Could fetch it from the furnace deep
And in thy horrid ribs dare steep
In the well of sanguine woe, etc.
Blake seeing, what was obvious, that this did not promise well and was leading nowhere, gave it up and changed the punctuation of the preceding stanza which had run simply—"What dread hand and what dread feet"—to its present form, so as to finish off the stanza to the eye, if not to the mind.
It is a masterful way out of a difficulty, but it takes the risk that we shall ask what the dread hand and feet are there to do? The original draft tells us—to fetch the tiger's heart from the furnace deep; but in the poem as we know it we may guess for ourselves, and there is no answer. This is not the dark sublimity of the prophet, but the wilfulness of the poet, who, having hit upon a fine sounding line, prefers it to sense. (There is also another reading which may come from Blake himself—"What dread hand forged thy dread feet?" It is not "prophetic," but it does make sense.)
It does not matter much, for the rhythm of the poem carries one through obscurities of detail; but the broken questions are not an added beauty or sublimity, they are merely Blake's way out of a difficulty that may beset any poet.
So I come, gradually and cautiously, to the Prophetic Books themselves, and to my contention that they too are to be judged, like the works of the Hebrew Prophets, as literature, since they were written for men to read. We must make a reasonable allowance for all mystics; they try to say what is very hard to say, what they have seen as in a glass darkly. If you think them worth reading at all, you believe that they are concerned with a reality men do not perceive naturally and immediately with the senses, a reality that we are aware of, if at all, only by hints and whispers. There are no commonly accepted sense-data for this reality, upon which we can reason as we can reason about the movements of the stars. Men are most fully aware of it when they are in an exalted state of mind—a state which expresses itself in images rather than in syllogisms. You may say, of course, that this state of mind is "purely subjective" and therefore only of artistic value; but the mystic himself denies that. He believes that he is aware of a reality not himself, though himself is a part of it; and aware of it, not by the normal use of the senses, but by a more immediate perception of the spirit. He knows it, perhaps, through sense perceptions, but by means of a faculty beyond them; he knows it with the whole of himself, that self which is not often enough of a unity to attain to this kind of knowledge. This you too must believe, or at least not refuse to believe, if you are to take him seriously; but the mystic, even if he does speak to us of an independent reality, speaks with a personal expression of his own, like the artist. Lâo-tsze has put it better than anyone: "It is the way of Heaven not to speak, but it knows how to obtain an answer." When he says Heaven he implies an independent reality; but men make other men aware of it by the answer they give to it, and this answer is personal to them.
So a man must convince us of his experience of this Heaven, this reality not perceived by the senses, by his own expression of it, his own answer. He must say what moves us by the ordinary means of expression; he must not pretend that he has a secret to tell us which we can understand only if he will play his game with his counters, his symbols, and allegories. If he has seen heaven, then it knows how to obtain an answer from him, exoteric in its power if esoteric in its meaning, and leading men into its meaning by its power. The power is in the answer, if the meaning is in the heaven he has seen, and that heaven is to be known by its fruits.
You must, of course, read a mystic with attention; but you should be able to gather his meaning as you read; it is to be found in each sentence and in the whole of each work, not by reference to some other work; for it is the mark of a bad writer not to be able to say what he has to say in the sentence he is writing, to give us always jam yesterday, or jam to-morrow, but never jam to-day. Yet that is what the Blake-fanatics offer us in the Prophetic Books. You cannot understand this unless you know that the key to it is in that. You must grasp Blake's "system" if you are to profit by him. They are like the Gnostics for whom nothing in the Gospels meant what it seemed to mean; they alone could give you the key to Christ's inner meaning.
Master Eckhart says that the eternal birth which God the father bore and bears unceasingly in eternity is now born in time and in human nature. "St. Augustine says this birth is always happening. But, if it happen not in me, what does it profit me? What matters is that it shall happen in me." So what matters for the mystic, and his readers, is that the eternal truth shall happen and be expressed in him, in his actual words. We must not be told that we can find it by turning from one work to another and by piecing them all together. He must utter it sentence by sentence, and it must happen in his sentences, with pain and labour perhaps, but still here and now and in these very words.
In Blake's Prophetic Books sometimes it happens and sometimes it does not, and often Blake by his very method seems to prevent it from happening. He has the weakness of many mystics, the desire for a vast geometrical system equivalent to the reality he believes himself to be aware of. Such a system, if once a man will abandon his mind to it, can unroll itself almost automatically, like a fugue. But many fugues are empty of content; they persuade the composer that he is saying something with the mechanical inevitability of their form; and they may also persuade the hearer. It is the very mechanism that prevents him from saying anything and the hearer from seeing its emptiness. We do not yet understand that automatism of the mind which can produce form without content so easily; the automatism of improvisation in many arts, which you find in some cubist pictures, in much music, and in Prophetic Books of all ages, especially in the Bible. Blake himself speaks of it, with seeming inconsistency, in his preface to Jerusalem: "When this verse was first dictated to me, I considered a monotonous cadence like that used by Milton and Shakespeare, and all writers of English Blank Verse, derived from the modern bondage of Riming, to be a necessary and indispensable part of verse. But I soon found that in the mouth of a true Orator such monotony was not only awkward but as much a bondage as rime itself. I therefore have produced a variety in every line, both of cadences and number of syllables. Every word and every letter is studied and put into its fit place." You may ask how there could be this choice and study where the verse was dictated; but Blake means, no doubt, to describe a process of writing half-conscious and half-unconscious, as a composer might choose to write a fugue and then let it write itself. We may use Sheridan's words of this method: "Easy writing makes damned hard reading"; and Jerusalem is not easy to read.
Yet it contains great passages and ideas, of which Messrs. Maclagan and Russell give a very clear account in their edition of it. Like all the great mystics, Blake was a foreteller of the discoveries of modern psychology; he knew the evils of "suppression"—Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires—and his story, in so far as there is one, is the story of the human mind in its effort to reach unity, not by suppression but by "sublimation." Yet it seems to me that his ideas often lost their way in the myth which he made about them; it is like allegorical painting in which there is a conflict between the allegory and the people and things represented, and a sacrifice of one conflicting element to the other. In Blake's story you have to remember that the characters are not men and women but different parts or faculties of the human mind; this requires a kind of double attention fatal in itself to the experience of a work of art, a double attention like that sometimes demanded by symphonic poems, in which you have to remember the story while you are listening to the music. If you are writing about the faculties of the human mind it must be best, both for yourself and for your readers, to call them by their names and to see them as themselves; so will you think most clearly and so will the reader understand most easily.