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?”