Anything better worth citation than such crude sonorous snatches of lyric 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?”