The “Jerusalem” may be regarded as an attempted poetic statement of Blake’s mystic philosophy regarding the development of humanity and its various states.
I give you the end of a golden string
Only wind it into a ball,
It will lead you in at Heaven’s gate
Built in Jerusalem’s wall,
writes Blake in the course of the book. Messrs. Ellis and Yeats have wound it into a very tangible ball, taking the symbolizism of the four Zoas as the clue to the whole mystery. Blake mentions the Zoas here frequently: “Four universes round the mundane egg remain chaotic” (nothing could be more true!) “One to the North Urthona; one to the South Urizen; one to the East Luvah; one to the west Tharmas. They are the four Zoas that stood around the throne divine.” But if the symbolism of the Zoas is in reality woven into the very tissue of the story, and forms its vital and coherent argument, it must be discovered on some mathematical principle very foreign, and, indeed, repugnant to the lover of true poetry. It is in no sense obvious or sequential. The value of the book lies, not in its poetical merit, nor even primarily in its mystic significance, but in the insight which it affords into the byways of Blake’s mind. The knowledge of his opinions gained here (they have been shortly commented on in a former chapter) enable us to form correct estimates of the scope of his plastic art, and his outlook on the world. Messrs. Maclaggan and Russell have edited a plain-typed and unillustrated edition of “Jerusalem,” and promise an expository essay on it to follow in due course, so that to earnest readers its study will be greatly facilitated. The book is concerned with one Albion, the father as it would seem of all created men, and Los (Time) who is his friend. Jerusalem and Vala are his emanations—Jerusalem being his wife. The city of Golgonooza—that is, I believe, Spiritual Art—is also described, and bears its part in the story.
On page 13, line 30, we read, “Around Golgonooza lies the land of death eternal; a land of pain and misery and despair and ever-brooding misery”—the repetition of the word “misery,” does not sound as if every word had been studied and put in its place! But the idea that the beautiful city of spiritual Art should be built in the midst of pain and despair reminds one of a similar idea of Goethe’s, “Art enshrines the great sadness of the world, but is itself not sad.” And the following lines develop the suggestion, page 16, line 61: “All things acted on Earth are seen in the Bright Sculptures of Los’s Halls, and every age renews its powers from these works. With every pathetic story possible to happen from Hate or Wayward Love and every sorrow and distress is carved here.”
The introduction of localities, streets and districts, has an almost ludicrous effect, as for instance in the following lines: “What are those golden builders doing near mournful ever-weeping Paddington?” Is it, one wonders, a prophetic announcement of the erection of the Great Western Terminus? Had Blake possessed the saving grace of humour, he would never have committed such laughter-provoking solecisms as this and other passages of the same kind. Humour is a means of restoring and keeping the balances true. It assists the sense of proportion, and like a fresh wind blows the cobwebs away; but, alas! Blake had no faintest trace of it.
In a kind of Dionysiac rage he has flung his noble ideas, original conceptions, pell-mell into the cauldron along with mere windy, mouth-filling rodomontade. There is a great deal of confused noise, but by snatches we distinguish the half-drowned but heavenly music. The fact is that his material (God-dictated, as he thought) so excited him that he was unable to deal with it, unable to direct the heat of his genius into fusing the heterogeneous mass into the perfect artistic unity. The vision unnerved him, and he all but lost his balance. Well might he too have cried:
A veil ’twixt us and Thee, dread Lord,
A veil ’twixt us and Thee,
Lest we should hear too clear, too clear
And unto madness see.
The illustrations to the book have all the concentration, power and grasp which the literary matter lacks. The pages seem to throb beneath the teeming forms of life with which his hand has adorned them. Each in the disposition of the beautiful writing is a picture. Wild passionate little figures, drawn with exquisite feeling, leap, climb, and fly about some of the borders while on others the writing is interrupted and entwined with creeping tendrils, or adorned with flames, stars, serpents, and processions of insects—a riot of decoration.
“Jerusalem” is a folio of 100 pages, one side of each leaf only being printed. From the first page to the twenty-fifth of the Museum copy the writing is in black, while the designs are left white outlined in black, on a dense sable ground. Pages 26 to 50 are in deep green, the printed designs being sometimes finished by hand, the deepest tones being laid on with a brush full of heavy colour. Pages 51 to 100 are again black and white—the black being always of great intensity.
In the first plate a man is seen entering through a door into darkness, with a lamp in his hand. This is our old friend Los entering into the dark places of Albion’s mind—Albion having turned his back on “the Divine Vision.” Curiously poetical suggestions are to be found in the title-page, whereon a cherubim with covering wings weeps over a beautiful prostrate female. This lovely body forms the central vein of a rose leaf, and is incorporated in its vegetable life. But above the woman’s head are the wings that have become atrophied, and the moon and stars, like the eyes of a peacock’s feathers, are seen on them, suggesting reminiscences and possibilities of spiritual development in “Vegetative humanity” beyond verbal expression. Glanced at as a whole without discriminating the parts, this fanciful and Gothic conception bears a strange resemblance to a butterfly. Did not the Greeks find in the butterfly a symbol of the immortality of the soul and its renewal in youth, and Blake, who was so profoundly sensitive to analogies of this kind, was not likely to have created this obvious resemblance accidentally. Everything is with him significant.