“For the female spirits of the dead pining in bonds of religion
Run from their fetters reddening and in long-drawn arches sitting.
They feel the nerves of youth renew, and desires of ancient times.”
Light and warmth and colour and life are shed from the flames of revolution not alone on city and valley and hill, but likewise
“Over their pale limbs, as a vine when the tender grape appears;
********
The heavens melted from north to south; and Urizen who sat
Above all heavens in thunders wrapt, emerged his leprous head
From out his holy shrine; his tears in deluge piteous
Falling into the deep sublime.”
Notwithstanding for twelve years it was fated that “angels and weak men should govern o’er the strong, and then their end should come when France received the demon’s light:” and the ancient European guardians “slow advance to shut the five gates of their law-built heaven, filled with blasting fancies and with mildews of despair, with fierce disease and lust;” but these gates were consumed in the final fire of revolution that went forth upon the world. So ends the poem; and of the decoration we have barely space to say enough. On one page are the visions of the renewed world, on another the emblems of oppression and war: children sleeping nestled in the fleece of a sleeping ram with heavy horns and quiet mouth pressing the soft ground, while overhead shapely branches droop and gracious birds are perched; or what seems the new-born body of Orc cast under the sea, enmeshed in a web of water whose waves are waves of corn when you come to look; maidens and infants that bridle a strong dragon, and behind them a flight of birds through the clouds of a starry moonlit night, where a wild swan with vast wings and stretching neck is bestridden by a spirit looking eagerly back as he clutches the rein; eagles that devour the dead on a stormy sea-beach, while underneath fierce pikes and sharks make towards a wrecked corpse that has sunk without drifting, and sea-snakes wind about it in soft loathsome coils; women and children embrace in bitter violence of loving passion among ripples of fruitful flame, out of which rise roots and grasses of the field and laden branches of the vine. Of all these we cannot hope to speak duly; nor can we hope to give more than a glimpse of the work they illustrate.
Throughout the Prophecy of Europe the fervent and intricate splendours of text and decoration are whirled as it were and woven into spreading webs or twining wheels of luminous confusion. The Museum copy, not equal in nobility of colour to some others, is crowded with MS. notes and mottos of some interest and significance. To the frontispiece a passage of Milton is appended; to the first page is prefixed a transcript of some verses by Mrs. Radcliffe concerning a murdered pilgrim, sufficiently execrable and explanatory; and so throughout. These notes will help us at least to measure the amount of connexion between the text and the designs; an amount easily measurable, being in effect about the smallest possible. Fierce fluctuating wind and the shaken light of meteors flutter or glitter upon the stormy ways of vision; serving rather for raiment than for symbol. The outcast gods of star and comet are driven through tempestuous air: “forms without body” leap or lurk under cloud or water; War, a man coated with scales of defiled and blackening bronze, handling a heavy sword-hilt, averts his face from appealing angels; Famine slays and eats her children; fire curls about the caldron in which their limbs are to be sodden for food; starved plague-stricken shapes of women and men fall shrieking or silent as the bell-ringer, a white-haired man with slouched hat drawn down and long straight cassock, passes them bell in hand; a daughter clings to her father in the dumb pain of fear, while he with arms thrust out in repulsion seems to plead against the gathering deluges that “sweep o’er the yellow year;” mildews are seen incarnate as foul flushed women with strenuous limbs contorted, blighting ears of corn with the violent breath of their inflated mouths; “Papal Superstition,” with the triple crown on a head broader across cheek and jowl than across the forehead, with bat’s wings and bloodlike garments dripping and rent, leers across the open book on his knees; behind his reptile face a decoration as of a cleft mitre, wrought in the shape of Gothic windows that straiten as it ascends, shows grey upon the dead black air; this is “Urizen seen on the Atlantic; and his brazen book that kings and priests had copied on earth, expanded from north to south;” all the creeping things of the prison-house, bloated leaf and dropping spider, crawl or curl above a writhing figure overgrown with horrible scurf of corruption as with network; the gaoler leaves his prisoner fast bound by the ankles, with limbs stained and discoloured; (the motto to this is from “The Two Noble Kinsmen,” Act ii., Sc. 1., “The vine shall grow, but we shall never see it,” &c.); snakes and caterpillars, birds and gnats, each after their own kind take their pleasure and their prey among the leaves and grasses they defile and devour; flames chase the naked or swooning fugitives from a blazing ruin. The prelude is set in the frame of two large designs; one of the assassin waiting for the pilgrim as he turns round a sharp corner of rock; one of hurricane and storm in which “Horror, Amazement and Despair” appear abroad upon the winds. A sketch of these violent and hideously impossible figures is pasted into the note-book on a stray slip of paper. The MS. mottos are mostly from Milton and Dryden; Shakespeare and Fletcher, Rowe and Mason, are also dragged into service. The prophecy itself is full of melody and mist; of music not wholly unrecognisable and vapour not wholly impermeable. In a lull of intermittent war, the gods of time and space awake with all their children; Time bids them “seize all the spirits of life and bind their warbling joys to our loud strings, bind all the nourishing sweets of earth to give us bliss.” Orc, the fiery spirit of revolution, first-born of Space, his father summons to arise; “and we will crown thy head with garlands of the ruddy vine; for now thou art bound; and I may see thee in the hour of bliss, my eldest born.” Allegory, here as always, is interfused with myth in a manner at once violent and intricate; but in this book the mere mythologic fancy of Blake labours for the most part without curb or guide. Enitharmon, the universal or typical woman, desires that “woman may have dominion” for a space over all the souls upon earth; she descends and becomes visible in the red light of Orc; and she charges other spirits born of her and Los to “tell the human race that woman’s love is sin,” for thus the woman will have power to refuse or accede, to starve or satiate the perverted loves and lives of man; “that an eternal life awaits the worms of sixty winters, in an allegorical abode where existence hath never come; forbid all joy, and from her childhood shall the little female spread nets in every secret path.” To this end the goddess of Space calls forth her chosen children, the “horned priest” of animal nature, the “silver-bowed queen” of desolate places, the “prince of the sun” with his innumerable race “thick as the summer stars; each one, ramping, his golden mane shakes, and thine eyes rejoice because of strength, O Rintrah, furious King.” Moon and sun, spirit and flesh, all lovely jealous forces and mysteries of the natural world are gathered together under her law, that throughout the eighteen Christian centuries she may have her will of the world. For so long nature has sat silent, her harps out of tune; the goddess herself has slept out all those years, a dream among dreams, the ghostly regent of a ghostly generation. The angels of Albion, satellites once of the ancient Titan, are smitten now with their own plagues, crushed in their own council-house, and rise again but to follow after Rintrah, the fiery minister of his mother’s triumph. Him the chief “Angel” follows to “his ancient temple serpent-formed,” ringed round with Druid oaks, massive with pillar and porch built of precious stones; “such eternal in the heavens, of colours twelve, few known on earth, give light in the opaque.”
“Placed in the order of the stars, when the five senses whelmed
In deluge o’er the earth-born man: then bound the flexile eyes
Into two stationary orbs concentrating all things:
The ever-varying spiral ascents to the heaven of heavens
Were bended downward, and the nostril’s golden gates shut,
Turned outward, barred and petrified against the infinite.
Thought changed the infinite to a serpent; that which pitieth
To a devouring flame; and man fled from its face and hid
In forests[54] of night; then all the eternal forests were divided
Into earths rolling in circles of space, that like an ocean rushed
And overwhelmed all except this finite wall of flesh.
Then was the serpent temple formed, image of (the) infinite
Shut up in finite revolutions,[55] and man became an Angel;
Heaven a mighty circle turning; God a tyrant crowned.”
Thus again recurs the doctrine that the one inlet left us for spiritual perception—that namely of the senses—is but one and the least of many inlets and channels of communication now destroyed or perverted by the creative demon; a tenet which once well grasped and digested by the disciple will further his understanding of Blake more than anything else can: will indeed, pushed to the full extreme of its logical results, elucidate and justify much that seems merely condemnable and chaotic. To resume our somewhat halting and bewildered fable: the southern porch of this temple, “planted thick with trees of blackest leaf, and in a vale obscure, enclosed the stone of night; oblique it stood, o’erhung with purple flowers and berries red;” image of the human intellect “once open to the heavens” as the south to the sun; now, as the head of fallen man, “overgrown with hair and covered with a stony roof;” sunk deep “beneath the attractive north,” where evil spirits are strongest, where the whirlpool of speculation sucks in the soul and entombs it. Standing on this, as on a watch-tower, the “Angel” beholds Religion enthroned over Europe, and the pale revolution of cloud and fire through the night of space and time; beholds “Albion,” the home once of ancient freedom and faith, trodden underfoot by laws and churches, that the God of religion may have wherewithal to “feed his soul with pity.” At last begins the era of rebellion and change; the fires of Orc lay hold upon law[56] and gospel; yet for a little while the ministers of his mother have power to fight against him, and she, allied now and making common cause with the God alien to her children, “laughs in her sleep,” seeing through the veil and vapour of dreams the subjection of male to female, the false attribute of unnatural power given to women by faith and fear. Not as yet can the Promethean fire utterly dissolve the clouds of Urizen, though the flesh of the ministering angel of religion is already consumed or consuming; nor as yet can the trumpet of revolution summon the dead to judgment. That first blast of summons must be blown by material science, which destroys the letter of the law and the text of the covenant. When the “mighty spirit” of Newton had seized the trumpet and blown it,
“Yellow as leaves of Autumn the myriads of Angelic hosts
Fell thro’ the wintry skies seeking their graves,
Rattling their hollow bones in howling and lamentation;”
as to this day they do, and did in Blake’s time, throughout whole barrowfuls of controversial “apologies” and “evidences.” Then the mother-goddess awoke from her eighteen centuries of sleep, the “Christian era” being now wellnigh consummated, and all those years “fled as if they had not been;” she called her children around her, by many monstrous names and phrases of chaotic invocation; comfort and happiness here, there sweet pestilence and soft delusion; the “seven churches of Leutha” seek the love of “Antamon,” symbolic of Christian faith reconciled to “pagan” indulgence and divorced from Jewish prohibition; even as we find in the prophet himself equal faith in sensual innocence and spiritual truth. Of “the soft Oothoon” the great goddess asks now “Why wilt thou give up woman’s secrecy, my melancholy child? Between two moments bliss is ripe.” Last she calls upon Orc; “Smile, son of my afflictions; arise and give our mountains joy of thy red light.”
“She ceased; for all were forth at sport beneath the solemn moon,
Waking the stars of Urizen with their immortal songs,
That nature felt thro’ all her pores the enormous revelry.
Till morning oped her eastern gate;
Then every one fled to his station; and Enitharmon wept.”