Nowhere has Blake set forth his spiritual creed more clearly and earnestly than in the last of the Songs of Experience. “Tirzah,” in his mythology, represents the mere separate and human nature, mother of the perishing body and daughter of the “religion” which occupies itself with laying down laws for the flesh; which, while pretending (and that in all good faith) to despise the body and bring it into subjection as with control of bit and bridle, does implicitly overrate its power upon the soul for evil or good, and thus falls foul of fact on all sides by assuming that spirit and flesh are twain, and that things pleasant and good for the one can properly be loathsome or poisonous to the other. This “religion” or “moral law,” the inexplicable prophet has chosen to baptize under the singular type of “Rahab”—the “harlot virgin-mother,” impure by dint of chastity and forbearance from such things as are pure to the pure of heart: for in this creed the one thing unclean is the belief in uncleanness, the one thing forbidden is to believe in the existence of forbidden things. Of this mystical mother and her daughter we shall have to take some further account when once fairly afloat on those windy waters of prophecy through which all who would know Blake to any purpose must be content to steer with such pilotage as they can get. For the present it will be enough to note how eager and how direct is the appeal here made against any rule or reasoning based on reference to the mere sexual and external nature of man—the nature made for ephemeral life and speedy death, kept alive “to work and weep” only through that mercy which “changed death into sleep”; how intense the reliance on redemption from such a law by the grace of imaginative insight and spiritual freedom, typified in “the death of Jesus.”[18] Nor are any of these poems finer in structure or nobler in metrical form.
This present edition of the Songs of Experience is richer by one of Blake’s most admirable poems of childhood—a division of his work always of especial value for its fresh and sweet strength of feeling and of words. In this newly recovered Cradle Song are perhaps the two loveliest lines of his writing:
“Sleep, sleep: in thy sleep
Little sorrows sit and weep.”[19]
Before parting from this chief lyrical work of the poet’s, we may notice (rather for its convenience as an explanation than its merit as a piece of verse) this projected Motto to the Songs of Innocence and of Experience, which editors have left hitherto in manuscript:
“The good are attracted by men’s perceptions,
And think not for themselves
Till Experience teaches them how to catch
And to cage the Fairies and Elves.
And then the Knave begins to snarl,
And the Hypocrite to howl;
And all his[20] good friends show their private ends,
And the Eagle is known from the Owl.”
Experience must do the work of innocence as soon as conscience begins to take the place of instinct, reflection of perception; but the moment experience begins upon this work, men raise against her the conventional clamour of envy and stupidity. She teaches how to entrap and retain such fugitive delights as children and animals enjoy without seeking to catch or cage them; but this teaching the world calls sin, and the law of material religion condemns: the face of “Tirzah” is set against it, in the “shame and pride” of sex.
“Thou, mother of my mortal part,
With cruelty didst mould my heart,
And with false self-deceiving fears
Didst bind my nostrils, eyes, and ears.”
And thus those who live in subjection to the senses would in their turn bring the senses into subjection; unable to see beyond the body, they find it worth while to refuse the body its right to freedom.
In these hurried notes on the Songs an effort has been made to get that done which is most absolutely necessary—not that which might have been most facile or most delightful. Analytic remark has been bestowed on those poems only which really cannot dispense with it in the eyes of most men. Many others need no herald or interpreter, demand no usher or outrider: some of these are among Blake’s best, some again almost among his worst.[21] Poems in which a doctrine or subject once before nobly stated and illustrated is re-asserted in a shallower way and exemplified in a feebler form,[22] require at our hands no written or spoken signs of either assent or dissent. Such poems, as the editor has well indicated, have places here among their betters: none of them, it may be added, without some shell of outward beauty or seed of inward value. The simpler poems claim only praise; and of this they cannot fail from any reader whose good word is in the least worth having. Those of a subtler kind (often, as must now be clear enough, the best worth study) claim more than this if they are to have fair play. It is pleasant enough to commend and to enjoy the palpable excellence of Blake’s work; but another thing is simply and thoroughly requisite—to understand what the workman was after. First get well hold of the mystic, and you will then at once get a better view and comprehension of the painter and poet. And if through fear of tedium or offence a student refuses to be at such pains, he will find himself, while following Blake’s trace as poet or painter, brought up sharply within a very short tether. “It is easy,” says Blake himself in the Jerusalem, “to acknowledge a man to be great and good while we derogate from him in the trifles and small articles of that goodness; those alone are his friends who admire his minute powers.”
Looking into the larger MS. volume of notes we seem to gain at once a clearer insight into the writer’s daily habit of life and tone of thought, and a power of judging more justly the sort of work left us by way of result. Here, as by fits and flashes, one is enabled to look in upon that strange small household, so silent and simple on the outside, so content to live in the poorest domestic way, without any show of eccentric indulgence or erratic aspiration; husband and wife to all appearance the commonest citizens alive, satisfied with each other and with their minute obscure world and straitened limits of living. No typical churchwarden or clerk of the parish could rub on in a more taciturn modest manner, or seem able to make himself happy with smaller things. It may be as well for us to hear his own account of the matter: