The subject-matter of Jerusalem is really philosophy and psychology, and it is better expressed in the prose sentences of the Marriage of Heaven and Hell than in myth. This should be read first by those who wish to understand Blake's ideas. Like Nietzsche, he went "beyond good and evil." Good according to the religious, he says, is the passive that obeys reason; evil is the active that springs from energy; but for Blake himself the conflict between this active and passive is the real evil; it is what makes men prefer dreams to reality. By the Marriage of Heaven and Hell he means the reconciliation of reason and energy and the destruction of the delusive, dreamer's, sense of a sin which yet allures. He who desires but acts not breeds pestilence. If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise. The pride of the Peacock is the glory of God. Exuberance is beauty. Energy is eternal delight. "Those who restrain Desire," he says, "do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained; and the restrainer or Reason usurps its place and governs the unwilling." To Blake Christ means the harmonious man in whom desire is master, and uses reason as an instrument. From this follows his belief, which is the belief underlying all religion, that true, supreme and harmonious desire is for reality, and that from it alone can reality be discovered. "Everything possible to be believed is an image of the truth." But, of course, belief to Blake means real belief, belief of the whole self, belief that is acted upon, not the acceptance of anything on authority. "I asked—Does a firm persuasion that a thing is so, make it so? He replied—All poets believe that it does, and in ages of imagination this firm persuasion removed mountains; but many are not capable of a firm persuasion of anything." Firm persuasion is that unity of the self which, for Blake as for all mystics, is salvation.
Blake is united to Christianity by his mystical doctrine of forgiveness; that is what makes him one of the great designers or creators of Christianity, those who know what Christ himself meant, in whom his passion is born anew, and to whom his theology is natural truth. This doctrine expresses itself in Blake's poetry without symbol; we need no key to understand it, and, whenever it possesses him, it lifts him to its own height and clearness. The evil of unforgivingness, to him, is in the remembrance of sin which keeps the sin itself alive:
To record the sin for a reproach, to let the Sun go down
In a remembrance of the sin, is a woe and a horror,
A brooder of an evil day, and a Sun rising in blood.
Come then, O Lamb of God, and take away the remembrance of sin.
That is so, whether a man remembers the sin of others or his own; and he who remembers the sin of others will remember his own. The sense of sin comes of the conflict between reason and desire; what we have to do is to end that conflict and attain to supreme desire and firm persuasion; thinking of the conflict only perpetuates it. The religion of Jesus was for Blake freedom from the past, and we attain to it by forgetting the sins of others; then we can forgive, and forget, our own past selves. Hence his doctrine that Jesus, the child of desire, was born in the forgiveness of sin; and the most beautiful passage in Jerusalem is the forgiveness of Mary by Joseph and her song that follows, "O Forgiveness and Pity and Compassion! If I were pure I should never have known Thee: If I were unpolluted I should never have glorified thy Holiness, or rejoiced in thy great Salvation." There is the same doctrine in the last section of the Everlasting Gospel, and it runs all through the Songs of Innocence and Experience. God Himself for Blake, as for Christ, is, by the very logic of the idea God, He who pities and forgives, He who blots out the past; the divine energy pours itself out in pity and forgiveness, making life and growth and beauty out of sin itself, justifying even evil, since, by the forgiving and forgetting of it, it is changed into a good more subtle, more entrancing, more assured of an infinite increase than any pure good that needs no change or forgiveness.
In his expressions of this doctrine Blake rises above all our poets by reason of the richness of his mastered content. He is simpler and deeper, more passionate and more philosophic, and attains in art to that harmony which he foretells in life. When I think of it, I am in danger myself of seeing in him the one prophet, the one poet, the infallible. I am sure, at least, that he will seem greater through all the new discoveries and enlarged experience of posterity.
SHELLEY AND HIS PUBLISHERS
(With Some New Letters)
By ROGER INGPEN