190 195 200 205 210 215 220 Saying, 'Crucify this cause of distress, Then was perfected His galling pride. Was Jesus born of a virgin pure His mother should an harlot have been, Or were Jew virgins still more cursed, From neither pain nor grief exempted,— He mocked the Sabbath, and he mocked 225 He turned the devils into swine 230 235 240 245 That he might tempt the Jews to dine; 'Obey your parents.' What says he? I am doing my father's business.' He scorned earth's parents, scorned earth's God, Against religion and government, And from the adultress turned away POSTSCRIPT I AM sure this Jesus will not do The editor offers this as a mere guess at Blake's own arrangement, after constantly studying the MS., which is written in a mass of scraps, the later portions often preceding the earlier, yet betraying themselves as not intended to be taken first. LA FAYETTE This short poem stands alone in Blake's work. It belongs to no series or collection. It seems to have been intended for 'The French Revolution,' a Book referred to by Blake as written, but of which nothing is known now but its title, and the bare fact mentioned in ‘Gilchrist' that it was printed and is lost. 1 FAYETTE beside King Lewis stood, He saw him sign his hand, And soon he saw the famine rage 2 Fayette liked the Queen to smile And soon he saw the pestilence From street to street to fly. 3 Fayette beheld the King and Queen And mute Fayette wept tear for tear 4 'Let the brothels. of Paris be opened To awake the pestilence through the city,' 5 The King awoke on his couch of gold crumb,' 6 The Queen of France just touched this globe, But our own good Queen quite grows to the ground, 7 Who will exchange his own fireside Blake often altered his mind about what verses he considered best to select as a final text of this poem. In the Quaritch edition an attempt is made to give all that he wrote, much as they came from his mind, the purpose being there mainly interpretative. Here a single principle is followed. Only such verses are printed as were never at any time crossed out by Blake in the manuscript. These, as will be seen here, form, in 'La Fayette,' a coherent symbolic poem -six verses of parable, and one of suggestive, though equally figurative, interpretation. It must be supposed to be the author's definitive and final text. The personages of the story are figures representing moods of the human mind. If it is reread in the light of the Prophetic Books, and the analogies between Luvah (who was once imprisoned by Vala in the furnaces of affliction) and Urizen, with Fayette and the King of France are noted, an idea of what Blake saw in it may be obtained. The metals here are also used as in the Prophetic Booksiron (love), and gold (intellect). So are the tears (nets), pestilence (the deadly sin of mental idleness leading to materialistic deception and the mixed mood called harlotry), the own fireside (the natural heart), and so forth. In the 'Resentment' epigrams this symbolic use is not to be found, and wherever it is absent the writing stands outside Blake's real life's work. BLAKE'S OWN IDEA OF GOOD AND EVIL Underneath all the fluctuating moods caused by his hopes, fears, troubles, and quarrels, a thread of coherence may be seen to bind Blake's fury, if we keep his chief moral beliefs always in sight. Blake held that Good is Existence and Fellowship, Evil is Illusion and Egotism. He had beyond this a number of particular beliefs of which this is the foundation. To begin with, he was philosophically convinced that our apparently real world exists for us merely by a 'contraction' of our mind from the mind of God, of which it is a part. This contraction causes an appearance, but does not produce a fact. Therefore God cannot exist in it and outside us. The simplest practical illustration of what this means may be found if we consider that we should never know the shape of anything by looking at it if we did not see it in perspective. Yet if we forget for a moment that perspective is no fact, but a disguise caused by limitation of visuality, we make just such a mistake as a child does when, on looking down a tunnel, it thinks the further end no bigger than its hand. The All-seeing Eye, of course, does not see in perspective. It sees the inside of a box, the outside, the top, and the bottom at once a manner of beholding so very uncontracted that if we could see a box in the same manner, we should not even perceive that it was a box at all. Mind being unknown to us except as human, from which we conjecture all other, above or below, one of Blake's names for the Complete or Divine Mind was Humanity. For the most contracted or personal form, so long as this does not lead to illusion to the child's error about the perspective of a tunnelhe took the name Adam. For illusion, from which we are never quite free now, he took the name of the great deceiver— Satan. Besides perception, always tempting us to error, by leading through narrow to mistaken personality, there is ‘Imagination' always inviting us to truth. For this Blake took the name of the Saviour, or Humanity free from Adam's narrowness or Satan's falseness. That we shall enter into this, he considered was what Scripture means when it says we shall 'meet the Lord in the air.' Meanwhile we must remember that there are aspects of each of these realities or names that are full of vivid feeling. These emanate from them as Eve from the side of Adam. If separated altogether, the Emanation' leaves the personality a most abominable thing-Blake found for it the name 'Spectre.' It is life without love, yet with the desire of power and possession constituting a side of love. The Emanation of the Man was the feeling, which the Son Himself has compared to the desire of a hen to gather together her chickens under her wing. Blake called it after the town which has stood for the greatest and longest felt desire of reunion that a long scattered race has shown in the world's history. He named it 'Jerusalem.' In most of its aspects, |