190

195

200

205

210

215

220

Saying, 'Crucify this cause of distress,
Who don't keep the secret of holiness!
The mental powers by disease we bind,
But he heals the deaf, the dumb, the blind.
Whom God hath afflicted for secret ends,
He comforts and heals and calls them friends.'
But when Jesus was crucified,

Then was perfected His galling pride.
In three days he devoured his prey,
And still devours this body of clay.
For dust and clay is the serpent's meat
That never was meant for man to eat.

Was Jesus born of a virgin pure
With narrow soul and looks demure?
If He intended to take on sin

His mother should an harlot have been,
Just such a one as Magdalen
With seven devils in her pen.

Or were Jew virgins still more cursed,
And with more sucking devils nursed?
Or what was it that he took on
That he might bring salvation?
A body subject to be tempted,

From neither pain nor grief exempted,—
Or such a body as might not feel
The passions that with sinners deal?
Yes, but they say he never fell.
Ask Caiaphas, for he can tell.

He mocked the Sabbath, and he mocked
The Sabbath's God, and he unlocked
The evil spirits from their shrines,
And turned fishermen to divines,
O'erturned the tent of secret sins,
And all its golden cords and pins;
'Tis the bloody shrine of war,
Poured around from star to star,-
Halls of justice, hating vice,
Where the devil combs his lice.

225

He turned the devils into swine

230

235

240

245

That he might tempt the Jews to dine;
Since when a pig has got a look
That for a Jew may be mistook.

'Obey your parents.' What says he?
'Woman, what have I to do with thee?
No earthly parents I confess,

I am doing my father's business.'

He scorned earth's parents, scorned earth's God,
And mocked the one and the other rod;
His seventy disciples sent

Against religion and government,
They by the sword of Justice fell,
And him their cruel murderer tell.
He left his father's trade to roam
A wandering vagrant without home,
And thus he others' labours stole
That he might live above control.
The publicans and harlots he
Selected for his company,

And from the adultress turned away
God's righteous law that lost its prey.

POSTSCRIPT

I AM sure this Jesus will not do
Either for Englishman or Jew.

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
About the fruitful land.

2

Fayette liked the Queen to smile
And wink her lovely eye,

And soon he saw the pestilence

From street to street to fly.

3

Fayette beheld the King and Queen
In tears of iron bound,

And mute Fayette wept tear for tear
And guarded them around.

4

'Let the brothels. of Paris be opened
With many an alluring dance,

To awake the pestilence through the city,'
Said the beautiful Queen of France.

5

The King awoke on his couch of gold
As soon as he heard these tidings told :
'Arise and come, both fife and drum,
And the famine shall eat both crust and

crumb,'

6

The Queen of France just touched this globe,
And the pestilence darted from her robe;

But our own good Queen quite grows to the ground,
And a great many suckers grow all around.

7

Who will exchange his own fireside
For the steps of another's door?
Who will exchange his wheaten loaf
For the links of a dungeon floor?

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,