunder and lightning broke around
And Jesus' voice in thunder's sound;
'Thus I seize the spiritual prey;
Ye smiters with disease, make way.
I come your King and God to seize;
Is God a smiter with disease?'"

This divine revolt and deliverance of the spiritual human "prey" out of the hands of law and fangs of religion is made matter of accusation against him by the "unredeemable part of the world" of which we spoke--using here as its mouthpiece the "shadowy man" or phantasmal shell of man, which "rolled away" when the times were full "from the limbs of Jesus, to make them his prey":--

"Crying 'Crucify this cause of distress
Who don't keep the secrets of holiness.
All mental powers by diseases we bind:
But he heals the deaf and the dumb and the blind,
Whom God has afflicted for secret ends;
He comforts and heals and calls them friends.'"

But Christ, instead of becoming a prey to it, himself makes his prey of this unclean shadow or ghastly ghost of the bodily life now divided from him--this pestilent nature in bondage to the daemonic deity, which thought to consume _him_ by dint of death:

"An ever-devouring appetite
Glittering with festering venoms bright;"[42]

puts it off and devours it in three nights; even as now also he feeds upon it to consume it; being made perfect in pride, that he may overcome the body by spiritual and "galling pride:" eat what "never was made for man to eat," the body of dust and clay, the meal's meat of the old serpent: as "the white parts or lights" of a plate are "eaten away with aqua-fortis or other acid, leaving prominent" the spiritual "outline" (_Life_, v. 1, ch. ix., p. 89). This symbol, taken from Blake's own artistic work of engraving--from the process through which we have with us the Songs and Prophecies--will give with some precision the exact point indicated, and might have been allowed of by himself, as not unacceptable or inapposite.

This final absorption of the destructible body, consumption of "the serpent's meat," is but the upshot of a life of divine rebellion and "spiritual war," not of barren physical qualities and temporal virtues:--

"The God of this world raged in vain;
He bound old Satan in his chain:
Throughout the land he took his course,
And traced diseases to their source:
He cursed the Scribe and Pharisee,
Trampling down hypocrisy."

His wrath was made as it were a chariot of fire; at the wheels of it was dragged the God of this world, overthrown and howling aloud:--

"Where'er his chariot took its way
Those gates of death let in the day;"

every chain and bar broken down from them, and the staples of the doors loosed; his voice was heard from Zion above the clamour of axle and wheel,

"And in his hand the scourge shone bright;
He scourged the merchant Canaanite
From out the temple of his mind,
And in his body tight does bind
Satan and all his hellish crew;
And thus with wrath he did subdue
The serpent bulk of nature's dross
Till he had nailed it to the cross.
He put on sin in the Virgin's womb,
And put it off on the cross and tomb
To be worshipped by the Church of Rome:"

not to speak of other churches. One may notice how to the Pantheist the Catholic's worship is a worship of sin, even as his own is to the Catholic. "You adore as divine the fallen nature and sinful energies of man:" "you, again, the cast-off body wherein Satan and sin were shut up, that he who assumed it might crucify them." Sin or false faith or "hypocrisy" was scourged out of the mind into the body, and the separate animal body then delivered over to death with the sins thereof--all the sins of the world garnered up in it to be purged away with fire: and of this body you make your God. The expressed gird at the "Church of Rome" is an interpolation; at first Blake had merely written. "And on the cross he sealed its doom" in place of our two last-quoted lines. Akin to this view of the "body of sin" is his curious heresy of the Conception; reminding one of that Christian sect which would needs worship Judas as the necessary gateway of salvation: for without his sin how could redemption have come about?

"Was Jesus born of a virgin pure
With narrow soul and looks demure?
If he intended to take on sin,
His mother should an harlot (have) been:
Just such a one as Magdalen,
With seven devils in her pen.
Or were Jew virgins still more cursed,
And more sucking devils nursed?"

(This ingenious solution, worthy of any mediaeval heresiarch of the wilder sort in a time of leprosy, is also an afterthought. From the sudden anti-Judaic rapture of grotesque faith or humour into which Blake suddenly dips hereabouts, one might imagine he had been lately bitten or stung by some dealer or other such dangerous craftsman of the Hebrew kind; for that any mortal Jew--or for that matter any conceivable Gentile--would have credited him to the amount of a penny sterling, no one will imagine. Let the reader meanwhile endure him a little further, suppressing if he is wise any comment on Blake's "insanity" or "blasphemous doggrel"; for he should now at least understand that this literal violence of manner, these light or grave audacities of mere form, imply no offensive purpose or significance, except insomuch as offence is inseparable from any strange kind of earnestly heretical belief. Neither is Blake here busied in fetching milk to feed his babes and sucklings. This he could do incomparably well on occasion, with such milk as a nursing-goddess gave to the son of Metaneira; but here he carves meat for men--of a strange quality, tough and crude: but not without savour or sustenance if eaten with the right sauce and prefaced with a proper grace.)

"Or what was it that he took on
That he might bring salvation?
A body subject to be tempted,
From neither pain nor grief exempted,
Or such a body as could not feel
The passions that with sinners deal?
Yes: but they say he never fell.
Ask Caiaphas: for he can tell."

Here follow as given by Caiaphas the old charges of Sabbath-breach, blasphemy and strange doctrine; given again almost word for word, but with a nobler frame of context, in the _Marriage of Heaven and Hell_, where, and not here, we will prefer to read them. One charge will be allowed to pass as new coin, having Blake's image and superscription in lieu of Caesar's.

"He turned the devils into swine
That he might tempt the Jews to dine;
Since when, a pig has got a look
That for a Jew may be mistook.
'Obey your parents'? What says he?
'Woman, what have I to do with thee?
No earthly parents I confess:
I am doing my Father's business.'
He scorned earth's parents, scorned earth's God,
And mocked the one and the other's rod;
His seventy disciples sent[43]
Against religion and government,"

and caused his followers to die by the sword of justice as rebels and blasphemers of this world's God and his law: overturned "the tent of secret sins and its God," with all the cords of his weaving, prisons of his building and snares of his setting; overthrew the "bloody shrine of war," the holy place of the God of battles, whose cruel light and fire of wrath was poured forth upon the world till it reached "from star to star"; thus casting down all things of "church and state as by law established," camps and shrines, temples and prisons,

"Halls of justice, hating vice,
Where the devil combs his lice."

Upon all these, to the great grief of Caiaphas and the grievous detriment of the God of this world, he sent "not peace but a sword": lived as a vagrant upon other men's labour, kept company by preference with publicans and harlots.

"And from the adulteress turned away
God's righteous law, that lost its prey."

So we end as we began, at that great practical point of revolt: and finally, with deep fervour of satisfaction, and the sense of a really undeniable achievement, the new evangelist jots down this couplet by way of epilogue:

"I'm sure this Jesus will not do
Either for Englishman or Jew."

Scarcely, as far as one sees: we may surely allow him that. And yet, having somehow steered right through this chaotic evangel, we may as surely admit that none but a great man with a great gift of belief could have conceived or wrought it out even as roughly as it is here set down. There is more absolute worship implied in it than in most works of art that pass muster as religious; a more perfect power of noble adoration, an intenser faculty of faith and capacity of love, keen as flame and soft as light; a more uncontrollable desire for right and lust after justice, a more inexhaustible grace of pity for all evil and sorrow that is not of itself pitiless, a more deliberate sweetness of mercy towards all that are cast out and trodden under. This "vision of Christ," though it be to all seeming the "greatest enemy" of other men's visions, can hardly be regarded as the least significant or beautiful that the religious world has yet been brought into contact with. It is at least not effeminate, not unmerciful, not ignoble, and not incomprehensible: other "visions" have before now been any or all of these. Thus much it is at least; the "vision" of a perfectly brave, tender, subtle and faithful spirit; in which there was no fear and no guile, nothing false and nothing base. Of the technical theology or "spiritualism" each man who cares to try will judge as it may please him; it goes at least high and deep enough to draw down or pluck up matter for absolution or condemnation. It is no part of our affair further to vindicate, to excuse, or to account for the singular gospel here preached.[44]