William Blake and the Visionary Law: Prophecy, Legislation and Constitution 3031377222, 9783031377228

Citation preview

William Blake and the Visionary Law Prophecy, Legislation and Constitution

Matthew Mauger

William Blake and the Visionary Law

Matthew Mauger

William Blake and the Visionary Law Prophecy, Legislation and Constitution

Matthew Mauger School of English and Drama Queen Mary University of London London, UK

ISBN 978-3-031-37722-8    ISBN 978-3-031-37723-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37723-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

For Ceri

Acknowledgements

William Blake and the Visionary Law is a book first conceived twenty years ago, as a doctoral student at Queen Mary University of London, under the supervision of Anne Janowitz. I owe much of my understanding of Blake to her patient and uncompromising tutelage, and I vividly recall the mixture of excitement and agitation with which I anticipated our regular conversations in the café at the British Library, poring over drafts of thesis chapters, or working through difficult passages of Blake’s prophetic books. My fledgling ideas about Blake, London, and the eighteenth-century more generally, were nurtured in the research world of the English Department, and I would like in particular to mention Andrew Lincoln, Christopher Reid, Markman Ellis, Richard Coulton, and the members of the Eighteenth-century Reading Group. My doctoral work was also influenced by Saree Makdisi and Kevin Gilmartin, convenors of the Mellon Interpretive Seminar in the Humanities at the Huntington Library during the late summer of 2003. My reflections on the project, and the ideas that it explored, have benefitted enormously from conversations with Jon Mee and Michael Baron as part of the examination of my PhD work. I never expected so much time to pass before I returned to Blake. Life, with its many challenges and joys both personally and professionally, has intervened. My interest in London as a place of literary production and inspiration, together with opportunities for collaboration, has led my research in unexpected directions. During this period, I have been enormously grateful to my undergraduate students on ESH351 Reading William Blake, who have kept my fascination with Blake’s work alive, and never failed to challenge my critical perspectives. I have routinely told vii

viii 

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

them somewhat pompously that I am ‘planning a book on Blake’. This, finally, is that moment. The advice of colleagues at Queen Mary has, once again, been invaluable in guiding my thoughts both when contemplating returning to Blake as a topic of focussed research, and in project planning, delivery, and review. James Vigus and David Duff have been generous in offering their time and advice in the framing of the project in its initial stages. I also want to acknowledge my sincere thanks to my long-time collaborators and friends, Richard Coulton and Markman Ellis, who have with enormous patience and good humour read drafts of this book, and provided advice of such clarity and insight during long evenings at the Lord Tredegar in Bow. Most recently, I have (once again) sought the advice and guidance of Jon Mee, which has been characteristically astute. I am also grateful for the advice of my editors at Palgrave, in particular Molly Beck and Raghupathy Kalynaraman, and to the anonymous reader who offered clear advice early in the project planning. This book has been enriched by the perspectives that all these individuals have offered. I would also like to thank the staff of the British Library, the Huntington Library, Senate House Library, and Guildhall Library, whose work has at various times supported my research. I like to think that I am broadly successful in keeping the anxieties of work in their place. But inevitably there have been times when my wife, Ceri, and my children Shannah, Asher, and Elian (whose astonishing monstrous drawings articulate ‘visionary forms dramatic’) have heard more about the subject than they would perhaps have wished. They have enormous patience, and provide immeasurable support. They have an uncanny knack for finding the humour that cuts through the stresses of life: ‘when it once is found, it renovates every Moment of the Day’. Thank you.

Contents

1 Introduction  1 2 Laws  Ancient and Modern: Nation, Custom and Legislative Renewal 17 3 One  Law for the Lion and the Ox is Oppression: The Emergence of Universal Law 45 4 One  King, One God, One Law: Building Constitutions in the Lambeth Books 75 5 The  Heavens Squared by a Line: Legal Architecture and Mystery109 6 Such  are the Laws of Eternity: Recovery, Redemption, and Prophecy139 7 Creating  Nature from this Fiery Law: Towards Visionary Legislation?171

ix

x 

Contents

8 Conclusion207 Bibliography213 Index227

List of Abbreviations1

Ahania America Europe The Four Zoas Jerusalem Marriage Milton Urizen Visions

The Book of Ahania America: A Prophecy Europe: A Prophecy Vala; or The Four Zoas: The Torments of Love & Jealousy in The Death and Judgement of Albion the Ancient Man Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion The Marriage of Heaven and Hell Milton: A Poem in 2 Books The [First] Book of Urizen Visions of the Daughters of Albion

1  All quotations from the work of William Blake are taken, unless otherwise acknowledged, from The Complete Poetry & Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman, comm. Harold Bloom, rev. ed. (New York: Doubleday, 1988). In writing this book, I have also made extensive use of Blake: The Complete Poems, ed. W. H. Stevenson, 3rd ed. (London: Routledge, 2007). In references to Blake’s work, I have followed the modern scholarly convention of including plate and line numbers for the illuminated books, adopting the numbering scheme used in the Erdman text. For works in manuscript, I have again taken my lead from Erdman, providing (before the line number) page references for The French Revolution and The Four Zoas, chapter references for Tiriel, and the lettered fragment markers for the scattered notebook drafts comprising The Everlasting Gospel. I have also provided references to page numbers in the Erdman edition, preceded by the abbreviation ‘E’. The letter-based ‘Copy’ designations for Blake’s illuminated books follow the system set out by G.  E. Bentley in Blake Books: Annotated Catalogues of William Blake’s Writings (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977). The longer titles of Blake’s works are typically abbreviated.

xi

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2 Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2 Fig. 4.3 Fig. 4.4 Fig. 5.1 Fig. 6.1 Fig. 6.2 Fig. 7.1 Fig. 7.2

Thomas Branch, Principia Legis & Æquitatis (1753), titlepage. (British Library, London) 29 William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Copy D, Plate 24. (Library of Congress, Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection) 57 William Blake, ‘The Approach of Doom’. (British Museum, Department of Prints and Drawings, London) 72 William Blake, The First Book of Urizen, Copy C, title page. (Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection) 76 William Blake, The First Book of Urizen, Copy C, Plate 5. (Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection) 83 William Blake, America: A Prophecy, Copy M, Plate 7. (Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection) 100 William Blake, Europe: A Prophecy, Copy D, frontispiece, with annotations by George Cumberland. (British Museum, Department of Prints and Drawings, London) 103 William Blake, Vala; or The Four Zoas, p. 25. (British Library, London)118 William Blake, Milton: A Poem in 2 Books, Copy D, Plate 16. (Library of Congress, Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection) 140 William Blake, Milton: A Poem in 2 Books, Copy C, Plate 36. (From The New York Public Library) 165 William Blake, The Woman Taken in Adultery (c. 1805). (Photograph © 2023 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) 191 William Blake, Jerusalem, the Emanation of the Giant Albion, Copy E (c. 1821). (Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection)200 xiii

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Satan! my Spectre! I know my power thee to annihilate And be a greater in thy place, & be thy Tabernacle A covering for thee to do thy will, till one greater comes And smites me as I smote thee & becomes my covering. Such are the Laws of thy false Heavns! but Laws of Eternity Are not such: know thou: I come to Self Annihilation Such are the Laws of Eternity that each shall mutually Annihilate himself for others good, as I for thee (Milton, 38:29–36, E139)

This is a book about the complex, contested, and ultimately redemptive potential of the law, as it is deployed in the prophetic visions of human life attested in the work of one of its most vibrant mythographers: William Blake. It draws attention to the legal codes, and the lawmakers who enforce them, that are a commonplace of Blake’s corpus: Urizen’s codification of ‘One King, One God, One Law’ in The Book of Urizen (4:40, E72); the moral law that is distributed to every nation at the beginning of The Song of Los (3:6–24, E67); the metal books of Night VII of The Four Zoas (77–80, E352–355); Satan’s scrolls of ‘Punishments … musterd and number’d’ in Milton (9:25, E103). In Blake’s work, the yearning for law often appears instinctual, primal, and habitual. It establishes a reassuring and comforting space of definition (when so much seems ambiguous), © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Mauger, William Blake and the Visionary Law, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37723-5_1

1

2 

M. MAUGER

coherence (when humanity is heading towards disintegration), and sanctuary (in the midst of chaos and noise). Law bespeaks humanity’s longing for order and certainty. But law’s consolations are also beguiling, duplicitous, and misleading. The spaces of security and relief that it promises are repeatedly unmasked as prisons of the mind and body. Under these regimes human society is bound within strict moral codes, the power of the imagination is curtailed, and the freedom to understand the world and realise the infinite potential of humanity is lost. Blake’s lawmakers often seem to be the source of error, not the means of its correction; yet law as an idea, as a language, as a source of constitutional integrity, underpins Blake’s visions of the universe. Throughout his work of the 1790s, law emerges as the vital foundation of the world in which humanity finds existence. Blake exhibits a remarkable tenacity in returning to the structure afforded by legal codes, even when—time and again—he confronts the limits of the law, even when he has repeatedly represented his legislators as imaginatively blind, and intellectually exhausted. Blake seems fascinated by these failures. He continues to explore the insistent, immanent, and visceral connections between humanity and law in his reading, in his annotations, and in the vast prophetic texts on which he focussed so much of his creative energy after the turn of the nineteenth century. In doing so, he persistently returns to the premise that law and the imagination are not necessarily antagonists, and that a visionary mode of prophetic legislation is the basis on which human action might enact recovery and freedom. The passage that I have highlighted above, taken from the climax of Blake’s nineteenth-century epic Milton, offers a particularly concise version of Blake’s exploration of this theme. It describes the final confrontation between the re-animated figure of John Milton (Blake’s prophetic envoy) and Satan, against whom Milton has struggled for much of the poem. The defeat of Satan has been forecast throughout; but at the very moment when such a climax may be enacted, Blake withholds the expected victory of Milton, and suggests that such a victory would be a defeat. As readers, our desire for the destruction of Satan arises (in Blake’s view) through our own adoption of Satanic selfhood. Such an approach, Milton tells Satan, would be the action recommended by the ‘Laws of thy false Heavns’. By ‘annihilating’ the Satan who stands before him, Milton will simply raise himself as a new and more powerful Satan, who will in turn be overcome in an endless aggregating spiral of Satanic power. Instead, Milton chooses to act under the aegis of a different legal epistemology.

1 INTRODUCTION 

3

With a tangible triumphant confidence born from the recognition of a visionary law, he affirms that ‘Laws of Eternity / Are not such’, before declaring their key principle with the authoritative ‘Know thou’. Under these terms, Milton is directed to destroy the Satan that lies within, his ‘selfhood’. Rather than perpetuating Satan’s evil, he enacts Satan’s ‘good’ (38[43]:36, E139). What is most compelling about Blake’s reassertion in this passage of his confidence in the redemptive potential of legal frameworks, is the venue within which it takes place. Of all Blake’s longer works, Milton is the most excessively personal. Blake inserts himself within its prophetic machinery, and becomes the focal point around which the events of the poem rotate. Indeed, the setting for the encounter between Milton and Satan is the most intimate visionary arena in Blake’s poetic oeuvre: the garden of the Felpham cottage in which he lived with his wife from 1800–1804, the only period of his life in which he resided outside London. But this garden is not only (perhaps not even) a space of private imaginative fertility or domestic warmth. It is also a site of intrusion and threat, associated directly with Blake’s most terrifying encounter with the law. For it was here in the autumn of 1803, as I consider in greater detail in Chap. 6, that he had become embroiled in a confrontation with a soldier which led to his arrest on charges of sedition (under the terms of the 1795 ‘Gagging Acts’) and common law assault.1 Although Blake was acquitted at the Chichester Quarter Sessions in January 1804, we might expect that this experience would have reinforced his sense of law’s iniquity, of its use as a tool of surveillance and control by an oppressive state machine. Blake was himself convinced that he had been the victim of a conspiracy, a ‘Fabricated Perjury’, and we might well imagine that this experience informs his insight that the ‘Laws’ of Satan’s ‘false heavens’ form ‘a covering for thee to do thy will’. It is striking, then, that it should be in this space of intense corporeal legal trauma that a visionary law is recognised, comprising the ‘Laws of Eternity’. And it is within the terms of this new prophetic legislation that Milton can demolish at a stroke 1  Mark Crosby, “‘A Fabricated Perjury’: the [Mis]Trial of William Blake,” Huntington Library Quarterly 72 (2009): 32–38; Mark L. Barr, “Practicing Resistance: Blake, Milton, and the English Jury,” European Romantic Review 3 (2007): 367–79; Jon Mee and Crosby, “‘This Soldierlike Danger’: The Trial of William Blake for Sedition,” in Resisting Napoleon: The British Response to the Threat of Invasion, 1797–1815, ed. Mark Philp (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 111–24; Paul Youngquist, Madness and Blake’s Myth (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989), 137–40.

4 

M. MAUGER

Satan’s power: ‘know thou’, he declares, ‘Such are the Laws of Eternity that each shall mutually / Annihilate himself for others good, as I for thee’ (38[43]:35–36, E139). The framework deployed within the Milton passage raises several questions, the most urgent of which concern the meaning of ‘Law’ in Blake’s work. What are the laws of the human world? Are they related to the Old Testament moral law, the Ten Commandments received by Moses on Mount Sinai in the Exodus account? Alternatively, are they the principles that constitute the legal framework of Blake’s world, the common and statute law of late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century England? Can they be both? Are the laws themselves Satanic, or is this—rather—the character of life in a world which is contained within the circumference of an ossified legal structure? If that is the case, on what basis can a set of ‘Laws of Eternity’ be established, that they should avoid such imprisonment? Can Eternity accommodate the notion of law, a concept which seems antithetical to the very idea of the infinite? The vision of a legalised Eternity is not something that readers would readily associate with Blake.

Blake, Law, and the Antinomian Turn For some decades, Blake scholarship has broadly settled on a specific intellectual context—religious antinomianism—as the lens through which Blake’s pronouncements about law can most effectively be brought into focus.2 In its broadest terms, ‘antinomianism’ relates to the idea that Christians are released, through the death and resurrection of Christ, from the moral obligations to God’s law as set out in the Old Testament. This debate in Blake studies finds its origin in A. L. Morton’s mid-twentieth-­ century study The Everlasting Gospel (1958).3 Morton noted the similarities between Blake’s language and that encountered in the publications associated with certain strands of religious radicalism at the time of the English Civil War, though he was unable to establish direct connections between these groups and Blake’s own world. When Michael Ferber reinserted Morton’s study within contemporary scholarly debate in 1985 2  As early as 1994, Jeanne Moskal referred to the strength of the ‘received opinion about Blake and antinomianism’ (Blake, Ethics and Forgiveness (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1994), 2–4. 3  A. L. Morton, The Everlasting Gospel: A Study in the Sources of William Blake (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1958).

1 INTRODUCTION 

5

as part of The Social Vision of William Blake, this uncertainty persisted. For Ferber, the absence of these clear links was unproblematic (though he speculated that antinomian debate may have resonated within radical Christian sects in 1790s London). Rather, Ferber suggested that tenets of seventeenth-century antinomian thought offered ‘a horizon against which to view Blake’s ideas on liberty and forgiveness of sins’.4 These included a conviction in the imminent arrival of a new age committed to the recognition of an ‘Everlasting Gospel’ that superseded both the Old and New Testaments; the rejection of the moral law of the Old Testament; the embracing of a new dispensation based on freedom and liberty rather than obedience to legal codes; and the notion that God dwells within each individual.5 More extreme versions of these arguments advocated the deliberate breaking of legal codes as the necessary task of the individual seeking salvation. Authority for this position was commonly drawn from passages in various New Testament letters attributed to Paul, which (in the words of Ferber) supported a doctrine that ‘for Christians, Christ’s crucifixion has abolished the Mosaic law’.6 In a number of important studies in the decades which followed Ferber’s book, the links between Blake and these seventeenth-century antinomian beliefs—connections which for Ferber had ‘disappeared from history’—were recovered and extended. In Witness Against the Beast (1992), E. P. Thompson established the antinomian credentials of various dissenting churches in late-eighteenth-century London, before offering an idiosyncratic narrative of the discovery, within the archives of a Muggletonian congregation, of antinomian tropes that might be considered strikingly ‘Blakean’ in character.7 Jon Mee’s influential consideration of Blake’s links with dissenting culture, Dangerous Enthusiasm (1992), 4  Michael Ferber, The Social Vision of William Blake (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 117. 5  For comprehensive accounts of antinomian thought, see Ferber, Social Vision, 116–25; Moskal, Blake, Ethics and Forgiveness, 13–15; Jon Mee, “Is There an Antinomian in the House? William Blake and the After-Life of a Heresy,” in Historicizing Blake, ed. Steve Clark and David Worrall (London: Palgrave, 1994), 43–45; Martin Priestman, Romantic Atheism: Poetry and Freethought, 1780–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 82–84. 6  Ferber, Social Vision, 117–18; Christopher Rowland, Blake and the Bible (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 200–207; Judith C.  Mueller, “Creatures Against the Law: Blake’s Antinomian Renderings of Paul,” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 19 (2012): 123–41. 7  E. P. Thompson, Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

6 

M. MAUGER

re-appropriated the structuralist term bricoleur to describe the remarkable facility with which Blake combines and redeploys ideas and forms of expression from across the fields of mainstream and radical nonconformity. Referring specifically to the religious enthusiasm of the late-­ eighteenth century, Mee emphasised the need to look beyond Swedenborg when tracing the millenarian routes of Blake’s prophetic voice, noting the profoundly antinomian nature of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, its ‘hostility to legalism’, and Blake’s continued ‘antinomian hostility to religious ceremonies’.8 Mee’s interest in dissenting culture as a context for Blake’s artistic production had a galvanising effect on Blake studies through the 1990s and beyond. Within this particular critical trajectory, Saree Makdisi’s account in William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s (2003) of the influence of antinomian discourse on Blake’s writing remains unsurpassed in its scope and ambition.9 Building directly on Mee’s work on Blake’s connections with radical culture on the one hand, and Mark Philp’s insights into the diversities of 1790s radicalism on the other, Makdisi develops a highly nuanced understanding of the character of Blake’s radicalism at this historical moment.10 The discourse of rights and liberty advanced by Thomas Paine, John Thelwall and the London Corresponding Society, Makdisi argues, would have been much too ‘bourgeois’ for Blake, who (we might surmise) feared that it would simply replace one form of authority and power with another. Rather, drawing on the more millenarian practices of Thomas Spence, and strongly influenced by the resurgence of seventeenth-century antinomianism among dissenting congregations in London, Blake occupied a position that was both intentionally and defiantly marginal. This rhetoric of antinomianism had a broader cultural and political frame of reference than an obscure religious heresy. As Makdisi makes clear, it is a discourse ‘naming a kind of cultural and political stance that would prove unassimilable to the requirements of a market economy and a properly modern mode of socioeconomic organization’.11 Makdisi  Mee, Dangerous Enthusiasm, 57–58.  Saree Makdisi, William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 10  Mark Philp, “The Fragmented Ideology of Reform,” in The French Revolution and British Popular Politics, ed. Mark Philp (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 50–77; and “English Republicanism in the 1790s,” The Journal of Political Philosophy 6 (1998): 235–63. 11  Makdisi, Impossible History, 72–73. 8 9

1 INTRODUCTION 

7

concludes that Blake was committed to finding a liberty based on the rejection of law and regulation; he calls this Blake’s ‘ontological antinomianism’. From this perspective, law is understood as a hallmark of the fallen world, finding expression ‘in the way in which legally-sanctioned forms constitute, determine … and regulate life, rather than leaving life free to determine its own ever-changing forms’.12 The core illuminated books that Blake completed during the period 1792–1795, including those often termed ‘the Lambeth books’, can readily be understood as unmasking the way in which a restrictive legislative code, afforded epistemological authority via its association with religious ritual and a mythical account of origins, becomes woven throughout the history of the world. As I will discuss in more detail in Chap. 3, this history is summarised in the Song of Los (1795) as an accretive and variegated process: the aspiring legal ontology is able to adapt its appeal nation-by-­ nation, appearing in one place as a new sacred text, in another as abstract philosophy, and elsewhere as a martial code. Nevertheless, the consequence is the same: the peoples of the world are bound ‘more / And more to Earth, closing and restraining; / Till a Philosophy of Five Senses was complete’ (Song of Los, 4:13–15, E68). We find this narrative, or particularised instances of it, throughout Blake’s work of this period and beyond: from the revolutionary desire of Orc to ‘stamp to dust’ that ‘stony Law’ in America: a Prophecy and (with minor variants) the ‘Song of Liberty’ (America, 8:5, E54; Marriage, 27, E45), to the swirling and overlapping story of successive legal and philosophical constructions seen in the manuscript of The Four Zoas; from the horrific recognition of the law’s self-­ perpetuating and invasive nature in Tiriel (8:7–28, E284–285), to Oothoon’s denigration of the marriage laws in Visions of the Daughters of Albion (5:21–32, E49). In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Jesus is celebrated by ‘a Devil in a flame of fire’ as a true antinomian hero: ‘I tell you, no virtue can exist without breaking these ten commandments. Jesus was all virtue, and acted from impulse. not from rules’ (23, E43). Even in his late work on the notebook poem reconstructed by various editors as The Everlasting Gospel, Blake seems to be toying with these arguments: whereas the Gospel of Christ embodies forgiveness, the codified ‘moral virtues’ enact the ‘Accusation of Sin’ before which ‘souls to Hell ran trooping in’ (E876).

 Ibid., 262, 280.

12

8 

M. MAUGER

Why then, if versions of this story appear with such regularity in Blake’s writing, might we harbour reservations about considering the antinomian rejection of legal discourse as somehow constituting Blake’s definitive position on the law? This book argues, in part, that the sustained interest in the antinomian resonances of Blake’s corpus effectively distracts us from his consistent aspiration for the law as a framework which affords protection for Humanity against incoherence, dissolution, and despair. It is Blake’s repeated retelling of the legal prison story that alerts us to this interpretative possibility. If Blake were committed to dismissing the law, moving to an idea of freedom that lies beyond legal frameworks, then why repeatedly insist on returning to law as a first principle? If law is by definition (so-to-speak) iniquitous, imprisoning, and enervating, why the recurring interest in charting its origin, its development, and its life? In articulating this counter-argument, I draw critical authority in part from Jeanne Moskal’s book Blake, Ethics and Forgiveness. Published in 1994 as part of the awakening critical interest in establishing Blake’s connections with dissenting culture and radical millenarianism, Moskal’s argument differs from many contemporaries and it is often overlooked in evaluations of scholarly approaches to Blake’s antinomian credentials. At the heart of Moskal’s analysis is her insistence on a fundamental logical ambiguity within antinomianism itself, in which the principle of nomos (‘law’) is always already present: ‘antinomianism, interwoven with law, consistently re-presents the obverse image of the system it seeks to escape’.13 Blake, in Moskal’s account, was committed to certain ideas of ‘good’ within humanity, and would have found it difficult to accept the logical conclusion of antinomian thought that violation of the law for its own sake might afford the basis for human freedom. According to Moskal, he thus reaches an impasse in his 1790s work that could only be resolved by conceptualising freedom in a way that is independent of law. This he achieves in his later work, she argues, by developing a version of ‘forgiveness’ that is philosophically and epistemologically independent of legal structures. Antinomianism cannot escape the legal frameworks that it resists, and neither can Blake, while he remains wedded to an antinomian rejection of the law. But while Moskal argues that Blake is able to move beyond antinomian tail-chasing by leaving legal discourse and structure behind in his nineteenth-century work, I argue that—even in his illuminated books of the 1790s—Blake seeks a recovery of the law itself as an essential  Moskal, Blake, Ethics and Forgiveness, 14, 15, 20.

13

1 INTRODUCTION 

9

component of the Divine Humanity, as a tool which initially protects, and can ultimately empower, the human race. Moreover, when freed from the constraints of emotional and sensual restriction, and liberated from its incarnation as a tool of state control, law’s potential as a structured, ordered, and tangible programme for the reconciliation of the human and the divine can be fully realised. Antinomian tropes abound in Blake’s work, and clearly form a crucial aspect of his experimentation with legality; but identifications of his work as intrinsically antinomian tend to limit its scope and ambition. They can, moreover, prejudice interpretation of Blake’s often positive valorisation of law, blinding readers to his faith that legal discourse can lead to improvement in the fallen human condition, a faith that ties him directly into contemporary debates about the role of law in a civilised society. Blake does not regard human recovery as predicated on some kind of epistemological escape from the reign of law. Rather, as I argue in the later chapters of this book, Blake’s vision of the Human Form Divine is predicated on law’s instrumentation as a profoundly human visionary apparatus. Law itself needs to be fundamentally reconceived, stripped of the ossified layers of control, regulation, and compulsion with which it has become associated.

Courtroom, Nationhood, and Prophecy A comprehensive approach to understanding the role of law in Blake’s work encompasses not only the radical rhetoric of the resurgent antinomianism encountered within millenarian dissent in London, but also the wider life of the law in the eighteenth century as a system of regulation and punishment, as an arena within which the individual encountered the machinery of the state, and as a site of jurisprudential, epistemological, and theological debate about the nature and origin of human society. The increased interest accorded in recent years to evaluating Blake’s encounter with judicial decision-making as a defendant at the Chichester Quarter Sessions affords a rare glimpse of his lived experience of the law. Mark Crosby locates Blake’s trial within the competing contexts of a judicial system charged with the even enforcement of the national law, and the immediate priorities of the local authorities in Sussex at a time of heightened military tension following the 1803 declaration of war against France. He explores in detail the surviving records of the trial in the West Sussex County Record Office, and coverage of the acquittal in the local

10 

M. MAUGER

newspaper.14 Elsewhere, Mark Barr has focussed on the trial’s decision making, in particular suggesting that the jury might have made use of the widespread practice of ‘pious perjury’ to shield Blake from the literal application of the law. Barr offers a reading of Milton, a poem which opens (as Barr reminds us) with an account of the trial of a dispute between Satan and Palamabron, which suggests that the jury’s assertion of independence in the face of legislative persecution is used by Blake as a model for the affirmation of private rebellion.15 Extending his earlier work on The Book of Urizen (in which he had explored the ways in which Blake sought to ‘immunise’ his prophetic writing against charges of treason and sedition by exploiting the breadth of the common law defence of insanity), Barr argues that Blake’s opposition to oppressive legal frameworks draws not only from the rhetoric of antinomian dissent, but also from a creative engagement with contemporary legal argumentation and courtroom procedure.16 Barr concludes that Blake’s prophetic voice articulates ‘an artistic opposition to rigid, Satanic law’: the legal regimes of ‘Punishments & deaths musterd & number’d’ in Milton and the legal code of the ‘One Law’ promulgated in The Book of Urizen.17 There nevertheless remains little wider discussion of the way in which Blake’s work might be understood in the light of eighteenth-century legal debate. This contrasts with the broader interests of scholars working in the field of law and literature, who have in recent years made important contributions to ongoing work on cultural production in the eighteenth century and Romantic period.18 We might highlight such examples as Barry Hough and Howard Davis’s study of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s residence in Malta in Coleridge’s Laws; Nancy E. Johnson’s survey of the Jacobin novel; Michael Scrivener’s analysis of the role of the trial in William Godwin’s Caleb Williams and Percy Shelley’s Cenci; and, in Kieran Dolan’s recent Law and Literature (2018), essays by Cheryl Nixon and Bridget M.  Marshall exploring manifestations of judicial argument and legal  Crosby, “Fabricated Perjury,” 44–47.  Barr, “Practicing Resistance,” 363–76. 16  Barr, “Prophecy, the Law of Insanity, and ‘The [First] Book of Urizen’,” Studies in English Literature 46 (2006): 739–62. 17  Barr, “Practicing Resistance,” 376; and “Prophecy, the Law of Insanity,” 748–49. 18  For a useful survey, see Regina Hewitt, “Romanticism and the Law: A Selective Introduction,” European Romantic Review 18 (2007): 299–315. 14 15

1 INTRODUCTION 

11

structures in (respectively) the eighteenth-century novel, and Romantic period Gothic fiction.19 Sue Chaplin has explored the way in which literature becomes reconfigured during the Romantic period as something ‘juridically defined’.20 A recent volume edited by Johnson—Impassioned Jurisprudence: Law, Literature and Emotion, 1760–1848 (2015)—brings together a series of essays focussing on the law as a site of feeling and emotion, based on the premise ‘that feeling, sentiment, and passion are integral to juridical thought as well as legislation’.21 Throughout the period in question, literature is understood as a key framework through which the law is debated and mediated. Within the contributions to Johnson’s collection, the legal writing of William Blackstone, David Hume and Adam Smith is used as a context for the discussion of the work of (among others) William Wordsworth, Frances Burney and James Boswell. The omission of any given writer in an edited volume hardly constitutes persuasive evidence of critical inattention, of course. Nevertheless, there can be little doubt that Blake is typically overlooked in such discussions in part because his body of work lacks the extensive writing in prose where a writer like Coleridge is found wrestling with such questions, and in part because his dominant critical association with marginal discourses of radicalism make him seem peripheral within wider legal debates concerning for example, the creeping encroachment of statute law; the separation of the powers of the executive, the legislature, and the judiciary; and the implication of British legal frameworks within the machinery of a nascent imperialism.

19  Barry Hough and Howard Davis, Coleridge’s Laws: A Study of Coleridge in Malta (Cambridge: OpenBook, 2010); Nancy E.  Johnson, The English Jacobin Novel on Rights, Property and the Law: Critiquing the Contract (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004); Michael Scrivener, “Trials in Romantic-Era Writing: Modernity, Guilt, and the Scene of Justice,” The Wordsworth Circle 35 (2004): 128–33; Cheryl Nixon, “Gender, Law, and the Birth of Bourgeois Society,” and Bridget M. Marshall, “Romanticism, Gothic, and the Law,” in Law and Literature, ed. Kieran Dolin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 121–41, 142–56. On Coleridge, see also Pamela Edwards, The Statesman’s Science: History, Nature, and Law in the Political Thought of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). 20  Sue Chaplin, “Law and Literature in the Romantic Era: The Law’s Fictions,” Literature Compass 3/4 (2006): 804–5. 21  Nancy E. Johnson, “Introduction,” in Impassioned Jurisprudence: Law, Literature, and Emotion, 1760–1848, ed. Nancy E. Johnson (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2015), ix. See in particular Simon Stern’s essay in that volume, “Blackstone’s Legal Actors: the Passions of a Rational Jurist”, 1–19.

12 

M. MAUGER

In one related area of contemporary scholarship, however, critical interests have acknowledged contexts for Blake’s work that move beyond the position suggested by antinomianism. The discourse of radical enthusiasm embodies an explicit resistance to code, structures, and the disciplinary apparatus of the state. As Steve Clark and David Worrall explain in the introduction to their 2006 collection Blake, Nation and Empire, locating Blake firmly within this discourse has occasioned renewed critical support (most significantly in Makdisi’s Impossible History, and subsequent essays) for his mid-twentieth-century identification by David Erdman as a ‘prophet against empire’.22 Clark and Worrall are nonetheless keen to recover to prominence an alternative approach, first suggested in 1992 by Susan Matthews and developed further by Julia M.  Wright in Blake, Nationalism and the Politics of Alienation (2004), which complicates any heroizing of Blake as a prophet of anti-imperialism by suggesting ways in which he might be considered complicit in the production of empire: its ideology; its mechanisms of growth, control, and surveillance; and by extension (we might add) its legal structures and codes.23 G. A. Rosso in The Religion of Empire (2016), the most recent extensive contribution to this discussion, has nevertheless argued in favour of Blake’s anti-­imperialist stance as an extension of his antinomianism. He develops the work of Makdisi in the light of Christopher Rowland’s Blake and the Bible, offering a reading of Blake’s longer poems in which ‘the antinomian power embodied in Jesus serves as a hermeneutical tool for transcending … theo-­ political power’.24 There is much in this approach that is persuasive; and 22  Steve Clark and David Worrall, introduction to Blake, Nation and Empire, ed. Steve Clark and David Worrall (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006), 3–4. For a detailed survey of this postcolonial approach to Blake, see G. A. Rosso, The Religion of Empire: Political Theology in Blake’s Religious Symbolism (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2016), 10–13. Makdisi has developed the themes proposed in Impossible History both in Clark and Worrall’s volume (see “Immortal Joy: William Blake and the Cultural Politics of Empire”, 20–39), and in “Blake and the Ontology of Empire,” in Blake and Conflict, ed. Sarah Haggarty and Jon Mee (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009), 12–26. 23  Susan Matthews, “Jerusalem and Nationalism,” in Beyond Romanticism: New Approaches to Texts and Contexts, 1780–1832, ed. Stephen Copley and John Whale (London: Routledge, 1992), 79–100; Julia M. Wright, Blake, Nationalism, and the Politics of Alienation (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004). See also David Fallon, “Homelands: Blake, Albion, and the French Revolution,” in Home and Nation in British Literature from the English to the French Revolutions, ed. A.  D. Cousins and Geoffrey Payne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 202–18. 24  Rosso, The Religion of Empire, 13.

1 INTRODUCTION 

13

yet the nuance that the wider debate evinces in terms of Blake’s unnerving attraction to structure, system, and nation demands that we tread carefully when evaluating the models of resistance and liberty that these epic prophecies recommend. After all, the intense joy that occasions the realisation of the ‘Fourfold Man’ on plate 98 of Jerusalem may be ‘glorious incomprehensible’, but it remains folded within the systematised imaginative framework of ‘the Covenant of Jehovah’; and while the ‘Four Living Creatures’ of the Humanity Divine are imaginative, infinite, and expansive, the One Man is ‘clearly seen / And seeing: according to fitness & order’ (Jerusalem, 98:28,39–40, E257–58). The same yearning for ‘order’ underpins Urizen’s legislative endeavours in Blake’s work of the mid-1790s. In his mythic representation of humanity, Blake draws on a set of paradigms concerning nationhood, law, individuality, and society that are recognisable commonplaces of eighteenth-century legal writing. In the next chapter, I consider the way in which law is used imaginatively within these legal philosophical debates as an entity accorded quasi-sacred agency. For English legal writers of the mid-eighteenth century, the story of the origin and evolution of the common law was a core component of accounts of nationhood that had coalesced in the Renaissance. This story was adapted and sentimentalised by eighteenth-century legal writers, in particular the self-appointed legal scientist William Blackstone in Commentaries on the Laws of England, who venerated the common law both as the enduring memory of a pre-Conquest English state, and as the collected (and updated) wisdom of countless generations. As Peter de Bolla has observed, the law is regarded within this tradition as ‘the collective memory of the race’.25 As we will see in Chap. 3 and Chap. 4, Blake too was interested in the creation of origin stories, and was clearly fascinated by the way in which the law is central to the mythic apparatus of nationhood. But these legal histories are not esoteric documents of the past. Rather, they define the lived experience of the present (as Blake knew at first hand), and have the potential—when reconfigured prophetically—to disrupt the inertia of events and redirect future history. Writers such as Blackstone and (perhaps more influentially in terms of wider debates) the French legal philosopher Montesquieu in The Spirit of the Laws, had a keen understanding of legal frameworks not only as mirrors reflecting national character, but also as engines driving social change. This potential finds expression in both 25  Peter de Bolla, “The Time of Law: Eighteenth-Century Speculations,” SubStance 109 (2006): 58.

14 

M. MAUGER

radical and reactionary responses to the revolutionary upheaval of the later decades of the eighteenth century: the constitutionalism that we readily associate with the period’s revolutionary movements, and also the fear with which writers like Edmund Burke contemplated the prospect of constitutional delineation and legislative codification. These are contexts that are at the heart of the equivocal representation of legal power and authority that we discover throughout Blake’s work of the late-1780s and 1790s, which—as I argue in Chap. 5—produces a landscape of ruined and imaginatively impoverished legal edifices in The Four Zoas. If the earlier chapters have shown how Blake’s original creative power became increasingly stymied by his immanent recognition of an inescapable regulative framework, Chap. 6  and Chap. 7 consider the startling renewal of poetic energy which led Blake to a fundamental reconfiguration of the very idea of the law, a revelation that allows him to discover in the law itself a basis for human recovery. We might imagine there to have been a number of catalysts for this reconfiguration: the artistic urgency to find a new direction in his work following the disappointment of The Four Zoas; the ongoing contexts of political repression and state control; the critical distance from metropolitan life afforded by residence in Felpham; and the difficulties Blake encountered in his personal and professional life. It nevertheless seems significant that it should be in Milton—a poem shot through with evidence of the poet’s pain and distress in response to his own encounter with law and legal process in his arrest and trial of 1803–1804—that Blake proposes a dynamic, visionary account of law that is quite distinct from the static, crystallised legal spaces encountered in the Lambeth books. It is a concept, as these two chapters demonstrate, that unlocks some of the interpretative conundrums of Blake’s nineteenth-­ century epics, Milton: A Poem in 2 Books and Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion. Blake, I argue, comes to recognise how radicalised prophecy can be the foundation for a new conception of legality: a prophetic legislation. For all that, the Laws of Eternity with which Milton confronts Satan in the visionary arena of Blake’s Felpham garden retain echoes of a revolutionary constitutionalism; this is defiantly not a new approach to defining statehood, or nationhood, or (indeed) empire. The rejection of the laws of Satan’s ‘False Heavens’—the codified ‘Punishments... musterd & Number’d’ that Satan conceives at the end of Milton’s bardic preamble—specifically refuses to invoke an antinomian ontology. Instead of rejecting law, Milton redefines the basis of law itself. Rather than a codified framework imposed

1 INTRODUCTION 

15

from above, the Laws of Eternity begin with individual sacrifice. They originate in the setting aside of a self-hood which is tainted, inauthentic, and complicit in the fiction of normative ideations of nationhood; and that setting aside, the responsibility of ‘each’ of us individually, means that what is ‘good’ in others is no longer ‘covered’. Whilst I broadly support the argument of Makdisi and Rosso, that Blake’s rejection of strict legal frameworks leads to a dismissal of the codified structures on which imperialism depends, I therefore disagree that this is part of a straightforward antinomian rejection of law. This is a new kind of constitutional activity, defining a radical political system in which the protection offered by the rule of law derives not from the charters, institutions, and judicial narratives of a state, but rather from the prophetic recognition of each individual’s participation in the Human Form Divine.

CHAPTER 2

Laws Ancient and Modern: Nation, Custom and Legislative Renewal

In the first chapter of Blake’s early satirical drama An Island in the Moon (typically reckoned to have been composed in around 1784), in the midst of the ribaldry, rivalry, and good-humoured point-scoring among a group of friends and intellectuals, a distracted figure named ‘Steelyard the Lawgiver’ is introduced, ‘engrossed’ with the introduction of a new piece of government legislation, draining the energy from the assembly. Oblivious to the high spirits of the company, he comes ‘stalking’ into the room ‘with an act of parliament in his hand, [and] said that it was a shameful thing that acts of parliament should be in a free state’ (2, E451). Perhaps Steelyard’s frustration is difficult to fathom at first. Why, given his identification as a ‘lawgiver’, would he dismiss as an abrogation of freedom the very existence of ‘Acts of Parliament’, statutory instruments arising from the decisions of the state legislature? As a ‘lawgiver’, we readily imagine Steelyard to be a stubborn adherent to legally enforced frameworks of rectitude, morality, and behaviour, an impression confirmed by his cold, inflexible name.1 Indeed, as Nick Rawlinson observes, a ‘steelyard’ is a measuring device, a type of balance in which a counterweight (the ‘steelyard weight’) is moved along the beam of a lever on the opposite side of the pivot from which the item being weighed is hung, until a 1

 Brenda S. Webster, Blake’s Prophetic Psychology (London: Macmillan, 1983), 18–19.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Mauger, William Blake and the Visionary Law, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37723-5_2

17

18 

M. MAUGER

position of equilibrium is found.2 A simple balance is, of course, a classical symbol of justice, which Blake disrupts in America, The Four Zoas, and Jerusalem. But Steelyard’s dismissal of an Act of Parliament as a ‘shameful thing … in a free state’ does not, as Rawlinson suggests, stem from ‘a disrespect for democracy’.3 As we will see in this chapter, it arises from deeply held convictions about the origins of the English law, and its relationship to cherished notions of the ‘liberty’ of the English state. Steelyard’s epithet is never fully explained in the manuscript of An Island in the Moon. It is possible that he is a lawyer, in which case his status as lawgiver conceivably rests in his work providing legal advice and services: his detailed understanding of the (often obscure) legal landscape, his knowledge of the intricacies of courtroom procedure, and his abilities in pleading and representation. A later oblique reference to his ‘parish work’ suggests, alternatively, that Steelyard may be a local magistrate, and thus a lawgiver in his knowledge of the requirements of the relevant civic and national law, in practices of sentencing for minor misdemeanours, and in the rules of criminal procedure that may require the defendant’s ‘arraignment’ to the Quarter Sessions or Assizes. Either way, Steelyard—we might conclude—is a defender of the sanctity and ‘freedom’ of the customary ‘common’ law as part of the historical and geographical fabric of the nation. From this perspective, legal authority is established as an historical legacy, rather than in the misguided legislative activity of the government of the moment which threatens a ‘free state’ with impetuous ‘acts of parliament’. Indeed, this customary legal authority is so woven into libertarian accounts of nationhood that it becomes difficult to imagine one without the other. Such arguments were a familiar component of eighteenth-­century philosophical and legal historical debate. Montesquieu in his vast treatise on comparative law De l’esprit des loix (1748, first published in an English translation in 1750 by Thomas Nugent as The Spirit of Laws), celebrated the English constitution through what he saw as its separation of both the judicial and the legislative power, from that of the

 Nick Rawlinson, William Blake’s Comic Vision (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 119. 3  Ibid., 119–20. 2

2  LAWS ANCIENT AND MODERN: NATION, CUSTOM AND LEGISLATIVE… 

19

executive.4 Steelyard’s suspicion of Acts of Parliament arises, we might presume, from a distrust of the constitutional reality of those separated powers. The cherished belief in the customs-based legal system as the fundamental guarantor of individual liberty was an assumption that lay at the heart of the period’s most influential authority on the English legal system: William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England. Described even by his opponents as ‘truly admirable’ (Joseph Priestley) and ‘learned’ (Phillip Furneaux), Blackstone had produced, in the effusive opinion of the philologist and judge William Jones, ‘the most correct and beautiful outline, that was ever exhibited of any human science’.5 The work had a profound impact: David Lieberman acknowledges its status as the ‘single great classic of law which overshadowed all other contemporary legal writing’; Wilfrid Prest judges it to be ‘the first accessible, authoritative, and comprehensive guide to the common law’s complexities’; while Michael Lobban notes that it ‘became the staple diet for the law student for over a century’.6 Daniel Boorstin, writing in the mid-twentieth century, compared the impact of Blackstone’s work to Justinian, and even the Bible.7 Jeremy Bentham, Blackstone’s arch critic, bitterly lamented that Blackstone was ‘an Author whose works have had beyond comparison a more extensive circulation, have obtained a greater share of esteem, of applause, and

4  Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, trans. and ed. Anne M. Cohler, Basia Carolyn Miller and Harold Samuel Stone, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 70, 164–66; Paul A.  Rahe, “Montesquieu’s Natural Rights Constitutionalism,” Social Philosophy and Policy 29 (2012): 68–69. 5  Priestley, Remarks on Some Paragraphs in the Fourth Volume of Dr. Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, Relating to The Dissenters (London: J. Johnson and J. Payne, 1769), 2; Furneaux, Letters to the Honourable Mr Justice Blackstone, concerning his Exposition of the Act of Toleration, 2nd ed. (London: T. Cadell, 1771); Jones, An Essay on the Law of Bailments (London: J. Nichols, 1781), 3–4. 6  Lieberman, The Province of Legislation Determined: Legal Theory in Eighteenth-century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 31; Prest, William Blackstone: Law and Letters in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 1; Lobban, The Common Law and English Jurisprudence 1760–1850 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 18. 7  Kunal M. Parker, “Historicising Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England,” in Law Books in Action: Essays on the Anglo-American Legal Treatise, ed. Angela Fernandez and Markus D. Dubber (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2012), 22.

20 

M. MAUGER

consequently of influence … than any other writer who on that subject has ever yet appeared’.8 This chapter explores law’s varied eighteenth-century discourses, mapping a range of contexts which seem important when evaluating Blake’s own treatment of law in his oeuvre, and instructive in understanding his commitment to legal definition as somehow essential for human survival in a world of despair and suffering. Blackstone, given his impact on the way in which the law was imagined in the later-eighteenth century, is my starting point; but we will not find straightforward allusions to the Commentaries in Blake’s poetry, any more than we might recognise explicit interventions in specific legal matters or courtroom debates. As we will see throughout this book, Blake ranges widely in his languages of law. He makes use of enlightenment ontologies concerning legal systems that are familiar to readers of Montesquieu and Blackstone, seventeenth-century English legal historical ideas associated with myths of legal antiquity and customs, and practices of biblical exegesis associated with morality and the law of Moses. He is drawn poetically to the gnomic allure of the legal maxim, to the strident pronouncements of the revolutionary leader or dictator, and to the delineated constitutional structure of the legal code. His fields of legal enquiry range from mythical courtrooms, to prophetic visions of the last judgement, to politically charged moments of revolutionary self-determination, and Druidic venues of ritual and sacrifice. His accounts of law’s origin—and its role in the past, present and future of human history—are sited both in the secular actions of human legislators, and in the workings-out of radical dissenting beliefs concerning the obligations of the ‘Everlasting Gospel’.

Building Legal Castles Those familiar with Blake’s epic writing will recognise how architectural construction recurs as a key feature of his visionary landscapes. In particular, we will see later in this book how Urizen, Blake’s foremost ‘lawgiver’, constructs law-built fortresses in his attempt to formalise his authority 8  Bentham, A Fragment on Government: Being an Examination of what is Delivered on the Subject of Government in General in the Introduction to Sir William Blackstone’s Commentaries (London: T.  Payne, 1776), iii. See Philip Schofield, “The ‘Least Repulsive’ Work on a ‘Repulsive Subject’: Jeremy Bentham on William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England,” in Blackstone and his Critics, ed. Anthony Page and Wilfrid Prest (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2018), 23–40.

2  LAWS ANCIENT AND MODERN: NATION, CUSTOM AND LEGISLATIVE… 

21

within the human chaos of The Four Zoas. In the province of eighteenth-­ century legal writing, perhaps no legal edifice loomed with such ostentation as the metaphorical Gothic castle constructed by William Blackstone in the first volume of Commentaries on the Laws of England. Blackstone’s monumental guide to the eighteenth-century English legal system, first published across 4 volumes from 1765–1769 (passing through a further 7 editions during his lifetime, and at least a further 15 from his death in 1780 to 1849), is in many respects a familiar piece of Enlightenment scholarship. Rooted both in its author’s intellectual knowledge and practical experience, and with the education of its reader foremost among its goals, Commentaries underscores Blackstone’s approach to the English law as a science, a body of learning which can be categorised and schematised as a ‘system’. Beyond the erudition of the opening essays ‘On the Study of the Law’, ‘On the Nature of Laws in General’, and others, the volumes are typically encountered as comprising a reference work or encyclopaedia, with long and technical explanations such as those concerning the fine details of English property law, the courtroom mechanics of the ‘pleading’ system, and the nature of the ‘Proceedings in the Courts of Equity’. There are nevertheless flashes of a more creative writing style, perhaps a vestige in these sober volumes of the poetic flights of fancy with which Blackstone dabbled in his youth.9 Of these, the most well-known is the extended metaphor that he develops when describing the modern experience of the customs-based common law system. Having acknowledged that the ‘intricacy of our legal process’ is a ‘troublesome, but not dangerous’ characteristic, one which is entrenched ‘in the frame of our constitution, and which therefore can never be cured, without hazarding every thing that is dear to us’, Blackstone continues: We inherit an old Gothic castle, erected in the days of chivalry, but fitted up for a modern inhabitant. The moated ramparts, the embattled towers, and the trophied halls, are magnificent and venerable, but useless. The inferior apartments, now converted into rooms of conveyance, are cheerful and commodious, though their approaches are winding and difficult.10

9  Matthew Mauger, “‘Observe how parts with parts unite / In one harmonious rule of right’: William Blackstone’s Verses on the Laws of England,” Law and Humanities 6 (2012): 179–196. 10  William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, vol. 3 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1768), 267–68.

22 

M. MAUGER

There is no compelling reason to suppose that Blake was aware of this passage from Commentaries (indeed, he may have encountered similar metaphorical constructions in Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, Hannah More’s Village Politics, Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, or even Jeremy Bentham’s response to Blackstone in A Fragment on Government); but it is clear that as a visual realisation of a legal system, Blake similarly found architectural construction to offer rich metaphorical potential.11 Blackstone’s imaginative representation is distinctive in the way that the law is understood as inhabiting a tenuous and contested space. The ramparts, towers and halls of the law’s castle might be ‘useless’ in terms of their practical application to the demands of modernity, but they are also fundamental to the way in which the law understands itself and its relation to the English state. The castle’s ramparts are ‘moated’: the body of laws is a demarcated and protected space, contained and complete within its own impervious boundaries. The towers are ‘embattled’: perhaps even more ostentatiously than the moat, the laws are understood as being in need of an active defence, fortified from incursions from outside. These defensive structures suggest a difficult, hard-won, perhaps even violent history, projecting a sense of the law’s strength and fierce independence; but their persistence also suggests that the threats of the present age might be similarly pervasive. Just as importantly, Blackstone conjures imposing halls whose ‘trophies’ exhibit the former glories and conquests of its inhabitants: the successes in the hunt, the wealth accumulated, the enemies conquered or resisted. The walls of law’s castle record its history; but those stories are also critical to its ongoing legitimacy and authority. Indeed, Markman Ellis has argued that Blackstone’s affirmative claim for the law’s Gothic legacy was, in part, a response to a republican neoclassicism which had dismissively branded

11  Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, and on the Proceedings in Certain Societies in London Relative to that Event (London: J. Dodsley, 1790), 50; Hannah More, Village Politics, Addressed to all the Mechanics, Journeymen, and Day Labourers, in Great Britain, 2nd ed. (London: F. and C.  Rivington, 1792), 8–9; Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (London: Strahan and Cadell, 1776–88), for example 1:2 and 2:1219; Jeremy Bentham, Fragment, xxxii–xxxiv. On Gibbon, see James William Johnson, “Gibbon’s Architectural Metaphor,” Journal of British Studies 13 (1973): 44–62.

2  LAWS ANCIENT AND MODERN: NATION, CUSTOM AND LEGISLATIVE… 

23

England’s monarchist past as ‘gothick’ (implying that ‘it was both barbarian and ruined’).12 The legal architecture of the Gothic castle also embodies the principle of renewal—it might have been erected ‘in days of chivalry’, but it has now been ‘fitted up for a modern inhabitant’. Strikingly, the parts of the castle that are relevant to mid-eighteenth century modernity (as contemplated by Blackstone) are the rooms formally understood as the ‘inferior apartments’. Perhaps Blackstone has in mind the constitutional legacy of seventeenth-­century revolutions, the ascendance of Parliament, and the moderated authority of the monarch and the nobility. Within the tighter frame of reference of the common law, he might be acknowledging the way in which the demands of modern life in Britain have required the development and expansion of legislative regions—those regulating trade, commerce, the establishment of contracts—which had hitherto been the poor cousins of the all-engrossing laws of property.13 The archaic ‘tradition’ of the common law, in Blackstone’s account, thus paradoxically embodies an active agency of ‘modernity’. Indeed, this spirit of renewal is ‘cheerful and commodious’. Rather than a tool of government producing fear and compulsion, then, the common law offers a protected space of generosity and negotiation. The narrative of the English law which Blackstone visualises so memorably is bound up in a set of apparent dichotomies which are themselves tantalising when we approach Blake’s prophetic representations of legal agency: tensions between antiquity and modernity, stability and change, history and legacy, visibility and secrecy, outward appearance and inner substance. Blake—as we will see throughout this book—seems particularly attuned to the way in which legal frameworks established on principles of clarity and order, are vulnerable to forms of corruption which lead to physical, emotional, and imaginative coercion. In Europe he instinctively regards the ‘secret codes’ of George III’s realm, ultimately abandoned amid the revolutionary fires that engulf Westminster, as symptoms of the state’s monstrosity. The entanglement of law with the subversive agency of 12  Markman Ellis, The History of Gothic Fiction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), 25. See also Wolfram Schmidgen, Eighteenth-century Fiction and the Law of Property (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 171; Kate Ferguson Ellis, The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989); David Punter, Gothic Pathologies: The Text, the Body and the Law (London: Macmillan, 1998). 13  Parker, “Historicising Blackstone,” 25–27.

24 

M. MAUGER

‘mystery’, first charted in the Book of Ahania, becomes an all-consuming concern of Blake’s fragmentary epic The Four Zoas, and returns with new prominence in his most ambitious long-form poem, Jerusalem. For Blackstone, of course, the law’s characteristic intricacy and circuitousness evidence its historical legacy. In Blackstone’s view, it is critical that we recognise the law as an ‘inheritance’, the accumulated wisdom of successive generations. It is from this vast history that the law derives its authority as a cornerstone of the constitution. The law is paradoxically both ancient and unchanging, yet also strangely organic, protean, responsive to change. An awareness of its history and development is critical in understanding its application in the present, and the ways in which it might remain similarly responsive to the as-yet unknown demands of the future. And although we might roll our eyes at the law’s winding corridors and labyrinthine passageways as the unfortunate survival of the immemorial ‘days of chivalry’ in which this edifice was built, they are also to be cherished as part of the elaborate and finely balanced legal inheritance, and it is sufficient that a place of cheer and comfort lies within. Implicit to this approach is a core belief not only in the close connection between the principles of the common law and the contours of English nationhood, but also more generally in the way a legal system is central to the notion of ‘being’ in a civil society.

Law and the Myth of the Ancient Constitution In his reverential notion of the customs-based English common law as a cherished inheritance that has grown and adapted in symbiosis with the changing needs and priorities of the nation, Blackstone subscribed to a core set of beliefs established in the seventeenth century, and termed by J.  G. A.  Pocock (whose 1957 study The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law remains the seminal historical work) the ‘English cult of the law’s antiquity’.14 Proponents of this view argued that the custom from which the law derived—and by extension the constitution of England— had existed since time immemorial, a period ‘ancient beyond memory or record’ (OED). The time of ‘memory’ had been set in 1275 by the first

14  J.  G. A.  Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century (1957), rev. ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 33.

2  LAWS ANCIENT AND MODERN: NATION, CUSTOM AND LEGISLATIVE… 

25

Statute of Westminster as 1189 (the date of accession of Richard I);15 but the myth of the ancient constitution held that there was effectively no historical period that could be identified as so ancient that it pre-dated the English law. Blackstone noted that ‘our ancient lawyers … insist with abundance of warmth, that these customs are as old as the primitive Britons; and continued down, through the several mutations of government and inhabitants, to the present time, unchanged and unadulterated’.16 The major obstacle complicating such a legal history was the Norman Conquest of 1066. Advocates of the principle of English legal antiquity typically sought to diminish the significance of this event. Edward Coke argued that the ancient laws of England had survived the Conquest, one of William’s first actions being the upholding of the law of Edward the Confessor.17 John Davies in the preface to his Irish Reports (1674) expressed a similar view, noting that William ‘found the ancient Laws of England so honourable & profitable … that he thought it not fit to make any alteration in the fundamental points or substance thereof’.18 More moderate voices argued that Norman customs must have impinged on the pre-existing system. Francis Bacon proposed that the laws of England ‘are as mix’d as our Language; compounded of British, Roman, Saxon, Danish, and Norman Customs: And surely as our Language is thereby so much the richer, our Laws are likewise by that Mixture the more compleat’.19 This holistic idea of the common law integrated as part of the historical growth and development of the nation is a recurring commonplace of seventeenth-­ century judicial writing. Davies himself notes with particular eloquence: England, having had a good and happy Genius from the beginning … ever embraced honest and good Customes, full of reason and conveniencie, which being confirmed by common use and practice, and continued time out of mind, became the Common Law of the Land. And though this Law be the peculiar invention of this Nation, and delivered over from age to age by Traditions … yet we may truly say, that no humane Law, written or unwritten, hath more certaintie in the Rules and Maximes, more coherence in the 15  Matthew Hale, The History of the Common Law of England (London: John Walthoe, 1716), 2–3. 16  Blackstone, Commentaries, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1765), 64. 17  Edward Coke, The First Part of the Institutes of the Laws of England, or, a Commentary upon Littleton (London: Richard Atkins and Edward Atkins, 1684), 2. 18  John Davies, Les Reports de Cases & Matters en Ley, Resolves & Adjudges en les Courts del Roy en Ireland (London: Richard Atkyns and Edward Atkyns, 1674), unpaginated. 19  Francis Bacon, ‘A Proposal for a New Digest of the Laws’, in The Philosophical Works of Francis Bacon, ed. Peter Shaw, 3 vols (London: J. J. and P. Knapton, and others: 1733), 216.

26 

M. MAUGER

parts thereof, or more harmonie or reason in it. … Briefly, it is so framed and fitted to the nature and disposition of the people, as we may properly say it is connatural to the Nation.20

Davies’s confidence in the common law’s excellence is rooted in its emergence through custom over a period beyond reckoning—‘time out of mind’—during which customary practices acquire the status of unwritten rules through historical acceptance. As part of this process, an account reminiscent of the movement from oral to written knowledge that Blake describes in the ‘Printing House’ of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, these practices acquire the status of principles that are written down in ‘Books’. The ongoing life of the law is rooted in the handing down of this wisdom not only in the study of those volumes, but also through the living processes of ‘Tradition’ itself, the practice and implementation of the law. Far from having resulted in a chaotic or quaint antiquarian curiosity, this attenuated and accretive historical emergence has delivered a law of enviable ‘certainty’ in its ‘Rules and Maximes’. Moreover, the English law proves to be a balanced and comprehensive system, an aesthetically pleasing structure full of ‘harmonie’, a structure that has been produced by— and which has in turn produced—the frameworks, habits, history, and character of the English nation itself. Indeed, this belief in a society regulated primarily through a set of laws that is ‘connatural’ with its people— and thus somehow resistant to the whims and caprices of the reigning monarch—remains influential in the way that the relationship between the individual and the state is popularly imagined.21 The central authority of the common law subsisted for these writers in its historical lineage: both its traceability up to and beyond the limit of national memory, and its mingling with the myths of the origins of the British state. These myths invoke fanciful theories concerning legal systems existing during the reign of Edward the Confessor or of Alfred, or the yet more whimsical stories that even Blackstone eschews. Lawyers like Matthew Hale (whose History of the Common Law of England, first published in 1713 nearly forty years after its author’s death, was a key model for Blackstone’s own ‘modern’ survey of the law) expressed a confidence 20  Davies, Les Reports, unpaginated, emphasis added. See Pocock, Ancient Constitution, 33–34; Ofir Haivry, John Selden and the Western Political Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 285–86. 21  David Lemmings, Law and Government in England during the Long Eighteenth Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 3–7.

2  LAWS ANCIENT AND MODERN: NATION, CUSTOM AND LEGISLATIVE… 

27

that the pre-history of England was bound up from the very beginning with the emergence of an English legal framework. The common genesis of nation and law was assumed as a reasonable extension of the action of custom, as formalised in the modern era through the legal mechanism of judicial precedent. Moreover as the nation’s history extended, as its character and behaviours developed and its institutions and structures grew, so the customary law accommodated those changes through its immanent processes of adaptation and extension. It is in some respects remarkable that Blackstone, who saw himself as a modern Enlightenment thinker at the forefront of conceptualising law ‘as a science entirely new’, should align himself with seventeenth-century thought in this way, especially given his stated aim to produce a map of the English law organised according to rational principles designed to exhibit ‘symmetry’.22 That Commentaries on the Laws of England should continue to acknowledge these semi-mythic histories evidences their ongoing prominence within legal debate in the mid-1760s. It also suggests the deep connection between the legal system and oft-repeated stories of national origin and identity, a connection that provides a rich vein of material in Blake’s mythmaking: the evolutionary account of the laws of the nations in The Song of Los; the emergence of Satanic law in the bard’s mythic preamble to Milton; and the fractured memory in The Four Zoas of a polity originating in the idea that ‘liberty was justice’. The ancient constitution narrative neatly summarises the account of a law whose authority lay through its antiquity; whose development was closely bound up with the emergence of the English state; whose continuity bespoke its stability and superiority over competing legal systems; and whose mysteries and apparent complexities, whilst a component of the Gothic castle’s defences, disguised an elegant and rational core. In confronting the phenomenon of an unwritten law, legal writers of the period were keen to demonstrate where its principles were made evident, and the manner in which its authority was asserted. Early in the eighteenth century, Hale’s History of the Common Law of England (1713) was anxious to clarify that ‘all those Laws have their several Monuments in Writing, whereby they are transferr’d from one Age to another’. Significantly, however, they do not derive their status as rules through having been written down as a part of a formal code. Rather, they have 22  Blackstone, An Analysis of the Laws of England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1756), vii. See also Commentaries, 1:9.

28 

M. MAUGER

‘acquired their binding Power and the Force of Laws by a long and immemorial Usage’.23 In Blackstone’s time, the forerunner of the modern system of recording courtroom decision-making in published ‘law reports’ was in its infancy, offering written testimony of the ‘immemorial Usage’ from which lawyers and judges could ascertain judicial precedent, and recognise the evolving frontiers of the common law. The notion of oral transmission is nevertheless appealing to Blackstone. It provides an account of the unbroken connection of modern legal decision-making to the practices of a distant mythic past, which does not depend on a written record (although, hedging his bets, Blackstone is also fond of making tantalising references to ancient written texts that have been lost in the passage of time). ‘In the profound ignorance of letters which formerly overspread the whole western world’, he imagines fancifully, ‘the British as well as the Gallic druids committed all their laws as well as learning to memory’.24 The oral traditions of common law logic subsisted in lawyers’ maxim books, typically single volume handbook repositories of legal proverbs each reflecting a key principle at the heart of the ‘common sense’ of the English system. Blake himself turns to a set of proverbs or maxims when he attests the ‘nature of infernal wisdom’ in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. The common law was frequently stated to proceed from such maxims, aphorisms communicating the fundamental truths which had from antiquity underpinned the concept of justice in England.25 For Peter Halverson, writing in 1823: ‘with regard to Law, Maxims are the pillars upon which the system is erected’.26 Even though many maxims drew on the Roman civil law on which university study was based rather than the common law practised in English courts, writers keen to demonstrate the immemorial nature of the legal system asserted their importance in preserving oral traditions associated with the law’s ongoing cultural memory.27 Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century maxim books, such as Thomas Branch’s Principia Legis & Æquitatis, were generally alphabetic

 Hale, History, 22.  Blackstone, Commentaries 1:63. 25  A. W. B. Simpson, Legal Theory and Legal History: Essays on the Common Law (London: Hambledon, 1987), 283. 26  Peter Halkerston, A Collection of Latin Maxims & Rules, in Law and Equity, Selected from the Most Eminent Authors (Edinburgh: John Anderson, 1823), [i]. 27  Simpson, “Legal Treatise,” 283–84. 23 24

2  LAWS ANCIENT AND MODERN: NATION, CUSTOM AND LEGISLATIVE… 

29

Fig. 2.1  Thomas Branch, Principia Legis & Æquitatis (1753), titlepage. (British Library, London)

arrangements of hundreds of maxims (Fig. 2.1).28 Other collections, such as Francis Bacon’s The Elements of the Common Lawes of England (1630), are legal treatises for which the recitation of maxims provides a framework (although Blackstone, eager to distinguish the method and achievement of his own erudite volumes, complains that Bacon abandons order altogether, ‘selecting only some distinct and dis-joined Aphorisms, according to his own Account of them’).29 Edmond Wingate, anticipating by a cen28  [Thomas Branch], Principia Legis & Æquitatis: being an Alphabetical Collection of Maxims, Principles or Rules, Definitions and memorable Sayings in Law and Equity (London: Henry Lintot, 1753). 29  Francis Bacon, The Elements of the Common Lawes of England … Contayning a Collection of some Principall Rules and Maxims of the Common Law (London: I.  More, 1630). Blackstone, Analysis, v.

30 

M. MAUGER

tury the intricate passageways of Blackstone’s Gothic castle, suggests that these ‘Grand Maximes of Reason, govern and resolve the subordinate Miscellanie of queries, and may serve for a Clue and Conduct, through the Labyrinth of that perplext variety’.30

Human History and the Laws of God The close association of law with history is a fundamental assumption of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century legal expositions, and for many the ultimately sacred genesis of that legal history is explicit. Although Blackstone celebrates the common law as a remarkable historical product of human reason, habit, and justice, and treats of the English domestic law in broadly secular terms, a core assumption of his approach is that ‘laws in general’ exist within the fundamental moral framework of a divine law. The common law might rhetorically have an unbroken history of effectively infinite recursion; but that narrative itself exists for Blackstone, in common with the legal systems of all nations, within the broader story of human origin and the creation of the world. This is a narrative repeatedly staged in Blake’s work. A recurring interest of this book is Blake’s fascination with the way in which the law operates on the interface between the secular and the divine. Indeed, law acquires its authority throughout the Lambeth books and The Four Zoas through its association with a power that lies beyond the immediate temporal concerns of the human world. In Tiriel, the strange intangibility of the law, the way in which it is both everywhere and nowhere, arises from its generational accretion at the hands of the king and his ancestors. At the hands of its eponymous lawgiver god, The Book of Urizen casts a veil of secrecy and darkness over the genesis of the universal law, before its startling declaration as an instrument of creation. Blackstone’s commitment to a divine account of legal pre-history found expression in a set of core assumptions about civilisation and human society that he shared with legal writers throughout Europe: the idea of natural law. In its most general sense, proponents of the natural law claimed that certain principles of right conduct were central to what it meant to be human. With sufficient scrutiny, a series of universal ‘natural laws’ and ‘natural rights’ could be ascertained constituting the basis of innate human 30  Edmond Wingate, Maximes of Reason: Or, the Reason of the Common Law of England (London: R & W. L., 1658), 267.

2  LAWS ANCIENT AND MODERN: NATION, CUSTOM AND LEGISLATIVE… 

31

behaviour and morality. National legal systems emerged from the need to balance the natural rights of individuals when joined together in society. Moreover, those systems can be measured, and indeed challenged, by reference to this overarching law of nature. As Richard Cosgrove explains, ‘natural law doctrine held that a law depended upon its conformity to morality for the validity it enjoyed and the obligation of obedience it imposed.31 For Gerald Postema, this claim to ‘rational morality’ sits alongside the concept of immemorial custom in establishing the ‘legitimizing myth’ of the common law in the eighteenth century.32 Even though Blackstone was convinced of the common law’s articulation of the customs of the people, he felt obliged to observe that those customs themselves derived from the moral imperatives ascribed by God: ‘when he created man, and endued him with freewill to conduct himself in all parts of life, he laid down certain immutable laws of human nature, whereby that freewill is in some degree regulated and restrained, and gave him also the faculty of reason to discover the purport of those laws.’33 His pamphlet exchange with Joseph Priestley, in which the latter accused Blackstone of political manoeuvring through his categorisation of religious nonconformity as a ‘crime against religion’ in the fourth volume of Commentaries (1769) is well known.34 But in his explicit connection of the customs-based common law with a divine notion of natural law, Blackstone and his interlocutor perhaps unwittingly shared common ground. Knowledge of the law was one of the key components of the innovative curriculum that Priestley introduced at Warrington Academy in the early 1760s, prior to the publication of the first volume of Blackstone’s magnum opus. Just as Blackstone’s innovation in the lecture series that 31  Cosgrove, Scholars of the Law: English Jurisprudence from Blackstone to Hart (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 28–29. 32  Postema, Bentham and the Common Law Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 268–69; Lieberman, The Province of Legislation, 38–45. 33  Blackstone, Commentaries, 1:39–40. 34  Priestley’s Remarks on Some Paragraphs in the Fourth Volume of Dr. Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, Relating to The Dissenters (London: J. Johnson and J. Payne, 1769); Blackstone, A Reply to Dr. Priestley’s Remarks on the Fourth Volume of the Commentaries on the Laws of England (London: C. Bathurst, 1769); Priestley, An Answer to Dr. Blackstone’s Reply to Remarks on the Fourth Volume of the Commentaries on the Laws of England, published as a part of The Palladium of Conscience: or, the Foundation of Religious Liberty Displayed, Asserted, and Established, ed. Robert Bell (Philadelphia: Robert Bell, 1773). See Anthony Page, “Rational Dissent and Blackstone’s Commentaries,” in Blackstone and his Critics, ed. Anthony Page and Wilfrid Prest (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2018), 77–96.

32 

M. MAUGER

underpinned Commentaries was to provide a programme of study of the English law (within a context where the study of law in the English universities focussed on the classical Roman law), Priestley sought to reform the Warrington curriculum by providing a form of liberal arts education that would be of practical use for its students in their development of professional careers. Underpinning Priestley’s approach, as Ruth Watts has shown, was a commitment to a millennial idea of education that was ultimately addressed to the human duty to learn more about the perfection of God.35 Priestley particularly valued the study of human laws because of their value as historical evidence. In a lecture entitled ‘Connexion of History and Law’, he reasoned that if we accept that laws come into existence in order to address particular problems in the world at large, then their very existence affords a valuable insight into the general conditions of everyday life at a given historical juncture.36 By this recursive process, the study of human law will lead to a greater understanding of the laws of nature associated with humanity itself, and (thereby) the purity of the divine creation. As a precedent-based system rooted in ongoing judicial refinement and a celebration of ancientness, the study of the English law in particular brought the student closer to God. Moreover, the integral historical association between law and human behaviour suggested to Priestley a core practical application. Just as the existence of laws offered an historical barometer for human behaviour reaching back centuries, Priestley was also interested in the opportunity legal reform afforded for the adjustment of human behaviour in the future. After all, as Montesquieu had observed in De l‘esprit des loix (1748), ‘les moeurs et les manieres’ of a people (in the modern translation, a nation’s ‘mores’ and ‘manners’) are inextricably connected. ‘Mores’ have a role in the definition of laws, and are in turn influenced by them. Accordingly, for Priestley, when imagined alongside biblical revelation of the ways of God, law can be a tool for writing future history and bringing forth the millennium.

35  Ruth Watts, “Joseph Priestley and Education”, Enlightenment and Dissent 2 (1983): 92–94. See also Wilfrid Prest, “Law, Lawyers and Rational Dissent,” in Enlightenment and Religion: Rational Dissent in Eighteenth-century Britain, ed. Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 169–92. 36  Joseph Priestley, Lectures on History and General Policy; to which is Prefixed, an Essay on a Course of Liberal Education for Civil and Active Life (Birmingham: Pearson and Rollason, 1788), 76.

2  LAWS ANCIENT AND MODERN: NATION, CUSTOM AND LEGISLATIVE… 

33

More radical dissenting publications of the later decades of the eighteenth century demonstrate the renewed currency of debates associated with seventeenth-century antinomianism. These include both the republication of tracts from the previous century, and new sermons in which dissenting clergymen attempt to clarify their position in the ongoing controversy about whether the gospel of Jesus confirmed the authority of the moral law received by Moses on Mount Sinai in the Exodus account, or otherwise replaced it—through grace—as part of a new dispensation. These detailed theological expositions of the authority, origin, and currency of the law (and its implications for human behaviour, freedom, and salvation) indicate the presence of a rich vein of legal visionary argument within dissenting debates of the late-eighteenth century, that Blake exploits and repurposes. They provide source material that is perhaps most evident in his nineteenth-century poetry (such as Milton, Jerusalem, and The Everlasting Gospel). In his 1677 sermon re-published in 1777, James Durham asserts that ‘the breach of the holy law of God, is no less sinful to us now, than it was to them before us’.37 John Beart’s two volume treatise A Vindication of the Eternal Law and Everlasting Gospel (originally published in 1707, but reprinted in 1753, 1779 and 1813) is typical in its subtle reconciliation of the ‘covenant’ associated with the Old Testament law of Moses, and the ‘new covenant’ proclaimed by Jesus as described in the gospel writings of the New Testament. Beart, who was associated with various congregational churches in Suffolk around the turn of the eighteenth century, claimed that Jesus by no means dismissed the divine law; in fact, his example confirms its agency. Nevertheless, ‘this is not the end of his coming, to be a lawgiver, but a Saviour’. No sinner could ever hope to remain in perfect compliance with the law of God. The guarantee of Jesus therefore, and the promise of his ‘everlasting gospel’, is to act as ‘Mediator, even to fulfil the law, redeem from it, save us from its curse, and dispose us under grace’.38 In similar terms, a sermon of 1797 observes that the law ‘constantly demands supreme love and perfect obedience’. Under its own terms, the sinner is thus condemned. But by God’s grace, Christ ‘undertook to obey and suffer for his people; to obey all the precepts of

37  James Durham, The Law Unsealed, or, a Practical Exposition of the Ten Commandments (Glasgow, John Bryce, 1777), 42. 38  John Beart, Truth Defended: or, a Vindication of the Eternal Law, and Everlasting Gospel, 3rd ed. (London: J. Mathews, 1779), 1:xxxiii.

34 

M. MAUGER

the law, and to suffer all its pains and penalties’.39 Time and again, we see the compelling agency accorded to grace within Protestant theology underpinning the theological resolution of the question of law’s authority. Indeed, the label ‘antinomian’ was frequently deployed by accusers as the most heinous of heresies. In the opinion of Robert Carter, in his address to William Huntington, the well-known pastor of Providence Chapel in London: ‘To be an Antinomian is reckoned, amongst the professors of Christianity, the worst of all beings’. For Huntington, whose preaching was often described by his opponents as sowing subversive ideas, the apparent contradiction within the Bible between the moral law and the gospel was again to be explained through a profound understanding of grace.40 The law absolutely remained in force, he confirmed in the midst of the revolutionary excitement of 1792: it is the ‘schoolmaster’ of God’s people, ‘the only and eternal rule of life and righteousness’.41 Those who transgress the code’s demands for perfection are sinners, and are claimed by Satan. But those among them who accept the grace of God are saved from this fate: When this change of raiment is put on, Satan skulks off, filled with the furious rebukes of God, like a betrayed, malicious villain, as he is; Moses, with his accusations, vanishes, and is lost in the glorious vision, and we know not what is become of him … The fiery Law appears quenched in a Saviour’s blood, and the everlasting Gospel shines like a million suns.42

This proclamation of salvation from the law’s punishments is rhetorically very distant from the accusation that antinomian sects deliberately transgressed the tenets of the moral law to demonstrate their freedom. Even J. Tomkies, unashamed to accept the label ‘antinomian’ in his published response to a pamphlet debate among Baptists in the mid-1780s, is at pains to point out that ‘while so much be granted, that we do not object to the name of Antinomians … yet, we must beg to object to it in the slanderous view our enemies so freely bestow it on us, as signifying 39  Christ, the End of the Law, for Righteousness: A Sermon on Rom x. 4 (London: Button, Conder, Chapman and Mathews, 1797), 5. 40  Robert Rix, William Blake and the Cultures of Radical Christianity (Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2007), 28–29. 41  William Huntington, The Moral Law not Injured by the Everlasting Gospel. A Sermon preached in substance at Providence Chapel (London: G. Terry, 1792), 35–36. 42  Ibid., 17–18.

2  LAWS ANCIENT AND MODERN: NATION, CUSTOM AND LEGISLATIVE… 

35

persons holding principles of a libertine tendency, that pay no sort of regard to our conduct and respective duties in life’.43 Blake’s approach to the Bible as a book, in the words of Stephen Prickett and Christopher Strathman, ‘stretched over an immense abyss separating the “gospel” and “moral law”’, clearly has its origin in his connections with antinomian congregations.44 Nevertheless, especially in the long-form poems associated with his nineteenth-century work, he is keen to explore ideas that bring legality and divinity together. Many pastors used the publication of sermons to exonerate themselves and their congregations from accusations of antinomianism, by redefining what the law of Jesus might be. These publications in particular suggest the existence of a constructive dissenting religious discourse of law that is separate from the moral demands of the Old Testament. As such, they provide an important context for understanding Blake’s late characterisation of Jesus as the embodiment of a ‘fiery law’ in Jerusalem. In his address to Birmingham’s Cannon Street Baptist church, James Turner notes that there is no contradiction between the law and the gospel: ‘while we live upon that grace which came by Jesus Christ, we may walk according to that law which was given by Moses’.45 Caleb Evans defended his Bristol church in 1779 by arguing that the demands of the law become integrated as part of faith in Christ: ‘We who preach justification by faith without the works of the law, do not make void the law through faith, but on the contrary we establish it’. The verb ‘establish’ has a particular agency here, signifying Evans’s conviction that the ‘supreme dignity and authority of the law’ is a cornerstone of his church’s idea of ‘faith’: ‘it is impossible to conceive how the holy law of God could be so magnified, so infinitely exalted, as it is by the gospel of Christ’.46 A similar logic is offered by John Smalley, a 43  J.  Tomkies, The Believer Nothing to do with the Law of the Ten Commandments … Observations on some of Mr Thomas’s Remarks on Mr Bradford’s Reflections upon the Baptist Circular Letter dated at Aulcester in June 1786 (Oswestry: J. Salter, [1786]), 35. 44  Stephen Prickett and Christopher Strathman, “Blake and the Bible,” in Palgrave Advances in William Blake Studies, ed. Nicholas M.  Williams (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 115–17; see also E. P. Thompson, Witness Against the Beast, 61. 45  James Turner, The Covenants of Works and Grace,—God’s writing his Law in the Hearts of his People—and engaging to be their God, explained in a Sermon on Jeremiah xxxi, 33. Preached in Cannon-Street, Birmingham, November 11 1770 (Birmingham: Luckman and Lisson, 1770), 5. 46  Caleb Evans, The Law Established by the Gospel: A Sermon preached before the Ministers and Messengers of the Baptist Western Association, assembled at Exon, June 3 1779 (Bristol: W. Pine, [1779]), 17, 20.

36 

M. MAUGER

congregationalist minister based in New England. For Smalley, the moral law absolutely remained ‘as a rule of duty’, but as ‘the divine justice is established by [Christ’s] sufferings, as much as if law had been literally executed’, following Christ’s example produces in believers a ‘personal righteousness’ by which they are ‘delivered from the curse, and entitled to eternal life’.47 These attempts to embody the law within the person of Christ lead some, such as David Rivers (writing in 1796 at the height of the state’s paranoia about revolutionary radicalism within London’s dissenting groups) to conclude that the gospel itself is a ‘law of liberty’. Human laws, Rivers argued, are defective because they can be ‘easily eluded’ and ‘basely perverted’; they can ‘reach only to the exteriors of men, and make their conduct outwardly decent and becoming … while the heart may be full of all wickedness’. By contrast, the ‘law of Christ penetrates in to the inmost recesses of the soul … it not only excels all human laws, but even the divine law, which was given by Moses’.48

Constitutionalism and Legal Nation Building The mythic account of the ancient British law nurtured via customary processes reaching to time immemorial is a nostalgic, perhaps self-­ consciously anachronistic indulgence in the cultural imaginary of the second half of the eighteenth century, but it nevertheless remains a cornerstone of conservative accounts of nationhood. For Edmund Burke in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), the principle of immemoriality was the guarantor of civil liberty: ‘You will see that Sir Edward Coke, that great oracle of our law, and indeed all the great men who follow him, to Blackstone, are industrious to prove the pedigree of our liberties’.49 Burke passionately defends this notion of a constitution derived through a system built on legislative inheritance, straightforwardly aligning the development of customary practice with principles deriving from natural law: By a constitutional policy, working after the pattern of nature, we receive, we hold, we transmit, our government and our privileges, in the same man47  John Smalley, The Law in All Respects Satisfied by our Saviour … A Second Sermon, preached at Wallingford, with a view to the Universalists (Hartford: Hudson and Goodwin, 1786), 15, 17. 48  David Rivers, The Gospel a Law of Liberty: A Sermon preached at Highgate, Middlesex, on Sunday the 17th of July 1796 (London: R. Hindmarsh, 1797), 10, 12. 49  Burke, Reflections, 45.

2  LAWS ANCIENT AND MODERN: NATION, CUSTOM AND LEGISLATIVE… 

37

ner in which we enjoy and transmit our property and our lives. … Our political system is placed in a just correspondence and symmetry with the order of the world, and with the mode of existence decreed to a permanent body composed of transitory parts … Thus, by preserving the method of nature in the conduct of the state, in what we improve we are never wholly new; in what we retain we are never wholly obsolete.50

In terms that are broadly the same as those used by Davies a century earlier, Burke argues that liberty is assured through the organic, self-renewing, and yet immemorial English constitution because such is in accordance with ‘the order of the world’.51 But the Gothic castle’s apparent strength disguised a growing fragility, even before the wholesale demolition of ancient unwritten constitutional settlements associated with the revolutionary movements in America and France. The process by which it had been ‘fitted up for a modern inhabitant’ was arguably less a consequence of the common law’s supposed ongoing ability to renew itself, and more the result of the newly defined legislative responsibility of Parliament. In Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes had declared the absolute right to make law to be an essential component of the sovereign power. In his view, human nature was not naturally sociable, but self-serving. Far from being part of the natural order, human society is an artificial construction held together by law.52 If the purpose of the law is to enable a peaceful and productive human society, its validity was not to be tested by reference to an idea of moral restraint emerging from natural law. Rather, it should be nothing less than the positive command of the sovereign. Hobbes did not explicitly deny the existence of natural principles, possibly divine in origin, that formed the basis of individual morality; but such principles only became law when articulated by the sovereign whose commands defined the rules of arbitration by which people could live in society. They are therefore binding on the people not due to their divinity or their long history of customary usage, but because the  Ibid., 48–49.  See J. G. A. Pocock, “Burke and the Ancient Constitution—A Problem in the History of Ideas,” Historical Journal 3 (1960): 131; Peter J.  Stanlis, “Burke, Rousseau, and the French Revolution,” in Burke and the French Revolution: Bicentennial Essays, ed. Steven Blakemore (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992), 97–119. 52  Sean Coyle, From Positivism to Idealism: A Study of the Moral Dimensions of Legality (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 13; Jean Hampton, Hobbes and the Social Contract Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 107. 50 51

38 

M. MAUGER

sovereign has ascribed them the status of law.53 In Britain, the constitutional settlement of the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries, praised so effusively by Montesqueiu and confirmed at the accession of George I in 1714, had effectively vested broad areas of the monarch’s legislative power within Parliament. The sheer volume of legislation passed by the eighteenth-century Parliament suggests the scale of the constitutional transformation. In the period between 1660 and 1688, an average of around twenty-five Acts entered the statute book in each Parliamentary session. During the first half of the eighteenth century, this figure more than doubled. From around 1760, a steep upward trend began, reaching nearly 300 Acts per session in the mid-1790s.54 David Lemmings has traced a parallel tendency of declining popular participation in the legal process during this period, as public judicial procedures that depended upon community involvement (via the membership of juries at the sessions and assizes courts, or the fulfilment of certain civic duties associated with the maintenance of law and order) evolved into more specialised and professionalised institutions of justice.55 These changes reconfigured the relationship between the wider community and the legal establishment via which its behaviour was regulated. Law was increasingly a mechanism by which the outlook of a distant and partisan political elite framed the contours of British life more generally. For the common law’s adherents, these developments threatened the fabric of the state itself. In an early passage which anticipates his more fulsome vision of the Gothic castle, Blackstone notes the ‘mischiefs’ that have resulted from ‘inconsiderate alterations in our laws’: The common law of England has fared like other venerable edifices of antiquity, which rash and unexperienced workmen have ventured to new-dress and refine, with all the rage of modern improvement. Hence frequently its symmetry has been destroyed, its proportions distorted, and its majestic simplicity exchanged for specious embellishments and fantastic novelties.56 53  See Michael Lobban, “Thomas Hobbes and the Common Law,” in Thomas Hobbes and the Law, ed. David Dyzenhaus and Thomas Poole (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 53. 54  Julian Hoppit, “Patterns of Parliamentary Legislation, 1660–1800,” in The Historical Journal 39 (1996): 109–10. See also Lemmings, Law and Government, 126–27. 55  Lemmings, Law and Government, 17–55, 172–85. 56  Blackstone, Commentaries, 1:10.

2  LAWS ANCIENT AND MODERN: NATION, CUSTOM AND LEGISLATIVE… 

39

The blame for these ‘niceties, intricacies, and delays’ are ‘innovations that have been made in it by acts of Parliament’.57 Here, we might argue, is the underlying context for Steelyard the Lawgiver’s frustration in An Island in the Moon. The failure of the political and legal establishment to recognise these so-called ‘improvements’ as malignant impairments can only be due to a shared blindness concerning the common law’s aesthetic beauties, the fit ‘proportions’ described in the previous century by Davies as its ‘harmonie’. By failing to recognise the beauty, antiquity, and quasi-sacred mystery of the nation’s legal underpinning, attempts at legal reform or wholesale revision risk destabilising the legal system as a whole, and the idea of nationhood which it embeds. The revolutionary movements in America and Europe nevertheless represented the most strident challenge to legal narratives rooted in antiquity and custom, encouraging the development of what James Epstein has termed a ‘constitutionalist idiom’, a ‘new political vocabulary’ which articulates resistance to the customary systems of the ‘law-built heavens’ (to use Blake’s phrase) of the European anciens régimes.58 In Common Sense, published in Philadelphia six months before the Declaration of Independence in 1776, Thomas Paine had expressed the importance of establishing a code of law superior to any individual government. In strikingly positivist terms, Paine envisages a legal and judicial settlement in which the law itself became sovereign, ensuring the continuation of revolutionary ideals. He imagines a legal coronation ceremony inaugurating the birth of the new state, in which the great charter of the nation is brought forth, placed on the Bible and crowned, ‘by which the world may know, that so far as we approve of monarchy, that in America the law is king.59 Voices of popular radicalism, such as Thomas Spence in his satirical Constitution of Spensonia, also drew on this new political discourse of constitutionalism. This provides another context in which Blake’s experimentation with constitutional declaration should be understood: the ‘One Law’ presented in The Book of Urizen, the ‘metal books’ of The Four Zoas, Satan’s scroll of punishments in Milton.

 Ibid., 10  Radical Expression: Political Language, Ritual, and Symbol in England, 1790–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 3–28. 59  Thomas Paine, Common Sense: Addressed to the Inhabitants of America (Philadelphia: W. and T. Bradford, 1776), 56. 57 58

40 

M. MAUGER

Thirteen years later, contemplating the legal documents that would underpin the new state in France, Paine made it clear that the ‘rights of man’ can only receive genuine constitutional protection through a law that has been published and declared (or ‘crowned’) in this manner. Whilst he accepts the notion of a natural law that ultimately reaches to ‘the divine origin of the rights of man at the creation’—his earlier pamphlet, after all, appeals to a notion of ‘common sense’ emerging from human nature itself—he sees no innate protection of those rights in the customary law of England, a system in which ‘precedents are taken in the lump, and put at once for constitution and law’.60 He concludes that the protection afforded these supposed ancient liberties is, given the legislative supremacy of Parliament, illusory. In this respect, Paine’s aim in Rights of Man is unexpectedly aligned with Blackstone’s: a desire to protect the ‘great laws of society [which] are laws of nature’ from ‘the operations of government’.61 Blackstone’s common law ‘has liberty at its core’. The constitutional protection of those liberties in the modern age will be affirmed as soon as the legal establishment is taught to value the common law as a national legacy worthy of preservation. Paine’s approach, conversely, is to argue that the law should be both codified and fortified, raised to constitutional pre-­ eminence, thereby enshrining liberties beyond the reach of Parliament. It is in the work of Jeremy Bentham, however, that we find the most explicit account of how law might define the parameters of the legal and political order, and how the power to enact legislation might be harnessed as a tool of social control.62 Not unlike Paine, Bentham’s starting point is a fundamental distrust of the historical narrative of the law’s assurance of individual liberty, a position which coalesces in his rhetoric into a vitriolic dismissal of Blackstone’s Commentaries.63 Bentham is, above all, an advocate for the full communication of the law. Like the ‘starry king’ in the Marriage of Heaven and Hell’s ‘Song of Liberty’, who ‘promulgates his 60  Paine, Rights of Man: Being an Answer to Mr Burke’s Attack on the French Revolution (London: J. Johnson, 1791), 45. 61  Paine, Rights of Man: Part the Second, combining Principle and Practice (London: for the booksellers, 1792), 13–14. 62  Postema, 315; Philip Schofield, “‘Professing Liberal Opinions’: The Common Law, Adjudication and Security in Recent Bentham Scholarship,” Journal of Legal History 16 (1995): 350–67. 63  John W. Cairns, “Blackstone, an English Institutist: Legal Literature and the Rise of the Nation State,” Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 4 (1984): 318–20; Lobban, “Blackstone,” 312; Cosgrove, Scholars of the Law, 26–27.

2  LAWS ANCIENT AND MODERN: NATION, CUSTOM AND LEGISLATIVE… 

41

ten commands’ in his desire to impose his will over the human world, Bentham is insistent that ‘promulgation’—official publication and public proclamation—is the key to the effective distribution of new law. To this end, he imagines the production of individual codes summarising particular aspects of law, which can then be displayed in the locations hosting behaviours which they regulate, for Lieberman ‘a cluttered vision of daily life decorated by the utilitarian promulgator’.64 Bentham rejects any moral notion of ‘natural limits’ within which liberties are guaranteed. He ­characterises the notion (repeated by Blackstone) that human laws can have no validity if contrary to the principles of natural law, as an invitation to transgression, to rebellion against the reasonable powers of the state.65 The common law is nothing more than a confused tangle serving the self-­ interests of the legal and judicial professions, and he ultimately refuses to accord it the status of ‘law’ at all.66 As a system of general rules, the Common Law is a thing merely imaginary: and the particular commands which are all that (in the way of command) there ever was of it that was real, can not every where, indeed can seldom, be produced.67

In his later work, Bentham argues for the positive conversion of the common law into redactional digests which could easily be passed into statute. Ultimately, he sought the codification of the laws of England in a Pannomion (‘all law’), ‘a complete and perfect code of laws’.68 Only when recompiled as a complete code can the law realise its full potential as a tool for government.69 Through codification, judicial power can be wrested from the hands of the judges and restored to the legislature: ‘by this means the legislator would see what the Judge was doing: the Judge would be a counsel to him, not a control, the sceptre would remain unshaken in his  Lieberman, The Province of Legislation, 251.  Blackstone, Commentaries, 1:41. Alexander M. Forbes, “Johnson, Blackstone, and the Tradition of Natural Law,” Mosaic, 27, no. 4 (December 1994): 85–88. 66  Lobban, Common Law, 116; Cosgrove, Scholars of the Law, 77. Philip Schofield, “Jeremy Bentham: Legislator of the World,” Current Legal Problems 51 (1998): 122. 67  Bentham, A Comment on the Commentaries: A Criticism of William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, ed. Charles Warren Everett (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1928), 125. 68  Lobban, Common Law, 116; Lieberman, The Province of Legislation, 257–90; Schofield, “Legislator of the World,” 120–22. 69  Lieberman, The Province of Legislation, 277. 64 65

42 

M. MAUGER

hands’.70 Positive legislation is therefore a government’s chief means of fostering a society which accords to its interpretation of the principle of utility, ‘which all laws have, or ought to have, in common’.71

Law, Nation, and Manners in Blake’s Prophetic Work The close connection between the defining characteristics of life in a nation, and the framework of laws through which that life is enabled, regulated, and limited was a core feature of eighteenth-century legal philosophy. At its heart lay a belief that ‘laws’ and ‘mores’ (to use Montesquieu’s terms) were rooted in each other. To its advocates, the English common law was ‘connatural to the nation’. England’s laws and mores had emerged alongside each other, mutually informing and co-dependent. The common law was one of the key inheritances defining English nationhood. It was the core component of an ancient constitution, a blueprint for the nation, the origin of which was bound up in a quasi-mythical account that mixed divine creation, the legendary history of England, and Enlightenment methodology. But it was also (again, to its supporters) a lithe and flexible framework that incorporated the principles of its own organic revision and modernisation, a system that seemed both to recognise and to respond to changes in national manners, but which also offered consistency and protection to the unique character of England. By contrast, when contemplating the design of the American constitution, Thomas Paine—who Blake later came to celebrate as a lawmaker prophet (see Chap. 6)—had no hesitation in assuming that if the outline of national law was redesigned along enlightened principles, a new and better kind of nation would be established. A similar conviction infuses Bentham’s visions of codification and delineation: change the laws, and real societal change will follow. As we will see, Blake maintains a consistent interest across his career in the infinite potential of humanity, in the ways in which contemporary life seems so often to acknowledge closure and limitation rather than imaginative freedom. Blake repeatedly investigates the relationship between individuals and the societies of which they are a part, a relationship which he discovers is made tangible through the legal frameworks that have emerged 70  Bentham, Of Laws in General, ed. H.  L. A.  Hart (University of London: Athlone, 1970), 241. 71  Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (London: T. Payne, 1789), clxvi.

2  LAWS ANCIENT AND MODERN: NATION, CUSTOM AND LEGISLATIVE… 

43

within the nations of the world. Throughout his prophetic texts, Blake is drawn to poetic representations of the life of the law: its institutions, structures, and origins. He attempts to elucidate the historical trajectories and influences that have led to the states of modern Europe (and, as he is keen to extrapolate, to the modern world in general); and he does so in order to think about possibilities for change, for fulfilling human potential, ultimately for realising what he terms ‘the Human Form Divine’. Blake is keen to establish a narrative for such a recovery that is not dependent upon the divine intervention of apocalypse (though his writing often seems to lead inexorably to such an impasse), but rather is achieved and realised through the agency of human labour, thought, and imagination. Eighteenth-century legal philosophy establishes a series of fundamental connections between the character of the nation and its laws, between individual lives and the frameworks of organisation by which human society is enabled. In the chapters which follow, we will see how Blake works with a similar set of paradigms. This is not necessarily because he was closely familiar with Montesqueiu or even Blackstone (though he may have been, either through his own reading or more vicariously through the intellectual discussions in which he may have participated), but rather because the contours of intellectual debate about the constitution of nations across the eighteenth century, especially in the revolutionary decades around the turn of the nineteenth century, were set upon such assumptions. For Blackstone, as for the seventeenth-century writers on whose work he drew, the law derives its authority from its antiquity, and from its inherent mystery. But although the law’s power is established through its usage, there is nevertheless a necessary connection between law and the written word, an assumption that the national law has developed within the fundamental moral framework of a divine law with its origin in the word of God. National law, emerging in correspondence with the character of the nation, is thus a local instance of the broad framework of a divine law of nature whose principles define humanity itself. But how did that divine law come into existence? How was it imposed? By what means was it ‘promulgated’? Blake satirises this process in the narrative which he builds across his short prophetic texts of 1790–1795, and in his abortive first attempts to write an epic later in the 1790s. His creator, his ‘Ancient of Days’, is the paradigmatic Enlightenment god Urizen. Urizen’s positivist moral law is ironically imagined as a product of solitary study and philosophy. Two thousand years of subsequent human history are represented

44 

M. MAUGER

through Blake’s creation of a complex mythology, offering a narrative of the emergence of the nations within a human world which has been measured and limited by Urizen, contained with his regulated blueprint for existence. Time and again, we see the development of national legal systems deriving their authority from Urizen’s mythical divine word: systems built upon secrecy, on antiquity. National legal codes may well have arisen out of an organic growth within the framework of a ‘God-given’ moral code; but that code is itself flawed, Blake argues, and as a result the legal systems it has spawned are themselves found wanting. Blake introduces us to tyrants who take upon themselves the authority to define new legal frameworks. In these narratives, the law is the tool-of-choice for despots wanting to subdue their subjects, and enforce compliance with their will. And yet, notwithstanding his apparent acceptance of this legal history, Blake maintains an equivocal position on the role of law in the human world. Flawed though Urizen’s creation may be, his actions nevertheless establish a realm within which humanity can exist. His is a fundamentally human vision, however abstracted it may become. In his epic work of the nineteenth century, we see how Blake remains committed to the idea of ‘freedom under law’, ultimately recognising that law can offer the basis on which individual and societal liberties can be established. Blake, following Paine and other revolutionaries of the 1790s, thus senses the redemptive potential of law. Revolutionary constitutionalism can signal a break with the regimes of the past, and—by creating new frameworks for existence—can effectively reset the ‘mores’ of the nation, and those of the world at large.

CHAPTER 3

One Law for the Lion and the Ox is Oppression: The Emergence of Universal Law

A mad king, searching for the origin of the curse which has ensnared him and his world in its unending cycle of cruelty, arrives at the end of his quest. A radical prophet distils a startling aphorism designed to warn humanity of its errors. A rapist seeking to justify his violent assault of a young woman begins to doubt the apparatus of male power that he has long assumed. Each acknowledges in this epiphany the ‘one law’ that governs human behaviour, the moral framework that is—it is assumed— enacted by a supreme original legal authority and applied with equal force to regulate the life of the ‘Lion’ and the ‘Ox’. This law is a universalising code that envelops figures of authority, even as it transforms them into the agents of its continued revision, implementation, and enforcement. Its existence offers a system within which power—political, sexual, religious, philosophical—is defined and concretised, in which hierarchies are constructed and enforced. Life lived under its rules is narrow, confined, and unimaginative: the one law is oppression. Critics who have noted the three-fold occurrence of this phrase have often glossed-over the differences in both context and form in each case.1 For the tyrant monarch whose final days are recounted in Tiriel (1789), the recognition that he is  S.  Foster Damon, William Blake: His Philosophy and Symbols (London: Constable and Company, 1924), 309; Harold Bloom, Blake’s Apocalypse: A Study in Poetic Argument (London: Victor Gollancz, 1963), 72; Elizabeth Stieg, “Reinterpreting the Old Testament: Blake’s Tiriel as Prophet,” Studies in Romanticism 29 (1990): 290. 1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Mauger, William Blake and the Visionary Law, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37723-5_3

45

46 

M. MAUGER

the agent of the legal codes of his forefathers brings final clarity to his age-­ wracked mind. Pointlessly quizzing his senile ancestor, Har, he asks ‘Why is one law given to the lion & the patient Ox[?]’, before dramatizing the way in which a child is crafted in the image of the father (8:9, E285). The strident prophetic voice that energises The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790) meanwhile, having witnessed the final transformation of the pious law-abiding Angel into a flaming energetic Devil, formulates a final aphorism to add to the Proverbs of Hell, ‘One Law for the Lion & Ox is Oppression’ (24, E44). Bromion, the aggressive sexual predator of Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793), who assaults Oothoon physically before imprisoning himself mentally, responds to her triumphant celebration of individual experience and sensory variety by falling back upon this unshakeable axiom: ‘is there not one law for both the lion and the ox?’ (4:22, E48). Across its three variants, the phrase seems to resonate with Old Testament authority. But whilst it recalls Isaiah’s foretelling of a time of judgement when ‘the wolf … shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid … and the lion shall eat straw like the ox’ (Isaiah 11:6–7), there is no single direct source. Rather, in crafting this memorable figure-of-speech, Blake seems to have a number of passages in mind: the rules governing the use of oxen at Deuteronomy 22:1–10; the command at Daniel 4:31–33 that Nebuchadnezzar be punished for his arrogance by being forced to behave as a humble ox; and the repeated symbolism in Isaiah and Jeremiah of lions as the agents of divine vengeance.2 Lions and oxen appear together in the carved decoration on Solomon’s temple at 1 Kings 7:29, and as two of the ‘living creatures’ of the throne of God described at Ezekiel 1:10, both contexts in which they appear to represent contrasting positions on a spectrum of living things. Whilst the Isaiah prophecy in particular alludes to the equality of the lion and ox before divine judgement, Blake adapts phraseology from elsewhere in the Old Testament for the allusions to the ‘One Law’. The instructions received by Moses in Exodus 12 concerning the celebration of the Passover include the requirement (at 12:49) that only circumcised men can participate in the eating of the unleavened bread: ‘One law shall be to him that is homeborn, and unto the stranger that sojourneth among you’. Indeed, Blake’s own aphorism seems distantly to echo the formal composition of this phrase from the King James translation. As we will see, Blake regarded the genesis of Old Testament law as a particularly tangible example of the 2

 For examples see Isa. 5:29, 15:9; Jer. 2:15, 50:17, 51:38.

3  ONE LAW FOR THE LION AND THE OX IS OPPRESSION: THE EMERGENCE… 

47

establishment and imposition of a moral code. Nevertheless, the phrase captures a broader sense of the association of universal behavioural frameworks with sources of doctrinal authority. Blake is never shy to re-use rhetorically powerful terms, phrases, or even entire narratives across his oeuvre. But the consistent deployment of the variants described above in compositions spanning the first four years of the French Revolution seems particularly striking, and anticipates his documentation of the arrival of Urizen’s ‘One Law’ in The Book of Urizen (see Chap. 4). It also clearly underpins the kind of antinomian perspective that scholars of recent decades have, as we have seen, demonstrated to be pervasive in Blake’s work. In the final ‘Memorable Fancy’ of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, as part of his rebuttal of the Angel’s deployment of moral orthodoxy to assert the rule of the ten commandments, the Devil argues that Jesus transgressed that legal code on multiple occasions, before concluding that ‘no virtue can exist without breaking these ten commandments: Jesus was all virtue, and acted from impulse: not from rules’ (23–24, E43). Jesus, to follow Makdisi’s argument, is presented here as the true antinomian hero who looks beyond the universal code of the ten commandments and is thus able to realise his innate, undefined, natural instinct to virtue: ‘clearly, the kind of obedience demanded by authoritarian organizations, whether religious, economic, or political, would be quite incompatible with even the most basic principles of antinomian faith in love and community’.3 The repeated assertions that we find in these texts of the malign imposition of ‘one law’ upon the ‘lion and the ox’ arguably forms a consistent thread within Blake’s formative prophetic writing advancing an antinomian world view. There is clear alignment to be found with additional Blake texts of this period: the authoritarian rule of the ‘cloud’ in The Book of Thel; the conflation of religious law and civil law as an ideological weapon of the state in The French Revolution; even the figure of Steelyard the Lawgiver in An Island in the Moon who is committed to Newtonian paradigms of ratio and measurement.4 It is the argument of this chapter, however, that although this antinomian perspective clearly colours Blake’s response to events in France, there are aspects of his dramatization of law’s role which are not easily reconcilable with an overarching legal narrative that leads inexorably to an imprisoning, universalising framework. Tiriel charts the creation and expansion 3 4

 Makdisi, Impossible History, 119–20.  Rawlinson, Comic Vision, 119–33.

48 

M. MAUGER

of the universal law of Har and his descendants, dramatized through a quest-narrative in which Tiriel searches for the origin of his ‘curse’; and yet Tiriel’s brother Ijim, a recluse who lives in the wilds of the ‘secret forests’ beyond the reach of the laws that structure Tiriel’s world, hardly offers an appealing alternative (4:79, E281). The multiple voices of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell seem to test various ways in which the universal law ‘is oppression’ by exploring its abstraction into laws of being and understanding (Locke), of religious doctrine (the establishment of priestly codes), of the universe (Newton). These are termed by Oothoon in Visions of the Daughters of Albion the ‘cold floods of abstraction’ (5:19, E49). Moreover, the Angel who ‘is now become a Devil’ in the closing plates of The Marriage—and who has consequently become the prophet-speaker’s ‘particular friend’—enacts not the annihilation of law, but rather its transformative (and literal) demonisation (24, E44). Even as the ultimate legal progenitor is named by Oothoon as ‘Urizen’, Bromion’s negatively articulated question—‘is there not one law’—is, I argue, evidence of a growing uncertainty. By casting doubt on the inevitability of a ‘one law’ which gives sanction to patriarchal dominance, Bromion’s crisis of legal existentialism offers the possibility of law as something less monolithic, perhaps more closely aligned to the establishment of individual human freedom rather than a universal ‘oppression’.

Why is One Law Given? Little read even by those with an interest in Blake, the strange and other-­ worldly tale of Tiriel—surviving unfinished on a heavily edited manuscript—offers a bleak portrayal of cruelty, decay, and collapse. Perhaps Blake’s earliest experiment with prophetic writing, in its revolutionary themes and rejection of the authority of an hereditary monarch the poem is most straightforwardly understood as a somewhat raw attempt to make sense of the political manoeuvres accompanying the outbreak of the French Revolution.5 At the heart of the narrative is a mysterious curse, which Tiriel discovers in the closing section of the manuscript to have its 5  While scholarly convention dates Tiriel to c. 1789 (see Stephen C.  Behrendt, “‘The Worst Disease’: Blake’s Tiriel,” Colby Library Quarterly 15 (1979): 175) or slightly later (e.g. David Erdman, Prophet Against Empire: A Poet’s Interpretation of the History of His Own Times, rev. ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 131), some authorities have opted for an earlier date of 1787 (e.g. David Bindman, Blake as an Artist (Oxford: Phaidon, 1977), 43–44).

3  ONE LAW FOR THE LION AND THE OX IS OPPRESSION: THE EMERGENCE… 

49

origins in the ‘One Law’ which he has received from his ancestors and has, in turn, disseminated within his kingdom. This curse has destroyed the ‘once delightful’ palace in which he had formerly lived ‘in joy’ as ‘King of the West’ (1:4, E276; 2:19, E278). In the decayed splendour of his court, supporting his dying wife Myratana, Tiriel addresses his descendants as ‘sons of the Curse’. They respond with similar affection: Old man unworthy to be calld. the father of Tiriels race For every one of those thy wrinkles. each of those grey hairs Are cruel as death. & as obdurate as the devouring pit Why should thy sons care for thy curses thou accursed man Were we not slaves till we rebeld. Who cares for Tiriels curse His blessing was a cruel curse. His curse may be a blessing (1:12–17, E276)

Tiriel has routinely ‘cursed’ his sons in a vain attempt to stamp his authority on his kingdom; but we see how the curses have fallen back on Tiriel, the cruelty that they occasion written into his aging body as the wrinkles and grey hairs associated with his physical and (as we come to learn) mental decay. The theme is continued a few lines later: ‘Why dost thou curse. is not the curse now come upon your head[?]’. Once uttered, the curse falls not only on those who are damned, but also upon the one who gives it life (1:39, E277). As ‘slaves’ who have ‘rebeld’, the passage calls to mind the imprisoned Israelites in Egypt at the opening of Exodus. But here there seems no escape from tyranny, and Tiriel—as the counterpart of Moses (and clear precursor to Blake’s own Urizen)—is himself ‘accursed’, the embodiment of error, disease, and cruelty.6 Tiriel’s former blessing on his heirs as a father and as a monarch, bestowing his approval and effectively affirming their transition into adulthood, has proven to be a curse. Blake’s characterisation of Tiriel, the mad king, clearly also shares associations with contemporary depictions of George III,7 and Shakespeare’s Lear.8 As his kingdom, his family, his body, and his mind decay under the  Behrendt, “The Worst Disease,” 178–79; Stieg, “Reinterpreting the Old Testament,” 286.  Erdman, Prophet, 135; Marsha Keith Schuhard, “Blake’s Tiriel and the Regency Crisis: Lifting the Veil on a Royal Masonic Scandal,” in Blake, Politics, and History, ed. Jackie DiSalvo, G. A. Rosso, and Christopher Z. Hobson (New York: Garland, 1998), 115–35. 8  Youngquist, Madness and Blake’s Myth, 77–82; Kathleen Raine, Blake and Tradition (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), 1:36–52; Robert F. Gleckner, The Piper & the Bard: A Study of William Blake (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1959), 147. 6 7

50 

M. MAUGER

influence of the curse, Tiriel is driven to leave by an unarticulated desire to learn the source of this affliction. His departing words of animosity to his sons allude to this quest, asserting that while they might bury their mother, they ‘cannot bury the curse of Tiriel’ (1:50, E277). Perhaps his bitterness suggests the failure of his own attempts to ‘bury the curse’? In pursuit of this barely understood mission, Tiriel wanders through the remote, largely featureless landscapes lying between his palace, the domains of his brothers Ijim and Zazel, and his ancestral home—the ‘vales of Har’—where his ancient parents (Har and Heva) live in advanced senility. A series of meetings offers some perspective on the decay of Tiriel’s once bright kingdom. Ijim, a fierce and isolated iconoclast, has for seven years lived in the wilds of the forest far from the civilised spaces of Tiriel’s kingdom. He remembers Tiriel in happier times, and still harbours a forlorn expectation that he might enjoy an evening of ‘sport’ with his brother. His rejection of the kingdom means that he has avoided its disease, though Tiriel warns him that just as his sons are infected it might pass to him as a contagion: ‘if thou smitest me / The curse that rolls over their heads will rest itself on thine’ (4:14, E280). Ijim has thus far escaped the fate of another brother, Zazel, who has been banished to the remote mountains. Tiriel finds him chained and in a semi-barbarous state, eking out an existence with his children in desolate caves. The most compelling passages of Tiriel’s journey, however, are those in which he encounters his ancient parents in the Vales of Har. On the first occasion, during which Tiriel attempts to conceal his identity, the verse describes an elaborate ritual in which Har and Heva ‘bless’ Tiriel. Though as readers we are forewarned by the earlier revelation that blessings may prove to be curses, the tentative uncertainty of this transaction initially produces a fleeting moment of tenderness: Tiriel is moved to compassion for Har and Heva, shares a meal with them, and grieves for his own self-­ exile. We soon see that he is in grave danger. The Vales of Har are perilously beguiling. Heva is keen to walk with Tiriel into ‘the cage of Har’, where he can help them ‘catch birds. & gather them ripe cherries’. Tiriel himself is to be closed within this beautiful prison with his ancestors: ‘thou shalt not leave us too / For we have many sports to shew thee & many songs to sing’ (3:10–13, E279). Angrily rejecting their insistent attempts at control, Tiriel escapes from the Vales. When he returns at the poem’s final climax, with renewed self-recognition and insight, it is with a dawning understanding of their dangerous ‘blessing’. ‘I am Tiriel King of the

3  ONE LAW FOR THE LION AND THE OX IS OPPRESSION: THE EMERGENCE… 

51

west’ he asserts, ‘Thy laws O Har & Tiriels wisdom end together in a curse’ (8:4, 8, E284–85). The affliction of Tiriel’s kingdom has its origin in the law of Har, enforced by the ‘wisdom’ of the king. With rhetorical conviction he asks ‘why is one law given to the lion & the patient Ox’, adding (in a line subsequently crossed out in the manuscript) ‘dost thou not see that men cannot be formed all alike[?]’. In the margin, Blake further pursues this argument: ‘And why men bound beneath the heavens in a reptile form / A worm of sixty winters creeping on the dusky ground’ (8:9–11, E285). New insights crowd upon Tiriel. He recalls his own infancy, as the moral framework of his parents was imposed from birth: ‘the child springs from the womb. the father ready stands to form / The infant head’. The father forms a whip to rouze the sluggish senses to act And scourges off all youthful fancies from the new-born man Then walks the infant in sorrow compelld to number footsteps Upon the sand. &c And when the drone has reachd his crawling length Black berries appear that poison all around him. Such was Tiriel Compelld to pray repugnant & to humble the immortal spirit (8: 17–23, E285)

The child’s development is mapped out by paternal authority. He is not free to wander as he chooses but compelled to ‘number footsteps’ in the sand. The child’s education is thus an imposed, codified programme set in place prior even to his birth. He becomes not an independent sentient being but a ‘drone’, the single bee which has no individual identity, and which only has a role as part of a collective colony. On reaching adulthood, compliance with the tenets of paternal moral law is ensured by the poisoning of all but the approved route. We see similar acknowledgements of child development in other Blake texts of this period. In the short poem ‘Infant Sorrow’ (in the Songs of Experience sequence) a new-born baby, ‘bound and weary’ in its ‘swadling bands’, rejects its father’s hands and clings to the protection offered by the mother (48:6–7, E28). Blake’s notebook drafts indicate that this was originally conceived as a much longer poem, in which the subject’s later childhood was to be presented. In the fourth stanza of that draft poem, the now-crawling infant enters a world of sensual delight in which ‘a mirtle

52 

M. MAUGER

tree / Stretchd its blossoms out to me’.9 At this stage, the influence of the father returns: My father then with holy look In his hands a holy book Pronounced curses on my head And bound me in a mirtle shade10

Of particular interest for the discussion of Tiriel, is the religious, moralistic justification for paternal authority, the explicit link between fatherhood and priesthood. The closeness of this connection for Blake is indicated in that ‘father’ in the first line above had itself been changed from ‘Priest’ in the notebook. Though it is difficult to trace the narrative of this longer ‘Infant Sorrow’ to its conclusion, the final stanza indicates that the child ultimately rebels against this father/priest figure: ‘So I smote him & his gore / Staind the roots my mirtle bore’. This rejection comes, however, at a price—the speaker’s childhood: ‘But the time of youth is fled / And grey hairs are on my head’.11 Notwithstanding his youthful rebellion against paternal authority, the child has now apparently taken on the mantle of the patriarch. This circularity, and a lurking horror at the inevitability of these moral frameworks, also lies at the heart of Tiriel’s dawning realisation at the end of his narrative. The apparent paradox to which Tiriel returns—the way in which the seeming contrast between ‘blessing’ and ‘curse’ is shown to be illusory—is a carefully constructed metonym for the way in which legal frameworks coalesce and become enforceable. A blessing is, after all, a ritual associated with the granting of approval, or the bestowing of divine favour. The action of a curse conceives a similar slippage between human and divine authority. A curse’s existence is explicitly anticipated in the words of a blessing. It comes into force when the framework approved by a blessing—defining a space of allowable action, or thought, or behaviour—is transgressed. The shared effect of the blessing and the curse is the imposition of a moral sanction, a paradoxical term itself redolent of apparently irreconcilable ideas of punishment and permission. Har’s universal law assumes that men are ‘all formed alike’. It ‘rolls over’ Tiriel’s head with 9  David Erdman and Donald K. Moore, The Notebook of William Blake: A Photographic and Typographical Facsimile (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 113. 10  Ibid., 113. 11  Ibid., 113.

3  ONE LAW FOR THE LION AND THE OX IS OPPRESSION: THE EMERGENCE… 

53

each act of fatherly control, with each ‘blessing’ that he confers. But Tiriel has also been complicit in its extension as a curse (or blessing) over his realm. The curse under which his kingdom has disintegrated is the product of both Har’s law, and Tiriel’s wisdom. Tiriel does not absolve himself from responsibility for the universal law, but he does come to recognise that his own role as a lawmaker, in which his ‘wisdom’ has made the law appear to be a blessing, is instrumental in its lived experience as a curse in his kingdom. As readers, we inevitably wonder about the pre-history of the Tiriel narrative. We are given enough tantalising glimpses of the former delights and beauties of the kingdom to know that it has not always been thus, that the decay and dissolution of the present have become dominant as a factor of the king’s old age. Presumably, that earlier period of happiness also existed under the ‘laws of Har’; but under Tiriel’s aegis, they have become hardened and destructive of human joy and energy. Just as the speaker of ‘The Garden of Love’ discovers that the place of play and friendship he recalls from his childhood has become a cold chapel with ‘Thou shalt not writ over the door’, so Tiriel has created a land of legal restraint ‘filled with graves, / And tomb-stones where flowers should be’ (Experience, 44:6, 9–10, E26). The deceptive beauty of the Vales of Har is the setting for another of Blake’s early prophetic works: The Book of Thel. Here, the narrative premise offers a counterpart for Tiriel. Thel lives in the beautiful realm of Har, a place of sunshine, fertility, and apparent natural harmony. Rejecting her shepherdess role as one of the ‘daughters of Mne Seraphim’ who ‘led round their sunny flocks’, Thel too sets out on a quest seeking a perspective from which she can assert her own individuality (1:1, E3). The landscape over which she wanders is lush and verdant, in contrast with the desolation of Tiriel’s wilderness. Her encounters are with flowers, plants, a god-like cloud, and the life-giving earth itself. Tiriel’s raving cowardice and endless curses are exchanged for curiosity, calm reflection, and even bravery. But as Helen Bruder has observed, these polite, even charming encounters disguise something rather more insidious: the quiet corroboration and beautifying of a series of patriarchal hierarchies designed to curtail Thel’s awakening identity.12 Time and again, the received wisdom that Thel must live simply and play her assigned role in the ecological cycles of Har is reinforced: the lily whose flowers are eaten by lambs tells 12  Helen Bruder, William Blake and the Daughters of Albion (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), 38–54.

54 

M. MAUGER

her that even the lowliest are loved by ‘he that smiles on all’; the cloud confirms that ‘if thou art the food of worms … How great thy use. how great thy blessing’; the Clod of Clay bolsters the message with her selfless conclusion, ‘we live not for ourselves’ but rather in service of the ‘helpless & naked’ worm who eats the leaves of the lily and the bodies of the dead (1:19, E4; 3:25–26, E5; 4:5, 10, E5). Notwithstanding this apparently coordinated campaign, in which each speaker passes the argument to the next every time their renewed evidence for the ‘natural order’ of patriarchy is questioned, Thel remains unconvinced. Attempts at gentle persuasion having failed, a special trap is prepared as Thel’s journey continues. Whereas, in the Tiriel narrative, the eponymous king discovers the beautiful (though deceptive) ancestral realm of Har within the general desolation of his kingdom, Thel has a terrifying encounter in which she is shown a ‘land of sorrows & of tears where never smile was seen’, a place in which the cloying beauties of Har are ripped aside and the bitterness that lies within is revealed. It is as though she has stumbled upon the kingdom of Tiriel. In this inversion of Har—a ‘land of clouds’ complete with dark valleys, ‘fibrous’ roots and ‘dewy’ graves—the ‘secrets of the land unknown’ are revealed to Thel (6:2–7, E6). Beside her own grave, she listens in horror as a ‘voice of sorrow’ reveals the ontological and empirical principles on which this world is constructed, a version of humanity devoid of free will and imaginative thought, and utterly in thrall to an unmediated and overwhelming cascade of information received by the senses. If Tiriel’s father and the father depicted in the notebook drafts of ‘Infant Sorrow’ are glimpsed as patriarchs placing curbs on the sensory faculties of their children, the voice from Thel’s grave narrates the horrifying conclusion of that process. The sensory organs are wide open, forcibly attentive to every phenomenon without discrimination, receptive to each sound, sight, taste, or feeling no matter how misleading, destructive, or deceptive. Amid this sensory cacophony, imaginative thought and visionary experience are precluded. In their place, Thel glimpses the imposition of a code of moral control: fertility is restricted, desire curtailed, and energy curbed. Yet rather than being cowed into compliance by this naked and aggressive assertion of the order of things and returning with sheepish resignation to the task of leading round the sunny flocks, Thel is finally roused from passive questioning to horrified activity: ‘the Virgin started from her seat, & with a shriek. / Fled back unhinderd till she came into the vales of Har’ (6:21–22, E6). Late-twentieth-century critics have proposed that rather than being terrified into obedience (the orthodox reading of Northrop

3  ONE LAW FOR THE LION AND THE OX IS OPPRESSION: THE EMERGENCE… 

55

Frye and others), she returns with anger and new understanding to start a revolution.13 The context of 1789–1790 surely supports this. Whatever future history we might imagine for Thel, however, our final glimpse of her in the lower portion of the final plate design, riding at speed with her hair streaming behind, holding the reins of a giant serpent, seems to speak more of purposeful joy and determination than it does of submission and dull imprisonment. In his final encounter with Har, Tiriel understands the curse under which he and his kingdom have fallen: Har’s laws, which have been internalised and recapitulated by Tiriel as ‘wisdom’. The ‘one law given to the lion & the patient Ox’ has restricted energy and curtailed human potential, draining beauty, fertility, and freedom from Tiriel’s ‘paradise’. Har is identified as the ultimate creator of these laws, not as a way for Tiriel to avoid responsibility for the collapse of his kingdom—he ultimately accepts his culpability in the imposition of the curse—but rather in recognition of the way in which law claims a legitimacy which is both primeval and autochthonous. As we will see in the next chapter, Blake is to go on to chart the primordial origin of the law as a key part of the conceptual framework of his prophetic writing of the mid-1790s. In the figure of Har, we also see Blake’s growing interest in the archetypal figure of the ‘lawmaker’. In the separate manuscript address ‘To Nobodaddy’, Blake conceives the law-making activity of the Old Testament ‘Father of Jealousy’ as part of his insidious, hidden power: Why dost thou hide thyself in clouds From every searching Eye[?] Why darkness & obscurity In all thy words & laws[?] (3–6, E471)

Here, the laws themselves are shrouded in mystery. Moral behaviours are defined and judged in terms of a legal code which is unseen and undocumented. Under the aegis of these laws, paranoia and fear have infected the earthly paradise of creation until ‘none dare eat the fruit’ of this land ‘but from / The wily serpents jaws’ (7–8, E471). Blake employs a similar figurative lexicon in describing how Tiriel is transformed by Har’s laws into a ‘serpent in a paradise / Consuming all both flowers & fruits’ (8:24–25, E285). The desperate questions of the verses ‘To Nobodaddy’; Tiriel’s anguished appeal to Har to account for the ‘one law given’; Thel’s  For a summary of the critical debate, see Bruder, Daughters of Albion, p. 53.

13

56 

M. MAUGER

horrified response to the bleak vision of the philosophical structures underpinning the seeming beauty of nature; these anguished challenges to often intangible legal progenitors establish a consistent pattern of thinking in these texts. This paradigm is stated most starkly in Visions of the Daughters of Albion in Oothoon’s agonising appeal to a figure she names for the first time in Blake’s corpus, a figure who is to emerge as Blake’s key lawmaker in the Lambeth prophecies of 1793–1795: ‘Urizen! Creator of men! Mistaken Demon of heaven’ (5:3, E48). Judged as impure by her lover Theotormon’s unfeeling implementation of an inflexible moral code, Oothoon concludes by addressing Urizen in the same terms as Nobodaddy: Father of jealousy. be thou accursed from the earth! Why hast thou taught my Theotormon this accursed thing? Till beauty fades from off my shoulders darken’d and cast out, A solitary shadow wailing on the margin of non-entity. (7:12–15, E50)

One Law is Oppression Amid the assembly of prophetic documents that together form Blake’s satirical miscellany, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, the five bearing the subheading ‘A Memorable Fancy’ enact visionary encounters that are conspicuous in their playful (if also almost breathtakingly heretical) storytelling. In a text comprised of mixed modes of writing including lyrical poetry, enumerated propositions, theological debate, artistic statements of purpose, and wisdom literature (in the form of a long list of proverbs), the five ‘fancies’—though themselves varied in style—offer a sense of continuity. In the last of these sections, we see the ‘marriage’ that the title acknowledges. After a theological contest between ‘a Devil in a flame of fire’ and ‘an Angel that sat on a cloud’, a debate in which the scriptural authority for the Ten Commandments is at stake, the Angel ‘stretched out his arms embracing the flame of fire & he was consumed and arose as Elijah’ (23–24, E43). Blake adds a gloss, in case his readers have missed the point: he ‘is now become a Devil’ (24, E44). As this Memorable Fancy (and indeed the main body of The Marriage) ends, we see Blake’s well-known composition of King Nebuchadnezzar crawling as a beast, captioned by the assertion that ‘One Law for the Lion & Ox is Oppression’ (Fig. 3.1). The earlier ‘Proverbs of Hell’ have already established gnomic utterances as a source of wisdom in this text. Here, the location and resonance of this final maxim suggests that it is to be understood as a conclusion to the vision of the Angel’s transformation, and—more widely—to the project of The Marriage as a whole.

3  ONE LAW FOR THE LION AND THE OX IS OPPRESSION: THE EMERGENCE… 

57

Fig. 3.1  William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Copy D, Plate 24. (Library of Congress, Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection)

58 

M. MAUGER

Blake’s artistic representation of Nebuchadnezzar splices the story from Daniel with Isaiah’s prophecy of the Messiah (as we have seen, a part of the scriptural source material for Blake’s maxim concerning the ‘One Law’). Daniel 4:33 describes the divine punishment visited upon Nebuchadnezzar: ‘he was driven from men, and did eat grass as oxen, and his body was wet with the dew of heaven, till his hairs were grown like eagles’ feathers, and his nails like birds’ claws’. Blake eschews the avian imagery, and instead aligns the account with Isaiah’s foretelling of a messiah under whose influence ‘the lion shall eat straw like the ox’ (Isaiah 11:7). He depicts Nebuchadnezzar as the lion, with fiery eyes and long flowing yellow hair (in some copies flecked with orange). The lion king is forced to ‘eat grass as oxen’ as a lesson in humility. Adjusting Nebuchadnezzar’s appearance in this way clearly reinforces the sense that it is to be understood alongside the assertion that ‘One Law for the Lion & Ox is Oppression’. The association is not, however, straightforward. Whilst instinctively we might expect ‘oppression’ to be a consequence of the king’s autocratic rule over his subjects, an interpretation strengthened if we recognise (as Vincent Carretta has argued) a contemporary resonance with satirical depictions of George III, the account in Daniel provides little evidence of despotism.14 Indeed, the ‘One Law’ that we see enacted on Blake’s plate is visited upon the body of Nebuchadnezzar himself, who offended God by establishing an earthly kingdom that rivalled in majesty the divine realm. Nebuchadnezzar, admonished for his hubris by a distant jealous God, is thus the victim of oppression, and his punishment is the performance of a tyrannical universal law. Blake effectively repurposes the Daniel story as a vehicle for undermining Isaiah’s bucolic vision of the pastoral bliss ushered in by the messiah’s arrival. In Blake’s hands, the Isaiah prophecy of natural harmony—not unlike the flowers, the sunny flocks and kindly reasoning of the land of Har—disguises a system of moral coercion and imaginative denial (the world governed by the ‘One Law’). As the ‘Devil in a flame of fire’ has just argued, the actions of Jesus as described in Christian scripture do not correspond with those of the saviour foretold by Isaiah. Far from having given his ‘sanction’ to the ‘law of ten commandments’ as the Angel has averred with such confidence, Jesus ‘acted from impulse: not from rules’. Indeed, 14  Vincent Carretta, George III and the Satirists from Hogarth to Byron (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990), 162–66); John Barrell, Imagining the King’s Death: Figurative Treason, Fantasies of Regicide 1793–1796 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 545–47).

3  ONE LAW FOR THE LION AND THE OX IS OPPRESSION: THE EMERGENCE… 

59

the ‘virtue’ of Jesus derives from his transgression of that code, rather than slavish observance. The Devil gives some examples: Jesus mocked the Sabbath, committed murder, stole ‘the labor of others’, bore false witness, demonstrated covetousness (and encouraged his followers to do so), and intervened (as described in John 8) to ‘turn away the law from the woman taken in adultery’ (23, E43). The image of Nebuchadnezzar, together with its caption, is the final line of the Devil’s argument. The suffering depicted here reveals the oppression that Isaiah’s vision perpetuates. Jesus, he argues, is not such a leader. Rather than reinforcing the Old Testament law through an appearance of mildness, he destroys it. An earlier memorable fancy, in which Blake—as the visionary narrator— shares a meal with Isaiah and Ezekiel, reaches a similar conclusion. Ezekiel is prompted to describe the emergence of the beliefs of the Jewish people, and the growing power of the religion that ‘we of Israel’ espoused. Taking their lead from their teachers who ‘cursed … the deities of surrounding nations’, the people of Israel ‘came to think that all nations would at last be subject to the jews’. This, Ezekiel claims, ‘is come to pass, for all nations believe the jews code and worship the jews god, and what greater subjection can be’ (13, E39). This invented history bespeaks, at best, a crude re-appropriation of contemporary defamatory attitudes which we now recognise as anti-Semitic tropes. Writing in 1998, and addressing what she then saw as a tendency in Blake scholarship to position the poet heroically ‘at odds with his culture and times’, Anne Mellor reminds us that Blake is often deeply complicit ‘in the racist and sexist ideologies of his culture’.15 He develops here a narrative about the hardening of Jewish ritual, belief and observance into a delineated series of coded scriptures, exemplifying the way in which the law extends its reach around the liberties of human life. Later, in the Lambeth prophecies (and particularly in The Song of Los), Blake mythologises this account in a way that makes the emergence of the Jewish code a symptom of a broader ‘human’ process rooted in the work of Urizen, rather than its cause (see Chap. 4). Here, however, the ‘subjection’ of the nations is the consequence—in Ezekiel’s account at least (though affirmed by the visionary speaker)—of the extension of the elaborate rituals and practices associated with Jewish worship. The plate which introduces the Ezekiel and Isaiah vision provides a limited contextual rationale. In the poetic activity of the ‘ages of 15  “Blake, Gender and Imperial Ideology: A Response,” in Blake, Politics, and History, ed. Jackie DiSalvo, G. A. Rosso, and Christopher Z. Hobson (New York: Garland, 1998), 350–53.

60 

M. MAUGER

imagination’, origin stories developed by ‘the ancient Poets’ to make sense of the external world are systematised and transformed into religious doctrine by priests, and used as mechanisms of control by which they ‘took advantage of & enslav’d the vulgar’ (11, E38). Forms of worship, themselves extrapolated from these ‘poetic tales’, are converted by this priesthood into regulative frameworks that they claim retrospectively to have been ordained by the Gods, in doing so coalescing divinity—which originated and lived ‘in the human breast’—as a separate, abstract, omniscient deity to which human behaviour is itself subject. The testimony of Isaiah and Ezekiel offers an example of this process. Isaiah insists that his senses ‘discover’d the infinite in every thing’: ‘I cared not for consequences but wrote’ (12, E38). But those writings then became distilled into principles of perception delineated and increasingly enforced by philosophers, teachers, and priests. The one law whose imposition on all nations is ‘oppression’, under the influence of which Blake asks ‘what greater subjection can be’, is thus not only a legal framework governing action, but a coded system in which poetry, philosophy, and perception are structured. The recurring interest of the book’s ‘Memorable Fancies’ in systems of regulation and control are particular articulations of its wider premises. Framing the broad aesthetic, philosophical and theological argument of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is Blake’s fraught notion of ‘contraries’, which is presented in one of its best-known formulations immediately after the text’s ‘Argument’: Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence. From these contraries spring what the religious call Good & Evil. Good is the passive that obeys Reason[.] Evil is the active springing from Energy. Good is Heaven. Evil is Hell. (3, E34)

Generations of students trying to get their head around these principles conclude that these are dialectical structures, dyads of opposing paradigms that—in the Blakean ideal—are to be retained in some kind of dynamic, restless equilibrium. Such a reading nevertheless struggles with Blake’s celebration of energy and imaginative excess, and his horrified representation of a world in which the infinite is limited by an aesthetic of closure, self-denial, and sensory empiricism. This problem is evident even in this quotation, in which Reason’s ‘passive’ characterisation stands in the shadow of the active, demonic ‘springing’ of Energy. The proposition contained in the title of Blake’s miscellany, The Marriage of Heaven and

3  ONE LAW FOR THE LION AND THE OX IS OPPRESSION: THE EMERGENCE… 

61

Hell, is also difficult to understand from a straightforward notion of the separation of ‘contraries’: surely a ‘marriage’ of these ideas—apparently enacted in the Angel’s transformation into a Devil in the final ‘Memorable Fancy’—is what we are enjoined to resist? David Stewart has argued that in The Marriage, at least, Blake rejected the idea that Good and Evil were equal counterparts, and had in mind a Behmenist notion of evil being transformed into good (as opposed to being cast out altogether).16 Good always retains the potential for evil just as (in Blake’s subsequent explanation) Energy embodies the principle of Reason: ‘Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy’ (4, E34). The production of the legalised frameworks of religious code and regulatory regime that Blake goes on to describe is a process that requires the passive observance of a ‘system’ of acceptable behaviours. ‘Good is the passive that obeys Reason’ (3, E34, my emphasis). The active, energetic potential of humanity to challenge the passive acceptance of these systems is, from that perspective, ‘Evil’; and yet the freedom of human activity and perception glimpsed in the text retains by necessity the principle of legal definition. The problem with these structures, as Blake makes clear on plates 11–13, is their tendency to be abstracted into a position of universal authority that appears to be beyond humanity itself: ‘at length they pronounced that the Gods had orderd such things’. These systematised blueprints for human behaviour coalesce as a consequence of the tendency towards reason, and yet their implementation enacts the primacy of reason and risks the casting out of energy. In one of his early experiments with his method of relief engraving, Blake in There is No Natural Religion (c. 1788) describes reason as ‘the ratio of all we have already known’. Reason’s favoured methodologies, ‘the Philosophic & Experimental’ approaches that Blake associates with Locke and Newton, anticipate ‘the ratio of all things’. Having determined that ratio, human endeavours based on those principles will ‘stand still unable to do other than repeat the same dull round over again’ (E2). Adam Cohen has argued persuasively that the static, totalising perspective of Lockean materialism and Newtonian mechanics constitute the ‘One Law’ that The Marriage of Heaven and Hell rejects as ‘oppression’.17 Certainly, the emergence of the abstract terms of 16  David Stewart, “The Context of Blake Contraries in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” Essays in Literature 21 (1994): 43–54. 17  Adam Max Cohen, “Genius in Perspective: Blake, Einstein, and Relativity,” The Wordsworth Circle 31 (2000): 164–69.

62 

M. MAUGER

‘the Philosophic & Experimental’ in the Marriage offer further instantiations of the legalised mindset of reason. A section subtitled ‘The Voice of the Devil’ notes with frustration that the five senses are ‘the chief inlets of Soul in this age’, and the Devil who goes on to list the ‘Proverbs of Hell’ describes the potential existence of an ‘immense world of delight, clos’d by your senses five’ (4, E34). Milton’s error in Paradise Lost was to reify reason as ‘Messiah’ instead of energy. The result is a depiction of Jesus as ‘a Ratio of the five senses’, and of the ‘Holy Ghost’—by definition indiscernible—as ‘Vacuum!’ (7, E35; 6, E35). Accounts of the way in which an energetic, dynamic knowledge hardens into written form recur within The Marriage in the vision of the infernal printing house, and in the ‘Proverbs of Hell’. The third ‘Memorable Fancy’ describes ‘a Printing house in Hell’, where the visionary is shown ‘the method in which knowledge is transmitted from generation to generation’ (15, E40). The activity takes place in six large caverns, continuing the previous plate’s allusion to Plato’s allegory of the cave in Book VII of The Republic. In Blake’s re-purposing of that story, the trapped man ‘sees all things thro’ narrow chinks’ of the curtailed senses: ‘if the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite’ (14, E39).18 In the first three chambers of the printing house, we see vibrant, imaginatively vivid creatures performing the ‘cleansing’ of perception: dragons expand the space and clear away the rubbish from the entrance; vipers enrich the cavern with precious metals and stones; eagles (celebrated elsewhere in the text as ‘a portion of Genius’) make the cave’s interior ‘infinite’. Blake has just described his own ‘infernal method’ of printing, ‘melting apparent surfaces away’. It seems that we see this process in action at mythological scale in the fourth and fifth chambers, where ‘Lions of flaming fire’ melt metals ‘into living fluids’, before they are then ‘cast’ into expansive knowledge by forms so protean that they are ‘Unnam’d’ (15, E40).19 At this moment, however—the instant when the ‘living fluids’ are cast into solid form—a striking rupture occurs in the description as the materials move into the sixth chamber: ‘There they were reciev’d by Men … and took the forms of books & were arranged in  The Republic, trans. by Desmond Lee, 2nd ed. (London: Penguin, 2003), 240–48.  John Howard, Infernal Poetics: Poetic Structures in Blake’s Lambeth Prophecies (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1984), 84–86; Joseph Viscomi, “In the Caves of Heaven and Hell: Swedenborg and Printmaking in Blake’s Marriage,” in Blake in the Nineties, ed. Steve Clark and David Worrall (London: Macmillan, 1999), 27–60; Robert Essick, “William Blake, Thomas Paine, and Biblical Revolution,” Studies in Romanticism 30 (1991): 189–212. 18 19

3  ONE LAW FOR THE LION AND THE OX IS OPPRESSION: THE EMERGENCE… 

63

libraries’. The magnificent mythological characters, the ‘flaming fire’, the imaginative intensity of the earlier caverns, the terrific, inexpressible infinite, has been replaced by ‘Men’ stripped of any adjectives. The ‘living fluids’ of the lions have become static books ‘arranged in libraries’. The process which begins with vigour and noise, ends in stillness and silence. The design accompanying Plate 10, the last of four plates containing the ‘Proverbs of Hell’, depicts a scene in which a winged figure with a scroll—presumably bearing the aphorisms that we have been reading— appears to be directing the work of two copyists. The composition here foreshadows the titlepage of the later Book of Urizen, in which Blake’s primeval lawmaker makes copies of his fundamental law (see the discussion in Chap. 4). Various prototypes have been offered for this list of gnomic truths. Most recognisable is the biblical book of Proverbs, traditionally attributed to Solomon.20 In the biblical book, the proverbs are presented with a clear educational purpose, the means by which a father communicates to his son ‘the instruction of wisdom, justice, and judgment, and equity’ (Proverbs 1:3). The father-figure in the biblical book repeatedly warns his son not to ignore the wisdom imparted: ‘forget not my law; but let thine heart keep my commandments’, ‘I give you good doctrine, forsake ye not my law’, ‘they that forsake the law, praise the wicked: but such as keep the law contend with them’ (Proverbs 3:1, 4:2 and 28:4). Secular forms of proverbial publication popular in the eighteenth century also provided Blake with a template. These include philosophical treatises such as the 1788 publication of an English translation of Johann Lavater’s Aphorisms on Man (which Blake annotated), various ‘dictionaries’ of proverbs claiming to document the ‘common sense’ of humanity, and—as we have seen in the previous chapter—popular maxim books that common law practitioners used as guides to legal wisdom.21 John Villalobos in 20  Bloom, Apocalypse, 85; Randel Helms, “Proverbs of Heaven and Proverbs of Hell,” Paunch 38 (1974): 51–58. 21  Michael E.  Holstein, “Crooked Roads without Improvement: Blake’s ‘Proverbs of Hell’,” Genre 8 (1975): 28–29. Collections of proverbs from the period include Francis Grose, A Provincial Glossary, with a collection of Local Proverbs and Popular Superstitions (London: S.  Hooper, 1787); Thomas Townson, The Poor Man’s Moralist, consisting of Proverbs, and Moral Sayings (Liverpool, 1798); Christian Prudence: Consisting of Maxims and Proverbs, Divine and Moral; Collect from the Sacred Scriptures; the Writings of Primitive Fathers, Heathen Philosophers, and eminent Divines (London: J. Johnson and B. Davenport, 1766); and John Ray’s seventeenth-century collection A Compleat Collection of English Proverbs, 4th ed. (London: W. Otridge, 1768).

64 

M. MAUGER

­ articular has categorised the ‘Proverbs of Hell’ as ‘wisdom literature, or p rather … a critique and parody of proverbial wisdom’.22 Clearly, practices of proverbial publication in the late-eighteenth century provided Blake with a useful meeting place between a claimed ‘popular’ wisdom, and law, both biblical and secular. This is the sense in which Blake contends that the proverbs ‘shew the nature of Infernal wisdom’ more effectively than ‘description of buildings or garments’. They are presented (however deviously) as a direct reflection of the beliefs and principles which constitute the world of Hell (6, E35). Among the texts of 1788–1794 on which this chapter concentrates, the bleakest descriptions of the oppression occasioned by ‘One Law for the Lion & Ox’ are found in two very different texts: The French Revolution (composed in 1791, and surviving incomplete in a set of letter-press proofs), and the illuminated book Visions of the Daughters of Albion (composed in 1793). In the former, we discover Louis locked in council with his nobles on the eve of revolution, as the National Assembly convenes at Versailles. The Duke of Burgundy foresees the collapse of the French state, symbolised by the obliteration of ‘sword and scepter’, ‘law and gospel’ and ‘reason and science’ (5:94–95, E290). The king’s council agrees to admit an ambassador from the National Assembly, the Abbé Sieyès (author of the key political pamphlet of the Revolution, ‘What is the Third Estate?’). Sieyès begs the nobles to hear the ‘voice of the people’, ‘the wild raging millions, that wander in forests, and howl in law blasted wastes’ (11:206, 227, E295–96). He paints a picture of a population worn down by sickness, crop failure, and military conflict, of life made miserable under the oppression of crown and church. For Sieyès, the Revolution is imagined in apocalyptic terms as a dawn, a ‘breaking of clouds, and swelling of winds’ (11:217, E296). The nobles will discard ‘The red robe of terror, the crown of oppression, the shoes of contempt, and unbuckle / The girdle of war from the desolate earth’, and priests will take up the plough. They promise the farmers: ‘No more I curse thee; but now I will bless thee: No more in deadly black / Devour thy labour’ (12:221–26, E296). This bitter description is inserted by Blake into his mythological schema in Visions of the Daughters of Albion, particularly in Oothoon’s furious unmasking of the sufferings in Albion under the aegis of Urizen. Oothoon describes the way in which the attempt to impose a one-size-fits-all model 22  John Villalobos, “William Blake’s ‘Proverbs of Hell’ and the Tradition of Wisdom Literature,” Studies in Philology 87 (1990): 246–59.

3  ONE LAW FOR THE LION AND THE OX IS OPPRESSION: THE EMERGENCE… 

65

for human society based on morality, property, and labour has converted the fertility of the land and its people into a sterile, narrow shadow of its former self. ‘How can one joy absorb another? are not different joys / Holy, eternal, infinite!’ (5:5–6, E48). She describes the rich landowner who ‘buys whole corn fields into wastes’, the parson who through the setting of ‘nets & gins & traps’ can extract tithes from the farmer in order to build ‘castles and high spires. where kings & priests may dwell’ (5:15–20, E48–49). Oothoon’s speech about the denial of fertility and desire reaches a compelling climax in which the curtailing of feminine sexuality is explicitly linked to the laws governing matrimony:23 Till she who burns with youth. and knows no fixed lot; is bound In spells of law to one she loaths: and must she drag the chain Of life, in weary lust! must chilling murderous thoughts. obscure The clear heaven of her eternal spring? to bear the wintry rage Of a harsh terror driv’n to madness, bound to hold a rod Over her shrinking shoulders all the day; & all the night To turn the wheel of false desire (5:21–27, E49)

The passage offers a stark contrast with the justification for women’s oppression under the matrimonial laws contained in accounts such as Blackstone’s Commentaries (‘we may observe, that even the disabilities, which the wife lies under, are for the most part intended for her protection and benefit’).24 David Aers has observed that the phrase ‘spells of law’ suggests that this legislative code is ‘more like the product of an enchanter’ than a ‘central manifestation of human community’. As we have seen, Blake in The Marriage has offered a narrative of the way in which behaviours and principles immanent to ‘human communities’ become systematised, externalised, and supernaturalised, ultimately acquiring the status of instruction from a distant primeval God.25 This linkage between the ­religion of Urizen, which depends on superstition and the maintenance of ‘mystery’, and secular legislation, demonstrates the religious mystification of the law, which provides a false legitimation for oppressive rule. 23  See Nelson Hilton, “An Original Story,” in Unnam’d Forms: Blake and Textuality, ed. Nelson Hilton and Thomas A. Vogler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 95–97. 24  Blackstone, Commentaries, 1:433. 25  David Aers, “Blake: Sex, Society and Ideology,” in Romanticism and Ideology: Studies in English Writing 1765–1830, ed. David Aers, Jonathon Cook and David Punter (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), 29.

66 

M. MAUGER

Is There Not One Law? The tortured exchange of political, philosophical, and sensual arguments that comprise Visions of the Daughters of Albion describes a circle at the centre of which is the poem’s causal act: Bromion’s sexual assault of Oothoon. A poem which opens with the physical activity of Oothoon’s excitement as she flies ‘in wing’d exulting swift delight’ to consummate her love for Theotormon, is grounded by Bromion’s physical attack (1:14, E46). Bromion the rapist, the slave-owner, the arrogant coloniser, claims Oothoon as ‘Bromions harlot’ and casually boasts about the power evidenced by his sexual and racial violence (2:1, E46). For the remaining seven of the poem’s eight plates, physical activity ceases; Oothoon, Bromion, and Theotormon are locked in relation to each other. Though the expected arrival of Oothoon’s child ‘in nine moons time’ might signify a deferred breaking of the deadlock, for the duration of the poem the plates describe a complex exchange of political and social views in which only Oothoon is prepared to travel imaginatively beyond the boundaries of closed thinking. Moreover, it becomes clear that Theotormon is complicit in imposing upon Oothoon the label ‘Bromion’s harlot’. Though he initially sits in silence weeping ‘secret tears’, his emotional response— rather than the grief, pity, or outrage that might be expected—is jealousy: Then storms rent Theotormons limbs; he rolld his waves around. And folded his black jealous waters round the adulterate pair Bound back to back in Bromions caves terror & meekness dwell (2:3–5, E46)

Theotormon’s jealousy leads him somehow to overlook Bromion’s violence, and to conclude that Oothoon must be complicit in the sexual encounter. He imprisons them within his ‘black jealous waters’, defining her together with Bromion as part of an ‘adulterate pair’. Theotormon is not alone in identifying Oothoon as an adulteress. Many of Blake’s mid-twentieth-century critics accepted his label, most notoriously that most influential of the period’s scholars, Northrop Frye, who describes Oothoon’s engagement with Bromion as an ‘extramarital amour’.26 Such an approach is also implied in the work of a number of critics who, following Harold Bloom, are willing to accept Bromion as a 26  Bloom, Apocalypse, 103; Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947), 239.

3  ONE LAW FOR THE LION AND THE OX IS OPPRESSION: THE EMERGENCE… 

67

rapist, but nevertheless identify the rape itself as an event which leads Oothoon to sexual liberation. In William Blake and the Daughters of Albion (1997), Bruder dismisses such readings. She notes the ‘profound effects’ that are, for Blake, the consequence of such actions: ‘no amount of critical apology can erase the fact that she entirely loses her sexual vision as a result of Bromion’s rape’.27 Theotormon regards Bromion’s rape of Oothoon as a proprietary loss of his own sexual claim on her. Linking her together with Bromion as part of an ‘adulterate pair’ demonstrates that Blake perhaps has in mind, as he does explicitly in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, the New Testament account of Jesus’s deliberate withholding of the penalty due under law from the woman accused of adultery. This was a particularly important story for Blake, to which he was to return (as we will see in Chap. 7) on two subsequent occasions: in one of his water-­ colour paintings of scenes from the Bible (c. 1805), and in The Everlasting Gospel (1818). Indeed, the accusation of Oothoon resonates with the demands for summary justice associated with that biblical story. In the account at John 8:1–11, the Pharisees bring a woman before Jesus, telling him (in the King James translation) that ‘this woman was taken in adultery, in the very act’. They remind him that the Law of Moses commands ‘that such should be stoned’. Jesus’s well-known riposte (‘He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her’) renders her accusers, and the law they represent, powerless. As the Pharisees drift away in confusion, Jesus apparently mindlessly writes in the dusty ground (more on this later) until he finds himself left alone with the woman. ‘Hath no man condemned thee?’, he asks archly, before quietly dismissing her: ‘Neither do I condemn thee: go and sin no more’. Theotormon’s ‘black jealous waters’ frame Oothoon as ‘adulterate’. Like the Pharisees in the New Testament account, he accuses her of a criminal act and effectively demands that she be judged according to law. In doing so, he conforms to what has become the accepted derivation of his name, first observed by S. Foster Damon: a combination of the Greek theo, ‘divine’, and the Hebrew tôrâ, ‘law’.28 His subsequent ‘severe’ smiles, his deafness to her pleas of innocence, confirm his doctrinal imprisonment within ‘religious caves beneath the burning fires / Of lust’ (2:9–10, E46). In the absence of a radical prophetic advocate, Oothoon enacts her own disempowerment of law’s authority. In contrast with the law-bound  Bruder, Daughters of Albion, 78.  Damon, Philosophy, 329.

27 28

68 

M. MAUGER

thinking of Bromion and Theotormon, her words indicate the continuation of the journey of perceptual emergence—characterised by Anca Munteanu as a visionary metamorphosis—on which we saw her embark at the poem’s opening, in which she moves ever further from the approved philosophical frameworks of sensual experience.29 ‘With what sense does the tame pigeon measure out the expanse?’ she asks, wonderingly. ‘With what sense does the bee form cells?’ (3:3–4, E47). Forced by Oothoon’s example to confront the possibility of sensual existence beyond the accepted codes, Theotormon retreats further into his religious cave, a space of self-pity and introspection, his enclosure emphasised by his inability to recognise whether it is day or night. By comparison, Bromion is profoundly unsettled by Oothoon’s words. Finding that his assumed certainties are challenged by the moral and sensual freedom that Oothoon has described, he shakes the cavern ‘with his lamentation’: Thou knowest that the ancient trees seen by thine eyes have fruit; But knowest thou that trees and fruits flourish upon the earth To gratify senses unknown? trees beasts and birds unknown: Ah! are there other wars, beside the wars of sword and fire! And are there other sorrows, beside the sorrows of poverty! And are there other joys, beside the joys of riches and ease? And is there not one law for both the lion and the ox? And is there not eternal fire, and eternal chains? To bind the phantoms of existence from eternal life? (4:13–15, 19–24, E48)

Far from being a self-confident re-assertion of the origins of his power and superiority, as critics such as Fred Hoerner have argued, these are the horrified questions of a violent bully who has found his convictions to be a series of chimeras.30 In his lament, Bromion moves from a creeping realisation of his own sensual confinement to a questioning of the principles at the heart of the world in which he has considered himself ascendant, the ‘one law for the lion and the ox’. It is only in terms of the false hierarchies and abstract frameworks of ‘one law’ that he can justify his rape of 29  Anca Munteanu, “Visionary and Artistic Transformations in Blake’s Visions of the Daughters of Albion,” Journal of European Studies 36 (2006): 64. 30  Fred Hoerner, “Prolific Reflections: Blake’s Contortion of Surveillance in Visions of the Daughters of Albion,” Studies in Romanticism 35 (1996): 119–50.

3  ONE LAW FOR THE LION AND THE OX IS OPPRESSION: THE EMERGENCE… 

69

Oothoon.31 Bromion lacks the courage to leave his cavern, and lacks the insight to determine the answers to his rhetorical questions. As a result, he falls still and silent. Oothoon waits—she ‘waited silent all the day. and all the night’—but there is no further contribution from Bromion (4:25, E48). While Bromion and Theotormon remain sealed within their caverns of darkness and silence, Oothoon (as we have seen) soars above them imaginatively, stripping away the false appearances of marriage, commerce, property, wealth, religion and work, and revealing the forms of coercion, exploitation, poverty, pain and self-denial on which they depend. The freedom of her imaginative vision is nevertheless curtailed by her ongoing physical confinement within a world of ‘hypocrite modesty’ which defines her as ‘a whore indeed’ (6:18, E50). Indeed, some critical perspectives have questioned the degree to which she is straightforwardly a revolutionary figure.32 We see her on plate 4, rising above Theotormon within a wave shaped like a tongue of fire, straining at the chain around her right ankle which keeps her tethered to the ground. Blake experiments with similar metaphorical figurations of enchainment in some of the Songs of Experience, though here their effect is often both physical and imaginative. The ‘mind-forged manacles’ of ‘London’ are well-known, of course (46, E26–27). The chains are so closely woven into the everyday experience of life for London’s crying multitudes that only the visionary walker can ‘hear’ them. Life in the urban landscape is determined by the permitted contours of the ‘charter’d Thames’, and the regulated behaviours of the ‘charter’d street’. Heather Glen observes that the poems of Experience typically ‘progress toward a final disillusion which echoes nothing and leads nowhere’.33 In ‘London’ the mind-forged manacles, in particular, are found by the speaker in ‘every cry’, ‘every voice’ and ‘every ban’; and whilst this is Blake’s only use of the term ‘ban’, its range of meanings as a close synonym for legal regulation (‘curse’, ‘proclamation’, ‘prohibition’) all seem to be in play here (46:6–7, E27). Elsewhere in the Songs of Experience, we might think again of the dismay 31  Ronald A. Duerksen, “The Life of Love: Blake’s Oothoon,” Colby Library Quarterly 13 (1977): 187; Howard, Infernal Poetics, 108. 32  Mellor, “Blake’s Portrayal of Women,” Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly, 16 (1982–83), 148–55; Harriet Kramer Linkin in “Revisioning Blake’s Oothoon”, Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly, 23 (1989–90), 184–94; Vernon E. Lattin, “Blake’s Thel and Oothoon: Sexual Awakening in the Eighteenth Century”, Literary Criterion, 16 (1981), 23. 33  Heather Glen, Vision and Disenchantment: Blake’s Songs and Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 165.

70 

M. MAUGER

of the speaker of ‘The Garden of Love’, with his carefree childhood memories of the colourful flowers and noisy games enjoyed ‘on the green’, who rediscovers (or perhaps reinterprets) the space as a grave-yard in which ‘Priests in black gowns, were walking their rounds, / And binding with briars, my joys & desires’ (46:11–12, E27). The manacles here are mind-­ forged, but they are also the means by which the priests impose moral curbs on human existence, converting the colours and desires of life to the greyness and coldness of death, and actively sponsoring what Oothoon describes as ‘the rewards of continence’ (Visions, 7:8, E50). The Songs of Experience sequence is introduced by two poems describing a dialogue between the Bard ‘who Present, Past, & Future sees’ and the planet Earth. Distraught by the shadow of darkness which has fallen, the Bard desperately tries to seize control of the Earth’s ‘starry pole’ and rotate the planet in reverse, to roll back time and ‘fallen fallen light renew!’. ‘Turn away no more’ he pleads again, ‘Why wilt thou turn away[?]’ (30:2, 10, 16–17, E18). In ‘Earth’s Answer’, the planet is personified as an aged, exhausted woman, ‘her locks cover’d with grey despair’. The joys and blossoms of the spring are hidden by the ‘Selfish father of men / Cruel jealous selfish fear’, terms reminiscent of Oothoon’s lament. Sexual delight is ‘Chain’d in night’ (31:11–14, E18–19). The poem ends with Earth’s cry of anguish: Break this heavy chain, That does freeze my bones around Selfish! Vain, Eternal bane! That free Love with bondage bound. (31:21–25, E19)

In the Songs which follow, commissioned in these terms by Earth, the Bard sings of the links of that ‘heavy chain’: links of oppression (‘London’, ‘The Garden of Love’), jealousy (‘My Pretty Rose-Tree’, ‘The Clod and the Pebble’, ‘A Poison Tree’), control (‘Infant Sorrow’, ‘Nurse’s Song’, ‘The Fly’), exploitation (‘The Chimney-sweeper’, ‘Holy Thursday’), and denial (‘The Sick Rose’, ‘The Angel’, ‘Ah, Sunflower’). In ‘The Human Abstract’, Blake describes in organic terms the emergence of the mind-­forged manacles of ‘London’, as the roots and branches of a parasitic infestation that he terms ‘mystery’ infest ‘the human brain’ (47:16, 24, E27). This is Blake’s first experiment with a complex and compelling emblem of the sinister growth of the systems, structures, and hierarchies that unwittingly

3  ONE LAW FOR THE LION AND THE OX IS OPPRESSION: THE EMERGENCE… 

71

imprison human life. Indeed, we will encounter its later incarnations in most of the subsequent chapters of this book. The Bard of the Songs of Experience lays bare the human vices which have cast the Earth under the ‘darkness dread & drear’ (31:2, E18). By doing so, he hopes to unchain her, and deliver ‘the opening morn, / Image of truth new born’ of which he sings in ‘The Voice of the Ancient Bard’ (a Songs of Innocence poem which Blake later re-located at the conclusion of the combined sequence (54–55, E30–E31)). Nevertheless, the promise of the flight of ‘doubt’ and the departure of the ‘clouds of reason’ seems a barely glimpsed future prophecy of renewal and recovery. In the meantime, unshackling the chain generated through the spread of the ‘One Law’ seems somehow beyond human reach.

The Stony Law Stamped to Dust The final document of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, entitled ‘A Song of Liberty’, points towards the mythic dramas that Blake develops across the two prophetic cycles associated with his residence in Lambeth (the subject of the next chapter). Indeed, two copies of the ‘Song’ survive independently from the rest of the Marriage, suggesting that Blake may have conceived it separately, and decided to bind it with the rest of the Marriage after its initial composition. The text, written in numbered verses that anticipate Blake’s experimentation with biblical form in The Book of Urizen, describes an elemental confrontation in the ‘atlantic sea’ between an aged king ‘with grey brow’d snows and thunderous visages’, and a ‘new born fire’ whose terrific birth is accompanied by troubling prophecies (25, E44). The initial composition of this encounter calls to mind one of Blake’s early experiments with print-making, an image known as ‘The Approach of Doom’ (c. 1787–1788) that was inspired by a drawing sketched by his brother Robert (Fig. 3.2). In Blake’s plate, a group are gathered together—possibly on a cliff-edge—gazing fearfully at an unspecified existential danger approaching in the foggy swirls of etching on the left-hand side. The closest figure, with a long-flowing beard and possibly sightless eyes, seems a prototype for the figure that is to coalesce as Urizen in Blake’s work of the mid-1790s. Whatever the ‘doom’ might be that approaches, one can readily relate this image to the revolutionary fires that threaten Britain in both America (as we will see in the next chapter) and, here, in ‘The Song of Liberty’.

72 

M. MAUGER

Fig. 3.2  William Blake, ‘The Approach of Doom’. (British Museum, Department of Prints and Drawings, London)

Terrified by the portents of apocalypse, and recognising a profound threat to his authority, the song’s king ‘hurl’d the new born wonder thro’ the starry night’, where it ‘shot like the sinking sun into the western sea’ (26, E44). Rather than extinguishing the fire in the western (American) waters, however, the king’s actions seem to make things worse. As the fire of revolution spreads, the king attempts to shore up his rule via the

3  ONE LAW FOR THE LION AND THE OX IS OPPRESSION: THE EMERGENCE… 

73

imposition of a legal code: ‘he promulgates his ten commands, glancing his beamy eyelids over the deep in dark dismay’ (27, E44–45). But even as he does so, the fire re-emerges ‘in his eastern cloud’, surely echoing the transferral of revolutionary energy from America to Europe in 1789. Here, even more alarmingly, the ‘son of fire’ destroys the fabric of monarchical power: Spurning the clouds written with curses, stamps the stony law to dust, loosing the eternal horses from the dens of night, crying Empire is no more! and now the lion & wolf shall cease. (27, E45)

The ‘stony law’ clearly refers to the moral law of Moses, the tablets on which God had written the moral law on Mount Sinai in Exodus 31.18: ‘tables of stone, written with the finger of God’. Robert Rix connects the stamping of the law ‘to dust’ with the biblical account of Josiah’s destruction of the idolatrous statue of Baal in 2 Kings 23.34 Characterising the moral law as a ‘false god’ which has been raised by the state as an object of worship and adherence seems apt. I would nevertheless suggest an additional biblical reference here, by which the anarchy of the unnamed revolutionary power is likened, once again, to the description of Jesus and the woman taken in adultery in John 8. When asked to judge the woman according to the law, Jesus—who has been enjoined to apply the ‘stony law’ of Moses—simply stoops down, and ‘with his finger wrote on the ground, as though he heard them not’. The unverbalised writing in the dusty ground in the New Testament account is a radical act representing the rejection of the law of Moses. In Blake’s imaginative repurposing of this figuration, the revolutionary power becomes an active agent in which the stony law, the universal ‘One Law’ whose imposition can lead only to ‘oppression’, is shattered to dust.

 Rix, Cultures of Radical Christianity, 32.

34

CHAPTER 4

One King, One God, One Law: Building Constitutions in the Lambeth Books

On the title page of the book inscribed indelibly with his name, the ancient figure of Urizen—creator, lawmaker, and architect—squats uncomfortably with arms outstretched (Fig. 4.1). In appearance, he is both wizened and dishevelled, his long white hair mingling with a straggling beard that cascades over his torso. This, together with his loose fitting white gown, is reminiscent in some respects of Renaissance paintings of God-as-patriarch inspired by the ‘Ancient of Days’ description in the Old Testament book of Daniel: ‘the Ancient of days did sit, whose garment was white as snow, and the hair of his head like the pure wool’ (Daniel 7.9). Unlike the visions of Michelangelo, however, or even Blake’s well-known ‘Ancient of Days’ composition in which Urizen defines the expanse of the world on the frontispiece of Europe: a Prophecy, this figure is sat cross-legged on the ground, his eyes hidden, his appearance weary. His throne, unlike the bright flames and scorching fires of the description in Daniel, is constructed from cold stone slabs, lying amidst the dank, dark undergrowth of a bare (possibly diseased) tree whose arching limbs unsettlingly frame the scene. The name ‘Urizen’ is itself a part of that tree, the letters twisted within a mossy tendril emerging from the trunk on the left-hand side, and lost on the right among the drooping and leafless branches. The overwhelming impression created by the image’s symmetry, its enclosure, its palette of yellow, brown, blue and grey that is unusually consistent across all known copies, is of oppressive silence, decay, and immobility.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Mauger, William Blake and the Visionary Law, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37723-5_4

75

76 

M. MAUGER

Fig. 4.1  William Blake, The First Book of Urizen, Copy C, title page. (Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection)

Urizen is nevertheless busy. Closer inspection reveals his right foot emerging from the yellowing beard, a foot which appears to be marking a place in a book which is open on the ground before him. His hands are holding writing implements, and they are moving across the surface of books—or possibly stone tablets like those behind him—which are also

4  ONE KING, ONE GOD, ONE LAW: BUILDING CONSTITUTIONS… 

77

resting on the ground. In common with most surviving copies, Urizen’s eyes in the plate from Copy C (reproduced here) are hidden from our gaze but perhaps contrary to our first impression, he is not asleep.1 They may be closed in intense concentration, or even engaged in scrutiny of the text at his feet. In Copy G by contrast, a product of Blake’s reprinting of many of his 1790s books in 1818, Urizen’s eyes are open towards the reader and yet unseeing. The text of the book itself is illegible to us. In common with many of the known versions of this plate, the pages of Urizen’s book seen here feature black splodges vaguely resolved into letters of an unknown alphabet, although greater detail—suggestive of pictograms or Egyptian hieroglyphs (a script that was well-known to eighteenth-century scholars though it remained largely undeciphered)—is discernible in some copies. David Worrall may be right that Blake depicts here the solidification of revelation ‘into rigid law’.2 If so, that visionary excitement is already lost. Urizen’s activity on this title page is demonstrably that of a scribe or even engraver, simultaneously making two copies of the words in the book he reads. Other potential copies, yet to be begun, are glimpsed beneath those on which he currently works. We might speculate that the stone uprights against which he leans, recognisable (as many scholars have pointed out) both as gravestones and as the tablets bearing the Ten Commandments, are copies already made.3 This plate is the title page of the book which bears his name; but the scene also invites us to ponder what indeed Urizen’s ‘book’ may be, and the nature of his connection with such a material text as subject, as owner, and even as author. If this is The First Book of Urizen (the full rendering of the title on the copies Blake produced in the mid-1790s), then Urizen himself appears to be making the second and third. Moreover, his activity as an engraver of books is, both unexpectedly and somewhat alarmingly, directly aligned with Blake’s own work 1  Morris Eaves, “The Title-Page of The Book of Urizen,” in William Blake: Essays in Honour of Sir Geoffrey Keynes, ed. Morton D. Paley and Michael Phillips (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 29–49. 2  David Worrall, ed., The Urizen Books: The First Book of Urizen, The Book of Ahania, The Book of Los, Blake’s Illuminated Books 6 (London: Tate Gallery Publications, 1995), 25. 3  John Beer, Blake’s Visionary Universe (Manchester: Manchester University Press; New York: Barnes & Noble, 1969), 79; Jon Mee, Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 169; Barr, ‘Prophecy’, 749. Leslie Tannenbaum, by contrast, interprets the open volume as the Book of Judgment (Biblical Tradition in Blake’s Early Prophecies: The Great Code of Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 222).

78 

M. MAUGER

as an engraver of books—a connection, as we will see, that is only heightened when we turn to the text itself.4 The task of writing and copying at which we see Urizen engaged on this titlepage, relates to the broad accounts of his activity in the text which follows; but a closer alignment appears to connect this scene with a distressing series of events in the little-read Book of Ahania, often regarded as the text that is intended to follow Urizen in Blake’s ‘Bible of Hell’. The passage in question offers an account of the appearance and growth of the ‘Tree of Mystery’—a motif that we have encountered already in the Songs of Experience poem ‘The Human Abstract’ (see Chap. 3)—an event associated with Urizen’s formulation of his plans. He sits on a ‘rock / Barren’ and writes ‘in silence his book of iron’, a text identified elsewhere as the blueprint for the act of creation which he anticipates (Ahania, 3:56–57, 64, E86). Initially unperceived by Urizen, this activity of writing has some disturbing consequences: ‘soon shot the pained root / Of Mystery under his heel: / It grew a thick tree’ (3:61–63, E86). As he works, so the bending boughs of the tree reach the ground around him, grow roots, and reproduce, forming an enormous growth that ‘hung over the Immensity’. Based on this description of the tree’s reproduction, Mary Lynn Johnson and John E. Grant have suggested that Blake may have in mind contemporary descriptions of the poisonous ‘Upas Tree of Java’.5 Clearly this representation of poisonous fertility is, in Blake’s hands, an apt metaphor for the spreading of Mystery. Too late, Urizen recognises the danger: Amaz’d started Urizen! when He beheld himself compassed round And high roofed over with trees He arose but the stems stood so thick He with difficulty and great pain Brought his Books, all but the Book Of iron, from the dismal shade (3:68–74, 4:1, E87)

4  John Sutherland, “Blake and Urizen,” in Blake’s Visionary Forms Dramatic, ed. David V.  Erdman and John E.  Grant (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 244–62; Bloom, Apocalypse, 175; Howard, Infernal Poetics, 154. 5  Mary Lynn Johnson and John E. Grant, Blake’s Poetry and Designs (New York: Norton, 1979), 54. See also Andrew M.  Stauffer, “Blake’s Poison Trees,” Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly 35 (2001–02): 36–39; Thompson, Witness Against the Beast, 210–11.

4  ONE KING, ONE GOD, ONE LAW: BUILDING CONSTITUTIONS… 

79

The growth of mystery is unending. Indeed, it ‘still grows over the Void / Enrooting itself all around / An endless labyrinth of woe’ (4:2–4, E87). Later in Ahania it becomes the great tree of the law, the cross of crucifixion (on which Urizen nails the body of his son), and—by extension—the gallows tree of Tyburn. It is clear that the principles that Urizen records in his book actively produce the roots of mystery that come to infest his world. Indeed, the description would suggest that the growth of the Tree of Mystery is somehow an inevitable outcome of the framework which Urizen encodes.6 With this passage in mind, we return to the titlepage of The Book of Urizen with renewed understanding. We notice the roots spreading through the ground from beneath Urizen, and from the book which lies open at his feet. The illumination may depict the reproduction and distribution of Urizenic law (which, I will demonstrate in this chapter, is Urizen’s unending task); but it is just as importantly about the growth of mystery, as yet unperceived by a legislator who has eyes only for his immediate task. The lifeless stone tablets behind Urizen are becoming one with the organic branches and roots of the tree itself: mystery and law bound together. This chapter focuses on the illuminated texts that Blake produced in the mid-1790s, an intense period of composition and design in which he produced two distinct series of original works. The Book of Urizen (1794), The Book of Ahania (1795), and The Book of Los (1795) are often regarded as the books of the ‘Bible of Hell’ promised at the end of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and mimic the chapter-and-verse organisation (and columnar appearance) of the King James Bible. Meanwhile, America: A Prophecy (1793), Europe: A Prophecy (1794), and The Song of Los (1795) form another closely related set of ‘continental’ books, and share some key characters and narratives. Together, scholars have conventionally termed these texts ‘the Lambeth prophecies’ both for their association with the period of Blake’s residence at Hercules Road in Lambeth and also, perhaps more importantly, for the way he designs each titlepage to highlight ‘Lambeth’ as the place of inspiration and production. It is in these books that Blake first fully develops his mythological pantheon, built around a re-imagining of the biblical account of creation in which the unveiling of ‘law’ is understood as central both to the human condition, and to the emergence of the nations of the world. It is here, too, that Blake perfects 6  Hatsuko Niimi, “The Book of Ahania: A Metatext,” Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly 34 (2000–2001): 49–50; Priestman, Romantic Atheism, 108.

80 

M. MAUGER

his prophetic mode. Two of these books have the words ‘a prophecy’ incorporated as part of their titles, and Los, for whom another two of the books are named, is described consistently as ‘the Eternal Prophet’. In his nineteenth-century epics, Blake is later to develop even further his notion of prophetic writing. It is nevertheless clear that ‘prophecy’ in these 1790s texts affords both a mode of writing (elliptical, sometimes obscure, often challenging) encountered in some books of the Old Testament, and a mode of ‘seeing’ that is uninhibited by the tyrannies of perception or meaning. Throughout the Lambeth books, Blake adopts the prophetic mode as a vehicle for social commentary which is rooted in an imagined mythic ‘pre-history’ of the human world. The core narrative of the Lambeth prophecies describes a vast conflict between the arch-legislator Urizen, the demon-rebel Orc (who seeks to ‘stamp’ the law ‘to dust’), and the liberty-seeking Los who (to some extent) seems to mediate between the two, striving to establish constitutional security and freedom. Indeed, the world which comes into being is produced through their confrontations and collaborations, rather than through a straightforward enactment of Urizen’s uncorrupted design. The first section of this chapter considers The Book of Urizen in detail as a text which presents the philosophical, legal, and moral framework for Urizen’s primeval act of creation, and its implications for the human world that it calls into being. It focuses on Urizen’s declaration of the constitutional dimensions of that world in the form of ‘One King, one God, one Law’, and considers Blake’s unstable account of its painful growth. In the second section, I turn to the ‘continental’ cycle of prophetic books, demonstrating how Blake engages specifically with the rights-based legal discourse associated with the American and French revolutions, by which individual liberties were to be guaranteed via a legal framework established through rational principle rather than historical experience. The chapter argues that whilst Blake finds these proposals appealing, even reassuring, he is also uncertain about the degree to which they genuinely represent a new departure for human society. Is there a danger that the revolutionary constitutionalism of Thomas Paine, rooted in a universal set of ‘rights of man’, is simply a piece of attractive idealism that will ultimately collapse into laws of imprisonment and containment once again? What if the new constitutionalism is simply the old morality lurking behind a new language of rights and freedoms? What will prevent such codification collapsing into a set of laws indistinguishable from those that they had replaced, only even more difficult to break down as they become enmeshed ever more tightly within the roots and branches of the Tree of Mystery?

4  ONE KING, ONE GOD, ONE LAW: BUILDING CONSTITUTIONS… 

81

The Constitution of Mind and Body Urizen is introduced at the opening of his book as nothing more than a whispered rumour. He is a banished and half-forgotten rebel, a ‘shadow of horror’, ‘unknown and unprolific’. Urizen has been exiled to a ‘place in the north’ by the barely resolved guardians of universal energy, the ‘Eternals’, who do their best to ignore him. In a manner obviously reminiscent of Satan at the opening of Paradise Lost, Urizen has taken advantage of the seclusion of his prison. It is not only ‘closed’, but also ‘all-repelling’, enforcing its own remoteness (3:1–3, E70). The awakening anxiety of the Eternals in the first lines of the text arises from the unknowable threat that Urizen’s realm represents. Rather than an ‘eternity’, it has acquired a scientific definition as a ‘void’ somehow pregnant with potentiality. ‘What Demon / Hath form’d this abominable void / This soul-­ shuddring vacuum?’ the Eternals ask, their fear and confusion profound. The answer is obvious, but they fear to name it: ‘Some said / It is Urizen’. But Urizen continues to bide his time. He is an ‘abstracted / Brooding secret’, a ‘dark Power’. The half-glimpses that we can discern within this void are suggestive of Urizen’s ‘enormous labour’. ‘Times on times he divided & measur’d / Space by space’, an activity both ‘silent’ and ‘unseen’ (3:4–10, E70). He prepares ‘ten thousands of thunders’, a vast army ranked ‘in gloom’d array’. The sense of an accumulation of stored energy is palpable, as the armaments and munitions of Urizenic warfare are massed: ‘the rolling of wheels / As of swelling seas, sound in his clouds / In his hills of stor’d snows, in his mountains / Of hail & ice’ (3:27–33, E71). The shrill sound of a trumpet at the foot of the plate announces that the dam is about to burst. This is exactly what happens in many of the surviving copies of Urizen. But in contrast to a celestial ‘big bang’ of twentieth-century cosmology, the trumpet call heralds an abrupt collapse. Urizen’s concepts of fixity and finitude rupture Eternity. For Kir Kuiken, drawing on the work of Gilles Deleuze, Eternity is a ‘plane of immanence’ which ‘Urizen irrevocably transforms in his first creative act by dividing Eternity from itself and by producing a transcendence that establishes something distinct from it’.7 Hitherto without limit, the unformed energies of are violently drawn into substance and form within the emptiness of Urizen’s void. In a sentence 7  Kir Kuiken, Shared Sovereignties: Toward a New Political Romanticism (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 25.

82 

M. MAUGER

which begins at the end of this opening plate and continues onto the next (respectively plates 3 and 5 in David Erdman’s schematic), the ‘myriads of Eternity / In living creations appear’d / In the flames of eternal fury’ (3:44, E71; 5:1–2, E72). Eternity splits apart, consumed in ‘roaring fires … in whirlwinds and cataracts of blood’ and inundated by an ‘ocean of wideness unfathomable’. No longer a cold and empty void, Urizen’s world is described first as ‘like a womb’, and later ‘like a human heart strugling & beating’ (5:11–13, 29, 36, E73). Above this calamitous description of the birth of the human world, the plate’s illumination depicts Urizen presiding over the scene, his vast book held wide open (Fig. 4.2). In some copies, his eyes gaze with confidence and self-­assurance at the viewer. The opening of the book and the exposure of the words it contains initiate the creative apocalypse that the plate describes but the markings on its pages are as meaningless to us as those of the titlepage, comprising vague indiscernible shapes. This textual mystery within the narrative frame proves to be merely the shadow of a broader meta-textual mystery. Tantalizingly, three of the documented copies of Urizen include a plate (Erdman’s plate 4) that is absent in the others, a plate that gives much more detail about both the nature of Urizen’s books and the shadowy processes at work here. This errant plate was clearly a part of Blake’s original conception for the text. Most crucially, it contains the heading ‘Chap: III’ which is confusingly missing from the other copies. Indeed, the numbering of the ‘verses’ is only continuous when it is included. Inter-leaved between plates 3 and 5 discussed above, the additional plate splits the cross-over sentence ‘the myriads of Eternity / In living creations appear’d’. In this alternative arrangement, the trumpet call is a signal for silent attention: ‘the myriads of Eternity / Muster around the bleak desarts’ (3:44, 4:1, E71). Into the silence the voice of Urizen-the-Creator finds expression. The words which follow offer a rare insight into Urizenic theory, before it is dramatically (and catastrophically) put into practice. The speech begins with the declaration of an overarching goal: ‘I have sought for a joy without pain / For a solid without fluctuation’ (4:10–11, E71). Urizen, taken on his own terms, thus seems very different from the malevolent ‘Demon’ described by the Eternals. His starting point is the establishment of a civilised idyll, a place of happiness and stability. The limitless energies of Eternity, according to Urizen, produce uncertainty, pain, and unfettered passions (the ‘unquenchable burnings’). Urizen casts himself as a Promethean figure, taming the elements, condensing the fire, the ‘winds merciless’ and the ‘vast waves’

4  ONE KING, ONE GOD, ONE LAW: BUILDING CONSTITUTIONS… 

83

Fig. 4.2  William Blake, The First Book of Urizen, Copy C, Plate 5. (Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection)

84 

M. MAUGER

into a ‘wide world of solid obstruction’. Only here within the corpus of the Lambeth prophecies, on this elusive plate of Blake’s metal book, do we learn what Urizen has been writing: ‘Here alone I in books formd of metals / Have written the secrets of wisdom / The secrets of dark contemplation’ (4:23–26, E72). The voice continues as he prepares to open the book: 7. Lo! I unfold my darkness: and on This rock, place with strong hand the Book Of eternal brass, written in my solitude. 8. Laws of peace, of love, of unity: Of pity, compassion, forgiveness. Let each chuse one habitation: His ancient infinite mansion: One command, one joy, one desire, One curse, one weight, one measure One King, one God, one Law. (4:31–40, E72)

Urizen’s books are the product of his ‘solitude’, the studied activity of his banishment. In them, he has developed the principles by which he imagines that he can establish a world of ‘joy without pain’. Creation is an act of law-making. Urizen’s ‘laws of peace, of love, of unity’ offer the promise of stability rooted in compassion. The performative placement of the open book on the rock, reminiscent of Paine’s imagined coronation of the legal charter as ‘king of America’ in Common Sense (see Chap. 2), declares its centrality to the events which follow. Moreover, we learn that this is a book of laws—indeed, it is the ‘one Law’, the judicial power that sits alongside ‘King’ and ‘God’ in Urizen’s tripartite vision for his state’s authority. It is, quite deliberately, a constitutional document, in Kuiken’s terms ‘a point at which all laws merge toward a single unified ground of authority’.8 For Mark Barr, this is a ‘constitution setting out the organization of the Eternal society that precludes political rebellion or prophetic inspiration’.9 Whilst it seems to me that Blake emphasises the radicalism of Urizen’s position as an alternative to the realm of the Eternals, rather than an attempt to formalise that domain, Barr’s argument that the promulgation of Urizen’s constitution is directed 8 9

 Kuiken, Shared Sovereignties, 27.  Barr, “Prophecy,” 749.

4  ONE KING, ONE GOD, ONE LAW: BUILDING CONSTITUTIONS… 

85

at the denial of the possibility of its own subsequent contradiction is important. Blake clearly has Enlightenment revolutionary movements in view. Like the philosophers who drafted the new constitutions in America and France, Urizen hopes to preserve the ideal vision of his world by enshrining its core principles in written law. The repeated singularities of the speech’s conclusion are particularly striking. The recurrent insistence of ‘one’ suggests an identity between the abstract components. As we have seen in Chap. 3, Blake’s insistence that ‘One Law for the Lion & Ox is Oppression’ rings through Tiriel, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and Visions of the Daughters of Albion. Not only can all commands be reduced to ‘one command’, all joys reduced to ‘one joy’, and all desires reduced to ‘one desire’; somehow the very notions of ‘command’, ‘joy’, and ‘desire’ begin to collapse into a single imperative. Urizen imagines that all desires and joys can be reduced, distilled, and made ‘one’ with the command of the state, that a singular regulative framework of curse/measure/weight can be established, under the jurisdiction of the three-in-one trinity of God/King/Law. His commitment to these principles as underpinning his constitutional settlement recall Blackstone’s celebration of the English constitution’s careful balance of divinity, monarchy, and legal principle. As we will see in Chap. 5, this is not the only moment where Urizen’s actions seem strangely aligned with the paradigms of Commentaries. There is, in this argument, an echo of Northrop Frye’s concept of the ‘Orc cycle’, the well-known claim that Blake’s Lambeth books demonstrate how today’s revolutionaries become tomorrow’s oppressors.10 Perhaps by aligning Urizen’s constitutional activity with contemporary revolutionary movements, Blake purposefully deploys an anachronism intended to evidence this universal tendency. Urizen’s moment of radicalism becomes orthodoxy through the machinery of legal and constitutional documentation. Blake may indeed have in mind the national legacy of the revolutionary movements of the seventeenth century. Martin Loughlin has described how Blackstone’s Commentaries participated in the wider intellectual and political affirmation of Parliament’s role in the constitutional settlement of the late-seventeenth century, effectively erasing the ‘constituent power’ of the people in favour of a notion of parliamentary

 Frye, Fearful Symmetry, 210.

10

86 

M. MAUGER

sovereignty.11 Irrespective of whether Blake specifically had Blackstone in mind in his characterisation of Urizen, the effect of the ‘one law’ appears to be similar: the benevolent concretising of a system of order and certainty that Urizen genuinely believes to be preferable to any alternative. We can only speculate on Blake’s reasons for including this compelling account of Urizen’s grand design in only certain copies of the Book of Urizen (three of the seven reproduced as a part of the Blake Archive website). Few of the other variations in this, Blake’s most unstable text, are quite as disruptive as the removal of this plate, and it is hard to disagree with Helen B. Ellis that its deletion ‘leaves serious gaps’ in the narrative, providing as it does the clearest statement of Urizen’s motive, and identifying his book unambiguously as a legal text.12 It suggests some uncertainty for Blake about how stridently he wanted to use Urizen as a satirical vehicle for a lawmaker God. In those copies in which the plate is omitted, the origin of law and regulation in the human world is shrouded in mystery. Urizen is glimpsed indistinctly as a distant divine creator. His secretive principles of creation have coalesced into an apparently ‘natural law’, a moral framework which reflects the divine form of humanity, and from which the legislative systems of the European states have derived. When the plate is included, the poem presents Urizen—with some sympathy, we should note—as an Enlightenment constitutionalist, carefully constructing a set of foundational documents for human society that challenge the status quo of the aptly named ‘Eternity’. As W. J. T. Mitchell observes, he is a ‘revolutionary, utopian reformer who bring new laws, new philosophies, and a new religion of reason’.13 In these copies, Blake satirically represents the emergence of the ‘natural law’ of God as a moment of 11   Martin Loughlin, “Constituent Power Subverted: From English Constitutional Argument to British Constitutional Practice,” in The Paradox of Constitutionalism: Constituent Power and Constitutional Form, ed. Martin Loughlin and Neil Walker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 43–45. See also Georgina Green, The Majesty of the People: Popular Sovereignty and the Role of the Writer in the 1790s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 24–27. 12  Helen B.  Ellis, “Added and Omitted Plates in The Book of Urizen,” Colby Library Quarterly 23 (1987): 105. A useful checklist of the plate ordering observed in the surviving copies can be found in Jerome J. McGann, “The Idea of an Indeterminate Text: Blake’s Bible of Hell and Dr. Alexander Geddes,” Studies in Romanticism 25 (1986): 307. 13  W. J. T. Mitchell, “Visible Language: Blake’s Wond’rous Art of Writing,” in Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism, ed. by Morris Eaves and Michael Fischer (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), 58. See also Andrew Cooper, “Freedom from Blake’s Book of Urizen,” Studies in Romanticism 48 (2009): 196–97.

4  ONE KING, ONE GOD, ONE LAW: BUILDING CONSTITUTIONS… 

87

consolidation, of positive law-making, encoding the ‘secrets of wisdom’. For Blackstone, as we have seen, the processes of judicial precedent applied within the customary frameworks of the common law rotate around core principles that are divine in origin, an articulation of God’s creation. In Blake’s re-mything of that process, this unseen ur-text comprises the tenets of Urizen’s abstract ‘one law’.14 These differing constructions of the book’s narrative are not contradictory, but it is clear that Blake—when he chooses to insert these passages— feels that it is important for his reader to recognise the humanity at the heart of the impulses that lead Urizen to the legal frameworks that he distils in his writing: the desperate and very human yearning for a ‘joy without pain’. For all that Blake is sympathetic to Urizen, and perhaps even identifies with him to some extent through their shared creation of metal books, it is also clear that we are to regard the world that emerges as a tragic failure. Again, it is the additional plate that offers the clearest explanation: a flawed approach to constitutional delineation which paradoxically produces pain at the cost of joy. As Urizen’s declaration of his new world order ends part way down the second column of the inter-­ leaved plate, verses forming the first part of ‘Chap: III’ of the text appear. Urizen’s hand is seen ‘On the rock of eternity unclasping / The Book of brass’ (4:43–44, E72). With the missing plate in place, it is the opening of the book rather than the trumpet call that initiates the drama of creation. The words are declared, and the vision they encode enacted. The primacy of Urizen’s text, held high over the birth pangs of the human world on the plate which follows, is thus confirmed. The vast and terrible creative energies released through the collapse of Eternity into Urizen’s void are the actualisation of the principles coded within the book. Particularly revealing are the lines which articulate the movement onto plate 5. They have the effect of providing a new grammatical subject for the sentence which otherwise begins at the end of plate 3, indicated in italics below: Rage, fury, intense indignation In cataracts of fire blood & gall In whirlwinds of sulphurous smoke: And enormous forms of energy: All the seven deadly sins of the soul In living creations appear’d In the flames of eternal fury (4:45–49, 5:1–2, E72, emphasis added)  Cooper, “Freedom,” 194–95.

14

88 

M. MAUGER

The opening of the book, to be clear, immediately results in the manifestation of the ‘seven deadly sins of the soul’, the cardinal vices of orthodox church teaching standardised in the sixth century by Pope Gregory, forming a core component of mediaeval Christian writing. The reader needs only to refer to Urizen’s earlier account of his method to understand their sudden appearance. He claims to have distilled within the Book of Brass the ‘secrets of wisdom / The secrets of dark contemplation’ through his consideration of the Seven Deadly Sins, the ‘terrible monsters Sin-bred: / Which the bosoms of all inhabit’ (4:26–29, E72). The methodology sounds reasonable: by focusing on human failings, Urizen seeks perhaps to legislate against them. Unnervingly, however, in the act of naming the seven deadly sins within the words of the Book of Brass, Urizen effectively enshrines them at the heart of his new world order. Urizen’s laws, by legislating against the ultimate crimes, have ironically brought them into existence. Jon Mee has suggested that Blake may be acknowledging a well-known argument within radical circles of the 1790s that the law was ‘the author of the crimes it punished’. Mee cites as an example Joseph Gerrald’s A Convention the Only Means of Saving Us from Ruin, which argues that by ‘setting snares’ designed to trap the people, ‘Governments, like the author of evil, first make the criminal and then punish the crime’.15 Blake was to return to this formulation in his nineteenth-­century epics. The epistemological limits of Urizen’s world are set in place by the delineated frameworks of the Book of Brass, definitions of behaviour and conduct given form through the tangible horror of the seven deadly sins. In terror and dismay, Urizen establishes physical boundaries for his creation in an attempt to establish a place of safety and shelter. Increasingly, it takes on the characteristics of a vast human body: the flames are quenched by ‘thousands of rivers in veins / Of blood’. With physical boundary emerges a sense of measurability. From within, this created finite world exists on a scale that could not hitherto be conceived: quite simply, it is immense. From the perspective of Eternity, however, ‘the vast world of Urizen’ is diminished to a troubling aberration, ‘a black globe’. The metaphor of an ‘event horizon’—a term borrowed from the physics of general relativity—seems helpful here. The event horizon is the boundary or ‘shell’ which contains the events of a defined region, the limit of sensation and causation, ‘a point of no return at which something is not perceptible or 15  Mee, Dangerous Enthusiasm, 178. See also Tannenbaum, “Transformations of Michelangelo in William Blake’s The Book of Urizen,” Colby Library Quarterly 16 (1980): 42.

4  ONE KING, ONE GOD, ONE LAW: BUILDING CONSTITUTIONS… 

89

knowable’ (OED). The principles of constitutional order and definition that have given rise to Urizen’s world have no basis for comprehension or observation from the perspective of Eternity. From Eternity, the world appears as a blankness. Within its own observational frameworks, within its event horizon, things appear rather differently: Urizen’s world is ‘like a human heart struggling and beating’ (5:30–37, E73). And this space— finite, law-bound, full of anguish, fear, and pain—is nevertheless a profoundly human space, a vast life-giving system, a heart of blood and feeling which beats against the endless stasis of Eternity, a womb within which humanity might be sustained and nurtured. Eternity experiences the emergence of Urizen’s universe as an unfathomable catastrophe, and it is consistently described as a ‘separation’. Just as humanity is separated from Eternity within the ‘black globe’, so Urizen himself becomes separated. Without introduction or fanfare, as if he had been there all the time, a new character emerges: ‘Los round the dark globe of Urizen / Kept watch’ (5:38–39, E73). As we learn on the plate which follows, Los has become separate from Urizen through the agency of his creation, a humanised, autonomous, finite reconception. That which is named ‘Urizen’—the age-worn creator, the philosopher, the codifier— is torn apart and ‘laid in stony sleep’. Los, at least initially, is the entity that is left behind. He is youthful where Urizen is aged, he is energetic where Urizen is dormant, he embodies action, production, and imagination where Urizen embodies thought and philosophy. Los is the ‘Eternal Prophet’. As we come to recognise, however, there are also many ways in which Los is a fundamental constituent of the creative impulses that we have understood as ‘Urizenic’ in the first two chapters of the prophecy. With the Urizen part of him now separated and sealed within the ‘black globe’, Los finds himself in the most frightening of situations—as Barr has argued, he has been ‘literally deprived of reason’.16 With Urizen he has developed an epistemology based on the concept of constitutionalism, frameworks for existence with established principles of order, finitude, hierarchy, and limit. The opening of the Book of Brass has brought about the logical expression of those principles, but Los is left trapped outside of the ‘black globe’.17 From this perspective, it is Eternity itself that terrifies Los, ‘a formless unmeasurable death’ (7:9, E74).

 Barr, “Prophecy,” 747. See also Youngquist, Madness and Blake’s Myth, 92–93.  Barr, “Prophecy,” 748.

16 17

90 

M. MAUGER

Rather than enjoying a prophetic visionary freedom, Los—in The Book of Urizen at least—is locked within the legal parameters that Urizen has set in place. His constitutional mind-set leads to a dependence on form and measurability. Terrified by their absence, Los longs for ‘confinement’, for a legal definition of boundaries. And he produces the paraphernalia of that confinement through an activity that is startlingly straightforward: by forging chains. Los’s actions are, in Bloom’s terms, born out of the hope ‘of somehow organising a chaos’.18 For all that they are directed towards limiting the damage created through the unveiling of the One Law, they are nevertheless necessarily about regulation, containment, and definition. Unable to remain inactive any longer, ‘Los formed nets & gins / And threw the nets round about’ (8:7–8, E74): The Eternal Prophet heavd the dark bellows, And turn’d restless the tongs; and the hammer Incessant beat; forging chains new & new Numb’ring with links. hours, days & years … Los beat on his fetters of iron; And heated his furnaces & pour’d Iron sodor [i.e. solder] and sodor of brass (10:15–18, 28–30, E75)

It is no surprise, of course, to discover that he too is a metal worker. The iron and brass that constitute Urizen’s books now form the materials from which Los forges his chains, organising time and space into measurable units, binding the energy of creation into rational form.19 For Kuiken, Los’s actions confer physical form on Urizen’s abstractions.20 As the forging of the chain continues across seven creative ages of ‘dismal woe’, so increasing definition accrues upon the human form that has emerged in Urizen’s world: a skeleton, a system of nerves connected to a brain, the emergence of fixed sensory organs by which experience can be mediated, packaged, interpreted, and regulated. As the process ends, we see that Los has brought himself within the event horizon of the human world: ‘now his eternal life / Like a dream was obliterated /…/ The Eternal Prophet & Urizen clos’d’ (13:33–34, 40, E77). In the single surviving copy of The  Bloom, Apocalypse, 169–70; Howard, Infernal Poetics, 165.  Dennis Welch, “Blake and the Web of Interest and Sensibility,” South Atlantic Review 71 (2006): 49–50. 20  Kuiken, Shared Sovereignties, 33. 18 19

4  ONE KING, ONE GOD, ONE LAW: BUILDING CONSTITUTIONS… 

91

Book of Los, another successor to The Book of Urizen, this process is described with greater clarity as a deliberate shaping of Urizen’s body as the prototype man. As Los works at his furnaces, forging the chain that binds Urizen, an ‘immense Fibrous form’ emerges which Los condenses into a glowing mass of melted metals, a ‘immense Orb’ which Los by turns heats, hammers upon his anvil, and quenches in water (Book of Los, 5:1, 34, E93–94). This ‘glowing mass’ he then binds to ‘the vast Spine of Urizen’, until a ‘Form’ is completed, ‘a Human Illusion / In darkness and deep clouds involved’ (5:42, 46, 55–57, E93–94). Los’s own metal work is clearly related to the Urizenic creation of the first two chapters. Whereas Urizen coded laws and principles within his metal books, Los has shaped in his furnaces and on his anvil the limits of the new human form. Los’s corporeal constitutionalism is the physical actualisation of Urizen’s moral constitutionalism. The foundational principles of the human world might be defined in the triumvirate structure of ‘One King, One God, One Law’ that Urizen has distilled, but it is somehow Los’s actions that make this structure seem inevitable or inescapable, mapped onto the contours of the human form itself. Later in The Book of Urizen, Urizen himself stirs into wakefulness—animated by the troubling cries of a child, Orc—having laid in ‘stony sleep’ since the sixth plate. In America (as we will see), Orc grows into a fiery warlike figure of rebellion. Here, he remains bound by the Chain of Jealousy to a mountain-top, a restraint forged by his father (Los) in what seems to be a barely understood attempt to contain an existential threat. Urizen sets about creating the instruments of measurement and enclosure that he will need to explore this law-built world: a ‘dividing rule’, a set of balances, a ‘brazen quadrant’, and ‘golden compasses’ (20:35–39, E80–81). He expects, perhaps, to find an actualisation of the creation that he had planned so carefully in the opening of his book. If so, then the world that he uncovers on his journey is a bitter and profound disappointment, a realm of ‘vast enormities / Frightning; faithless; fawning / Portions of life’. His ‘eternal creations’ have taken form as ‘sons & daughters of sorrow’ (23:2–4, 9–10, E81). It is a world of lamentation, of ‘howling’: 4. He in darkness clos’d, view’d all his race And his soul sicken’d! he curs’d Both sons & daughters; for he saw That no flesh nor spirit could keep His iron laws one moment,

92 

M. MAUGER

5. For he saw that life liv’d upon death The Ox in the slaughter house moans The Dog at the wintry door And he wept. (23:22–25:3, E81–82)

The great ambition to establish a ‘joy without pain’ has ended in failure. The ‘solid without fluctuation’ produced by the ‘One Law’ set out in the Book of Brass is a bleak, terrifying landscape, a living death. Its principles, which were to determine human behaviour (its ‘mores’ and ‘manners’ to use Montesquieu’s terms), are incompatible with ‘flesh’ and ‘spirit’. In utter dismay, Urizen wanders through the towns and cities of the human world, unwittingly weaving the means of the absolute indoctrination of his moral code, stretching out as a web over the cities of his world: ‘So twisted the cords, & so knotted / The meshes: twisted like to the human brain’. The work is finally completed, ‘And all calld it, The Net of Religion’ (25:22, E82).21 The effect is immediate; ‘the Inhabitants of those Cities: / Felt their Nerves change into Marrow’, and perception becomes contracted within the Philosophy of the Five Senses (25:23–24, E82). The peoples of the world ‘shrink together’ under the Net; they ‘form’d laws of prudence, and call’d them / The eternal laws of God’, establishing the hegemony by which Urizenic authority is assured through the weaving together of moral law and religion (28:6–7, E83). Urizen’s constitutional blueprint for a new ‘human’ order is thus transformed into religious moral principles, laws of ‘prudence’ (literally, the wisdom to see what is virtuous). As the legal code becomes enmeshed with the contours of the human brain, so the limits of the human body and mind are confirmed. In The Book of Urizen, The Book of Ahania, and The Book of Los, the mythology that Blake has introduced in The Book of Thel, Visions of the Daughters of Albion and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell develops into a cosmology, an account of the development of a human world called into being through an act of legal definition. The work of Urizen and Los in this primordial narrative is focussed on providing definition, creating order, establishing principles, fashioning and protecting the human form. These forms, orders, definitions, and principles together comprise a human constitution of body and mind, a constitution established in legal theoretical terms by Urizen in his books of metals, and made tangible as a physical, 21  Kay Parkhurst Easson and Roger R. Easson, The Book of Urizen (London: Thames and Hudson, 1979), 79; Mee, Dangerous Enthusiasm, 187–88.

4  ONE KING, ONE GOD, ONE LAW: BUILDING CONSTITUTIONS… 

93

emotional, and spiritual existence by Los. The prophetic vision of this series is thus the establishment of a pre-history, a creation story in which for the first (but certainly not the only) time in his career Blake, like Milton before him, attempts to understand the shortcomings and disappointments of the present age through a poetic investigation of the start of time itself.

Urizen Gives His Laws to the Nations The chronology of the ‘continental’ prophecies arguably begins in Africa, the first of the two chapters of the ‘song of Los, the Eternal Prophet’. Its opening words appear beneath an emblem of a vivid red serpent winding its way through the giant letters comprising ‘Africa’, a name so densely woven among branches and foliage that it goes almost unnoticed by the reader: Adam stood in the garden of Eden: And Noah on the mountains of Ararat; They saw Urizen give his Laws to the Nations By the hands of the children of Los. (Song of Los, 3:6–9, E67)

The references to the book of Genesis in the first two lines are unusual in their straightforward alignment of Blake’s cosmology with Old Testament scripture. Adam and Noah, enlisted as spectators upon Urizen’s foundation of human legislative frameworks, gaze wordlessly from their biblical arenas: the garden of Eden from which Adam and Eve are expelled after gaining the knowledge of good and evil, and the mountain-top on which the Ark runs aground as the waters of the flood recede. Both acknowledge elemental stories of divine wrath, and of subsequent human renewal. They also underscore the status of the song which follows as part of the foundation story of humanity: the distribution of Urizen’s laws among the nations of the world through the agency of Los’s children. Blake’s continued insistence on the establishment of humanity as some kind of antagonistic joint-enterprise between Urizen and Los acknowledges their former unified state in an Eternity before the establishment of limit, measurement, and law. The specification of ‘heart-formed Africa’ as the location of the Song’s performance seems to spring from Blake’s awareness of the continent’s cartographic outline. In its birth pangs in the third chapter of The Book of Urizen, the ‘black globe’ of the human world is seen ‘like a

94 

M. MAUGER

human heart strugling & beating’; so it is perhaps entirely fitting that within the framework of his cosmology Blake might regard Africa as having a deep-rooted connection with human origin. The remaining lines of the plate trace the promulgation of Urizen’s law among the peoples of the world, with an acknowledgement of the biblical parallel in the ‘dark delusions’ of the divine law received by Moses on Mount Sinai. In each context, we see that law received and distributed under a different name as a legal and religious code that becomes (to echo John Davies’s seventeenth-century account of the common law discussed in Chap. 2) ‘connatural’ to each nation: Rintrah gave Abstract Philosophy to Brama in the East: … To Trismegistus. Palamabron gave an abstract Law: To Pythagoras Socrates & Plato. … Jesus … recievd A Gospel from wretched Theotormon. … Antamon call’d up Leutha from her valleys of delight: And to Mahomet a loose Bible gave. But in the North, to Odin, Sotha gave a Code of War (3:11–30, E67)

Saree Makdisi focusses on this passage as an example of Blake’s resistance to the Orientalist worldview associated with the political and religious establishment. Eastern cultures, Makdisi points out, are not set apart for particular disdain here. Rather than being an accusation of sexual licentiousness as some have argued, the reference to the Qur’an as a ‘loose Bible’ is, for Makdisi, an acknowledgment that it is an energetic text ‘open to interpretation’ rather than one which is ‘fixed’ in meaning.22 Blake has in mind here a global transformation, an account of epistemological, political, and sociological origin which invokes all nations. Again, the narrative has a universal resonance as a part of the story of humanity itself. In the desiccated lines of The Song of Los, however, the chains of imprisonment 22  Makdisi, “Blake and the Ontology of Empire,” 12–26; Angus Whitehead, “‘A Wise Tale of the Mahometans’: Blake and Islam, 1819–26,” in Blake and Conflict, ed. Sarah Haggarty and Jon Mee (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009), 27–28. Makdisi makes specific reference to Edward Larrissy’s arguments about the Song of Los in “Blake’s Orient,” Romanticism 11 (2005): 1–13.

4  ONE KING, ONE GOD, ONE LAW: BUILDING CONSTITUTIONS… 

95

are soon recognised. With striking keenness, applying an insight that recalls Jeremy Bentham’s contemporaneous conception of the panopticon in the way that it discerns the complicity of the institutions of state in limiting individual physical and imaginative freedom, Blake recognises the cultural agents by which these legalised frameworks are imposed within each nation: ‘these were the Churches: Hospitals: Castles: Palaces: / Like nets & gins & traps to catch the joys of Eternity’ (4:1–2, E67).23 What seems clear, then, is that the ‘Africa’ section of The Song of Los offers a sweeping global history charting how ‘the terrible race of Los & Enitharmon gave / Laws & Religions to the sons of Har’.24 Moreover, the narrative demonstrates how these structured frameworks distributed among the nations of the world give rise in turn to a universal ideology of empiricism, completing a ‘Philosophy of Five Senses’ that Urizen passes ‘into the hands of Newton & Locke’ (4:12–16, E68). The emergence of this Lockean worldview is the ultimate prison for Blake, as we have seen in The Book of Thel and Visions of the Daughters of Albion. It constitutes a codified framework within which perception is limited to the operation of the five sensory organs, energy is curtailed, and the imagination denied. Blake’s argument in The Song of Los, however, is unequivocal: the Philosophy of the Five Senses is predicated on Urizen’s ‘Laws’, and is the logical consequence of their distribution. In America: A Prophecy, his Atlantic dramatization of the events of the American Revolution, Blake anchors his cosmology of the human world to an historical event that would have been in the recent living memory of his intended readers. The effect is startling, in part because this is so unusual in Blake’s corpus. Rather than being aligned obliquely with details from Old Testament prophecy or classical mythology, the words and actions of Urizen, Los, and the rebel Orc are mapped onto those of Thomas Paine, George Washington, the governors of the American colonies, the military forces seeking to preserve British authority, and those of the

23  David W. Lindsay, “The Song of Los: An Interpretation of the Text”, Forum for Modern Language Studies 13 (1977): 1–5. Jeremy Bentham, Management of the Poor; or, a Plan containing the Principle and Construction of an Establishment, in which Persons of Any Description are to be Kept under Inspection (Dublin: James Moore, 1796). 24  Michael Ferber, “The Finite Revolutions of Europe,” in Blake, Politics, and History, ed. Jackie DiSalvo, G. A. Rosso, and Christopher Z. Hobson (New York: Garland, 1998), 212; Erdman, “The Symmetries of The Song of Los,” Studies in Romanticism 16 (1977): 179; Stephen C. Behrendt, Reading William Blake (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), 110–11.

96 

M. MAUGER

revolutionaries seeking its overthrow.25 On the opening plate, containing the poem’s mysterious ‘Preludium’, an adolescent Orc is seen chained to a rock. This is broadly the scenario associated with his infancy, as described in the Book of Urizen. The text describes how Orc bursts free from his chains in an act of fierce sexual and imaginative awakening, an analogy for the eruption of revolutionary violence associated with the American Revolutionary War. These are the chains forged by Los, we must remember, whose visionary potential was trapped within the mind-set of the One Law that makes the structures of the human world seem inevitable. The breaking of the chains, then, symbolises a breaching of the assumed juridical order, a moment of constitutional crisis in which the potential for radical re-formulation of those governing frameworks becomes imaginable. In the poem’s final plates, the revolutionary armies energised by the rise of Orc spread across the Atlantic and threaten the ancient kingdoms of England (referred to by Blake using its poetic name, ‘Albion’) and the other European countries. The British forces, represented by a Urizenic tyrant named ‘Albion’s Angel’, have lost America. The penultimate plate heralds the arrival of the revolutionary fires in Albion itself, brought by ‘the fierce Americans rushing together in the night’ (America, 15:12, E57). But the Angel of Albion has one final card left to play, as the regime’s patriarch makes a direct intervention to preserve the order of his realm: Urizen ‘emerg’d his leprous head / From out his holy shrine’ (16:3–4, E57): Weeping in dismal howling woe he dark descended howling Around the smitten bands, clothed in tears & trembling shudd’ring cold. His stored snows he poured forth, and his icy magazines He open’d on the deep, and on the Atlantic sea white shiv’ring. (16:7–10, E57)

Urizen’s weapon is ice, the chemical and ideological opposite of Orc’s ‘Human fire fierce glowing’ (4:8, E53). Fire heats the passions, animates and energises revolutionary activity. Ice converts fluid nature into petrified abstraction, silences voices, freezes conflict into quietude, and preserves the status quo. Urizen glaciates the Atlantic Ocean. A strange quiet 25  Geoffrey Keynes, America: A Prophecy (London: Trianon Press, 1963); Damon, Philosophy, 109–12; Frye, Fearful Symmetry, 205–09; Erdman, Prophet, 56–63; Bloom, Apocalypse, 119–28; Minna Doskow, “William Blake’s America: The Story of a Revolution Betrayed,” Blake Studies 8 (1978–79): 167–86.

4  ONE KING, ONE GOD, ONE LAW: BUILDING CONSTITUTIONS… 

97

descends, as ‘clouds & cold mists’ from the ocean hide Orc and the rebel angels from the sight of Albion. Urizen’s barricades of ice are a desperate response to an existential emergency, but the confrontation between the intense fires of the revolutionary inferno and the passive agency of frozen stasis can end only one way. During a respite of 12 years ‘Angels & weak men … govern o’er the strong’; but the appearance of the ‘Demon’s light’ in France is historically inevitable, especially when seen from the perspective of 1793 (16:14–15, E57). Once again, the forces of the anciens regimes seem taken by surprise: Stiff shudderings shook the heav’nly thrones! France Spain & Italy, In terror view’d the bands of Albion, and the ancient Guardians Fainting upon the elements, smitten with their own plagues They slow advance to shut the five gates of their law-built heaven Filled with blasting fancies and with mildews of despair With fierce disease and lust, unable to stem the fires of Orc (16:16–21, E56–57)

At an earlier stage of the conflict, Blake has dramatized the way in which the ideological weapons of the tyrant Angel of Albion are turned back upon them by the revolutionary forces, represented as the spreading of a plague amongst Albion’s rulers. The other monarchies of Europe witness the sickness of Albion (they ‘view’d the bands’ of disease on his body) and see to their horror that they too are ‘smitten with their own plagues’. Long accustomed to their comfortable, unassailable authority, these despotic rulers are slow to recognise the threat, finally striving to seal off the five remaining gates through which the external world still reaches into their ‘law-built heaven’. It is not long, however, before the ‘five gates were consum’d, & their bolts and hinges melted / And the fierce flames burnt round the heavens’ (16:22–23, E57). The ‘law-built heaven’ of the European monarchies is the realisation of the ‘one law’ through which Urizen frames the human world in The Book of Urizen, a law whose distribution and re-articulation across the nations is documented in The Song of Los. The infernal wisdom imparted in the Marriage of Heaven and Hell claims memorably that ‘Prisons are built with the stones of Law, Brothels with the bricks of Religion’. Indeed, a ‘Prison’ seems an appropriate moniker for the coldness and abstraction of the ‘heaven’ over which Urizen reigns as God, suffering under the oppression of a universal law that concretises the human mind, formalising and ‘fixing’ the sensory organs as the only valid conduits of perception.

98 

M. MAUGER

Urizen’s law might have had a radical impetus to establish a ‘joy without pain’ at its conception, but its historical reality has proven to be an instrument of regulation and control, a moral framework in which energy and imagination is contained, a legacy which shackles the European nations through its ancient, primeval authority. Hidden deep in the myths, secrets and conventions of the common law’s Gothic castle—an arcane science approachable only by the initiated—are the foundational principles of Urizen’s metal books. But whilst Urizen’s law is the source of oppression and control, it is also the critical framework of the European monarchies, the bricks with which their ‘heavens’ are constructed. ‘The King of England looking westward trembles at the vision’ of a frightening, incomprehensible horror rising over the Atlantic, the ‘Human fire fierce glowing’ that announces itself in the terms of an apocalyptic second coming of Christ (4:8, 12, E53). ‘Art thou not Orc’ Urizen asks hesitantly, the ‘Lover of wild rebellion, and transgresser of Gods Law’? (7:3, 6, E53–54): The terror answerd: I am Orc, wreath’d round the accursed tree; The times are ended; shadows pass the morning gins to break; The fiery joy, that Urizen perverted to ten commands, What night he led the starry hosts thro’ the wide wilderness: That stony law I stamp to dust: and scatter religion abroad To the four winds as a torn book, & none shall gather the leaves (8:1–6, E54)

Urizen-as-lawmaker is here identified with Moses (who led the Hebrews out of slavery through ‘the wide wilderness’ in the Exodus account). Orc’s response to Urizen’s challenge is an emphatic ‘yes’—he is the transgressor of the law-built heaven created by Urizen and sustained by his priests, in which Urizen sets himself in the place of God. He is an antinomian revolutionary with a spontaneous aversion to structure, system, and hierarchy. For Michael Ferber, he is the ‘trampler in the vineyards’ of Old Testament prophecy, ‘a root-and-branch man; he is the fire that burns up all the proud and the wicked (Malachi 4.1)’.26 It would be a mistake, however, to identify Blake too closely with the anti-law convictions of Orc, given the text’s acknowledgement of other articulations of radical opinion associated with the revolutionary period. The opening lines of the prophecy set the stage for the Atlantic drama which follows, as the forces of Albion’s Angel and those of the American  Ferber, “Finite Revolutions,” 214.

26

4  ONE KING, ONE GOD, ONE LAW: BUILDING CONSTITUTIONS… 

99

leaders face each other across the Atlantic. In the west stand Washington, Benjamin Franklin and, perhaps most pointedly, Thomas Paine. Indeed Paine is named on four occasions in America, the only times he is addressed directly in Blake’s illuminated books. As Albion’s Angel gazes west with growing fear and anger, the striking design of plate 5 suggests the dissolution of cherished notions of British liberty under the law (Fig. 4.3). Above a depiction of Orc rising in flames among the twists of a serpent’s body, a number of figures move through the sky. Their bodily attitude and their streaming hair give a strong sense of being propelled backwards from the right-hand side of the plate to the left. In the poem’s spatial geography, this is a movement from Britain to America. One of the female figures carries an enormous sword, streaming with flames or (perhaps) blood. Another holds a vast pair of balances which, it should be noted, are in a state of disturbance. This is no signal of an apocalyptic Last Judgement, as Damon argued.27 Rather, we see a strangely atomised figure of Justice, split apart, asymmetrical, misaligned. The figures appear exiled from Britain, political refugees, the British state dissociated from a key emblem of its own freedom.28 Paine himself embodies in this poem the status of freedom as a refugee in America. On plate nine, the transatlantic gaze of Albion’s Angel meets that of the exiled Thomas Paine, who stands with the iconic revolutionary leader Joseph Warren (whose death at the Battle of Bunker Hill, memorialised in a painting by John Trumbull, was commonly presented as an act of martyrdom for the revolutionary cause).29 They stand defiantly ‘with their foreheads reard toward the east’ (9:11, E54). It is Paine’s insistent presence in the poem’s depiction of revolutionary America, in particular, that requires a more complex understanding of Blake’s own position with respect to the codification of law than that which is offered by the account of his known antinomian sympathies. It also raises questions regarding how far Blake himself is a supporter of the apocalyptic Orcian revolution as an end in itself, or whether he sees it as a

 Damon, Philosophy, 340.  For more on the figure of Justice, see Dennis E. Curtis and Judith Resnik, “Images of Justice,” Yale Law Journal, 96 (1987): 1726–72. 29  Christian di Spigna, Founding Martyr: The Life and Death of Dr. Joseph Warren, the American Revolution’s Lost Hero (New York: Penguin, 2018). 27 28

100 

M. MAUGER

Fig. 4.3  William Blake, America: A Prophecy, Copy M, Plate 7. (Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection)

4  ONE KING, ONE GOD, ONE LAW: BUILDING CONSTITUTIONS… 

101

necessary (if brutal) means of achieving millennial transformation.30 The fourth chapter of the second part of Rights of Man is devoted to the topic of constitution-writing: ‘a constitution is not the act of a government, but of a people constituting a government; and government without a constitution, is power without a right’.31 Orc’s fires burn down the ancient constitutions, his violent attacks will ‘stamp the stony law to dust’, but they propose no apparent alternative, no basis upon which the ‘right’ of a new social organisation might be based. Does Blake propose an anti-legal anarchy as a viable proposal, or do Orc’s actions constitute a constitutional ‘clearing of the decks’ in order to make way for a new approach? Blake’s prophetic representation of the intellectual warfare of the revolution seems to suggest that it is Paine who will fill the void thus created. But by representing Urizen himself as an enlightenment rebel in The Book of Urizen, developing and applying his own newly devised constitution, it seems at least arguable that Blake is uncertain about whether the latest phase of revolutionary law-making is ultimately going to be abstracted into a similar narrow framework of universal moral laws as that which it replaced. Whereas Andrew Cooper has highlighted how Blake seems sensitive to the way in which radicalism based on constitutionalism and a Paineite discourse of rights can substitute an abstract idea of freedom for liberty itself, I would go further by suggesting that Blake is concerned that such an abstraction might lead directly to the stony moral law that the revolution had shattered.32 After all, Urizen’s creation of the human world is itself ostensibly a law-based revolution against the settled certainties of Eternity. Blake seems torn. The anti-law position of Orc shatters the structures that have imprisoned human life, but offers only anarchy—or millennial expectation—in their place. Paineite constitutionalism offers the promise of a basis on which humanity might work for its own recovery, but here the danger seems to be that Urizenic abstraction will result in revolution turning a futile circle and returning to the forms of imprisonment that it had destroyed.

30  James McCord, “West of Atlantis: William Blake’s Unromantic View of the American War,” Centennial Review 30 (1986): 385; Behrendt, “History When Time Stops: Blake’s America, Europe, and The Song of Los,” Papers on Language and Literature 28 (1992): 379–97; Morton Paley, Apocalypse and Millennium in English Romantic Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999). 31  Paine, Rights of Man: Part the Second, 27–28. 32  Cooper, “Freedom,” 201–02; Mitchell, “Visible Language,” 58.

102 

M. MAUGER

Blake’s most familiar depiction of Urizen as ‘the Ancient of Days’, measuring the extent of the world with his golden compasses, forms the frontispiece of America’s companion piece, Europe: A Prophecy.33 The beautiful Copy D of this illuminated book preserved in the British Museum, created during the text’s original production phase in 1794, contains marginal glosses—commonly attributed to Blake’s friend George Cumberland— that offer a rare insight into how Blake’s first readers may have interpreted these works (Fig. 4.4). This reader has annotated the frontispiece of this copy with a quotation adapted from Book VII of Milton’s Paradise Lost:                     In his hand In his hand, he took the Golden Compasses… One foot he center’d, and the other turn’d Round through the vast profundity obscure, And said, thus far extend, thus far thy bounds This be thy just circumference, O World!34

The quotation is apt. The opening plates of Europe, dominated by Enitharmon’s roll-call of her children, seem closely related to the later stages of the account of the creation of the human world as seen in The Book of Urizen. As Urizen awakes at the end of Chapter VII of that text, so we are told that ‘Los encircled Enitharmon / With fires of Prophecy … / And she bore an enormous race’ (20:42–45, E81). One after another, in Europe, she rouses them: Orc, Rintrah, Palamabron, together with their female counterparts Elynittria and Ocalythron. In rejection of Urizen’s plan to create a ‘joy without pain’, she enlists their assistance in the establishment of a legal system of prohibition in which ‘Woman … may have dominion’, built on the principle of the strict moral regulation of human desire: ‘Forbid all Joy’ she commands, ‘Spread nets in every secret path’ (5:4, 8–9, E62).35 Almost without warning, however, Enitharmon enters a sudden and profound sleep, a slumber of ‘eighteen hundred years’: the expanse of human history from the birth of Christ to Blake’s own time. ‘Man was a Dream!’. If the plates of Enitharmon’s song seem closely related to The 33   Ferber, “Finite Revolutions,” 212; Erdman, “Symmetries,” 179; Behrendt, Reading, 111–12. 34  See John Milton, Paradise Lost, VII: 224–231. 35  Andrew Lincoln, “Alluring the Heart to Virtue: Blake’s Europe,” Studies in Romanticism 38 (1999): 621.

4  ONE KING, ONE GOD, ONE LAW: BUILDING CONSTITUTIONS… 

103

Fig. 4.4  William Blake, Europe: A Prophecy, Copy D, frontispiece, with annotations by George Cumberland. (British Museum, Department of Prints and Drawings, London)

104 

M. MAUGER

Book of Urizen in terms of their attention to the circumstances of creation, the plates which follow—comprising Enitharmon’s dream of humanity— return readers to the immediacy of the revolutionary events of America. We see ‘shadows of men in fleeting bands upon the winds’ who ‘divide the heavens of Europe’: Till Albions Angel smitten with his own plagues fled with his bands The cloud bears hard on Albions shore: Fill’d with immortal demons of futurity: In council gather the smitten Angels of Albion The cloud bears hard upon the council house; down rushing On the heads of Albions Angels (9:6–13, E63)

We re-join the action at the moment in the chronology of revolution that we reached on the final plate of America (underscored through the re-use of the signal phrase ‘smitten with [their] own plagues’). Indeed, the plates which follow offer more detail about the response of Albion’s Angel to the profound threat presented by the ascendant American revolutionaries. As the guardians (or ‘Angels’) of Albion gather in Parliament for a crisis meeting, so the revolutionary threat acquires tangible force and causes the building to collapse. In disarray, they arise and follow their king in search of a prehistoric sanctuary, the ‘venerable porches’ and ‘oak-­surrounded pillars’ of ‘golden Verulam’ (10:5–6, E63). This shrine is a ‘serpent temple’. Originally conceived as a reflection of Eternity, it has long been transformed into a Urizenic shell, the imposition of the Philosophy of the Five Senses acquiring architectural form: ‘Then was the serpent temple form’d, image of infinite / Shut up in finite revolutions, and man became an angel; / Heaven a mighty circle turning; God a tyrant crown’d’ (10:21–23, E63). Within the precincts of the serpent temple, the Angel locates the ‘Stone of Night’, a monolithic standing stone which embodies here, as in America, authority and law in Albion. From this vantage point, a fitting position for his last stand, Albion’s Angel can see Urizen bearing his ‘brazen Book, / That Kings & Priests had copied on Earth’, the process imagined (as we have seen) in The Song of Los (11:3–4, E64). The plate’s remarkable symmetrical illumination offers a compelling depiction of Urizen (apparently conflated with the Angel himself) in the robes of a senior bishop, complete with episcopal mitre. This association was also clearly in the mind of the annotator of Copy D, who captioned the plate ‘papal superstition’. His disturbing bat-like wings seem quite at odds with

4  ONE KING, ONE GOD, ONE LAW: BUILDING CONSTITUTIONS… 

105

the delicate appearance of the lesser ‘angels’ seen below. The ‘brazen book’—that is, a book of brass—is open on his lap. Behind him, the gothic arches of a vast church are glimpsed: a cathedral or basilica perhaps, but also strongly reminiscent of the imposing north entrance of Westminster Abbey where, in observance of a long-established tradition, George III had been crowned in September 1761. For whilst the Angel’s depiction as a figure of temporal and spiritual authority does not depend on a specific identification, surely Blake intends that readers have the British monarch in mind as the embodiment of Albion’s Angel, holding open his copy of Urizen’s ‘One Law’, enforced through the institutions of state and church over which he presides. This connection is supported by the figure’s striking caricatural resemblance to George, which has led Carretta to speculate that Blake deliberately presents the King as Pope: ‘no symbol better expresses the concept of a religious-political power dependent upon mystery and “secret codes” than the image of the papacy with which Blake damns George III’.36 As the Orcian threat draws closer, we see how Albion’s Urizenic existence is dependent on these laws for its integrity. Indeed, they are specifically deployed in the defence of the ancien régime. Urizen ‘unclaspd his Book’. As a result, ‘Rolling volumes of grey mist involve Churches, Palaces, Towers’, casting London into darkness (12:3–4, E64). As Albion’s Angel is seen ‘howling in flames of Orc’, the law’s centrality to the conflict is represented through a horrific transformation: Above the rest the howl was heard from Westminster louder & louder: The Guardian of the secret codes forsook his ancient mansion, Driven out by the flames of Orc; his furr’d robes & false locks Adhered and grew one with his flesh, and nerves & veins shot thro’ them With dismal torment sick hanging upon the wind: he fled Groveling along Great George Street thro’ the Park gate (12:14–19, E64)

The sudden intrusion into Blake’s mythological world of London place and street names warrants an identification of this figure. This ‘Guardian of the secret codes’, wearing the ‘furr’d robes’ and wig of a senior judge, can be identified as the Lord Chancellor, second only to the king himself in the hierarchy of judiciary and legislature. Whilst Erdman might be right to connect this figure to the circumstances of the dismissal Lord Chancellor 36  Carretta, George III and the Satirists, 231; Howard, Infernal Poetics, 143; Erdman, Prophet, 213–14.

106 

M. MAUGER

Edward Thurlow by William Pitt in 1792, I lean towards David Fuller’s view that the significance of this figure in the poem is more as a ‘type’, rather than as ‘an encoded reference’ to a specific person or event.37 As we glimpsed in the process of legislative creation depicted in the opening plates of The Book of Urizen, the ‘One Law’ is wrapped in secrecy and darkness. Its specific articulation in the domain of Albion’s Angel is similarly a ‘secret code’, by which the lives of the people of Albion are determined, regulated, and confined. The recurrence of the imagery of Urizen’s ‘Net of Religion’ in the illuminations to this page reminds us of how Urizenic codes depend on secrecy and religious mystification to persuade those they govern of their divine authority.38 The laws of England exist in the shadowy regions of custom and judicial precedent known only to the legal profession, but they are exposed here in the person of the Lord Chancellor, grotesquely transformed into a hideous legal monster.39 As Enitharmon’s dream of human history reaches its conclusion, we see that Orc has apparently succeeded in driving the embodiment of the secret legal codes away from the seat of government. Orc’s flames are reaching to the foundations of Urizen’s ‘law-built heaven’, and threaten its imminent collapse.

The Strife of Blood Among the giant forms whose conflict establishes the philosophical and epistemological stage for Blake’s re-telling of the events of creation, perhaps the most complex is Los. But his is nevertheless a critical role. In the pre-history of Blake’s cosmology (as we have seen), he and Urizen are one, split apart when their blueprint for humanity is skewed towards a legal code deriving from an enshrinement of the Seven Deadly Sins. Like Urizen, Los is a worker of metals, a blacksmith who ‘fixes’ the human form in the aftermath of the separation of Urizen’s world, creating a finite space of safety on the one hand (when it appeared that Urizen’s great project was about to disintegrate), and yet confirming on the other humanity’s closure within a Philosophy of Five Senses. With Enitharmon 37  Erdman, Prophet, 216–18; David Fuller, Blake’s Heroic Argument (London: Croom Helm, 1988), 56. 38  Michael Tolley, “Europe: ‘to those ychain’d in sleep’,” in Blake’s Visionary Forms Dramatic, ed. David V. Erdman and John E. Grant (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 121–22; see also Carretta, George III and the Satirists, 230. 39  Ferber, “Finite Revolutions,” 231.

4  ONE KING, ONE GOD, ONE LAW: BUILDING CONSTITUTIONS… 

107

he generates an ‘enormous race’ at whose hands Urizen’s ‘Laws & Religions’ are distributed to all the nations. Their offspring also includes Orc, the bringer of wild rebellion, who seeks to stamp the stony law to dust. Los is regularly presented as the ‘Eternal Prophet’, and yet he is rarely named within America and Europe, the core components of a prophetic cycle which is bookended by the twin components of Los’s Song: ‘Africa’ and ‘Asia’. These prophetic books are, perhaps, to be understood as Los’s prophecies; but if so, their prophetic voice is not about distance or mysticism, but rather active engagement and transformation. For all that Urizen might be understood as a rebel in Eternity, establishing a space of finitude and mortality, we sense that what is really ‘human’ about this world is the result of Los’s sometimes desperate and yet co-creative prophetic response. By the time we reach the final plate of Europe Enitharmon, who wakes from her dream and initially continues her rousing song oblivious to the narrative of human history which has passed, has fallen silent once again. None of her children have responded to her call, for all were ‘forth at sport beneath the solemn moon / Waking the stars of Urizen with their immortal songs’ (14:32–33, E66). As the sun of revolution rises over ‘the vineyards of red France’, the uprising gathers pace with its ‘furious terrors’, its blood-wheeled chariots and wrathful lions. Amid these apocalyptic omens the hitherto watchful Los is roused to action ‘and with a cry that shook all nature to the utmost pole / Call’d all his sons to the strife of blood’ (15:2–3, 10–11, E66). Blake seems uncertain about what this new action might entail. Los’s apparel—‘he reard in snaky thunders clad’—suggests that he has become reconciled with the revolutionary energy of Orc, an energy which he had previously feared and sought to contain. Yet it seems unlikely that Los (or Blake, for that matter) would uncritically align himself with a purely destructive force that threatens dissolution and ‘non-entity’. Perhaps the ‘Asia’ section of The Song of Los is then to be interpreted as a battle cry, a call to action. Rather than transgressive and wild, Orc’s fires are here described as ‘thought-creating’. And the thoughts that they create unwind the system of oppression and exploitation on which Urizen’s system depends. No longer will ‘King call for Famine from the heath / Nor the Priest, for Pestilence from the fen / To restrain! to dismay! to thin!’ (Song of Los, 6:9–11, E68). Nor shall the politician control the labouring multitudes by fixing the price of labour and thus enforcing poverty, or civic authorities ‘cut off the bread from the city/ That the remnant may learn to obey’ (7:1–2, E69). These incendiary claims, born

108 

M. MAUGER

out of a startling unmasking of the way in which an affluent ruling class sustains its power, are themselves the flames of revolution. Their intense heat reaches Urizen himself as he passes through ‘the heavens / Of Europe’, liquefying the rigid legal frameworks which he has enforced: ‘And his Books of brass iron & gold / Melted over the land as he flew’. As the grave ‘shrieks with delight’ and ‘milk & blood & glandous wine / In rivers rush & shout & dance’ in the closing line, it seems that some kind of apocalypse is about to burst (7:12–15, 35–39, E69–70). Is this the end of human history, of mortal life, and of finitude, order and law? Or is the Orcian revolt a means to an end: an alternative millennial future for humanity, envisioned by Los the Eternal Prophet? For the enfeebled, emasculated Urizen, whose tears close the Song, there may be no meaningful difference.

CHAPTER 5

The Heavens Squared by a Line: Legal Architecture and Mystery

The contention between Urizen, Orc, and Los in the key prophetic books of the Lambeth period takes place within a revolutionary arena in which societal hierarchies, moral and sexual codes of behaviour, and technologies of exploitation and control, are thrown into sharp relief. Legal structures derived from both ancient practice and new constitutional principle are variously defended, contested, proposed, and destroyed. That said, the illuminated books considered in the previous chapter offer no straightforward dramatization of the epistemological conflict between the ancient European monarchies and a revolutionary movement whose momentum originates in America in the 1770s. Blake’s mythography evolves over these years, growing in intricacy in direct response to the increasing complexity of the poet’s observations concerning the direction of revolutionary politics in Europe. The role of legal frameworks seems central to this growing uncertainty. Orc represents the raw, violent, antinomian energy that typically ‘stamps … to dust’ the moral codes inherited by Urizen; yet it is in the legally defined spaces associated with Urizen’s creation that humanity finds sanctuary, and protection from the unimaginable state of ‘non-entity’. Order and structure embody the idea of ‘humanity’ that Urizen enables in The Book of Urizen. His vision of ‘One King, One God, One Law’ calls into being the authority confronted by Orc’s rebellion in America. But that creative action is itself presented as Urizen’s rebellion against the despotism of the Eternals, a process by which humanity is

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Mauger, William Blake and the Visionary Law, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37723-5_5

109

110 

M. MAUGER

granted agency, self-determination, and its own bodily form. Blake seems uncertain whether to regard legal activity as being at the heart of the problem of humanity’s imaginative poverty, or as somehow available—in a perhaps as-yet unrecognised form—as a part of the solution, as a central component of a strategy for recovery that promises a brighter, divine future. The mythological framework for Blake’s story of humanity is persistently unstable across his work of 1792–1795. New characters are introduced, new historical pathways briefly rise to prominence, before fading or being occluded by other narrative structures, offering (albeit obliquely) a sense of Blake’s response to the political turmoil of his world ‘in real time’. But in spite of this imaginative restlessness, we sense that he increasingly comes to think of these illuminated books as taking place in a ‘shared universe’, as so many fragments of a broader prophetic vision. In Vala, or The Four Zoas, a vast poem on which Blake appears to have been working from around 1797 and into the first decade of the nineteenth century, we find an attempt to reconcile, combine, re-imagine and re-package those fragments, constructing thereby Blake’s prophecy of human history at epic scale. The mythic trajectories of the Lambeth books, and particularly The Book of Urizen, underpin the overarching structure; but phrases, tableaux, ideas and tropes from earlier texts including The Book of Thel, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and Tiriel are folded within that framework. The attempt is, at best, only partially successful. Perhaps as a consequence of the exercise of recombination, Blake becomes aware of the inconsistencies in his ideas. This is exacerbated by new directions of thought, and new complexities of revolutionary vision, which Blake attempts to accommodate through a persistent shuffling of segments of verse that have often proved irresolvable for modern editors attempting to construct definitive editions.1 As part of these revisions, the poem’s title— initially Vala; or, the Death and Judgement of the Ancient Man, a Dream of Nine Nights—is changed to The Four Zoas: The Torments of Love & Jealousy in The Death and Judgement of Albion the Ancient Man. Blake accordingly left his readers with what Donald Ault in the introduction of Narrative Unbound describes as a ‘radically open text, whose heterogeneity exposes the uncompletable, self-revisionary nature of its fundamental inquiry into

1  George Anthony Rosso, Jr., Blake’s Prophetic Workshop: A Study of The Four Zoas (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1993), 15.

5  THE HEAVENS SQUARED BY A LINE: LEGAL ARCHITECTURE AND MYSTERY 

111

being’.2 John Pierce captures perhaps a more familiar experience of r­ eading the long works, characterising Blake’s process of revision as ‘part of a sometimes frantic attempt to save all that he wrote, no matter whether it fit the immediate context or not’.3 After what appears to have been years of patching the tapestry of his epic in order to address these deep-seated problems, Blake ultimately abandoned The Four Zoas in favour of other large-scale verse projects better suited to his evolving ideas. G. A. Rosso’s characterisation of the poem as a ‘prophetic workshop’ seems particularly apt. Whatever his original intentions may have been for the poem—and it appears that he persisted for some time with varying plans for its ‘publication’—the manuscript clearly became (as Rosso has described in detail) a visionary space within which Blake experimented with new figurations and alternative synchronic approaches to organising his mythos, which can be detected when we encounter them afresh in Blake’s later ‘completed’ epics, Milton and Jerusalem.4 As a consequence, The Four Zoas appears by turns retrospective and anticipatory, both a place within which a version of Blake’s narrative of human history coalesces, and where new future possibilities for that history are recognised. Perhaps as a consequence of this Janus-like quality, The Four Zoas manuscript is a revealing text when it comes to understanding Blake’s prophetic vision across his oeuvre. At its heart, to some extent obliterated through the layers of revision (as Andrew Lincoln has demonstrated in his exhaustive charting of the manuscript’s development in Spiritual History), is the culmination of the vision of the Lambeth books: a broadly linear late-1790s mythic staging of the revolutionary excitement of the French Revolution in which we recognise the re-appearance of ideas associated with Blake’s illuminated books of the previous decade.5 Alongside the wholesale splicing together of long passages from the earlier texts within 2  Narrative Unbound: Re-Visioning William Blake’s The Four Zoas (New York: Station Hill, 1987), xxiv. 3  John B.  Pierce, Flexible Design: Revisionary Poetics in Blake’s Vala or The Four Zoas (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1998), 19. 4  Rosso, Blake’s Prophetic Workshop, 12. For a useful summary of various mid-twentieth-­ century hypotheses concerning Blake’s intentions—together with his own argument that Blake was seeking a ‘compromise between his customary copperplate methods and the strictures of commercial publishing’, see Paul Mann, “The Final State of The Four Zoas,” Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly 18 (1985): 204–15. 5  Andrew Lincoln, Spiritual History: A Reading of William Blake’s Vala or The Four Zoas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995).

112 

M. MAUGER

the new visionary apparatus, however, we find startling new verse representations of his insights concerning social politics, sensory and sexual restriction, and imaginative loss. As Christopher Hobson observes, the re-tellings and re-purposings, in which we find Blake ‘pointedly varying an earlier version of the same story’, are important for the way in which meaning is generated.6 As in the earlier texts, we see Urizen in his role as guarantor of certainty, protector of humanity’s cohesion, defining spaces of sanctuary against the void that lies beyond. But his methods are only explicitly recognised as legal instruments in the second half of the poem, in which the composition of his metal books of iron and brass is documented in detail. Moreover, as we will see in the troubled and contested encounters that lead to the poem’s apocalyptic ending, Blake offers an incisive analysis of the way in which legal activity enacted in the name of order, certainty, and equality, can be twisted and corrupted into an antagonistic set of tendencies associated with the corruption of ‘Mystery’.

Strong Heroic Verse, Marshalled in Order Across its somewhat fraught structure of nine ‘Nights’ of varying length, The Four Zoas charts a universal struggle for supremacy involving Urizen— typically associated with the ‘reasoning’ preoccupations of science, geometry, law, and architecture—and various collaborators and adversaries. Some of these are familiar from earlier work, including Orc who whilst associated (in ways that are familiar to readers of America and The Book of Urizen) with passionate vigour and revolutionary energy, is generally aligned with the more violent, destructive, and anarchic aspects of his earlier character. The optimistic representation of his fire in The Song of Los as ‘thought-creating’ has receded, and one senses Blake’s increasing commitment to the idea of the long hard struggle for what is right (represented in the unending work of Los, anticipating his characterisation in the later epics Milton and Jerusalem), rather than sudden violent upheaval. In Blake’s complicated expansion of the core myth, Urizen is one of the four ‘Zoas’ or ‘living creatures’ which together make up the universal body of humanity (often termed ‘the Eternal Man’ or simply ‘Man’ in the text). Orc is presented as a diminished, unsettled incarnation of a second Zoa, Luvah. Los, meanwhile, is similarly re-cast as a manifestation of a third 6  Christopher Z. Hobson, The Chained Boy: Orc and Blake’s Idea of Revolution (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1999), 30.

5  THE HEAVENS SQUARED BY A LINE: LEGAL ARCHITECTURE AND MYSTERY 

113

Zoa named Urthona. Aspects of Los’s story from The Book of Urizen and The Book of Los are retained. Yet while Los as the ‘eternal prophet’ remains a mediator between Urizen and Orc, he is afforded a multifaceted, often perplexing role in which he is both partly responsible for humanity’s oppression and suffering, and also critical to its cohesion and survival. The fourth Zoa is a new entity named Tharmas, perhaps the least resolved of these core figures, who shares with Los and Urizen a creative role in preventing the disintegration of the Eternal Man. In his unfallen state, Tharmas is characterised as a shepherd; but amid the chaos of The Four Zoas (as Matt Lorenz has recently examined) he is also an angry sea god, whose work responds to that of Urizen in a relationship of inverted symbiosis.7 A profound disturbance within the constitution of the Eternal Man is dramatized as conflict between the Zoas, manifested variously as duplicitous betrayals, temporary strategic alliances, excessive collaborative hard work, political manoeuvring, and desperate super-human efforts to resist the growing darkness. The settled roles of each of the Zoas—relationships elliptically indicated by Blake in tantalising ways that elude straightforward delineation—have been disturbed and made uncertain, occasioning forms of oppression and exploitation within the human world. It is far from clear whether the situation that prevailed ‘before’ this disturbance represents a divinely established prelapsarian state whose ‘unity’ is something which humanity should strive to regain or, as with Urizen’s rebellion against the Eternals in the Book of Urizen, the quarrels between the Zoas represent a creative agency, the agonised striving for a new organisation of humanity, a rejection of a status quo whose divine perfection we might question. Nevertheless, it is clear that in some sense this narrative structure echoes the biblical notion of a ‘fall’ from paradise, evidenced both in the language used to describe that former state within the text, and the occasional use of the term ‘Fallen Man’ as a reference to humanity’s current condition. The poem itself (at least as it survives in the manuscript’s final state) begins in medias res, amid the catastrophic collapse of that unity. The impetus for this disaster is (mis)remembered on multiple occasions throughout The Four Zoas as an act of betrayal, ambition and usurpation, in which either Urizen or Luvah—the details vary between 7  Matt Lorenz, “Blakean Wonder and the Unfallen Tharmas: Health, Wholeness, and Holarchy in The Four Zoas,” in Disabling Romanticism, ed. Michael Bradshaw (London: Macmillan, 2016), 138–42.

114 

M. MAUGER

retellings—sought to gain dominance over the other ‘Mighty Ones’ within the Eternal Man (3:4, E300). One of the immediate consequences of the collapse occasioned by this quarrel is the separation of distinctive ‘female’ components from the persons of each of the Zoas. Some of these are effectively insertions, within this elaborate structure, of named characters we have encountered in the Lambeth books: Enitharmon (associated with Urthona), Ahania (linked to Urizen). Others are new: Enion (the counterpart of Tharmas) and, most importantly, Vala (whose conspiracy with Luvah forms a core component of some versions of the collapse into disunity). Completing the pantheon are antagonistic embodiments of the Zoas themselves, typically relatively fleeting and unnamed figures termed ‘spectres’ or ‘shadows’. These figures, fixtures of Blake’s epic writing, often seem associated with reason and the denial of imaginative joy and desire. In a useful modification of this reading, Mátyás Layos has recently suggested that the interaction between a fallen Zoa and their spectre is central to the ‘intellectual warfare’ that The Four Zoas recommends, a confrontation with the lurking human tendency to adopt frameworks of reason that is in itself valuable, and at times produces important collaboration.8 In this chapter, I seek neither to resolve the chaos and uncertainties of The Four Zoas manuscript, nor to answer the question of the poem’s abandonment. Moreover, I do not aim to offer a unified, coherent reading of the epic, or to account for the at-times unfathomable complexity of the mythic structure described above. Rather, I demonstrate the ways in which we can see Blake—in a prolonged period of post-revolutionary reflection, consolidation, and undoubted uncertainty—wrestling with questions about human social coherence, freedom from oppression, and liberty from forms of physical and mental imprisonment. As we will see, many of the poetic vehicles for these questions derive from the earlier prophetic books. But there is also much that is original, daring and unexpected in this epic vision which points forward to Blake’s later prophetic narratives on which the final chapters of William Blake and the Visionary Law focus. Throughout The Four Zoas and the illuminated prophecies of the Lambeth period, Blake seems unexpectedly committed to Urizen’s consistent reasoning tendency to produce legal frameworks as a means of human definition, sanctuary, and preservation for all that they repeatedly collapse 8  Mátyás Layos, “The Reader’s Struggle: Intellectual War in The Four Zoas,” Eger Journal of English Studies 19 (2019): 25–46.

5  THE HEAVENS SQUARED BY A LINE: LEGAL ARCHITECTURE AND MYSTERY 

115

into structures of compulsion, coercion, imprisonment, and slavery. This chapter argues that in its fulsome account of the rise of Mystery and the insidious means by which legal systems become parasitically dependent on its indoctrination, The Four Zoas offers an incisive quasi-theoretical history of law’s emergence, expansion, and final corruption. In the opening lines of the poem, themselves revised countless times, Blake promises his readers a song ‘which shook the heavens with wrath / Hearing the march of long resounding strong heroic Verse / Marshalld in order for the day of Intellectual Battle’ (3:1–3, E300). The manuscript of the Four Zoas suggests how fraught that desire to ‘marshal’ the verse ‘in order’ proved to be, whilst providing evidence of Blake’s determination that ‘intellectual battle’ itself should be enabled and conceptualised through that order. This is a desire arguably shared in the poem by Urizen, whose work as ‘sovereign architect’ is where my argument begins. The focus of the chapter then shifts to Orc, chained for much of the poem on top (and within) the iron mountain that looms over its visionary landscape. His representation, I argue, embodies Blake’s growing distance from the antinomian rejection of legal order and definition. The final section of the chapter returns to the question of the ‘unity’ of the Eternal Man, something variously the subject of prelapsarian misrememberings and uncertainties at various moments in the poem, and which the apocalyptic harvest of the souls in the final night aims to recover. What is the role of legal order in this vision of the Eternal Man? What position is accorded Urizen in the recovery of humanity? What is there about ‘legality’ in its Eternal form that is at all recognisable as ‘law’?

The Architecture of the Law While each of the Zoas is associated with a moment of imaginative ascendancy in the chaotic narrative of the poem, and each in turn becomes convinced of his status as a universal deity, it is Urizen’s vast creative activity in Night II, its subsequent collapse, legacy, and partial reconstruction, that dominates the narrative of the poem’s central nights. As in the Book of Urizen, Urizen’s motive to act—whilst driven by his own conviction in his righteous moral crusade—is a powerful need to establish order, a sympathetic desire to give humanity a space to exist, to avoid disintegration and collapse. Lionised throughout The Four Zoas as the fallen ‘Prince of Light’, Urizen deals in certainties and scientific proof. His default response when confronted with the unknown or the immeasurable is to impose limits, to

116 

M. MAUGER

define a space, to frame a sphere of existence, even though the impact of such strategies threatens to transform ‘all the Human Imagination into rock & sand’ (25:6, E314). Teetering on the edge of an emptiness which acts ‘to draw existence in’ to the ‘silent grave’, Urizen characteristically decides that practical intervention, however unfocussed, is better than inaction. Appointing himself ‘the great Work master’, he directs a vast building project establishing a ‘Mundane Shell’ (an experimental term here, only fully developed in Milton) within which humanity can exist (24:5, 8, E314). Instruments of manufacture are established, the furnaces, anvils, hammers, and ploughs to give material form to this world. Tools of measurement fix the ratios of length and weight, disguise the terrifying ‘deeps of Non Entity’, and divide the world into ‘orderd spaces’. Vast draperies are woven on golden looms with ‘weights of lead & spindles of iron’, and hung on ‘golden hooks’ to create the impression of a finite space within the limitless cosmos. This beautification—reminiscent in some ways of Tiriel’s ‘Vales of Har’—is extended through music, as flutes and lyres ‘trap the listeners, & in cruel delight / Bind them, condensing the strong energies into little compass’ (28:25–30:5, E318–19). As Morton Paley has explored in detail, architectural design and the activity of building offer important symbolic resources for Blake in his long prophetic works, an interest (Paley surmises) that originated in Blake’s apprenticeship to James Basire, an engraver noted for his commissions for architectural works.9 Urizen’s building project in Night II of The Four Zoas anticipates, in some respects, the fantastically detailed account of the construction of Golgonooza in Chapter One of Jerusalem. There, however, the builder is Los, and the city itself a place of imagination and creativity. With Urizen installed as architect-in-chief, the design has rather different connotations: Then rose the Builders; First the Architect divine his plan Unfolds, The wondrous scaffold reard all round the infinite Quadrangular the building rose[,] the heavens squared by a line. Trigon & cubes divide the elements in finite bonds Multitudes without number work incessant (30:8–12, E319)

9  Morton D.  Paley, “The Fourth Face of Man: Blake and Architecture,” in Articulate Images: The Sister Arts from Hogarth to Tennyson, ed. Richard Wendorf (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 184.

5  THE HEAVENS SQUARED BY A LINE: LEGAL ARCHITECTURE AND MYSTERY 

117

Urizen the ‘architect divine’, whose constitutional model defined the human world in the Book of Urizen, here unveils an architectural design for a new world order in which reason has rationalised infinite organic variety into pure geometrical shapes. Jennifer Michael, taking her lead from Paley’s argument that geometric regularity demonstrates ‘disregard for human concerns’, terms the principle of measurement here ‘an inhuman ratio’. That may be true, at least from the perspective of the ‘heavens’. As in the Book of Urizen, however, there is a sense that Urizen’s intention here is to create a profoundly human space.10 The straight lines and vertices of these ‘trigons’ and ‘cubes’ paradoxically both ‘divide’ the elements of existence, and join them ‘in finite bonds’, suggesting the way in which Urizenic rationalism both distorts and ‘fixes’ the natural world. The sketch on page 25 of the manuscript appears to capture Urizen in the very act of ‘squaring the heavens’, depicting a figure wielding a set of architect’s ‘squares’ used to measure right-angles (Fig. 5.1).11 The colossal building embodies the material universe of humanity that Urizen has called into being: Twelve halls after the names of his twelve sons composd The wondrous building & three Central Domes after the Names Of his three daughters were encompassed by the twelve bright halls Every hall surrounded by bright Paradises of Delight In which are towns & Cities Nations Seas Mountains & Rivers Each Dome opend toward four halls & the Three Domes Encompassed The Golden Hall of Urizen (30:15–21, E319)

By broadening the key metaphorical identity of Urizen from lawmaker to divine architect, Blake widens the potential of his creative impetus; but we recognise in the principles of its limitation, construction, and design that this remains a ‘law-built’ construction. The constitutional blueprint of ‘One King, One God, One Law’ developed amid great secrecy in the earlier text, is re-cast here as a set of design specifications through which a ‘beauteous order’ can be maintained. The work is ‘infinitely beautiful’, ‘a Golden World whose porches round the heavens / And pillard halls & rooms receivd the eternal wandering stars / A wondrous golden Building’ (32:7–10, E321). As Lincoln has observed, 10  Jennifer Davis Michael, Blake and the City (Lewisburg: University of Bucknell Press, 2006), 93–95; Paley, “The Fourth Face,” 191. 11  For alternative readings of this sketch, see Rosso, Blake’s Prophetic Workshop, 167.

118 

M. MAUGER

Fig. 5.1  William Blake, Vala; or The Four Zoas, p. 25. (British Library, London)

5  THE HEAVENS SQUARED BY A LINE: LEGAL ARCHITECTURE AND MYSTERY 

119

the unfallen reasoning potential of Urizen is suggested through its symmetrical magnificence: ‘the world that he brings into being is an ideal creation, the most perfect construction that fallen reason can place upon the external world it contemplates’.12 Yet the ‘order’ that Urizen’s plan enforces comes at a high cost. The multitudes who ‘work incessant’ on the construction include ‘female slaves’ who tread the mortar. Moreover, notwithstanding the clear symmetry of the architectural principles on which it is planned, the Golden Hall soon becomes a place of ‘labyrinthine’ passageways and ever increasing abstraction: ‘many a window[,] many a door / And many a division let in & out into the vast unknown / Cubed in window square immoveable’ (32:10–12, E321). Foreshadowing the growth of Mystery which becomes the focus of the later nights, a vast sacrificial altar is established at the main entrance, the labour of the ‘ten thousand Slaves / One thousand Men of wondrous power spent their lives in its formation’ (30:39–40, E320). As law’s great work master, Urizen calls into being the legal architecture which defines the order and principle of the material world within which human life is enacted. As part of this, Blake imaginatively portrays him as the progenitor of the intricate and opaque systems of social hierarchy, control, ownership and organisation which he sees at work in the late-eighteenth century. Indeed, Urizen’s Golden Hall, with its ‘pillard roofs & porches & high towers’ (33:2, E321), calls to mind William Blackstone’s portrayal of the English law as a ‘Gothic Castle’ in Commentaries on the Laws of England (see Chap. 2). The Gothic castle is central to Blackstone’s understanding of the law, both in defining a place of sanctuary and protection from external threats, and in establishing the required behaviours and attitudes of those whom it regulates. The rational scientific principles on which the castle of the law was built have become obscured through centuries of organic development, extension, and growth, though they can be recovered to sight through philosophical investigation and legal study. Urizen’s legal palace is aligned with the fashions of the later decades of the eighteenth century. Its simple geometrical symmetries, domes, and interlocking halls are suggestive more of neo-­ classical architecture than Gothic. In this sense, perhaps, it shares the spirit of renewal associated with Blackstone’s construction, being ‘fitted up for a modern inhabitant’. But while Urizen’s Golden Hall may manifest a neo-classical sense of order and apportionment, this disguises a profoundly  Lincoln, Spiritual History, 46, 51.

12

120 

M. MAUGER

Gothic interior: it is labyrinthine, complex, and mysterious to those whose manners and mores it defines, and unmoved by the suffering and exploitation that it occasions. Both buildings embody change and responsiveness, but while Blackstone seems convinced that this is an essentially benevolent impetus to adapt to new circumstances, Urizen’s legal structure seems acutely vulnerable both to the effects of unchecked reason and regulation (leading ultimately to a bizarre, abstract celestial mechanics in which planets in the shape of pyramids, cubes, trapeziums and parallelograms move along right-angled orbits), and to the more insidious approaches of superstition and mystery. Urizen initially seems satisfied with the ‘beauteous order’ achieved within the Golden Hall, which contrasts with the chaos that exists outside its walls ‘where in ceaseless torrents / … billows roll[,] where monsters wander in the foamy paths’. In particular, we are told that he is ‘comforted’ by the vision of ‘Heaven walled round’, though it seems deliberately unclear whether his kingdom is that heaven surrounded by defensive walls, or that his creation exists outside of a heaven from which it is permanently excluded (33:6–8, E321). Urizen’s reassurance does not persist, however. Far from being a moment of contented rest, the aftermath of the Golden Hall’s construction is marked by growing paranoia. His deluded belief in the perfection of his world (perhaps a satirical reference to the Genesis account of creation in which God judges each stage of the creation to be ‘good’) is undermined on two fronts by prophetic visions. Urizen finds his imagination filled with ‘dread fancy’ concerning future challenges to his power arising from the ‘unformed void’ that exists beyond the golden curtains. This fear of an imagined ‘futurity’ (which comes to fruition with the birth of Orc in Night V) becomes an all-­ absorbing obsession that proves resistant to Urizen’s predisposition to ‘fix’ the status quo through regulation and control. More catastrophically, Urizen and Ahania are confronted with visions of the suffering and oppression on which the Golden Hall depends, which they—as distant and detached overlords—appear to have been unwilling to countenance. None of this is surprising to readers of The Four Zoas, of course. Although the Hall’s beauty and wonder is repeatedly celebrated, ‘within its walls & cielings / The heavens were closd and spirits mournd their bondage night and day’ (32:12–13, E321). The lament of the exiled Enion, heard by Urizen and Ahania in their sleep, provides a series of

5  THE HEAVENS SQUARED BY A LINE: LEGAL ARCHITECTURE AND MYSTERY 

121

chilling insights into the forms of this ‘bondage’ (35.1–36.13, E325–26). She offers a first-hand account of the slavery upon which the outward displays of beauty and order in Urizen’s world depend. She explains how she is compelled to accept ‘the thistle for wheat, the nettle for a nourishing dainty’. She describes the patronising pity of the wealthy landowners who ‘talk of patience to the afflicted’, who teach ‘the laws of prudence to the houseless wanderer’, and who imply that hunger and poverty are the consequence of laziness and inattention. Blake clearly has in mind here the conservative moral evangelism associated with writers like Hannah More, whose Cheap Repository Tracts (published 1795–1798, and therefore contemporaneous with Blake’s work on The Four Zoas manuscript) urged the working poor to adopt practices of prudence, industry, modesty, and political quietude. Indeed, in the earlier Village Politics (1792), More had herself deployed Blackstone’s model of the Gothic castle to urge acceptance of the benevolent hierarchies of the status quo, and the rejection of Paine’s call for revolution in part two of The Rights of Man. She celebrates the village squire’s commitment to his ‘fine old castle … raised by the wisdom of … brave ancestors; which outstood the civil wars, and only underwent a little needful repair at the Revolution’, even though ‘there may be a dark closet or an inconvenient room or two in it’, in opposition to his wife who, according to fashionable French taste, wants to pull it down and ‘build it up in her frippery way’.13 In the drama that ensues, it becomes evident that it is Enion’s revelations concerning the ‘laws of prudence’ that are most devastating to the Golden Hall’s creator. Ahania is so distressed at this revelation that ‘never from that moment could she rest upon her pillow’ (36:19, E326). As the third Night begins, we see both Urizen and Ahania profoundly unsettled. In trying to help Urizen understand his feelings of anxiety and his fixation on futurity, Ahania emphasises what she has learned from Enion’s lament: that in order to maintain order, Urizen is ‘compell’d / To forge the curbs of iron & brass’ (39:4–5, E326). In his horror at these revelations, Urizen attempts to externalise this inclination for law-making onto Ahania, accusing her of being a seductress, intent on emasculating the power of the Zoas (itself a recurring theme in the poem): 13  More, Village Politics, 8–9. More’s use of the figuration may allude specifically to its appearance in Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, in which he accuses the revolutionary leaders of tearing down their ‘noble and venerable castle’ rather than seeking its repair and renovation (Reflections, 50).

122 

M. MAUGER

Shall the feminine indolent bliss. the indulgent self of weariness … Set herself up to give her laws to the active masculine virtue[?] Thou little diminutive portion that darst be a counterpart Thy passivity[,] thy laws of obedience & insincerity Are my abhorrence. (43:6–11, E328–29)

Aghast at discovering the moral behavioural laws that underpin his world, Urizen seeks to eliminate them by ‘casting out’ Ahania. The effect is immediate. The foundations of the Golden Hall are ripped away. Even as Ahania falls ‘like lightning’, we learn that ‘a crash ran thro the immense[,] The bounds of Destiny were broken’ and the swelling sea ‘Burst from its bonds in whirlpools fierce roaring with Human voice / Triumphing even to the Stars at bright Ahanias fall’ (43:24–30, E329). The convulsions reverberate, ‘Loud the Crash continud loud & Hoarse’ until Urizen’s creation is swallowed amid the confusion ‘like a crack across from immense to immense’. Amid the catastrophe, we see ‘Urizen & all his hosts in curst despair down rushing’ (44:6, 10, 13, E329). The horror that Urizen expresses at the discovery of the ‘law-blasted wastes’ of his world (to take the phrase that appears in both The French Revolution and America) may seem surprising to readers of the Lambeth books, for whom Urizen is the legislator who defines the ‘One Law’. Clearly in his expansion of the core Lambeth narrative in the conceptualisation of The Four Zoas, Blake is keen to open a space to explore in more detail the account of law’s emergence in the human world in the person of Urizen. This is a matter to which we will return later in this chapter. For the time being, it is sufficient to observe that the Golden Hall that he designs in Night II of the epic—a building that defines not simply a world for humanity but ultimately a material Urizenic cosmos—is utterly dependent on an intricate and comprehensive set of moral codes. Urizen, the chief architect, is somehow oblivious to this critical legal scaffolding until it is pointed out as the cause of humanity’s enslavement. Without law, the Golden Hall collapses, and the disintegration of the Eternal Man recommences.

5  THE HEAVENS SQUARED BY A LINE: LEGAL ARCHITECTURE AND MYSTERY 

123

Antinomian Fire Extinguished Given the prominence of Orc in the mythology of the Lambeth books, it is striking that his appearance in The Four Zoas is deferred until Night V, the central section of the poem when measured in terms of its structure of nine nights. Whereas the drama of the Lambeth books was organised around the elemental conflict of Urizen and Orc, the many-layered contentions of The Four Zoas coalesce around a struggle for supremacy between Urizen and Luvah. In their fractured memories of the ‘unity’ of the time-before-time, they are the Prince of Light and the Prince of Love, associated respectively with the rational and passionate faculties of Man (a refinement of the earlier fundamental confrontation between reason and energy). Orc’s emergence has nevertheless been foreseen by Urizen since Night II, the focal point of Urizen’s dread of ‘futurity’. Blake repurposes the account of the birth of Orc from The Book of Urizen. As in the earlier account, Orc’s birth is accompanied by emblems of awakening and re-­ birth that disrupt the cold, stony silence of the status quo.               The wheels of turning darkness Began in solemn revolutions. Earth convulsd with rending pangs Rocked to & fro & cried sore at the groans of Enitharmon … The groans of Enitharmon shake the skies the labring Earth Till from her heart rending his way a terrible Child sprang forth In thunder smoke & sullen flames & howlings & fury & blood (58:7–9, 16–18, E339)

The turning of the wheels both announces the arrival of a new age, and evokes America’s vision of Orc rising above the Atlantic ‘in vast wheels of blood’. Orc’s raw disruptive power is performed through the characteristic energy of his emergence (he ‘sprang forth’); but the demonic, apocalyptic portents with which it is accompanied acquire a new prominence here. The grotesque reference to Enitharmon’s heart as an unnatural organ of a monstrous birth (the child actively ‘rending’ his way through) is also a departure from the original source material with which Blake is working, somewhat crudely inserting the earlier narrative within a new mythological framework in which Orc is re-pointed as the fallen form of Luvah. Even the ‘choir of demons’ which celebrates his birth, a parody of

124 

M. MAUGER

the choir of angels at Christ’s nativity, seems perplexed.14 Its premature proclamation of the arrival of ‘Luvah King of Love’ provokes an immediate antiphonal recognition of his fallen incarnation as ‘the King of rage & death’ (58:22, E339). While the Book of Urizen myth underpins this account, Orc’s presentation in The Four Zoas is more than a superficial re-dressing of the earlier narrative. As Christopher Hobson has explored, in perhaps the most detailed critical account of the development of the character of Orc across Blake’s corpus, Orc ‘loses his central place in Blake’s scheme of redemption, yet he is not replaced by a new symbolic form capable of playing the same roles’.15 Hobson suggests that Blake’s hopes for human transformation may have been darkened by contemporary events: the failure of Jacobinism, the rise of Napoleon, and the increasing climate of fear and paranoia among radical groups in Britain (particularly in the context of the Treason Act and the Seditious Meetings Act, both passed in 1795). The opening stages of the Orc story nevertheless seem very familiar, as Los’s increasing jealousy leads to attempts to regulate the ‘fiery child’. The first technology of control extends the text’s deployment of legal architecture. Los encloses Orc and Enitharmon within a tower named Golgonooza (not yet realised as the magnificent city of the imagination of Blake’s late epics) whose fourfold design and metallic construction recall Urizen’s Golden Hall. But his distrust and fear return as Orc enters adolescence, and in an expanded version of the Book of Urizen account, Los forges a Chain of Jealousy and shackles Orc to the summit of a desolate mountain. The continuation of the story of Orc’s confinement, however, marks a significant point of departure from Blake’s earlier formulation. Here, The Four Zoas account forks into two narratives, by turns conflicting and fusing with each other, both of which leave the Lambeth myth far behind. At the heart of this is a tangled confusion arising from the manuscript itself. Two sections of the text are indicated as the start of ‘Night the Seventh’. One version of the Night focusses on the ascendancy of Vala (the female counterpart of Luvah), and the consolidation of her creed of sexual and imaginative denial. Blake regards this development as a deliberate strategy of emasculation, to which all the Zoas become subject. The other Night 14  W. H. Stevenson, ed., Blake: The Complete Poems, Longman Annotated English Poets, 3rd ed. (London: Routledge, 2007), 362, and Hobson, Chained Boy, 171–72. 15  Hobson, Chained Boy, 151; Stewart Crehan, Blake in Context (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1984), 303.

5  THE HEAVENS SQUARED BY A LINE: LEGAL ARCHITECTURE AND MYSTERY 

125

VII (by contrast) de-centralises Vala’s role by relating it to broader accounts of the growth of the Tree of Mystery, and the imposition of Urizen’s books of iron and brass. This version is often designated ‘VIIa’ by editors arising from an assumption in mid-twentieth-century scholarship that it was intended to replace an earlier version (‘VIIb’); indeed, in the first edition of David Erdman’s seminal Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, Night VIIb was relegated to an appendix.16 The detailed investigative work of John Kilgore, Mark Lefevbre, and Andrew Lincoln, published in a special 1978 issue of Blake Quarterly challenged the two assumptions on which this approach rested. Kilgore in particular is not persuaded that VIIb was somehow ‘earlier’ than VIIa, and the authors agree that there is no compelling reason to consider the two versions as mutually exclusive alternatives, considering the traces Blake left on the manuscript of his inconclusive thoughts about how to combine the two Nights. Indeed, Lefevbre’s summative proposal for the arrangement of the lines has proven particularly influential in subsequent editions of the poem.17 The opening of Night VIIb—at least as it was first arranged on the manuscript—reconstructs the ‘Preludium’ of America. Like the earlier text, it promises the story of a revolution, of a break from the chains of control and coercion. The adolescent Orc, chained to the mountain top and tended by a ‘nameless shadowy’ female, rages with unfocused apocalyptic energy. Prompted by ferocious desire, he breaks free: ‘the hairy shoulders rend the links[,] free are the wrists of fire’ (91:2, 17, E363). Orc’s chaotic, revolutionary power bursts forth, and—as readers of the Lambeth books—we anticipate a fierce, existential challenge to the authority of Urizen, whose power has regenerated during Night VI. We are mistaken. Instead, the cataclysm prompts an urgent reactionary call-to-arms that aims to restrain Orc/Luvah in the moment of his resurgence. ‘Stop we the rising of the glorious King. spur spur your clouds’ the song urges, before broadening the Christ-like associations of Orc—familiar to readers of America and Europe—by pronouncing the ultimate legal judgement: ‘They vote the death of Luvah, & they nailed him to the tree; / They 16  John Kilgore, “The Order of Nights VIIa and VIIb in Blake’s The Four Zoas,” Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly 12 (1978–79): 107–8; Andrew Lincoln, “The Revision of the Seventh and Eighth Nights of The Four Zoas,” Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly 12 (1978–79): 115–19. 17  Mark S.  Lefebvre, “A Note on the Structural Necessity of Night VIIb,” Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly 12 (1978–79): 134.

126 

M. MAUGER

pierced him with a spear, & laid him in a sepulchre’ (91:30, 92:13–14, E364). As conflict rages, Urizen’s sons turn aside from the creative activities of farming, weaving and building, and produce destructive instruments of war: swords, chariots and axes. More ominously, they establish forms of labour practice and political organisation that perpetuate and normalise hierarchies of inequality and exploitation. They reject the ‘simple workmanship’ of the ‘hour glass’ and ‘waterwheel’ that organise traditional practices of rural labour: And in their stead intricate wheels invented Wheel without wheel To perplex youth in their outgoings & to bind to labours Of day & night the myriads of Eternity. that they might file And polish brass & iron hour after hour laborious workmanship Kept ignorant of the use[,] that they might spend the days of wisdom In sorrowful drudgery to obtain a scanty pittance of bread In ignorance to view a small portion & think that All And call it Demonstration[,] blind to all the simple rules of life (92:26–33, E364)

Blake argues that these arrangements have a seductive allure that effectively neutralises opposition and serves the interests of the wealthy. His vehicle for representing that process is the figure of Vala, the embodiment of ‘Mystery’, whose beauty makes ‘the wound of the sword Sweet & the broken bone delightful’ (92:36, E365). We have encountered Blake’s idea of ‘Mystery’ in The Book of Ahania and the Songs of Experience poem ‘The Human Abstract’—but it is in The Four Zoas that Blake offers his most sustained analysis of Mystery’s role in the corruption of humanity. Rosso argues that Mystery is the material form of human bondage: ‘the sacrifice of human energies to natural morality depends upon the deluded acquiescence of those whose energies are sacrificed’.18 Delusion is an important context here; but I would argue that ‘morality’ is much more contrived than Rosso suggests. In many respects, Blake’s use of ‘Mystery’ seems to anticipate Marxist critiques concerning the establishment of state ideology. Mystery is associated with secret knowledges, supernatural impositions, invented histories, opaque customs, and religious doctrine. It forms a complex web of shadowy, hidden, barely acknowledged structures and practices by which social hierarchies  Rosso, Blake’s Prophetic Workshop, 125.

18

5  THE HEAVENS SQUARED BY A LINE: LEGAL ARCHITECTURE AND MYSTERY 

127

are justified, individual self-determination is constrained, and wealth is accumulated in the hands of an elite. It creates an intellectual fog that has the effect of absorbing, dampening, and stupefying radical imaginative thought. The coercion of the working population into conditions of relentless labour, scarcity, self-denial and imaginative poverty is accomplished through its quiet, insidious growth through the nations of the world, a process repeatedly likened by Blake to the growth of a poisonous and invasive tree whose roots spread across the channels of the human brain. We typically accept its premises without question—in fact, we may do so without even necessarily recognising its presence—even though, by so doing, we effectively enact our own imprisonment within its strictures, and ultimately contribute to its expanding inertia. By aligning Mystery with Vala in a poem originally conceived as a vehicle to tell her story, Blake emphasises its active agency in the human world. Indeed in Night VIII, at her moment of utmost triumph, Vala is adorned in the garb of the ‘Mother of Harlots’ of Revelation 17.5, with ‘Mystery’ written in blood on her forehead (110[106]:6, E379; 109[105]:15, E378). Vala may be the companion of Luvah, ‘Prince of Love’; but in the world of chaos and disunity depicted in the poem, she is associated with destructive tendencies of lust, temptation, and sexual licentiousness. Mystery is alluring. It promises fulfilment and power. But its indulgence leads to apathy and acceptance, the suppression of righteous anger, and the strengthening of the forms of oppression that it disguises as ‘inevitable’. Orc’s barbaric, libertine, lusting desire to force himself upon Vala in Night VIIb is rapidly exhausted as he is ‘consumed by his own fires’, his human form passively ‘mingled’ with hers. Vala meanwhile is triumphant: she ‘joyd in all the Conflict[,] Gratified’ (93:21–23, E365). Far from representing an existential antinomian challenge to the world of legislative and moral confinement, Orc’s raw energy dissipates and is dispersed within the webs of mystery and control that Vala represents, webs that resonate with the concerns of capital, power, empire, and enslavement. The revolutionary forces that might in the earlier prophecies have sought to stamp the law to dust, are left without direction: ‘They go out to war with Strong Shouts & loud Clarions[.] O Pity / They return with lamentations mourning & weeping’ (93:30–31, E365). Vala, meanwhile, is all powerful, ‘far & wide she stretchd thro all the worlds’ (87[95]:1, E367). The remaining segment of this ‘VIIb’ version of the Night concerns another phase of Urizen’s building work, and the onset of conflict with Tharmas and Los. In its first arrangement in the manuscript, this section

128 

M. MAUGER

followed the triumph of Vala described above; but many modern editions, again following Lefevbre’s interpretation of Blake’s marginal indications, invert the structure and place this portion before the account of Orc’s fleeting revolutionary outburst. Most significantly, we see Urizen establishing the technological apparatus of a vast mercantile empire:19 I will walk forth through those wide fields of endless Eternity A God & not a Man[,] a conqueror in triumphant glory And all the Sons of Everlasting shall bow down at my feet First Trades & Commerce ships & armed vessels he builded laborious To swim the deep & on the Land children are sold to trades Of dire necessity, still labouring day & night till all Their life extinct they took the spectre form in dark despair And slaves in myriads in ship-loads burden the hoarse-sounding deep, Rattling with clanking chains the universal empire groans (95:22–30, E360–61).

This vision is perhaps derived from Blake’s observation in London of the global expansion of Britain’s commercial influence in the period, in which forms of exploitation including trans-continental slavery and child labour, long-distance trade, and naval domination are inextricably linked in the establishment of an empire defined not only in terms of territorial acquisition, but also in terms of the mercantile procurement of the trade routes that allow access to valuable markets for goods. Placed after the story of Vala’s triumph over Orc (as in the original manuscript arrangement), these actions suggest Urizen’s misinterpretation of Orc’s defeat as a confirmation of his own power. The vast temple that he goes on to build, a temple ‘in the image of the human heart’ that produces secrecy and reverses ‘all the order of delight’, demonstrates that he has simply become an agent of Vala. Placed before that account (as Blake seems subsequently to have directed), the passage indicates that Urizen has already fallen under Vala’s spell as he fights Orc. Either way, we see how Urizen’s tendency towards systemisation, codification, and structural design is perpetually corrupted by the temptations of Mystery, evolving into a system of coercion, control, poverty and dispossession. The revolutionary promise that Orc may once have represented has dissipated. Indeed, the horrific machinery of empire  Michael, 105–6.

19

5  THE HEAVENS SQUARED BY A LINE: LEGAL ARCHITECTURE AND MYSTERY 

129

seems able to absorb that energy, and twist it to its own purposes. Urizen’s law is not shattered by the voices of the oppressed. Rather, it is transformed by Mystery, and made secret, insidious, unseen.

Legal Travel Journals Whether ultimately intended as a replacement for an ‘original’ Night VII, or as a separately composed Night which Blake sought to splice with its counterpart, the material identified in contemporary scholarship as ‘Night VIIa’ is even bleaker in terms of its narrative of the law, of mystery, and of the failed promise of revolution. To make sense of these lines, however, we need to return to Night VI of The Four Zoas to trace in particular its account of the origin of Urizen’s metal books of the law. Here, again, we sense Blake’s intention for the poem as an expanded version of the Lambeth myth. The narrative circumstances are broadly those of Chapter VIII of The Book of Urizen, in which Blake’s lawmaker creator—roused from his deathly slumber by the cries of the chained Orc—explores the ruins of the human world. In the re-framed myth, the appearance of Urizen’s metal books, which had provided the impetus for the creation of the human world in The Book of Urizen, are deferred to this moment of recovery, consolidation, and rebirth. Rather than being introduced as books of law, they are seen initially as travel journals. As he meanders through the desolate landscapes of the world, Urizen records in his ‘books of iron & brass / The enormous wonders of the abysses’. Lincoln describes this activity as an attempt to distil meaning from the chaos of the abyss, continually hampered by Urizen’s difficulty in finding a place of certainty on which to base his observations.20 Given Urizen’s tendency to search for principles of order and containment, this is a reasonable conclusion. The ruination of the world through which he moves, however, suggests that the books themselves—at least initially—cannot be more than a collection of fragments, shards of wisdom later to be organised into a system. Urizen’s journey is arduous. He recognises the fragments of the ruined Golden Hall, and of the ‘once-glorious Heaven’ in which he was the undisputed Prince of Light before the disunity of the Eternal Man. But this is now a world of misery and compulsion, of curses and despair, the landscape dominated by ‘horrid shapes & sights of torment in burning dungeons & in / Fetters of red hot iron’. These details are recorded by  Lincoln, Spiritual History, 133–37.

20

130 

M. MAUGER

Urizen ‘writing in bitter tears & groans’ (70:3, 18–19, E347). Even in moments of greatest despair and exhaustion, ‘still his books he bore in his strong hands, & his iron pen’ (71:35, E348). Notwithstanding the trials and miseries of the journey, in which Urizen continuously falls, dies and is reborn, the metal books in which he records his travels remain unscathed: the books remained still unconsumd Still to be written & interleavd with brass & iron & gold Time after time[,] for such a journey none but iron pens Can write And adamantine leaves receive[,] nor can the man who goes The journey obstinate refuse to write time after time (71:39–72:1, E348–49)

As discussed in the previous chapter, the parallel between Urizen’s medium and Blake’s own practices as an engraver is striking. Both Blake and his flawed alter ego use iron pens to write on adamantine leaves, a term suggesting pages whose material is not only indestructible but also inflexible, unmoving, unresponsive to claims of sympathy or affection. This is also a journal which Urizen has become compelled to write, perhaps a commentary on enlightenment scholars enslaved to the vast projects on which they embark, or an acknowledgement of the poet-prophet whose impetus to write may not be voluntary. Urizen is the author, but also the editor of these texts. At moments of rest ‘oft would he sit in a dark rift & regulate his books’, the task of editing ironically couched in terms of order and legislation (72:6, E349). If this record of the wisdom that can be discerned among the ruins of the abyss is by necessity fragmentary, this absorbing process of ‘regulation’ describes the means by which Urizen attempts to systematise those ideas into some form of knowledge. Is Blake once again drawing upon his own experience of writing? Pursuing this idea further, there is a clear parallel between Urizen’s ceaseless endeavour to bring order to his books, and the chaotic revisions of The Four Zoas manuscript itself, were it not for the material contrast: these are metal books in which Urizen engraves with an iron pen. The ‘regulation’ of that text must be painful, laborious, and exhausting. This account of the composition of the books extends into the additional Night VIIa material, as Urizen enters the cavern in which Orc remains chained. This hellish enclosure resounds with the apocalyptic noise and fervour of antinomian fire: ‘raging lamps of mercy’ are fed by ‘holy oil [that] rages thro all the cavernd rocks’ in rivers. The flames are ‘drunk with fury’, and Urizen sees how they consume even the

5  THE HEAVENS SQUARED BY A LINE: LEGAL ARCHITECTURE AND MYSTERY 

131

‘adamantine scales of justice’ on which legislative order depends. Orc himself is the source of this effervescent vitality, his limbs ‘cast forth red smoke & fire’ (77:5–19, E353). Urizen is right to be wary of this apparently limitless spring of destructive revolutionary energy. Judiciously keeping his distance he ‘ranged his books around him’, a kind of physical and intellectual barricade against the fires of Orc. Hobson draws our attention to the high comedy of this moment. But the insidious transformation of the books into a full-fledged legislative programme is also completed here. Initially, Orc addresses Urizen as an aged reactionary, scornfully dismissing his ice and snow as powerless in the face of the youthful revolutionary fire. Urizen is characterised by Orc as helplessly tied to his intellectual schemes of writing and categorisation in the midst of the destructive chaos that overwhelms him: now a Lake of waters deep Sweeps over thee freezing to solid[,] still thou sitst closd up … Thundring & hail & frozen iron haild from the Element Rends thy white hair[,] yet thou dost fixd obdurate brooding sit Writing thy books. Anon a cloud filld with a waste of snows Covers thee still obdurate still resolved & writing still[.] Tho rocks roll oer thee[,] tho floods pour[,] tho winds black as the Sea Cut thee in gashes[,] tho the blood pours down around thy ankles Freezing thy feet to the hard rock[,] still thy pen obdurate Traces the wonders of Futurity (79:4–16, E354)

But Orc has underestimated Urizen, and has misunderstood the terrifying power of his books. As the passage demonstrates, the imperative to write and to record is strangely impervious to the cataclysmic events that seek to disrupt it. ‘Read my books’ Urizen advises, before adding with cold sarcasm: ‘they shall teach thee how to war’ (79:20–21, E355). Urizen’s daughters, like the sirens who lure sailors to certain death, then ‘sing’ the words of the book of iron, and Orc finds himself ‘compelled’ to listen. Their words knead ‘the bread of Orc’, defusing the apocalyptic power of the cavern and relentlessly turning the rivers of fire into cold lakes that feed the growth of the Tree of Mystery (79:25–80:26, E355–56). The ‘words of wisdom’ contained in the book of brass, advises Urizen, will further refine their song, their tongue ‘tuned’ by ‘moral duty’. As Haram Lee—following Paley’s lead—has recently reminded us, the

132 

M. MAUGER

Urizenic science that the book contains is a satire on Thomas Malthus’s proposals in An Essay on the Principle of Population, first published in 1798, by which citizens are made compliant through the encouragement of a form of rational individualism that prioritises the pursuit of happiness, property, and self-mastery.21 As with Enion’s lament at the end of Night II, the measures again recall aspects of Oothoon’s devastating assessment of contemporary society in Visions of the Daughters of Albion (5:7–32, E48–49), and the bitter denunciation of the practices of ‘kings’ in The Song of Los (6:9–24 and 7:1–8, E68–69). We can ‘reduce all to our will, as spaniels are taught with art’, Urizen recommends, through a mixture of flattery, charity, reward and punishment. Make the poor dependent on the ‘goodness’ of those who have produced their poverty: ‘With pomp give every crust of bread you give, with gracious cunning / Magnify small gifts, reduce the man to want a gift, & then give with pomp’. Preach on the necessity of temperance and thrift, ‘though you know that bread & water are all / He can afford’ (80:15–21, E355). Unknown even to Urizen, however, his instinctual recourse to use law and justice as a route to establish order and ensure survival, has been redirected (as in Night VIIb) through the agency of Vala. As in The Book of Ahania we see Urizen, engrossed in writing and inattentive to his surroundings, become trapped within the startling growth of the Tree of Mystery, which springs from his heel, ‘struck through the rock’ and ‘shooting up / Branches’ that themselves ‘bending down / Take root again, wherever they touch again branching forth’. As before, ‘he with difficulty & great pain brought / His books out of the dismal shade, all but the book of iron’ (78:4–12, E353). Far from the beautiful constitutional framework that informed his desire to produce ‘a world without pain’ in the Book of Urizen, given architectural expression earlier in The Four Zoas through the geometrical magnificence of the Golden Hall, the law has become infected by Vala’s desire to pervert human life through the doctrine of Mystery. Moreover, instead of being presented as a tool of reason, deployed by the Prince of Light according to principles of certainty, clarity, and equity, Urizen’s law advances Mystery’s agenda for exploitation, apathy, and quiet acceptance. Indeed, it is the vehicle by 21  Haram Lee, “The Critique of Reason and Biopolitics in William Blake’s The Four Zoas,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 63 (2021): 59–60; Morton D. Paley, Energy and the Imagination: A Study of the Development of Blake’s Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), 113–15.

5  THE HEAVENS SQUARED BY A LINE: LEGAL ARCHITECTURE AND MYSTERY 

133

which Mystery finds expression in the human world, and provides the nourishment which allows the phenomenal growth of the Tree itself. Urizen is oblivious to this. A rare intervention from the poem’s visionary speaker explains that Urizen, ‘Nor knew the source of his own but thought himself the Sole author / Of all his wandering Experiments in the horrible Abyss’ (80:51-p.81:1, E356). Notwithstanding his fierce resistance to Urizen’s creed, Orc finds himself weakening, his wrath subsiding, compelled ‘like a worm’ to ‘rise in peace’ (80:29, E356). As Urizen drives home his advantage, Orc begins to assume the twists of a serpentine body, the condition in which he is left by Vala in Night VIIb. To effect the general subjugation of the human population as envisaged in the Book of Brass, Urizen uses his code of wisdom to compel Orc as a serpent to ‘stretch out & up the mysterious tree / He sufferd him to Climb that he might draw all human forms / Into submission to his will’ (81:4–6, E356). The story of Urizen’s books reaches its culmination in Night VIII in the final indication of Mystery’s victory: Urizen takes his books into the temple he constructed in Night VII, and consecrates them to Vala. With this final act, Vala channels the impetus of both Orc’s fiery energy, and Urizen’s icy legislation: Urizen heard the Voice & saw the Shadow. underneath His woven darkness & in laws & deceitful religions Beginning at the tree of Mystery circling its root She spread herself thro all the branches in the power of Orc A shapeless & indefinite cloud (103:21–25, E375)

Far too late, Urizen recognises his mistake. He feels the ‘numming stupor’, and finds himself ‘tangled in his own net in sorrow lust repentance’ (106:19, E381; 103:31, E376). The Tree of Mystery thrives, fed by the black waters of a lake named Udan Adan: ‘For this Lake is formd from the tears & sighs & death sweat of the Victims / Of Urizens laws. to irrigate the roots of the tree of Mystery’ (113:27–28, E377). Now the tree is seen as a living cross or gallows, a site of judicial sacrifice. Amidst the gyrations of the narrative, the figure of the Lamb of God coalesces within the ruined world, anticipating the divine intervention of Night IX. Urizen convenes a court, ‘the Synagogue of Satan in dire Sanhedrim’, presided over by the triumphant Vala, presented with her name—‘Mystery’—written in blood on her forehead (109[105]:5, 15, E378). The members of the assembly condemn the Lamb of God to death and, in a deliberate appropriation of

134 

M. MAUGER

the biblical account of the crucifixion in the Gospel of Matthew (see Matthew 27:27–37), mock his claims to be the Messiah: ‘They naild him upon the tree of Mystery weeping over him / And then mocking & then worshipping calling him Lord & King’ (110[106]:2–3, E379). The additional material offered in the lines comprising Night VIIa explores the susceptibility of Urizenic moral law to being instrumented as a means to achieve malign desires for control, domination, and the subservience of the population at large. Blake characterises these desires using a gendered paraphernalia of fallen ‘male’ Zoas being seduced from their assigned roles in the body of the Eternal Man, by an alluring ‘female’ alternative. The gender politics of such a framework are, of course, deeply troubling. David Aers has suggested that the survival of such a traditional idea of sexual hierarchy in Blake’s work demonstrates ‘the hold of received ideology and abstractions over even the most radical imagination’.22 We should not attempt to explain-away the clear misogyny implied in Blake’s framework; and yet it is also the case that the ‘masculine’ responses to the fallen human condition are also seen to be powerless, ineffective, easily distracted, full of noise but lacking in substance. Both the unfocussed revolutionary energy of Orc, and the legalised frameworks of Urizen’s metal books are shown to be mere conduits for the rise of coercion, psychological control, and despotism. In the bleak contexts of the immediate post-­ revolutionary world that Blake confronted at the turn of the nineteenth century, we can only assume that this represents the poet’s dismay with the afterlife of the revolutionary movements which had seemed a few years earlier to hold the promise of recovery and freedom.

Glimpsing the Laws of Eternity In the final state of the manuscript, The Four Zoas opens with the proposition that ‘Four Mighty Ones are in every Man; a Perfect Unity / Cannot exist. but from the Universal Brotherhood of Eden’ (3:4–5, E300). For all that the poet claims that only God understands ‘the natures of those living creatures’, the epic which follows presents their story of conflict, betrayal, ambition, and reconciliation as a means of understanding the current state of humanity. But the ‘perfect Unity’ whose collapse is recalled, with multiple variations, time and time again throughout the poem is never documented unambiguously, nor is it clear that the recombination and recovery  Aers, “Sex, Society and Ideology,” 41–43.

22

5  THE HEAVENS SQUARED BY A LINE: LEGAL ARCHITECTURE AND MYSTERY 

135

of Man in Night IX, as the Zoas assume their ‘proper’ places, is a straightforward return to the primeval unity which had been lost. Urizen’s own role in that divine structure is particularly intriguing. Blake’s continued persistence in locating Urizen, his figure of Reason, definition, and science at the very centre of his drama of humanity suggests that he remains committed to the law’s essential humanity. That being the case, what can we discern to be Blake’s ideas about unfallen, uncorrupted law? To what extent is law related to Urizen’s proper role in the ‘perfect Unity’ of the ‘Universal Brotherhood of Eden’? Throughout The Four Zoas, as we have seen, Urizen is accorded the epithet ‘Prince of Light’. The term typically appears in the context of the various fragmented memories of the time before the discord among the Zoas, and often carries ironic resonance given the tendency of Urizen’s schemes to end in darkness, imprisonment, and ruination. Urizen is the standard-bearer of ‘reason’ throughout Blake’s 1790s work. His unfallen soubriquet in The Four Zoas clearly invokes an idea of ‘enlightenment’; he is, after all, the natural philosopher whose commitment to scientific methodology offers to bring understanding and clarity to that which is unknown, or accountable only in terms of the supernatural. Urizen, who represents the light which banishes Mystery, becomes its slave in the chaos of humanity’s fall. As the Prince of Light, we are told on a number of occasions, Urizen was also the keeper of the ‘Horses of Light’. Their acquisition by Luvah (either through theft, trickery, carelessness, or through bargain according to the various accounts of the epic’s core back-story that we only ever glimpse) seems central to the disruption of Unity and the sickness of the Universal Man. Although their meaning is never clarified, the repercussions of Urizen’s loss of his horses indicate that they represent a key aspect of Man’s cohesion, suggestive of reason’s role as the driving force of order and unity. In her misguided efforts to calm Urizen at the opening of Night III, Ahania draws a direct connection between the loss of the horses, and Urizen’s fallen creation of the Golden Hall: Why didst thou listen to the voice of Luvah that dread morn To give the immortal steeds of light to his deceitful hands No longer now obedient to thy will[?] thou art compell’d To forge the curbs of iron & brass[,] to build the iron mangers To feed them with intoxication from the winepresses of Luvah Till the Divine Vision & Fruition is quite obliterated[.]

136 

M. MAUGER

They call thy lions to the fields of blood, they rowze thy tygers Out of the halls of justice, till these dens thy wisdom framd Golden & beautiful but O how unlike those sweet fields of bliss Where liberty was justice & eternal science was mercy (39:2–11, E326–27)

Ahania offers here a rare moment of perspective. Over the second half of Night II, as we have seen, Urizen as legal architect has directed the construction of a beautiful world of order and proportion, the Golden Hall. Ahania describes this world as if it were a courtroom. It is a development of Urizen’s ‘halls of justice’, framed by his ‘wisdom’ to be ‘Golden & beautiful’. She is keenly aware, however, that notwithstanding its wonder and magnificence, this creation is a poor reflection of the ‘sweet fields of bliss’ they enjoyed when he reigned as Prince of Light. Now he can no longer direct the ‘immortal steeds of light’ through his ‘will’, Urizen has become dependent on artificial mechanisms for order and control, described by Ahania as ‘curbs’. Although this is a term used more generally to describe a means of restraint, in the period it retained a specific connection to its original meaning as one of the components of the headgear of a domesticated horse (a ‘curb bit’ is a particularly severe mechanism conventionally used to control an unruly animal). Urizen’s curbs are manufactured from ‘iron & brass’, the same materials that are associated in Nights VI and VII with his legal books. A world in which order is maintained through coercion and physical control may appear ‘Golden & beautiful’ from the outside. But Urizen’s creation is impoverished, it has been drained of the creative and potent energy of the lions and tigers, which have instead been sent to the ‘fields of blood’ where they enforce Urizen’s power through warfare and violence. In the former times of distant memory, ‘liberty was justice’. In the new regime, we might imagine, that equivalence cannot be assumed. Blake clearly has in mind here the contrast between nostalgic accounts of liberty under the English law, and the experience of the law’s supposed protection of rights and freedoms in 1790s Britain, where radicalism, opposition, and passion attract surveillance, control, trial, and incarceration. Echoes of the Treason Trials of 1794, and of the passing of the ‘gagging acts’ of 1795, seem to reverberate here. ‘Liberty’ and ‘justice’ become antagonistic terms in this lived experience. Justice and ‘eternal science’ are concerns that we might readily associate with Urizen throughout Blake’s 1790s work for all that in Urizenic practice, they lead to error. In Ahania’s memory, they seem untainted. There is no space between theory and practice.

5  THE HEAVENS SQUARED BY A LINE: LEGAL ARCHITECTURE AND MYSTERY 

137

Luvah, the ‘Prince of Love’ in times of unity, seems to acknowledge the way in which this conceptual purity has become occluded. He mourns the transformation which has come upon him and Urizen: ‘for I was love[,] but hatred awakes in me / And Urizen who was Faith & Certainty[,] is changed to Doubt’ (27:14–15, E318). Later, that uncertain and fearful Urizen recollects his ‘throne sublime’ where he was surrounded by ‘the sons of wisdom’. Now, in terms which recall ‘The Garden of Love’ from Songs of Experience, ‘the gardens of wisdom are become a field of horrid graves / And on the bones I drop my tears & water them in vain’ (63:25–26, 30–31, E343). Whereas wisdom formerly defined a space of delight, harmony and beauty, in the corruptions of the human world it has led to fear and paranoia. The cacophonous apocalyptic visions of the poem’s climax in Night IX describe at great length a divinely initiated day of judgement, a violent— occasionally horrific—account of refinement, purification and cleansing in which the souls of the dead are planted, tended as a crop, harvested, processed, and crushed either as wheat in a grindstone or as grapes in a winepress. Throughout, the judgement of the dead and the recovery of the Eternal Man are described in terms of the determined completion of a detailed organised process that allows the resumption of order and form. Urizen himself is initially anxious and fearful. He lies weeping in the abyss, reflecting with bitterness on the machinery of authority and control that he has created: the cities whose ‘turrets & towers & domes … destroyed the pleasant gardens’, the ships of his mercantile empire that have ‘chokd’ rivers and burdened oceans. Nevertheless he is drawn from the darkness: ‘renewed he shook his aged mantles off / Into the fires … exulting in his joy’ (121:6–8, 29–30, E390–91). He announces the withdrawal of the elaborate structures of compulsion which he has established: Let Orc consume[,] let Tharmas rage[,] let dark Urthona give All strength to Los & Enitharmon & let Los self-cursd Rend down this fabric as a wall ruind & family extinct Rage Orc[,] rage Tharmas[,] Urizen no longer curbs your rage (121:23–26, E390)

Amid the prophetic fervour, we see the various legal corruptions that have been charted in the earlier Nights destroyed. Urizen’s books ‘unroll with dreadful noise’, the Synagogue of Satan—the evil courtroom of Vala in Night VIII—is consumed in the fire. The Tree of Mystery, whose insidious spread and endless growth seemed impervious to any form of

138 

M. MAUGER

resistance in Nights VII and VIII, is destroyed in less than a line of verse. The rejuvenated Urizen then directs the stages of the great harvest, which he manages with care and calmness, with due attention to order and apportionment, inhabiting a range of skilled roles in the process. Urizen the ploughman cuts furrows across the cities and villages. Urizen the sower scatters the souls of the dead: ‘from the hand of Urizen the myriads fall like stars / Into their own appointed places’ (125:6–7, E394). Urizen the reaper wields the tools of the harvest and binds the wheat in sheaves. Urizen the thresher separates the grain of the nations from the chaff, in preparation for grinding. As the Eternal Man recovers, we also see the remaining Zoas assuming their designated roles, with Luvah and Vala instructed to ‘obey & live’, to ‘return O Love in peace / Into your place[,] the place of seed[,] not in the brain or heart’ (126:7–8, E395). As the ‘dream’ of The Four Zoas ends, we see in the final line that the cleansing of knowledge has concluded: ‘the dark religions are departed, & sweet science reigns’ (139:10, E407). Night IX of The Four Zoas provides a salvation of sorts for mankind, and a way to bring the ‘Dream of Nine Nights’ to a conclusion. But by the end of the apocalyptic cleansing of sin and error, the dismissal of Mystery, and the destruction of legal structures, it seems questionable what there is that remains ‘human’ in the ‘humanity’ that it purges. Is human history completed, or reset? Are the vast stories of human endeavour, suffering, labouring and building—charted in the first eight nights of the poem— now cast aside, revoked, dismissed as an embarrassing departure from the ‘unity’ of Divine conception? The poem offers glimpses, as we have seen, of a different pathway to human recovery, one which is rooted in the perpetual striving for forms of organisation and structure, in human agency rather than divine intervention. But the exhaustion of Urizen, of Los, and indeed of Blake himself—the manuscript itself was abandoned after years of struggle—nevertheless suggests an imaginative and epistemological crisis. Legal codes and revolutionary constitutions lead to abstraction and closure. Constitutional space is not a sanctuary, but a prison. The limits of the law have apparently been reached, and human liberty remains exposed and unprotected.

CHAPTER 6

Such are the Laws of Eternity: Recovery, Redemption, and Prophecy

The familiar aged countenance of Urizen stares blankly outward from a full-page design part way through the first book of Milton: A Poem in 2 Books, the first of two illuminated epics that Blake completed in the early decades of the nineteenth century (Fig. 6.1). His long white beard and flowing robes combine pictorially with the water of a river that flows across the plate. This is decidedly not the rejuvenated Prince of Light who rises in Night IX of The Four Zoas to direct the great harvest. Rather, the figure is immediately recognisable as the primordial lawmaker whom Blake has been drawing since the early 1790s: the spirit of corruption and poverty who stalks ‘London’; the guardian deity of Albion who confronts the revolutionary rise of Orc in America; the primeval power who opens his metal books to create a world according to the principles of ‘One King, One God, One Law’ in The Book of Urizen; and the ‘Ancient of Days’ whose golden compasses set the limits of the world in Europe. The composition from Milton exhibits the familiar formal symmetry that Blake uses to striking effect throughout his work, including the titlepage of The Book of Urizen, on which (as explored in the opening of Chap. 4) the same figure sits inscribing the law onto the stone tablets that surround him. Urizen is here once again depicted with those stone tablets, either leaning on them with his forearms, or grasping them rather awkwardly in his hands. The symbols they bear, suggestive of Hebrew block letters, heighten their association with the Mosaic decalogue. Erdman argues that the

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Mauger, William Blake and the Visionary Law, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37723-5_6

139

140 

M. MAUGER

Fig. 6.1  William Blake, Milton: A Poem in 2 Books, Copy D, Plate 16. (Library of Congress, Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection)

6  SUCH ARE THE LAWS OF ETERNITY: RECOVERY, REDEMPTION… 

141

disintegrating syllables of the inscription evidence the collapse of the law itself.1 On the hill behind Urizen, a group of women play musical instruments, including a trumpet, a harp, a tambourine, and perhaps a serpent (a wooden bass horn). In the immediate foreground, a naked muscular figure—identifiable from the text as a version of the re-awakened author of Paradise Lost, Blake’s complex fractured hero—walks through a single line of text into the plate design and appears to be grasping Urizen’s shoulders. His right foot performs in literal terms the destruction of ‘Selfhood’ that the line itself apparently presents as a caption for the scene, a visual motif with echoes of Milton’s similar splitting of his own name on the titlepage.2 The commencement of this strange confrontation is described in the text on Plate 19. Milton, ‘unhappy though in heaven’, has travelled back to the World of Time and Space in which he had lived, his feet bleeding from the long and arduous journey, resolved to correct the errors for which his literary legacy has been responsible. Urizen, planting his feet deep in the rock, prepares to block Milton’s path: Silent thy met, and silent strove among the streams of Arnon Even to Mahanaim, when with cold hand Urizen stoop’d down And took up water from the river Jordan: pouring on To Miltons brain the icy fluid from his broad cold palm. But Milton took of the red clay of Succoth, moulding it with care Between his palms: and filling up the furrows of many years Beginning at the feet of Urizen, and on the bones Creating new flesh on the Demon cold, and building him, As with new clay a Human form (19[21]: 6–14, E112)

Urizen strives through icy baptism to extinguish the prophetic fire of Milton ‘the Awakener’, a satirical counterpart to the New Testament scene in which John the Baptist baptises Jesus in the waters of the Jordan. But Urizen’s ice is ineffective against Milton’s fire, just as it was against the fires of Orc in America. Unlike Orc, however, Milton does not identify Urizen as his enemy. Rather, he strives to redeem him, to rejuvenate the aged lawmaker. Filled with a prophetic determination to renovate false  Erdman, Illuminated Blake, 234; see also Behrendt, Reading, 159.  Robert N.  Essick and Joseph Viscomi, eds, Milton a Poem, and the Final Illuminated Works, Blake’s Illuminated Books 5 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 24; Erdman (Illuminated Blake, 234). 1 2

142 

M. MAUGER

coverings and restore the unblemished ‘Human form’, and using the same red earth from which Humanity was first moulded in the Genesis account, Milton quietly softens the clay, filling in the wrinkles of age, despair, and corruption.3 Whilst there is no specific reference in the text to the stone tablets of law that we see in the design of Plate 16, it is clear that they reflect an aspect of Urizen’s position in this conflict. Perhaps they offer the solidity on which Urizen depends for his physical support? Alternatively, we might argue that they are wielded as a shield by which he hopes to defend himself against Milton’s ceaseless re-sculpting of his body, or otherwise brandished (ineffectively) as weapons, an attempt to petrify Milton into compliance with his law through a baptism into stone.4 The symmetry of the design also allows them to be seen as the teetering pillars of a gateway defended by Urizen. It may be that Blake is happy to have all these defensive and offensive possibilities in play. So focused is Milton on his task that he does not even appear to notice any resistance, or the musical allurements of Satan’s minions who are sent forth ‘in all their beauty to entice Milton across the river’. He stands silent before Urizen ‘as the sculptor silent stands before / His forming image; he walks round it patient labouring’ (20[22]:8, E114). The encounter continues as a wordless backdrop to most of the rest of the poem. Leonard Deen has argued that in sculpting a new body for Urizen, Milton transforms the moral law into ‘New Testament mercy’.5 As I will show in this chapter, however, the transformation does not enact straightforwardly the Protestant triumph of grace over law, but rather (by the end of the poem) the revival of the redeemed ‘Laws of Eternity’. Milton’s restoration of a ‘Human form’ for Urizen will displace the scaffolding of moral laws on which Urizen’s current form depends. The suggestion is not that they will be ‘stamped to dust’ in the violent revolutionary movements associated in the Lambeth books with Orc, but that they will simply 3  Johnson and Grant, 264; Bloom, Apocalypse, 329; Paley, “’Wonderful Originals’—Blake and Ancient Sculpture,” in Blake in his Time, ed. Robert N.  Essick and Donald Pearce (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), 170–97. 4  Florence Sandler, “The Iconoclastic Enterprise: Blake’s Critique of Milton’s Religion,” Blake Studies 5 (1972–73): 19; David Fuller, “Milton and the Development of Blake’s Thought,” in An Infinite Complexity: Essays in Romanticism, ed. J. R. Watson (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1983), 62. 5  Leonard W. Deen, Conversing in Paradise: Poetic Genius and Identity-as-Community in Blake’s Los (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1983), 182.

6  SUCH ARE THE LAWS OF ETERNITY: RECOVERY, REDEMPTION… 

143

become irrelevant, discarded, part of an artificial covering which can be set aside. Once divested of these apparent surfaces, the simple order of the human form conferred by the structure of the Laws of Eternity is asserted. Law imposed as an imprisoning system of punishments designed to enforce behavioural compliance, is replaced by law imagined as a liberating system of imaginative protection, guarantee, and the conferment of responsibilities associated with human community. In Milton, Blake deploys a number of new metaphorical representations of the ossification of the moral law into structures of imprisonment and coercion. Legal codes coalesce with the agents of economic capital, empirical scientific rationalism and doctrinal religious abstraction, hardening into a false covering around the perfect eternal human form. This false outline obscures the divine vision that it contains until it is forgotten, and the covering becomes mistaken for the form itself. Blake terms this manifestation ‘the Covering Cherub’, a reference to the design of the ‘mercy seat’ with which the Ark of the Covenant was sealed and subsequently hidden from sight within the Temple’s inner sanctuary, the Holy of Holies, in the Old Testament accounts of Exodus 25 and 1 Kings 6. Blake’s interpretation of the biblical source material may have been influenced by the dissenting exegesis that he encountered in London meeting houses. In Muggletonian treatises in particular, the phrase ‘outward visible tabernacle’ is used in the explication of Exodus 25. Moses may well have shown the Hebrews the ‘outward letter of the law … [in order] to shew that law more plain that was written within’ wrote Thomas Tomkinson in The Harmony of the Three Commissions (first published in 1757, though written in the early 1690s); but ‘when Moses had given reason a law, he gave him an outward visible tabernacle, as also he gave them several outward legal ceremonies, which was to signify the true tabernacle itself … but reason being blind it could never see into the substance, but rested in the shadow’.6 The physical form of the law—the ‘ceremonies’ performed in its service, the tablets on which it was written, the container in which they were placed, the cover which sealed the container—beguiles and distracts reason, and disguises the inner ‘substance’ of divine revelation. This is a helpful gloss for Blake’s Covering Cherub, 6  Thomas Tomkinson, The Harmony of the Three Commissions; or, None but Christ ([London?], 1757), 9; the phrase also occurs in Lodowick Muggleton’s A True History of the Eleventh Chapter of the Revelation of St John (London, for the author: 1662), but also re-­ published in the mid-1750s.

144 

M. MAUGER

re-imagined as the accumulation of millennia of religious teaching in the tradition of Moses. It stretches over the material world as ‘the Mundane Shell, a mighty Incrustation / Of Forty-eight deformed Human Wonders of the Almighty’ (37[41]:53–54, E138). But the Covering Cherub is also apparent within each human individual as the ‘selfhood’, a false covering generated (in John Howard’s view, at least) through the individual’s fear, curtailing imaginative creativity.7 The poem’s staging of ‘self-annihilation’, in which that apparent surface is stripped away, is similarly conceived as both general and individual; or at least, a general recovery and the restoration of humanity’s divine form begins at an individual level though liberation from selfhood. More broadly, as the poem describes, the effects will be transformative at national and indeed universal scale.

Radical Prophecy and the Law Blake’s impetus for this personal and general act of ‘self-annihilation’ is a new commitment to a radical prophetic resolve, expressed primarily through the figure of Milton. The moral codes that Satan has implemented in the material World of Time and Space are to be left behind as a part of that process. But Blake seems determined in Milton to demonstrate that this act is not necessarily antagonistic to the idea of law itself. Indeed, as we saw at the opening of this book, Milton in his final confrontation with Satan insists that self-annihilation is the key principle of the ‘Laws of Eternity’ under the authority of which he acts. The prophetic drive to self-­ annihilation somehow proceeds from a law which has been stripped of earthly abstractions. Moreover, in a series of plates (considered in detail later in this chapter) that are devoted to the work of Los and Enitharmon in Golgonooza, their great city of art and the imagination, the district of Bowlahoola that contains Los’s blacksmith’s forge ‘is namd Law. by mortals’ (24[26]:48, E120). The qualification ‘by mortals’ is important, of course; but as the work of Golgonooza in this poem is primarily to offer sanctuary to those cast out from the World of Time and Space, designating the focal point of Los’s labours as ‘law’ is both unexpected and arresting. It is as though Blake recognised that the redemption of humanity is dependent on the redemption of legal principle itself.

7  John Howard, Blake’s Milton: A Study in the Selfhood (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1976), 13, 63.

6  SUCH ARE THE LAWS OF ETERNITY: RECOVERY, REDEMPTION… 

145

Blake’s use of the formal motifs of biblical prophecy, and his attraction to the radical potential of the prophetic voice, is well known.8 Yet in the Lambeth books, the antithetical relationship between law and prophecy which readers might expect is repeatedly problematized. Urizen (as lawmaker) and Los (as ‘Eternal Prophet’) seem locked together as unhappy, and even unwitting, collaborators. Prophetic perspectives and legalistic perspectives are bound together, even becoming proxies for each other: Urizen justifies his obsession with constitutional definition as a means of redirecting the historical inertia of which prophecy warns. Blake nevertheless preserves in these books the association of prophecy with an impending violent disruption to established systems of order. The ‘Song of Liberty’ that he includes at the end of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell describes the gathering storm of revolution as ‘Shadows of Prophecy’ which ‘shiver along by the lakes and the rivers and mutter across the ocean!’ (25, E44). America and Europe, each announced as ‘a prophecy’, use stories of recent (and ongoing) revolutionary uprisings to generate imminent eschatological expectation. The vision of a millennial world free from the corruptions of the ancien régime, at liberty from its imprisoning structures, is never attained in the Lambeth Books. The purity of that vision, like the voice of the prophet itself, always becomes tainted with the intrusion of a legal structure directed by Urizen’s principles of reason and science. While we see this overarching narrative described at scale in The Four Zoas, Blake’s insistence on the importance of order and definition in the salvation described in Night IX, together with Ahania’s memories of a time before Man’s disunity when ‘liberty was justice’, suggests that legal vision and prophetic vision are not necessarily mutually exclusive. The affinities between the perspectives of law and prophecy seem problematic, or at least unexpected, in the Lambeth myth; but they become increasingly crucial in Blake’s nineteenth-century work as the basis for human recovery. We can find evidence for the evolution of Blake’s thought at the turn of the nineteenth century in his annotations (dated 1798) in the margins of his 1797 edition of Richard Watson’s Apology for the Bible, a strident defence of Christian scripture written in response to the second 8  See, for example, chapter three of Stephen Goldsmith, Unbuilding Jerusalem: Apocalypse and Romantic Representation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993); chapter one of Jon Mee, Dangerous Enthusiasm; Tannenbaum, Biblical Tradition; Terence Allan Hoagwood, Prophecy and the Philosophy of Mind: Traditions of Blake and Shelley (University, Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 1985).

146 

M. MAUGER

part of Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason. Jason Snart rightly warns of the dangers of reading Blake’s marginal notes divorced from the context of the books in which they were written, as somehow unadulterated indications of the views of the ‘real’ Blake.9 The profile acquired by Blake’s pronouncements about prophecy in Watson’s text are good examples of this critical tendency. By setting them within the context of the Apology, however, these disconnected declarations can be understood as interventions in the argument between Watson and Paine. Watson, the Bishop of Llandaff, was regarded within the church hierarchy as something of a maverick, a liberal voice who had initially expressed some sympathy with the French Revolution.10 Nevertheless, the Apology is clearly regarded by Blake as an establishment response to Paine’s book. Blake holds considerable common ground with Paine, particularly in their shared suspicion of the authority of the institutions of established religion. But there can be little doubt that the major project of the Age of Reason must have made difficult reading for Blake. Whilst he may have had sympathy with Paine’s mission to expose a false and corrupting priesthood (and, in particular, with divesting religious practice of mystery), Paine’s relentless and systematic dismissal of biblical accounts of prophecy and miracle must have been frustrating, to say the least. Blake nevertheless identifies an enemy who is more subtle than Paine, and in his opinion much more dangerous, in the person of Watson.11 In Blake’s view, Watson’s writing is hypocritical. It introduces itself as a gentlemanly enquiry, whilst being the work of a ‘State trickster’. As a response to Paine it is an abject failure, because it has not ‘dared to Consider’ any of Paine’s major arguments including the challenge that the Bible is ‘a State Trick’ which was ‘never believd willingly by any nation’ (E616). For Paine, a particularly cruel aspect of that ‘trick’ is the authority the state derives from the so-called ‘Books of the Law’ (the first five books of the Old Testament, in which the codification and implementation of the moral law is described) to justify the ‘inhuman and horrid butcheries of men, women, and children’.12 The biblical material, in particular the account of ‘the destruction of the Canaanites’ is defended by Watson as ‘exhibiting to 9   Jason Snart, “Recentering Blake’s Marginalia,” Huntington Library Quarterly 66 (2003): 134–53. 10  Prickett and Strathman, “Blake and the Bible,” 119. 11  Rosso, Blake’s Prophetic Workshop, 49–50. 12  Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason. Part the Second. Being an Investigation of True and Fabulous Theology (London: H. D. Symonds, 1795), 12.

6  SUCH ARE THE LAWS OF ETERNITY: RECOVERY, REDEMPTION… 

147

all nations, in all ages, a signal proof of God’s displeasure against sin’.13 Blake’s response in the margins of this page is blunt, designed to cut across Watson’s specious reasoning: All Penal Laws court Transgression & therefore are cruelty & Murder The laws of the Jews were (both ceremonial & real) the basest & most oppressive of human codes. & being like all other codes given under pretence of divine command were what Christ pronounced them: The Abomination that maketh desolate. i.e State Religion which is the Source of all Cruelty (E618)

We have seen Blake’s dramatic representation of the way in which penal laws ‘court transgression’ in The Book of Urizen, as the unfolding of Urizen’s law leads directly to the appearance of the ‘seven deadly sins of the soul’. This is a clearly antinomian theme (as Mee and Paley have discussed) to which Blake returns in Milton in his account of Satan’s promulgation of the law of the World of Time and Space.14 Blake takes Paine’s position here, rejecting the idea that the ‘laws of the Jews’, whose imposition in Canaan is celebrated by Watson, have any divine authority. As in the ‘Memorable Fancy’ of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell considered in Chap. 3, in which Ezekiel alleges that ‘all nations believe the jews code and worship the jews god, and what greater subjection can be’ (13, E39), Blake strays close in this annotation to antisemitic myths concerning the ultimate source of legal corruption. Here, however, the ‘laws of the Jews’ are an example (though nevertheless the principal example) of ‘codes given under pretence of divine command’. Makdisi’s summary is useful: ‘the moral law of the Old Testament serves as a kind of ultimate disciplinary horizon, a master source for all forms of cruelty’.15 And yet Paine too is the creator of ‘human codes’, a revolutionary who—not unlike Urizen in that earlier book—favours assigning authority to the principles of liberty through the establishment of constitutional frameworks. On the final page of the Apology, Blake concludes that ‘I have read this Book with attention & find that the Bishop has only hurt Paines heel while 13  Richard Watson, An Apology for the Bible, in a Series of Letters addressed to Thomas Paine, 8th ed. (London: T. Evans, 1797), 25. 14  See Mee, Dangerous Enthusiasm, 58–59, and Paley, “‘To Defend the Bible in This Year 1798 Would Cost a Man His Life’,” Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly 32 (1998–99): 40. 15  Makdisi, Impossible History, 68.

148 

M. MAUGER

Paines has broken his head’ (E620). The allusion here is to the aftermath of the temptation of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden (Genesis 3.14–15), in which God punishes the serpent: ‘upon thy belly shalt thou go’. From this submissive position, God warns him, Eve’s heirs ‘shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel’. Blake’s annotation unambiguously identifies Watson as the serpent. And whilst Blake clearly considers The Age of Reason’s diatribe against the Bible as objectionable, his enigmatic comments regarding Paine—celebrated in the margins as an ‘Energetic Genius’ and as ‘either a Devil or an Inspired man’—suggest a more complex appraisal of his impact. Robert Rix is right to point to Blake’s considerable ingenuity in appropriating Paine’s arguments ‘to fit his own agenda’—but it seems to me that, in doing so, Blake attempts to redefine the parameters of the relationship between law and prophecy.16 To the certain offence of both his interlocutors, he explicitly draws parallels between Paine and Jesus, as individuals persecuted by ecclesiastical authority. The significance of this response goes beyond Hazard Adams’s view that Blake ‘has some fun at Watson’s expense’.17 Indeed, notwithstanding Paine’s dismissal of the biblical evidence of ‘miracles’ as proof of divine power, Blake insists on presenting the author of The Rights of Man as a miracle worker: Is it a greater miracle to feed five thousand men with five loaves than to overthrow all the armies of Europe with a small pamphlet[?] look over the events of your own life & if you do not find that you have both done such miracles & lived by such[,] you do not see as I do (E616)

In general, as H. J. Jackson has argued in Marginalia, annotators ‘often address the author directly’ from the margins, or—perhaps more appositely—‘the book itself, addressed as a personification of its author’.18 The situation here is more complex, as Blake is acknowledging two authors, and two books. Typically, he refers to Watson as ‘the Bishop’. The second-­ person observations found in the above quotation, and elsewhere in the annotations, seem most obviously to be direct addresses to Paine. Blake challenges Paine to recognize in himself the radicalised Jesus, and expresses  Rix, Cultures of Radical Christianity, 37–38.  Hazard Adams, Blake’s Margins: An Interpretive Study of the Annotations (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009), 77. 18  H. J. Jackson, Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 83–84. 16 17

6  SUCH ARE THE LAWS OF ETERNITY: RECOVERY, REDEMPTION… 

149

surprise that ‘Paine the worker of miracles [can] ever doubt Christs in the above sense of the word miracle’ (E617). Blake’s contention with Paine on the question of prophecy is similarly articulated as a matter of mis-definition. Paine had challenged the conventional contemporary exegetical practice by which the truth of the scriptures was ‘proven’ by demonstrating how Old Testament prophecy had been borne out in subsequent history. He labels the book of Isaiah as ‘prose run mad’,19 and seeks to expose the wilfully misleading character of modern writers who, in making biblical prophecy ‘bend to times and circumstances, as far remote even as the present day … shews the fraud, or the extreme folly, to which credulity or priestcraft can go’.20 This conclusion, Blake states, is the consequence of Paine uncritically taking on a popular misconception of prophecy: Prophets in the modern sense of the word have never existed[.] Jonah was no prophet in the modern sense for his prophecy of Nineveh failed[.] Every honest man is a Prophet[:] he utters his opinion both of private & public matters/Thus/If you go on So/the result is So/He never says such a thing shall happen let you do what you will. a Prophet is a Seer not an Arbitrary Dictator. (E617)

Paine adopts the ‘modern sense’ of the prophet as an ‘Arbitrary Dictator’, and then notes the failure of such ‘prophecy’ as evidence of the imposture of Old Testament scripture. For Blake the prophet is the outsider within, who can chart the current trajectory of a whole nation and issue warnings accordingly. The fact that the events which Jonah prophesied at Nineveh failed to occur, is evidence rather of the success of his prophecy in persuading the inhabitants of the city to amend their habits. Blake’s implication is, once again, striking. Paine as the author of The Rights of Man is himself a prophet, the outsider whose voice is heard inside, whose message will by necessity be threatening to established authority. Understood in their Blakean senses, therefore, it becomes clear that it is Watson who denies true miracle and prophecy, and Paine who practises them. This enables Blake to joke: ‘It appears to me Now that Tom Paine is a better Christian than the Bishop’ (E620).

 Paine, Age of Reason, Part the Second, 43.  Ibid., 59.

19 20

150 

M. MAUGER

In his annotations to Watson’s Apology, Blake is keen to dismiss the authority of absolutist accounts both of biblical law and prophecy. The Old Testament moral law is used by the state as a justification for a cruel penal code given ‘under pretence of divine command’. In a similar fashion, established practices of exegesis regard biblical prophecy as the articulation of fixed predictions that ‘such a thing shall happen let you do what you will’. Codifiers like Moses, like Urizen, like Paine perhaps (in his performance of constitutionality), seek to place frameworks around the development of human society by enforcing legal codes driven by their fear of ‘futurity’. These codes will direct the future behaviour of the people, formalising a new concept of nationhood. The true potential of prophecy, as understood by Blake, is to restore humanity’s autonomy, the ability to change the course of its subsequent history. But this cannot be achieved through the abandonment of principles of structure and order: Paine himself is no anarchist. Rather, in the annotations we see Blake re-moulding Paine (analogous in some measure to Milton’s re-sculpting of Urizen discussed above) into a version of a contemporary prophet for whom structure and order is liberated, both conceptually and in terms of implementation, from doctrine and priesthood. The insights which the annotations provide for these developments in Blake’s thought are instructive when it comes to understanding the role of law in his evolving ideas about human form, redemption, and the relationship between humanity and divinity. In his nineteenth-century work, I argue, Blake builds on his experimentation in The Four Zoas, in which he imagined the unfallen role of Urizen-as-lawmaker as part of the Universal Man, and comes to conceive how prophetic vision can establish the basis for a redeemed legality. Rather than a doctrinal law of codified rules and regulations, such an approach offers the possibility of a visionary law based not on generalised precepts of humanity to which individuals must conform, but rather on a dynamic idea of the human form which accommodates individuality and difference.

Punishment and Death—The Law of Satan’s Elect On 25 April 1803, Blake wrote to his friend Thomas Butts, joyfully acquainting him with his intended imminent return to London after ‘three years’ Slumber on the banks of the Ocean’ in the village of Felpham. Blake and his wife had moved from their Lambeth residence to the West Sussex coast under the patronage of William Hayley in 1800. But the relationship

6  SUCH ARE THE LAWS OF ETERNITY: RECOVERY, REDEMPTION… 

151

had broken down during the intervening years, and by 1804, they had returned to the city, renting the ground floor of a house in South Molton Street. The date of the letter is consistent with the period during which Blake may be considered to have been working on Milton. Though excited to be returning to a city which will afford him many opportunities of ‘seeing fine Pictures’, Blake expresses his keenness to demonstrate, in a new illuminated book, the ‘Spiritual Acts’ which have absorbed him at Felpham: I have in these three years composed an immense number of verses on One Grand Theme[,] Similar to Homers Iliad or Miltons Paradise Lost[,] the Person & Machinery intirely new to the Inhabitants of Earth (some of the Persons Excepted)[.] I have written this Poem from immediate Dictation twelve or sometimes twenty or thirty lines at a time without Premeditation & even against my Will. the Time it has taken in writing was thus renderd Non Existent. & an immense Poem Exists which seems to be the Labour of a long Life all producd without Labour or Study. (E728)

Whatever the ‘immense poem’ might be to which Blake refers—most likely to be Milton, but possibly an early version of Jerusalem—the extraordinary means of composition intentionally places both his work, and the source of his inspiration as a poet, in the tradition of prophecy. Blake claims ‘immediate Dictation’ from a source beyond the phenomenal World of Time and Space. His pen becomes the conduit for the words of another even, crucially, where Blake himself may have wished otherwise. Milton, moreover, is a poem whose drama is energised by prophecy: ‘Say first!’ the poet asks his muse, ‘what mov’d Milton’? What prompted the dead poet who had ‘walkd about in Eternity / One hundred years’ to return to the mortal world? Again the poet asks: ‘What cause at length mov’d Milton to this unexampled deed’. The answer: ‘A Bards prophetic Song!’ (2:16–17, 21–22, E96, emphasis added). The Bard’s song occupies the next ten plates of the poem. Milton’s response is to be ‘moved’: moved in its emotional sense of provoking self-­ contemplation, yet also moved in a physical sense. The prophetic song moves Milton from a state of apathetic sadness (‘Unhappy tho in heav’n, he obey’d, he murmur’d not. he was silent’) to positive action (‘I go to Eternal Death!’), from the infinite expanses of heaven to the closed material world of mortality (2:18, E96; 14[15]:14, E108). The song itself offers an aspect of the epic’s backstory, a creation narrative in which the fallen Satan is established as God of the human world, its supreme deity,

152 

M. MAUGER

the source of its moral and legal framework. The Satan of this poem is not the Promethean hero of humanity about whom Blake wrote in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Nevertheless, aspects of the theological inversions that are the hallmark of that book are present in Blake’s separation of ‘Three Classes of Men’, in which he adapts the theological model of atonement that arose during the Reformation. Calvinist doctrine separates the peoples of the earth into the ‘Elect’ (those predestined by God for salvation), and the ‘Reprobate’ (those who reject the gospel and are denied salvation). In an adaptation of this strict Calvinist position, more moderate Protestant groups argued that the redemption of the Reprobate was always possible, and that those among the Reprobate who were ‘Redeemed’ could be reconciled with God. Blake upends this three-fold structure in Milton. His ‘Elect’ are those who turn their back on imaginative freedom, who restrict themselves to a life of moral servitude within the closed material regime of Satan (who they mistakenly call God). The ‘Reprobate’, by contrast, are those whose wild imaginations lead them to reject Satanic codes, marking them out as predestined for eternity. The ‘Redeemed’ are those among the Elect whose rebellion against Satan leads to the attainment of this imaginative freedom. As we will see later in this chapter, this redemption is represented in the poem as the ongoing work of Los and Enitharmon in their wondrous city of Golgonooza. The Bard’s song offers a narrative of the creation of the human world, in which Los and Enitharmon construct the great city of imagination and art, ‘Golgonooza the spiritual Four-fold London eternal’ (6.1, E99). A series of additional plates inserted within this section of Milton in the later copies imperfectly locates these events within the as-yet barren material wasteland known as ‘Generation’, following its traumatic separation from Eternity (a scene broadly resonant of Chapter V of The Book of Urizen, whose mythic apparatus is specifically recalled via the late insertion of plate 3). As Los’s children work at a range of practical creative tasks (in the fields, in the mills, at the looms, in the forge), a conflict for supremacy arises between the youngest child, Satan, and his brother Palamabron. The dispute leads to a trial, a ‘Great Solemn Assembly’, during which Satan is held within a ‘Space’ of concealment: both a sanctuary for his own protection, and a means to contain Satanic error. During the trial, Satan’s deception and duplicitous conduct is revealed: his pretence of brotherly love, his ‘soft dissimulation of friendship’. But rather than straightforwardly finding against him, the court delivers a perplexing and inconclusive verdict in which the judgement falls on a third brother connected only peripherally

6  SUCH ARE THE LAWS OF ETERNITY: RECOVERY, REDEMPTION… 

153

to the matters at hand: Rintrah. As we will see, this apparent reversal of due process—in which ‘the Innocent should be condemn’d for the Guilty’—is emblematic of the redemptive code later described as the ‘Laws of Eternity’, in which Milton accepts ‘self-annihilation’ rather than a moral victory over Satan. For Deen, the judgement on Rintrah avoids eternal warfare between Satan and Palamabron, and leaves open a path to recovery. It is precisely the example of Rintrah’s sacrifice that ‘mov’d Milton’ to ‘return to the mortal world’ for his own act of self-sacrifice.21 In the confusion which follows, Satan capitalises on the Assembly’s apparent inaction by establishing his own legal framework: He created Seven deadly Sins drawing out his infernal scroll, Of Moral laws and cruel punishments upon the clouds of Jehovah To pervert the Divine voice in its entrance to the earth With thunder of war & trumpets sound, with armies of disease Punishments & deaths musterd & number’d; Saying [“]I am God alone There is no other! let all obey my principles of moral individuality[”] (9:21–26, E103)

Again, Blake appears to be repurposing the scenarios (if not the words) from earlier work, most clearly Urizen’s unfolding of the ‘One Law’ in The Book of Urizen, and his reading of the metal books in Night VII of The Four Zoas. A plate added in the later copies makes this connection explicit: ‘Then Los & Enitharmon knew that Satan is Urizen / Drawn down … into Generation’ (10[11]:1–2, E104). The satirical account from The Book of Urizen, in which the Seven Deadly Sins coalesce as the unexpected consequence of Urizen’s law-making, is here advanced as the deliberate act of the moral legislator: by defining sin, Satan controls the means of its regulation. Satan deploys his ‘Moral laws and cruel punishments’ as the basis for laying territorial claim to his Space, establishing himself as supreme deity over the nations. In an attempt to limit the damage, the Great Solemn Assembly sets a temporal limit on the Space: they ‘gave a Time to the Space, / Even Six Thousand years’ (13[14]:16–17, E107). Additional safeguards are also established, a double barrier against the abyss, using terms drawn from Blake’s perverse understanding of Cartesian cosmology: a ‘Limit of Opacity’ below which the world cannot fall further from the clarity of the Divine Voice, and a ‘Limit of Contraction’ below which  Deen, Conversing in Paradise, 167–73.

21

154 

M. MAUGER

the imaginative faculties cannot shrink further.22 This completes the Song’s narrative of the creation of the World of Time and Space, the venue of human life and history, with its legal codes and lawmaker God. The World of Time and Space is also, of course, the dwelling-place of the book’s readers, and of its creator. Indeed, it is as a dweller in this World that Blake himself was arrested, arraigned, and ultimately tried under the terms of that code of ‘punishments & deaths mustered & numbered’. Mark Crosby, whose work provides the most exhaustive presentation of the surviving records concerning Blake’s trial, has argued that the Solemn Assembly that determines the matter of Satan and his brothers in the Bard’s song is based on Blake’s experiences of proceedings at the Sussex Quarter Sessions in October 1803, and January 1804.23 As the events are covered in detail in Crosby’s article and elsewhere, I provide only a brief summary here. On 12 August 1803, at a time of heightened alarm about a possible French invasion that had led to the mobilisation of both regular and volunteer military units along the south coast, Blake was surprised to find a soldier of the Royal Regiment of Dragoons in the garden of his Felpham Cottage. When Private John Scolfield (according to Blake’s account in a letter to Thomas Butts dated four days later) refused his polite request to leave his property, Blake ‘took him by the Elbows & pushed him before me till I had got him out’. Once outside the gate, the altercation continued, and Blake ‘putting aside his blows took him again by the Elbows & keeping his back to me pushed him forwards down the road’ until reaching the Fox Inn (where the soldiers were quartered), ‘he all the while endeavoured to turn round & strike me & raging & cursing drew out several neighbours’. Scolfield, together with another soldier at the scene—Private John Cock—made an official complaint, that led to Blake being brought before John Quantock, the local Justice of the Peace. The soldiers claimed that, in addition to the physical attack on Scolfield, Blake had cast doubt on the ability of the stationed battalions to resist Napoleon’s strength should a French invasion be launched, and had ‘Damned the King of England—his country and his subjects’. Bound over by Quantock to appear before the Grand Jury at the October sessions in Petworth, Blake ultimately found himself indicted on three counts: ‘seduction from allegiance’ (under the terms of the 1797 22  Jules van Lieshout, Within and Without Eternity: The Dynamics of Interaction in William Blake’s Myth and Poetry (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994), 86. 23  Crosby, “Fabricated Perjury,” 29–30.

6  SUCH ARE THE LAWS OF ETERNITY: RECOVERY, REDEMPTION… 

155

Seduction from Allegiance and Duty Act), ‘seditious expression’ (defined by the Treasonable and Seditious Practices Act of 1795), and ‘assault’ (prosecuted under common law precedent). At the trial itself at the January sessions held in Chichester, Blake was acquitted—according to Crosby’s reading—after his lawyer pointed to inconsistencies in the soldiers’ evidence, and the contradictory testimony of additional witnesses. In a separate reading of these events, Mark Barr has argued that the outcome can be placed in the context of the widespread practice of ‘pious perjury’ whereby juries were inclined to acquit defendants of charges carrying the death penalty (or otherwise to find them guilty of lesser crimes), even where evidence appeared compelling. It seems likely that the ordeal confirmed Blake’s intention to leave the coastal seclusion and relative comfort of Felpham and return to the clamour of London. But the trauma that Blake carried from these legal proceedings had an artistic impact too, evident in his nineteenth-century epics—particularly Jerusalem—in which the names of Scolfield (Scofield), Cock (Cox) and Quantock (Kwantok) recur alongside others associated with the trial as embodiments of the divided, fractured body of Albion, the Eternal Man. The detailed investigative work of Crosby and Barr suggests strongly that Blake’s acquittal was secured through the careful strategy of the experienced lawyer. Desperate as he was to avoid a guilty verdict, Blake must have hated the quiescence that his advocate would in all likelihood have recommended, a symptom of law’s alignment with the processes of ‘mystery’ that he had explored in Night VII of The Four Zoas. We might well imagine that he was advised to let the proceedings take their course, to avoid grandstanding or ranting, to let his lawyer—only available to him through the generosity of his wealthy patron—expose the flaws and inconsistencies in the evidence, and to play to the natural inclination of the jury to acquit. The cranky, indignant, determined Blake who, by his own account, in righteous anger frogmarched a soldier to his billet sounds entirely plausible, and perhaps corresponds more closely to the idiosyncrasies that—as his readers—we claim to recognise, confident as we are of Blake’s self-identification with the class of the Reprobate. Yet it seems likely that his experiences of these criminal proceedings brought home just how the legal system demands quietude, acceptance, apathy, and the grateful appreciation of those who somehow evade its punishments. As he explains in Milton, ‘Satan[,] making to himself Laws from his own identity[,] / Compell’d others to serve him in moral gratitude & submission’ (11[12]:10–11, E104).

156 

M. MAUGER

Like Blake, Milton—notwithstanding his reprobate imaginative anger—was when alive ‘compelled’ both to observe and, as we will see, even to extend the laws of Satan within the World of Time and Space. ‘Mov’d’ by the Bard’s Song to ‘go to Eternal Death’, Milton’s journey takes him from Heaven (also termed ‘Eden’ in the poem) to Generation via the intermediate realm of ‘Beulah’. As he crosses the ‘verge of Beulah’ into the mortal world, a deeply perplexing transformative fragmentation takes place, itself one of the most difficult interpretative problems of the poem. Milton encounters his ‘own Shadow’, apparently the earthly form associated with his mortal life. To progress further, he must enter into that shadow ‘in direful pain’. This allows him to pass, as mortal, through the perimeter of the Mundane Shell ‘& thence to Albion’s land / Which is this earth of vegetation on which now I write’ (14[15]:39–41, E108–9). As part of this transformation, however, part of Milton nevertheless gets left behind; his ‘real and immortal Self’ remains in Eden, guarded by ‘the spirits of the Seven Angels of the Presence’ (15[17]:3, 11, E109). Milton’s Shadow meanwhile journeys on like a comet, and is now seen for the first time by William Blake of Felpham, ‘in the Zenith as a falling star, / Descending perpendicular, swift as the swallow or swift; / And on my left foot falling on the tarsus, entered there’ (15[17]:47–49, E110). Milton’s onward passage through the World of Time and Space is blocked, as we have seen, by Urizen. Yet in a further complication, his return also revives the earthbound ‘Satanic self’ of the author of Paradise Lost. The now three-fold fragmentation of Milton maps onto Blake’s inverted concept of the ‘three classes of men’: Milton’s Reprobate imaginative self is in Eden; ‘his Redeemed portion … formed the clay of Urizen’; and his compliant Satanic identity—‘that portion named the Elect’—returns into his mortal ‘shadow’ in Time and Space (20[22]:10–12, 20, E114). This ‘Mortal part’ of Milton is seen ‘frozen in the rock of Horeb’. Horeb is one of the biblical names for the mountain of God, also known as Sinai, where (in Exodus 34) Moses received the Ten Commandments. Blake would have found the name associated with the moral law throughout the Old Testament, such as the warning in Malachi 4 to ‘Remember ye the law of Moses my servant, which I commanded unto him in Horeb for all Israel, with the statutes and judgments’. This ‘portion’ of Milton is, of course, a writer: He saw the Cruelties of Ulro, and he wrote them down In iron tablets: and his Wives & Daughters …

6  SUCH ARE THE LAWS OF ETERNITY: RECOVERY, REDEMPTION… 

157

They sat rangd round him as the rocks of Horeb round the land Of Canaan: and they wrote in thunder smoke and fire His dictate; and his body was the Rock Sinai; that body, Which was on earth born to corruption (17[19]:9–15, E110)

This is a complex tableau, which seems to make most sense when imagined as a representation of Milton’s legacy as the author of Paradise Lost. He sees the ‘Cruelties of Ulro’ (Blake’s name for the hellish realm of imaginative and spiritual poverty), and—in an echo of Urizen’s recording of his metal travel journals within the abyss of Night VI of The Four Zoas— he inscribes them ‘in iron tablets’. The various female figures, the shadows of his wives and daughters who are later understood to comprise his composite fallen emanation Ololon, are themselves compared to the ‘rocks of Horeb’. They also write according to Milton’s dictation. The text produced is Milton’s ‘body’, his poetry thus conflated with the moral law of Sinai. This association of Milton’s literary legacy with the spreading of the Satanic law is imagined by Blake as a ‘black cloud … spread over Europe’ (15:50, E110, repeated in amended form at 21[23]:36, E116). Some sense of this legacy’s power is acknowledged in Plate 18, added in the later copies of the poem, in which garments of ‘Cruelty’ are woven inspired by Milton’s legacy, a false approximation of the ‘Human Form’. They ‘will have Writings written all over … in Human Words / That every Infant that is born upon the Earth shall read’ (18[20]:12–13, E111). Orc, horrified, condemns the desire to ‘weave this Satan for a covering’.

Golgonooza and the Machinery of Redemption In the extraordinary visionary universe that Blake constructs in his late epics, the material World of Time and Space is surrounded by three realms: the paradise of Eden, the restful hinterland known as Beulah, and the darkness of Ulro. Within this cosmology, we struggle to locate with precision the astonishing, vibrant, imaginative centre of operations associated with Los, Enitharmon, and their children: the city of Golgonooza. Golgonooza seems to be both everywhere and nowhere, and yet also specifically positioned for prophetic action as the ‘spiritual fourfold London eternal’. It is a province comprising many regions, most importantly the alphabetic Allamanda, Bowlahoola, and Cathedron. And it is also a factory, an intricate spiritual machine, whereby the souls of the dead of Time and Space are saved from disintegration in Ulro, and prepared for the

158 

M. MAUGER

possibility of redemption. It is towards Golgonooza that Milton’s redeemed portion travels, even if his ‘track’ via the World of Time and Space is blocked by Urizen. Notwithstanding the apparent placelessness of Golgonooza, its establishment and existence seems spatially deliberate: ‘We were plac’d here by the Universal Brotherhood & Mercy / With powers fitted to circumscribe this dark Satanic death’, Los explains to his sons, ‘But how this is as yet we know not, and we cannot know’ (23[25]:50–51, 53, E119). Moreover, the landscape of Golgonooza seems vividly realised, even if we have to work hard as readers to piece together its components. Hints that we glean from the startling, yet often perplexing, visionary accounts located from plates 22–29 of Milton suggest that Blake most consistently positions Golgonooza within Ulro though immune to its chaos, a space of order and organisation, a clearing within the wild confusion of the forest of Entuthon-Benython, on the banks of the dark and formless Lake of Udan-Adan. The visionary apparatus of Golgonooza is far removed from the simple defensive stone tower described in Night IV of The Four Zoas, its first appearance in Blake’s writing. Nevertheless, we first see its function as an engine of redemption in Night VIII of that poem, in which the formless souls of Ulro acquire ‘bodies of vegetation’ through the combined labour of Enitharmon’s weaving and Los’s forging. This account is extended in Milton, in which precise details are provided concerning the function of each of Golgonooza’s regions. The ‘weak spectres’ which move without form through Ulro, the shadows of the human forms that have lived in the World of Time and Space, are drawn into Golgonooza through the gateway known as ‘Luban’. Here they are received by Los, who ‘conducts the spirits to be vegetated into / Great Golgonooza’, where they are liberated from the ‘tyranny’ of the ‘four iron pillars of Satan’s throne’. These are the four cardinal virtues celebrated in classical philosophy and mediaeval Christian theology: ‘Temperance, Prudence, Justice, Fortitude’ (29[31]:46–49, E128). We can interpret each of these as an aspect of the moral regulation of individual freedom, apparent ‘universal’ virtues whose performance reinforces the hierarchies of the status quo. Under Satan’s rule, passionate excess is curtailed through the virtue of ‘temperance’, imaginative indulgence limited through the promotion of habits of ‘prudence’, conformity with legal sanction assured via a framework of ‘justice’, and the tolerance of pain, suffering, and poverty celebrated as the demonstration of ‘fortitude’ (valorised as a moral, physical, and emotional good).

6  SUCH ARE THE LAWS OF ETERNITY: RECOVERY, REDEMPTION… 

159

The fractured, elliptic ‘visions’ of Golgonooza that follow offer shifting perspectives on the processes at work. The fabric of ‘vegetation’ is produced by the looms of Cathedron, tended by Enitharmon and her daughters. ‘Bright Cathedrons golden dome’ recalls both the Dome of the Rock at Jerusalem’s Haram al-Sharif (Temple Mount), and St Paul’s Cathedral in London, suggestive of Golgonooza’s hybrid association as the ‘spiritual London’ (26[28]:36, E123). Cathedron is itself dependent on the work of Golgonooza’s other major provinces. ‘Were it not for Bowlahoola & Allamanda’ the looms would produce ‘No Human Form, but only a fibrous Vegetation / A Polypus of soft affections without thought or vision’ (the growth of the ‘polypus’ is one of Blake’s favoured representations of formless materiality in his nineteenth-century work). Bowlahoola is Los’s province, the counterpart to Cathedron. This is the location of his forge: ‘in Bowlahoola Los’s Anvils stand & his Furnaces rage’ (24[26]:36–38, 51, E120). It is associated with ideas of structure and foundation, and its industrial processes are aligned with the lungs, heart, and stomach of a vast animal. It is significant that neither the brain nor the bodily structures associated with sensation are invoked here. Bowlahoola, it appears, is principally associated with the primary organs that sustain animal life: the lungs that receive air, the heart that pumps blood, the stomach that digests food, mapped respectively onto the bellows, hammers and furnaces of Los’s forge. The unformed ‘vegetated mortals’ of Cathedron are thrown into the maelstrom of Bowlahoola, where (we might presume) they are ‘forged’ as living bodies. The work continues in Allamanda, ‘the Cultivated land / Around the city of Golgonooza’, the location of its farms, mills, and winepresses (27[29]:42–43, E125). Here, the sons of Los nurture the human souls in preparation for the millennial ‘great vintage & harvest’ when the six-thousand year period of the World of Time and Space ends. By this stage in the process of Golgonooza, every ‘Generated Body’ is recognised as ‘a garden of delight & a building of magnificence, / Built by the Sons of Los in Bowlahoola & Allamanda’, and ‘the Looms of Enitharmons Daughters / … with care & love & tears’ (26[28]:32–33, 35–36, E123). The souls who began the process ‘with neither lineament nor form, but like to watery clouds’ are thus preserved through the efforts of the children of Los, who ‘clothe them & feed, & provide houses & fields’ (26[28]:30, E123). The regions are also deliberately aligned with prosaic, real-world functions. Blake laments that he and his readers ‘see only as it were the hem of their garments / When with our vegetable eyes we view these wondrous

160 

M. MAUGER

visions’ (26[28]:11–12, E123). Yet the limited ‘mortal’ understanding of Golgonooza’s regions nevertheless seems telling: Allamanda is ‘calld on Earth Commerce’ (27[29]:42, E125); Bowlahoola ‘is namd Law. by mortals’ (24[26]:48, E120); Golgonooza itself is ‘namd Art & Manufacture by mortal men’ (24[26]:50, E120), the second of these labels having a productive function that we might attach in particular to the work of Cathedron. Commerce, Law, Manufacture and Art are indeed functions that might readily be associated with the earth-bound city of London. The prophetic vibrancy of Golgonooza extends beyond the limits of these mundane definitions, and yet as the ‘hem of their garments’ it seems significant that these concepts are not rejected as Satanic perversions, but rather understood as diminished versions of the unrestrained Human imagination. When mortals identify Bowlahoola as ‘Law’, they do so in the same way as they might identify the vicinity of Newgate, or the Inns of Court around Holborn, as ‘Law’ in the city of the mortal world. And they are not wrong. Just as the law functions as an agent of control in the World of Time and Space, enforcing conformity with Satan’s scroll of moral behaviour, so Bowlahoola is a space of discipline, order and definition associated with the divine framework of the Human Form. The lawmaker here is Blake’s indefatigable prophet Los, who thus performs a hybrid role bestowing a visionary structure and shape upon the unformed fibrous bodies. This is a tendency in Los that Blake has, of course, always acknowledged: we might think particularly about the confinement of Urizen in the books of the Bible of Hell, and the binding of Orc with the Chain of Jealousy. Here, however, a new visionary purpose is found. In a later Golgonooza vision (27[29]:55–63, E125), ‘law’ is identified as the single impoverished remnant of the Eternal art of music which remains visible in Time and Space. Oblique as this may be, it helps us understand how the conferment of the human form in Bowlahoola, a process we might note that is described in the terms of multiple overlapping musical phrases ‘terrible, but harmonious’, might in part be understood as the activity of ‘Law’ (24[26]:65, E121). The staged redemptive work of Golgonooza recalls a factory production line, and Blake—who throughout his writing seems to find industrial process both compelling and horrifying—may well have had in mind a visionary counterpart to turn of the century innovations in manufacture. The system described is nevertheless closed. The spectres of Ulro are rescued from ‘non-entity’ through the physical work of Allamanda, Bowlahoola, and Cathedron, but there is no sense that the act of

6  SUCH ARE THE LAWS OF ETERNITY: RECOVERY, REDEMPTION… 

161

redemption itself, and the admission of the Redeemed to Eden, is ordinarily within the ambit of Golgonooza. The story of Milton transforms this state of affairs. As Los comes to recognise, Milton’s journey from Eden back to Generation is—to use Blake’s repeated term—a ‘breach’ in the settled order of things. Los’s sons misinterpret the arrival of Milton’s shadow as a portent of Satan’s victory, and are keen to send him immediately into Bowlahoola’s furnaces. In response, Los tries to articulate his visionary insight as a means to assuage their fears: I recollect an old prophecy in Eden recorded in gold; and oft Sung to the harp: That Milton of the land of Albion[,] Should up ascend forward from Felphams Vale, & break the Chain Of jealousy from all its roots; be patient therefore O my Sons[.] These lovely Females form sweet night and silence and secret Obscurities to hide from Satans Watch-Fiends[ ] Human loves And graces; lest they write them in their Books, & in the Scroll Of mortal life, to condemn the accused: who at Satans Bar Tremble in Spectrous Bodies continually day and night While on the earth they live in sorrowful Vegetations (23[25]:35–44, E119)

As we have seen at the end of the Bard’s song, the inhabitants of Eden are slow to act on such prophecies: only Milton is ‘mov’d’ by the story he hears in the opening of the poem. It is through a latter-day Milton, the poet of ‘Felpham’s Vale’, that Paradise Lost’s author has passed back into the World of Time and Space. His return heralds the breaking of the Chain of Jealousy, the restraint forged unwittingly for Orc by Los and Enitharmon in the Lambeth myth, and which could only be shattered through Orc’s sexual revolutionary violence. Milton’s return, by contrast, promises the comprehensive removal of the Chain ‘from all its roots’. In this passage’s striking courtroom vision, Los imagines the scene ‘at Satans Bar’, before which those who have transgressed the laws contained in the ‘Books, & in the Scroll / Of mortal life’ are accused as criminals for ‘condemnation’. The unending work of the ‘lovely females’ (the daughters of Enitharmon at the looms of Cathedron) disguises the ‘Human loves / And graces’ whose memory is preserved in Golgonooza, so that they do not become the subject of further legislative definition and control within the ‘Books’ and the ‘Scroll / Of mortal life’ maintained by ‘Satans Watch-Fiends’. The descent of Milton, as Los recognises, is the signal that the finite period of six thousand years—the merciful limit placed upon the Satanic

162 

M. MAUGER

separation of ‘space’—has passed. The history of the World of Time and Space is thus complete, and the hard work of Cathedron, Bowlahoola, and Allamanda to create forms for the formless is finished. This is the time to gather in the harvest of the souls for judgement: ‘you must bind the Sheaves not by Nations or Families / You shall bind them in Three Classes’. The Reprobate who ‘never cease to Believe’ and the Redeemed ‘who live in doubts & fears’ are to be prepared for the purgatorial fires. The Elect are to be kept separate: ‘they cannot Believe in Eternal Life / Except by Miracle & a New Birth’ (25[27]:26–27, 33–36, E122). The end of time and the imminent expectation of consummation mirrors Milton’s own progress. As the reader moves into Book Two of the poem, it is clear that the self-annihilation of its eponymous hero is at hand.

Self-Annihilation and the Laws of Eternity The second of Milton’s two books is much shorter than the first. It describes the journey of Milton’s emanation, Ololon, who follows Milton’s track from Beulah into the darkest depths of Ulro. In so doing, the tortuous ‘breach’ created by Milton’s own passage broadens into ‘a wide road … open to Eternity’, suggestive of the universal redemption which their sacrifice is to enable (35[39]:35, E135). The completion of this second journey sets the stage for the climactic confrontations of the poem’s final plates, and the enactment of Milton’s self-annihilation. This act is born of the recognition that ‘moves’ Milton at the end of the Bard’s song. Selfhood is the Satan in each of us, the product of life within the World of Time and Space, in which we mistakenly deify Satan as God and observe the Satanic law as a divine code. An early plate in Book Two summarises Satan’s establishment of his dominion, how his subjects were ‘compelld to combine into Form by Satan … / Who made himself a God &, destroyed the Human Form Divine’ (32[35]:12–13, E131). The shadows of Generation are described as distorted shapes produced through Satan’s abstract laws. those combind by Satans Tyranny first in the blood of War And Sacrifice &, next, in Chains of imprisonment[,] are Shapeless Rocks Retaining only Satans Mathematic Holiness[:] Length[,] Bredth & Highth Calling the Human Imagination: which is the Divine Vision & Fruition In which Man liveth eternally: madness & blasphemy (32[35]:16–20, E132)

6  SUCH ARE THE LAWS OF ETERNITY: RECOVERY, REDEMPTION… 

163

The ‘form’ into which mortals are ‘compelld to combine’ through Satanic principle has obscured the Human Form Divine so completely that they appear as blank ‘Shapeless Rocks’ observing a shape defined simply in terms of a ‘holy’ mathematical proportion. The Imagination, whose brilliance embodies for Blake the true life of humanity, is outlawed as ‘madness & blasphemy’. As ever, these agonised appeals ring with the bitterness of personal experience; yet we see how Blake extrapolates from his own personal feelings of being forced into the framework of a ‘Shapeless Rock’, a visionary understanding of national and universal life. The Satanic Selfhood that ‘covers’ each mortal in the World of Time and Space is the individual incarnation of the Covering Cherub which spreads over the human world. ‘Self-annihilation’ is not a Blakean coinage per se. It refers to the New Testament exhortation to seek humility before God through the discarding of the trappings of wealth and status. Richard Watson himself, in his Collection of Theological Tracts (1791) described the ‘annihilation of self, and worldly desires’ as the ‘best of ends’.24 Blake would not have been comfortable with Watson’s theological association of self-annihilation with the denial of desire, of course; but in other respects, Blake’s treatment goes well beyond the mildness of the Church of England rhetoric of writers like Watson. Self-annihilation is an utterly transformative process, achieving nothing less than a universal liberation and the reconciliation of the human and the divine. In discarding the false Satanic outline of the Selfhood, the divine form that has become obscured is acknowledged once again. This is a challenging task because it means drawing back from the natural inclination to self-preservation, and casting aside the very components of life to which the Satanic doctrines ascribe value as a part of the definition of ‘identity’. The ‘Seven Angels’ who accompany Milton’s divine portion try to elucidate the process by drawing a distinction between ‘states’ and ‘individuals’: ‘Individual Identities never change nor cease’, but they can appear to change depending on what ‘state’ they are in. The Angels counsel Milton on his preparation: ‘Judge then of thy own Self’, and ask ‘What is Eternal & what Changeable? & what Annihilable?’. Through self-annihilation, the Satanic state is discarded, and the imaginative agency of the individual restored: ‘the Imagination is not a State: it is the Human Existence itself!’. Memory and reason are simply ratios 24  Richard Watson, A Collection of Theological Tracts, 2nd ed. (London: T.  Evans, 1791), 5:39.

164 

M. MAUGER

‘created to be annihilated’. The ‘Forms Eternal’ that exist within, by contrast, are indestructible and will exist ‘for ever’ (32[35]:30–32, 38, E132). The arena for Milton’s self-annihilation is both intimate and fraught. The poet describes how Los took him from Lambeth to Felpham, ‘& prepard a beautiful / Cottage for me’ where ‘I might write all these Visions’. As he continues in this mode of visionary biography, our knowledge of the legal trauma of 1803 offers a particular insight into Blake’s imaginative associations when he describes a series of unexpected encounters whilst ‘Walking in my cottage garden’. But it is not the presence of a soldier that ‘sudden I beheld’, but rather a startling series of visions. ‘Walking in my cottage garden sudden I beheld / The virgin Ololon’, who has completed her journey from Beulah into Time and Space, searching for Milton (36[40]:23–27, E137). Her voice summons Milton’s shadow, which has until now been frozen among the rocks of the moral law in Horeb. His appearance in the garden of the astonished prophet narrator (Fig.  6.2) offers the most harrowing account of existence under the Covering Cherub: I saw he was the Covering Cherub & within him Satan And Raha[b], in an outside which is fallacious! within Beyond the outline of Identity, in the Selfhood deadly And he appeard the Wicker Man of Scandinavia in whom Jerusalems children consume in flames among the Stars (37[41]:8–12, E137)

The Wicker Man of Scandinavia is a reference to a supposed druidic sacrificial ritual observed by Julius Caesar, and described in Book VI of Commentaries on the Gallic War.25 Caesar claimed to have seen vast human figures woven from wicker, and filled with people: ‘when these images are set on fire the people inside are engulfed in flames and killed’.26 In this World of Time and Space, as Thomas Tomkinson argued, reason has become obsessed with the ‘outward visible tabernacle’ of the tangible body of the law, the structures which serve to limit individual liberty. The framework of the Wicker Man of Scandinavia is thus a metaphor for the false Satanic form which Humanity has acquired, the Selfhood at universal scale. Its artificial generic outline is ‘fallacious’, but being ‘beyond the 25  A.  L. Owen, The Famous Druids (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), 224–36; Anne Janowitz, England’s Ruins: Poetic Purpose and the National Landscape (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 166–67. 26  Gaius Julius Caesar, Seven Commentaries on the Gallic War, with an Eighth Commentary by Aulus Hirtius, trans. by Carolyn Hammond (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 128.

6  SUCH ARE THE LAWS OF ETERNITY: RECOVERY, REDEMPTION… 

165

Fig. 6.2  William Blake, Milton: A Poem in 2 Books, Copy C, Plate 36. (From the New York Public Library)

166 

M. MAUGER

outline’ of Identity we see only that false covering rather than the divine form within. The forms of human individuals, the beautiful children of Jerusalem, are forced into this ‘deadly’ framework of Selfhood under the dominion of Satan’s scroll of punishments, and here they are sacrificed ‘in flames’. The Satanic law is described by its priests as divine, beautiful, and inevitable. Its acolytes teach an apathetic confidence in its supposed enshrined liberties. The horror of the Wicker Man gives the lie to this rhetoric, demonstrating how the artificial coercive frameworks of Satan’s realm extinguish the energy of individual life. This is the form in which Milton’s Shadow arrives in the Felpham garden. All the evils and corruptions of Selfhood comprising humanity’s Covering Cherub are condensed into one form and made visible for what they truly are: the twenty-seven ‘Monstrous Churches’, the ‘Gods of Ulro dark’, the twelve ‘Synagogues of Satan’ (37[41]:16–17, E137). Each of these manifestations of error is named and catalogued. ‘All these are seen in Milton’s Shadow, who is the Covering Cherub’ (37[41]:44, E138). The stage is fully set when Satan himself arrives ‘upon the roaring sea … loud & dark upon mild Felpham shore’ (38[43]:9, 13, E139). Blake, as the visionary chronicler of these events, discovers in ‘Satan’s bosom’ a wrecked landscape reminiscent of the abyss through which Urizen journeys in Nights VI and VII of The Four Zoas. He sees ‘pits & declivities flowing with molten ore’, ‘ruind palaces & cities & mighty works’, ‘Arches & pyramids & porches colonnades & domes: / In which dwells Mystery’ (38[43]:15–23, E139). Milton’s voice rings out with discernible determination and confidence: Satan! my Spectre! I know my power thee to annihilate And be a greater in thy place, & be thy Tabernacle A covering for thee to do thy will, till one greater comes And smites me as I smote thee & becomes my covering. Such are the Laws of thy false Heavns! (38[43]:29–33, E139)

Milton has learnt to recognise the circularity of Satanic doctrine in the World of Time and Space. Resistance to the ‘Laws of thy false Heavns’ which is articulated within the framework of that law cannot overcome it. In seeking to overpower Satan in this way, Milton would simply become a yet stronger Satan. One day, he would be defeated by a manifestation of Satan that is stronger still. Thus Milton would become just one more stratified layer of the Covering Cherub, the ‘outside which is fallacious’.

6  SUCH ARE THE LAWS OF ETERNITY: RECOVERY, REDEMPTION… 

167

Attempting to destroy Satan serves only to strengthen Satan, to allow the hegemony of his law to reach its roots and tendrils ever deeper into the created world. The cyclical growth of regulation, control and oppression explored in the Lambeth books and The Four Zoas, is thus restated. Milton steadfastly refuses to play the game by Satan’s rules. Rather, he states the principles by which he is prepared to act, stepping outside of the regulative cycle produced by Satan and announcing his adherence to a different legislative realm from beyond the limits of the World of Time and Space. It produces a striking contrast with Los’s somewhat blundering response to Urizen’s codification of the ‘One Law’, narrated in the cycle of biblical prophecies (see Chap. 3), demonstrating how far Blake has come in his working-out of this process.: Such are the Laws of thy false Heavns! but Laws of Eternity Are not such: know thou: I come to Self Annihilation Such are the Laws of Eternity that each shall mutually Annihilate himself for others good, as I for thee[.] Thy purpose & the purpose of thy Priests & of thy Churches Is to impress on men the fear of death; to teach Trembling & fear, terror, constriction; abject selfishness[.] Mine is to teach Men to despise death & to go on In fearless majesty annihilating Self, laughing to scorn Thy Laws & terrors (38[43]:33–42, E139)

The ‘Laws of thy false Heavens’, contained in the ledgers by which Satan has codified his rule over the World of Time and Space, is first introduced in the Bard’s Song as a scroll of ‘punishment & deaths mustered and numbered’. Here too, Milton emphasises the association with death. The priests who impose the law do so in order ‘to impress on men the fear of death’. The horror of death is occasioned by the prospect of judgement under those laws. The fear of being sentenced to damnation as one of the Reprobate (in the conventional arrangement) encourages fulsome adherence to a system whose key principles involve a denial of life and the imagination (through the process here termed ‘constriction’), and the indulgence of false indicators of earthly success comprising ‘abject selfishness’. This is a theme familiar to us from Blake’s 1790s work: imaginative denial and corporeal poverty are the consequence of the ‘mind-forged manacles’ of the city dwellers of ‘London’, who look no further than their own self-interest. Milton goes on to describe these ‘wonders of Satan’s

168 

M. MAUGER

holiness’ as ‘the Idol Virtues of the Natural Heart’ (i.e. the mortal organ of earthly life rather than a form of eternity). We might identify these as the pursuit of fame, the accretion of wealth, pride, commercial success, political power (38[43]:45–46, E139). By contrast, the laws of Eternity teach mortals not to fear death, but to despise it ‘& to go on / In fearless majesty annihilating Self’ (38[43]:40–41, E139). These laws do not comprise a code of behaviours or a framework of regulations, but they do define the parameters of the ‘Human Form Divine’ which the Satanic laws disrupt. The fundamental requirement— ‘such are the Laws of Eternity, that each shall mutually / Annihilate himself for others good’—is imagined by Blake as the immediate consequence of the Human Form. In ways that are not entirely made clear, the destruction of the false covering of the Self, and the recovery of the ‘individual’ from the state of Selfhood, is imagined as a restoration of the communality of human existence, as the Human Form Divine is acknowledged once again. Quite what ‘individuality’ can be when totally dissociated from ‘self’ is difficult to conceptualise, as doing so itself requires prophetic sight that is not limited by the frameworks which give meaning to life within Time and Space. The same problem forestalls our attempt to imagine what ‘Laws of Eternity’ can be, in such a way that is remotely recognisable as ‘Law’. What is clear, however, is that a world free from Satanic corruption is not a world without structure, or order, or principle. It is not a chaos, a void, or an anarchy. Indeed, Blake’s universal visions suggest that chaos is immediately conjured as a consequence of the presence of Satanic regulation, rather than its absence. ‘Eternity’ is a realm that prizes form (most importantly the sanctity of the Human Form), order (the grouping of mortals into the ‘three classes of men’, for example), and the definite (nothing is more terrifying to Eternity than ‘non-entity’). Moreover, as we have seen, the detailed visions of Golgonooza demonstrate that the process of redemption itself invokes (at least on some level) processes overseen by Los which are associated with law, embodied in the operation of the living forge at Bowlahoola. Beyond the space of Blake’s garden, a detail that seems almost casual in its brevity acknowledges the end of a struggle that has been ongoing since Milton’s return to the World of Time and Space: ‘Urizen faints in terror striving among the brooks of Arnon / With Milton’s spirit’ (39[44]:53–54, E141). As we saw in the opening of this chapter, Milton’s ‘redeemed spirit’ has been engaged in a patient re-sculpting of Urizen’s body, filling in the crags and furrows of years of Satanic law-making, ‘building him, /

6  SUCH ARE THE LAWS OF ETERNITY: RECOVERY, REDEMPTION… 

169

As with new clay a Human form’ (19[21]:13–14, E112). The striking fullplate illustration which depicts this encounter, in which Urizen doggedly—yet ineffectually—attempts to confront Milton’s prophetic vigour with the tablets of the moral law, is captioned ‘To annihilate the Self-hood of Deceit and False Forgiveness’. This is an apt summary of Milton’s struggle with a Satan that he recognises as an aspect of himself. The determined focus of Milton’s redeemed portion to replace the artificial form of the moral law with a ‘Human form’ projects an internal transformation onto an external canvas. We are reminded of Los’s words of comfort to his sons at the gateway of Golgonooza: that Milton’s return augurs not a new age of violent revolution in which Orc bursts free from the Chain of Jealousy, but rather a more methodical, more complete removal of the chain (and, by implication, the circumstances of its manifestation). Another full-plate illustration accompanies the textual announcement of the conflict’s conclusion: a radiant Milton, a Christ-like figure with a halo comprising sparks of energy arcing from his head, supports the figure of Urizen who is collapsed on the riverbank.27 The composition emphasises peace, kindness and compassion rather than celebration and triumph. Yet there is also none of the passivity associated with pity or shame. In the light of the caption of the earlier plate, it seems that we can read Milton’s strength and vigour as having been acquired through the struggle itself, and the setting aside of the ‘Urizen’ within. The association with Christ is apt. Milton’s self-annihilation is a personal act of redemption; but it is also an undertaking with limitless ramifications. In the garden at Felpham, Milton’s shadow makes evident the universal Selfhood, the Covering Cherub which surrounds the World of Time and Space, and presents it for annihilation: ‘This is a false Body: an Incrustation over my Immortal / Spirit; a Selfhood which must be put off & annihilated alway’ (40[46]:35–36, E142). Milton, like Christ, takes on the burden of humanity and sacrifices himself ‘for others good’. This effects a general atonement, in which the redemption of the Reprobate— or, as Blake would have it, the Elect of Satan—becomes possible. This is the enactment of the ‘Laws of Eternity’. For all that they render irrelevant 27  Notwithstanding the proximity of the plate to the related line on plate 39, and its clear compositional affinity with plate 16, some scholars prefer interpretations which relate the scene to other aspects of the poem. Behrendt (The Moment of Explosion: Blake and the Illustration of Milton (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), 25) for example, following Damon (Philosophy, 432), has identified the fainted figure as Ololon.

170 

M. MAUGER

the Satanic frameworks of moral discipline that had hitherto gained ascendancy, they do not inaugurate an age of individuated antinomian libertinism. Rather, they enact a structured freedom, an ‘Eternity’ based on individual imaginative autonomy articulated within the shared visionary jurisdiction of the Human Form Divine. The distinction between this position and Blake’s conclusion in his work of the early 1790s that universal law is ‘oppression’ may seem convenient, but it also indicates how Blake is trying to resolve the paradoxes of the antinomian position without abandoning its rejection of compulsion, punishment, and exploitation. This essential shared humanity becomes visible only when the corruptions of selfhood are ‘annihilated’. In his work of the early 1790s, Blake may have rejected as ‘oppression’ the universal application of ‘one law’ for the lion and the ox. But in Milton, the dissolution of the Covering Cherub is enacted in the annihilation of the self. The distinction between universality and individuality becomes blurred. The laws of Eternity are found within each human individual, rather than being imposed as part of an external system of order. Milton is finally unified with the Seven Angels, and transformed into ‘One Man Jesus the Saviour’. The iron tablets of Paradise Lost that we saw on plate 17, on which Milton had written ‘the cruelties of Ulro’ surrounded by the rocks of Horeb, have been replaced with a new, visionary, textual clothing: ‘a Garment dipped in blood / Written within & without in woven letters’ (42[49]:12–13, E143). These are words of ‘Divine Revelation in the literal expression’; but they also constitute a fabric of ‘six thousand years’, offering a dynamic history of the World of Time and Space purged from the errors of Milton’s works.

CHAPTER 7

Creating Nature from this Fiery Law: Towards Visionary Legislation?

In the last months of his life, Blake acquired a copy of The Lord’s Prayer, Newly Translated from the Original Greek, with Critical and Explanatory Notes (1827), by London physician and botanical writer Robert Thornton. Blake knew Thornton professionally. He had been engaged to produce a series of woodcuts for the 1821 edition of Thornton’s Pastorals of Virgil. Nevertheless, Thornton’s avowed religious conservatism, and his opposition to the political radicalism associated with the French Revolution, suggests that the relationship was primarily commercial.1 Morton Paley has speculated that Blake may have been loaned a copy of The Lord’s Prayer ‘for the specific purpose of annotation’, and there is some evidence that the annotated text circulated among his limited coterie of admirers in the year following his death.2 If so, his sponsors were not to be disappointed  Martin Kemp, “Thornton, Robert John (1767–1837),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, last modified 14 November 2018, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/27361; Adams, Blake’s Margins, 177–178. 2  Morton Paley, The Traveller in the Evening: the Last Works of William Blake (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 279. Paley draws attention to a letter by Samuel Palmer to Thomas Linnell dated 29 August 1828, which makes reference to the annotations (documented in G.  E. Bentley, Blake Records, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 486). 1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Mauger, William Blake and the Visionary Law, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37723-5_7

171

172 

M. MAUGER

even if (in common with those twentieth- and twenty-first-century editors who have attempted to transcribe them) they may have been left scratching their heads when trying to interpret some of the marginal notes.3 Most of Blake’s sallies from the text boundary are directed against the general tenor of the publication, rather than at the specific words which Thornton uses in his translation, declaring on the title page that ‘I look upon this as a Most Malignant & Artful attack upon the Kingdom of Jesus.’ But it is Thornton’s rendering of the line which appears in prayer books as ‘Give us this day our daily bread’ that seems particularly to have jolted the annotator’s pencil. Thornton’s clunky text reads ‘Grant unto me, and the whole world, day by day, an abundant supply of spiritual and corporeal Food’ (E668). A particularly lucid vein of invective in the margin beneath the translation seems to target this line: Lawful Bread Bought with Lawful Money & a Lawful Heaven seen thro a Lawful Telescope by means of Lawful Window Light[.] The Holy Ghost … cannot be Taxed is Unlawful & Witchcraft. Spirits are Lawful but not Ghosts especially Royal Gin is Lawful Spirit … No Smuggling British Spirit & Truth[.] (E668)

This characteristically Blakean explosion of anger shows his continued deep-rooted suspicion of the principles of state religion in the final year of his life. Corporeal bread is ‘lawful’ and attracts taxation, just as honest British spirits (contrasted with smuggled French brandy, perhaps) are ‘lawful’.4 Light itself, divided from darkness in the primordial acts of creation, is made subject to law via the window tax. The ‘lawful telescope’ (the instrument that marshals light according to Newton’s principles of optics) offers a view of the ‘lawful heaven’ that has supplanted the divine firmament. Blake notes archly that Thornton brings even the person of God within the ambit of the revenue-raising activities of the state by replacing (as Thornton patiently explains in his explanatory note to his translation of this line) the ‘Holy Ghost’ of the King James Bible with the more modern, and for Blake more taxable, ‘Holy Spirit’. The Holy Ghost, like smuggled foreign intoxicants, is ‘Unlawful & Witchcraft’. 3  See, for example, “Blake’s Divisive ‘Lord’s Prayer’ Marginalia,” Hell’s Printing Press: The Blog of the Blake Archive and Blake Quarterly (blog), 9 November 2017, https://blog. blakearchive.org/2017/11/09/blakes-divisive-lords-prayer-marginalia/. 4  Adams, Blake’s Margins, 188.

7  CREATING NATURE FROM THIS FIERY LAW: TOWARDS VISIONARY… 

173

It is clear that in his rhetorical anger of 1827, Blake’s adjectival use of ‘lawful’ somewhat incoherently encodes a range of ideas and principles that he finds hateful: morality, deism, measure, limit, obligation, scientific rationalism, inequity, poverty, and the exchange values assigned to goods and labour within a capitalist economy. But there is also a concrete sense here of the way in which moral law has been surreptitiously established, via the institution of state religion, as the key technology by which individual freedom and imaginative liberty is constrained by those in authority. Thornton’s translation lays bare, in Blake’s view, the way in which the established church has raised up Satan in the name of Christ: an ‘honest’ version of Thornton’s ‘new translation’ would therefore begin ‘Our Father Augustus Caesar’. The introductory verses which Blake added to his 1793 emblem book For Children in around 1818, part of a broader repurposing in which it was retitled For the Sexes: The Gates of Paradise, further dramatize this development. Whereas the Gates of Paradise embody liberation and the ‘mutual forgiveness of each vice’, the ‘Accuser’ (Satan) attempts to enforce the moral law authored by the Old Testament God on Mount Sinai: Jehovahs Finger Wrote the Law Then Wept! then rose in Zeal & Awe [And in the midst of Sinais heat Hid it beneath his Mercy Seat] O Christians! tell me Why You rear it on your Altars high[?] (For the Sexes, ii:5–10, E259)

It is a posture reminiscent of Urizen in Blake’s 1790s texts: defining the law, then weeping on seeing its impact. On Mount Sinai in the Exodus 19 account, Jehovah descends in a cloud of smoke and fire, and over the course of the next eleven chapters defines the terms of the ‘covenant’ with the children of Israel. At the end of chapter 31, using terms echoed by Blake both here and in The Everlasting Gospel, he gives Moses ‘two tables of testimony, tables of stone, written with the finger of God’. In these lines from For the Sexes, Jehovah soon regrets this delineation of the law, and hides the tablets through the agency of Christ. But the so-called Christians of the modern age perpetually re-instate its authority by setting it on their ‘Altars high’. Indeed, in copies of For the Sexes printed in the 1820s the third and fourth lines above have been adjusted to the even more strident ‘And the Dead Corpse from Sinais heat / Buried beneath his Mercy Seat’ (E259).

174 

M. MAUGER

These texts demonstrate that, in the last decade of his life, Blake increasingly saw law as a synecdoche for the errors and compulsions of the authority of church and state, built around religious teaching which substituted (under the name of Christianity) a constricted ‘Satanic’ humanity in the place of the Human Form Divine. In many respects, this seems to represent a renewed commitment to an antinomian worldview in which a radical reading of the New Testament gospels is offered as an anti-law rejoinder to the excessive legalism of the Old Testament scriptures. We might speculate about the contexts which may have prompted the resurfacing of this position in Blake’s work. The promotion of principles of moral virtue was becoming more insistent in the world that he observed, with the growth both of Methodism, and of Evangelical influence within the established Church.5 This chapter focuses on two poems: Jerusalem, Blake’s monumental final epic on which he was working from around 1804–1820, and the unfinished notebook poem The Everlasting Gospel, part of which survives on paper with an 1818 watermark. Both warn repeatedly of the dangers of framing existence within moral legalism, telling their readers of the sickness and death occasioned by humanity’s adoption of a universal ‘law of chastity’. Albion’s story in Jerusalem revolves, time and again, around this legal tragedy of moral imprisonment. But the chapter will also ask what remains of the more optimistic accounts of law that Blake attempts to refine in The Four Zoas and Milton. As we will see, both Jerusalem and The Everlasting Gospel share a framework (and, to some extent, a language) for re-imagining the New Testament Christ within Blake’s mythological elaborations. Moreover, amidst a poetics which is invested ever more heavily in the aesthetics and structures of the Bible, the chapter will consider the extent to which these poems can be understood as responding with immediacy to the exigencies of eighteenth-century London life.

5  Jeffrey S. Chamberlain, “Moralism, Justification, and the Controversy over Methodism,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 44 (1993): 652–55; David Hempton, “Evangelicalism in English and Irish Society, 1780–1840,” in Evangelicalism: Comparative Studies of Popular Protestantism in North America, the British Isles, and Beyond, 1700–1900, ed. Mark A. Noll, David W.  Bebbington, and George A.  Rawlyk (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 156–76.

7  CREATING NATURE FROM THIS FIERY LAW: TOWARDS VISIONARY… 

175

The Wheel of Religion In the preface ‘To the Christians’ which announces the fourth chapter of Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion, Blake asks ‘Can you think at all & not pronounce heartily! That to Labour in Knowledge. is to Build up Jerusalem: and to Despise Knowledge, is to Despise Jerusalem & her Builders[?]’ (77, E232). Within each of the four chapters of Blake’s longest and most ambitious illuminated book, Los’s unending ‘Labour’ is the construction of the city of Golgonooza, whose dynamic structures require constant reshaping and renewal to stave off the decay of inertia and historical inevitability. In his ceaseless attention to this task, Los maintains the hope that we might somehow ‘Build up Jerusalem’ (that is, the re-­ establishment of humanity’s divine form). But complacency, imaginative exhaustion, fear of the future and the closure of the visionary faculties darken the landscape within which he works—the land of Albion—as they have in Blake’s work since Thel fled the vales of Har in 1789. This tendency to ‘Despise Knowledge’ obscures humanity’s divine potential, leading it into restricted, imaginatively impoverished, legally defined sanctuaries that beguilingly offer peace, certainty, and protection. Optimistic labour driven, in the words of the Chapter Four preface, by the ‘Divine Arts of Imagination’ (described as the ‘Intellectual Fountain’ of the Holy Ghost) promise London’s renovation as Jerusalem. But human paranoia arising from moralising codes of ‘self-reproach’ and the ‘tortures of repentance’ perpetually lead to the rejection of ‘Art & Science’ and the ‘devastation of the things of the Spirit’ (E232). In common with each of Jerusalem’s chapter prefaces, ‘To the Christians’ includes a visionary lyric. The speaker of ‘I stood among my valleys of south’ finds himself transported to an apocalyptic landscape, in which the material of creation is being destroyed by a mysterious but terrifying force: I stood among my valleys of the south And saw a flame of fire, even as a Wheel Of fire surrounding all the heavens: it went From west to east against the current of Creation and devourd all things in its loud Fury & thundering course … And I asked a Watcher & a Holy-One Its Name? he answered. It is the Wheel of Religion. I wept and said. Is this the law of Jesus

176 

M. MAUGER

This terrible devouring sword turning every way[?] He answered; Jesus died because he strove Against the current of this Wheel (77:1–6, 12–17, E232)

The dream of the wheel of fire is related to two Old Testament visions of the chariot or throne of God, depicted in Ezekiel 1 and Daniel 7 (‘his throne was like the fiery flame, and his wheels as burning fire’). Blake may particularly have had in mind the broader eschatological context of the Daniel passage, in which God as ‘the Ancient of Days’ presides over a vast court setting in which ‘ten thousand times ten thousand’ stand awaiting judgement. In the Jerusalem lyric, the wheel spins ‘against the current’ of creation, consuming ‘all things’ in a vast conflagration. Unlike the spinning wheel of textile production which generates the thread for weaving fabric, the Wheel of Religion is a de-creative machine that moves against such narratives of production. It is an angry, destructive, violent force, a ‘terrible devouring sword turning every way’ (itself a reference to the ‘flaming sword which turned every way’ set at the gateway of Eden in Genesis 3 to prevent the descendants of Adam and Eve from returning to the Tree of Knowledge). Paley has explored how Old Testament visions such as these were used by radical writers in the 1790s, who found prophetic resonance between the images of fiery wheels and the concept of violent revolution.6 The visionary speaker of the Jerusalem lyric, however, watches the Wheel’s apocalyptic passage in horror and dismay. Notwithstanding the promise of the New Testament gospel, is this finally (he asks, aghast) the ‘law of Jesus’? But the figure of the ‘watcher’ in the vision gives some unexpected reassurance: Jesus lived (and died) to resist this destructive power. By opposing the ‘current’ of the Wheel, Jesus thereby sought to preserve the wonders of humanity. The Wheel of Religion, then, is a symbol of an old order. The vision of humanity represented by Jesus gives the speaker hope for an alternative future history. Over the duration of most of its hundred plates, Jerusalem describes a world driven into darkness and despair through the preaching ‘of sin, of sorrow, and of punishment’, a doctrine founded on the moral law and its implementation.7 The imaginative closure of humanity is represented as the sickness and sleep of Albion, a world where pleasure and sensory  Paley, Apocalypse and Millennium, 17–22.  For a useful summary of the dates and phases of composition, see Paley, The Continuing City: William Blake’s Jerusalem (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 1–7. 6 7

7  CREATING NATURE FROM THIS FIERY LAW: TOWARDS VISIONARY… 

177

indulgence are outlawed, and strict codes of morality, virtue, and denial are enforced. Jerusalem, who as the true ‘emanation’ of Albion represents desire, joy, and humanity, is denounced as a harlot and driven to the extremities of existence. Los meanwhile, as in Milton, is both the prophet striving for human recovery, and—as the embodiment of ‘Human perfection’ (6:14, E149)—the guardian working for the preservation of the human form. He is always alert, always watching, and always building Golgonooza. The structural integrity of Golgonooza seems to embody the form of Humanity itself, and Los’s indefatigable defence of the city’s structure is an allegory for his dedication and faithfulness in keeping the memory of the human form intact. In Jerusalem, Los is sure-footed and somehow never loses sight of his purpose: ‘dare not to mock my inspired fury’ (8:35, E151); ‘Why stand we here trembling around’ (38[43]:12, E184). There are none of the moments of violence, agony, utter despair, or ambiguity of purpose that characterise his representation in the Lambeth books and The Four Zoas. Indeed, he has a pragmatism here that is only latent in the earlier texts, a practical ability to make the most of a bad situation. He strives ‘with Systems in order to deliver Individuals from those Systems’ (11:5, E154), and recognises that ‘I must Create a System, or be enslav’d by another Mans’ (10:20, E153). As we will see later in this chapter, there is often a sense that Los preserves the memory of what is essentially human about humanity.

Building Laws of Moral Virtue The steadfast Watcher may offer reassurance that the Wheel of Religion is not ‘the law of Jesus’, but it is Jesus’s endorsement—rather than its force as ‘law’—that he refutes. Indeed, the dazzling visions which comprise much of Jerusalem’s relentless iterative structure describe in uncompromising fashion the impact of the imposition of legal codes that carry the authority of priestly approval. The legal narrative which Blake formulated in The Four Zoas, and which was structural to Milton, remains a core trajectory of the human world in Jerusalem. Time and again, the lines describe how a regime dominated by Satan, Vala, and Rahab (a figure who acquires to some extent the role of Satan’s female counterpart) has established authority over humanity. Their growing power enacts the ever-stricter implementation of a code of moral laws which restricts human behaviours, feelings, and emotions. This structure of regulation ultimately becomes synonymous with mortal life itself, and is perpetuated by those who it

178 

M. MAUGER

controls. Blake later imagines this process in the terms of Newtonian principle: Satan is the great ‘Reactor’ who has ‘founded his Reaction into a Law / Of Action’.8 Albion, who had been granted custodianship of ‘the Nations, / Of the whole Earth’, succumbs to this system and is ‘compelld … to become a Punisher’ (43[29]:6–7, 14–16, E191). Jerusalem opens, however, with a version of this narrative in which Satan’s role is hidden. We see Albion turning away from the ‘Saviour’, dismissing him (in a phrase adapted, as W.  H. Stevenson notes, from Shakespeare’s Macbeth) as a ‘phantom of the overheated brain’:9 By demonstration, man alone can live, and not by faith. My mountains are my own, and I will keep them to myself! The Malvern and the Cheviot, the Wolds[,] Plinlimmon & Snowdon Are mine. here will I build my Laws of Moral Virtue! Humanity shall be no more: but war & princedom & victory! (4:27–32, E147)

Satan might not be named here, but the possessive pronouns alert us as readers of Blake’s epics to the source of Albion’s error. Indeed, the words echo Satan’s imposition of his ‘infernal scroll, / Of Moral laws and cruel punishments’ following his banishment to the World of Time and Space in the bard’s song of Milton (9:21–22, E103). The plates which follow describe the impact of this decision: despair, incoherence, sorrow, violence. ‘Albions mountains run with blood, the cries of war & of tumult / Resound into the unbounded night, every Human perfection / Of mountain & river & city, are small & wither’d & darken’d’ (5:6–8, E147). Albion’s sons take a leading role in the implementation of the ‘Law of Sin’, and among them we see some familiar names from Blake’s trial: ‘Scofield: the Ninth / Of Albions sons’ together with ‘Kox, Kotope, & Bowen, One in him, a Fourfold Wonder’ (7:42–43, 48, 50, E150). Their presence here reminds us that Blake developed his mythological frameworks as a way of making sense of the world in which he lived. Alongside the militarisation associated with the ongoing Napoleonic threat that was the immediate context of Blake’s encounter with the soldier in Felpham, Blake was surely sensitive to the civil unrest throughout this period, associated variously with increasing food prices, Britain’s growing 8  Susanne Sklar, Blake’s Jerusalem as Visionary Theatre: Entering the Divine Body (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 103–4. 9  Stevenson, Blake, 662.

7  CREATING NATURE FROM THIS FIERY LAW: TOWARDS VISIONARY… 

179

industrialisation, and (later in Jerusalem’s composition) the hardships associated with the economic slump that followed the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1815, and the campaign for Parliamentary reform that led to moments of state-sponsored violence such as the Peterloo Massacre.10 Looking with Los’s eyes at this desolate scene, Blake sees how joy is ‘forbidden as a Crime’, ‘Inspiration deny’d; Genius forbidden by laws of punishment’ (9:14–16, E152). Vala, the original subject of The Four Zoas, is re-cast in this poem as the companion who—in his sickness—Albion has embraced following his misguided rejection of Jerusalem. In many respects, she is presented as a character for whom we feel some degree of sympathy. Indeed, as part of Albion’s ultimate recovery in Chapter Four, Vala and Jerusalem combine as Britannia, the emanation of the reawakened Albion. As in The Four Zoas, however, she is closely associated in Jerusalem with the promulgation of the moral framework that curtails human life in Albion, which is itself often described as her ‘Law of Chastity’. Plates 20–23 acknowledge, via their account of the ‘Veil of Vala’, a narrative for the hardening of Albion’s moral code. Initially, this ‘veil of tears’ is a defensive shield, a barricade behind which Vala protects herself from the disappointments, fears, and demands associated with the joys of human love and desire. Jerusalem, regarding Vala as a vulnerable friend in need of support, notes shrewdly that in hiding herself from the pain of experience in this way, Vala effectively amplifies via the label of ‘sin’ minor transgressions that would otherwise be considered ‘but a little / Error & fault that is soon forgiven’ (20:23–24, E165). The veil which acts as the filter to ‘sin’ thus demarcates (by counter-definition) the bounds of virtue, decency, and morality. By plate 22, Vala describes herself to Albion in the terms of the Old Testament moral law, the commands of God concealed (as described in For the Sexes) beneath the mercy seat. Susanne Sklar proposes that Blake particularly has in mind a passage in the Pauline epistles, 2 Corinthians 3.13–16, in which Paul describes the moral law received by Moses as veiling the minds of the people of Israel, ‘a veil which stands between the heart and God’.11 The 10  Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837, new ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 289–325; Frank O’Gorman, The Long Eighteenth Century: British Political & Social History 1688–1832 (London: Arnold, 1997), 233–76; Charles Tilly, Popular Contention in Great Britain, 1758–1834 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 192–283; George Rudé, Hanoverian London, 1714–1808 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 228–55. 11  Sklar, Visionary Theatre, 166.

180 

M. MAUGER

passage has clear antinomian credentials: Christ, Paul assures the Corinthians, has ‘done away’ with the veil. Vala aligns herself moreover with the weaponisation of the moral law in the Old Testament accounts. Just as the ark is repeatedly described as accompanying the Israelites in their military campaigns, she claims that Jehovah ‘in a golden Ark, / Bears me before his Armies’ (22:4–5, E167). Blake may also be experimenting figuratively with the veil used to cover the Ark when travelling (as described in Numbers 4), or the fabric which screened the innermost sanctuary of the temple—the Holy of Holies traditionally containing the Ark—from the mortal world of sin.12 In the midst of his delusion, already folded within the veil’s moral philosophy, Albion marvels at its magnificence: ‘I see it whole and more / Perfect, and shining with beauty!’ (23:6–7, E168). When confronted by Jerusalem with evidence of his grave error in turning aside from the Divine Vision, Albion instinctively seizes the veil as a means to hide himself from the judgement of the Eternals, before angrily casting it—as he dies—over his world:13 He drew the Veil of Moral Virtue, woven for Cruel Laws, And cast it into the Atlantic Deep, to catch the Souls of the Dead. … Lo[!] here is Vala[’]s Veil whole, for a Law, a Terror & a Curse! And therefore God takes vengeance on me: from my clay-cold bosom My children wander[,] trembling victims of his Moral justice. (23:22–23, 32–34, E168)

As G. A. Rosso has explained in the most recent detailed critical appraisal of this scene, ‘Albion transforms the veil into an ideological force’.14 In this angry, spiteful act—a retelling in part of Moses’s casting of the moral laws of Sinai over the Israelites—we hear echoes of both Tiriel and Urizen. A restrictive code of harsh laws is imposed not as a framework for peace and happiness, nor as a sanctuary from perceived threats, nor as an expression of the structure of a divine humanity, but as a curse. Urizen deploys his Net of Religion, only to find himself tangled within its fibres, subject to its principles. There is no straightforward hope in Jerusalem for the unwinding of this law. The chapter ends with Albion’s dying exclamation  For the latter suggestion, see Paley, Continuing City, 194.  Paley, Continuing City, 195. 14  Rosso, The Religion of Empire, 163. 12 13

7  CREATING NATURE FROM THIS FIERY LAW: TOWARDS VISIONARY… 

181

‘Hope is banished from me’. In death, the fabric of the moral law falls in its entirety from his lifeless hands onto his world: ‘Thundring the Veil rushes from his hand Vegetating Knot by / Knot, Day by Day, Night by Night’ (24:60–62, E170). It represents, as Rosso goes on to demonstrate, a ‘system of moral virtue, a system that entrances its subjects into supplanting their desires, or adapting them to the codes of the social order’.15 Later in the poem, we are told how the veil began ‘to Vegetate & Petrify / Around the Earth of Albion. among the Roots of his Tree’ (59:3–4, E208). The entwining of these key symbols of the moral law’s propagation is reminiscent of Vala’s malign association with the Tree of Mystery in Books VII and VIII of The Four Zoas. Albion’s fearful recourse to the enforcement of strict legal frameworks becomes a hallmark of his response in Jerusalem to moments of fleeting recognition of his sickness. Indeed, the account is effectively retold, albeit within revised mythological contexts, in the final stages of both Chapters Two and Three. Such patterns in the narrative structure of the poem have led many scholars to suggest that each chapter is a retelling of the same story from a different perspective, mapped, for example, onto the four gospels of the New Testament, the persons of the four Zoas, the three ages of man, or the three errors (of body, of mind, and of the imagination) which have perverted the Human Form Divine, though no critical consensus has emerged.16 Paley notes that such ‘schematic analyses of Jerusalem fail because none of them account for the Minute Particulars of the work’.17 Stuart Curran has pointed out more evocatively that such approaches do not reflect the bewildering experience of reading the poem, which is ‘to be involved in a crescendo of turmoil, of contradiction, of seemingly spontaneous changes of course’.18 Minna Doskow proposes a narrative form based on the principle of iteration: ‘time is transcended as  Ibid., 164.  See, respectively, Joan Witke, William Blake’s Epic: Imagination Unbound (London: Croom Helm, 1986), 89; E. J. Rose, “The Structure of Blake’s Jerusalem,” Bucknell Review 11 (1963): 35–54; Karl Kiralis, “The Theme and Structure of William Blake’s Jerusalem,” in The Divine Vision, ed. V. de Sola Pinto (London: Gollancz, 1957), 147–48; Anne K. Mellor, “The Human Form Divine and the Structure of Blake’s Jerusalem,” Studies in English Literature 11 (1971): 595–620. 17  Paley, Continuing City, 284. 18  Stuart Curran, “The Structures of Jerusalem,” in Blake’s Sublime Allegory: Essays on The Four Zoas, Milton, Jerusalem, ed. Stuart Curran and Joseph Anthony Wittreich, Jr. (Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1973), 335–36. 15 16

182 

M. MAUGER

one action is consecutively revealed in all its multiple meanings from many perspectives’.19 Each chapter of Jerusalem, she suggests, is like the turning of the barrel of a kaleidoscope: the pieces ‘recompose themselves in new patterns and seem to reveal new appearances of the whole but are only actualizing those patterns potentially present all along’.20 Ultimately I find this characterisation of the reading experience more helpful—and more reassuring, perhaps—than the attempt to map the poem’s organisation onto a tight thematic structure (though this is something Doskow herself goes on to do). As Sklar insists, ‘Jerusalem is not a cryptogram designed to be “decoded”, and those seeking to do so find the poem very confusing’.21 But irrespective of whether we regard the recurring pattern of Albion’s paranoid imposition of the law as separate repetitive events in a sequential historical narrative, or as a single moment performed multiple times, it is clear that it is an important crux for the poem. In its Chapter Two configuration, we find Albion as ‘punisher & judge’ bitterly defining all of life’s ‘ornament[s] of perfection’ as ‘crimes’. Albion fashions a seat of judgement from these criminalised loves, condensing them ‘into solid rocks, steadfast! / A foundation and certainty and demonstrative truth’, a throne of moral law described as ‘Moses Chair’ in The Everlasting Gospel (Jerusalem: 28:6, 10–11, E174; Everlasting: f:7, E521). These much re-fashioned lines, originating in the account of the spread of Urizen’s law in The Book of Ahania and adapted in The Four Zoas, lose none of their chilling resonance through their familiarity:22 Cold snows drifted around him: ice coverd his loins around He sat by Tyburns brook, and underneath his heel, shot up! A deadly Tree, he nam’d it Moral Virtue, and the Law Of God who dwells in Chaos hidden from the human sight. The Tree spread over him its cold shadows, (Albion groand) They bent down, they felt the earth and again enrooting Shot into many a Tree! an endless labyrinth of woe! (28:13–19, E174–75)

In its Jerusalem incarnation, the tree of mystery is called ‘Moral Virtue’, and its roots draw their water from the Tyburn river. This establishes a 19  Minna Doskow, William Blake’s Jerusalem: Structure and Meaning in Poetry and Picture (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1982), 15. 20  Ibid., 15. 21  Sklar, Visionary Theatre, 258. 22  See Paley, Continuing City, 199.

7  CREATING NATURE FROM THIS FIERY LAW: TOWARDS VISIONARY… 

183

direct association with the former site of the London public gallows at the north-eastern corner of Hyde Park ‘near mournful ever-weeping Paddington’ (27:26, E172). The Tyburn tree is the apparatus signalling the ultimate authority accorded by the state to the moral law as the arbiter of life and death in the human world. At plate 32, in an isolated reference to the cosmology of The Book of Urizen, we see the astonishment of the ‘Eternals’ at this development: ‘Have you known the judgement that is arisen among the / Zoas of Albion?’ they ask each other incredulously, ‘where a Man dare hardly to embrace / His own Wife, for the terrors of Chastity that they call / By the name of Morality’ (32[36]:43–47, E179). Their apparent mirth suggests that they are out-of-touch observers of the affairs of Albion; and yet life under the moral law, in which the imaginative ecstasies of joy and desire are criminalised under the aegis of virtue and morality is, in Blake’s view, genuinely ludicrous. Albion recognises his short-sightedness not via an appeal from Jerusalem, but rather through the remarkable visionary apparatus of Los’s furnaces, the operation of which throughout the poem most vividly calls to mind a prophetic video surveillance system through which Los can observe mythological transactions occurring across Jerusalem’s cosmos. As the ‘watchman’ of Golgonooza, Los is able to use the furnaces to observe and interpret actions that would otherwise go unnoticed. He also occasionally makes use of this system to reveal hidden truths to his friends and collaborators. Los has enlisted the help of the twenty-four ‘Friends of Albion’—principally personifications of the major cathedral cities of England—to support their sick friend in Beulah ‘till the Error is removed’. On plate 42, Los opens the furnaces, and Albion recognises that the ‘accursed things’ of the doctrine he has adopted are in fact ‘his own affections, / And his own beloveds’ (42:3–4, E189). Once again, he responds to this revelation with fear and anger. He labels Los his ‘deceitful friend’, claiming that what has been demonstrated is not his error but Los’s own ‘turpitude’. ‘I demand righteousness & justice’, Albion declares. Los, whilst apparently happy to concede the second of these, takes issue with the first: Los answered. Righteousness & justice I give thee in return For thy righteousness! but I add mercy also … Thou art in Error; trouble me not with thy righteousness. I have innocence to defend and ignorance to instruct:

184 

M. MAUGER

I have no time for seeming; and little arts of compliment, In morality and virtue: in self-glorying and pride. (42:19–20, 25–28, E189)

Albion’s ‘Righteousness’ is the principle by which morality and virtue are demarcated, and acts defined as right or wrong. It presupposes the moral superiority of its supposed arbiter, and therefore relates to the Satanic anathema of Blake’s nineteenth-century epics: the celebration of the self. Los seems initially to temper Righteousness with Mercy, before dismissing it out-of-hand: ‘I break thy bonds of Righteousness’, he re-­iterates a few lines later. In a blind rage, Albion rejects Los’s proposition and orders his sons to capture the twenty-four ‘rebellious’ Friends. Albion’s world closes in, the Veil of Vala tightens, and Albion himself is transformed into the terrifying framework of legal compulsion and perversion that we previously encountered in Milton: ‘that Holy Fiend / The Wicker Man of Scandinavia’ (47:6–7, E196). His last words at the end of Chapter Two —‘Hope is banish’d from me’—echo those reported at the end of Chapter One (47:18, E196). As might be considered appropriate for a section of the poem whose preface is addressed ‘to the Deists’, Albion’s representation in  Chapter Three of Jerusalem is articulated predominantly in the restricted form of his ‘Reasoning’ Spectre. He gathers like ‘a hoar frost & a Mildew’ over Albion, declaring ‘I am God O Sons of Men! I am your Rational Power!’ (54:15–16, E203). At the end of the chapter, Blake reminds his readers that the Spectre, ‘when separated / From Imagination … thence frames Laws & Moralities / To destroy Imagination!’ (74:10–12, E229). The chapter itself demonstrates the lived experience of this form of human selfimprisonment. Here we find a variation on the pattern observed in Chapters One and Two, with Los (wise after the experience of the previous chapters) showing greater caution in confronting his friend ‘fearing lest Albion should turn his Back / Against the Divine Vision: & fall over the Precipice of Eternal Death’ (71:58–59, E226). Los attempts instead to avert disaster by reforming Vala, arguing that the virtuous principles woven in her veil are transfigured by ‘reasoning’ into codes of accusation and judgement, producing a marketplace of ‘Sexual Death’ in which ‘Love & Innocence’ become commodities to be bought and sold (64:22–24, E215). Indeed, a later account of the establishment of a ‘Religion of Chastity, forming a Commerce to sell Loves / With Moral Law’ demonstrates the veracity of Los’s vision (69:34–35, E223). Los’s attempt to intervene backfires, however, and Albion’s Spectre jealously draws Vala

7  CREATING NATURE FROM THIS FIERY LAW: TOWARDS VISIONARY… 

185

‘into his bosom’ (64:25, E215). She is glimpsed with ‘Distaff & Spindle’ in her hands enshrining her creed within his world ‘with the Flax of / Human Miseries’ (64:32–33, E215). Into this re-­telling of the legal narrative we have seen in Chapters One and Two of the poem, Blake inserts— with only cosmetic changes—his account (from Night VIIb of The Four Zoas) of Urizen’s rebuilding of the human world based on the principles of his metal books.23 Industrial production lines, on which young labourers work for hours in ‘sorrowful drudgery’ on the same small task, replace the established forms of ‘workmanship’ (65:20, 26, E216). The same doctrine sends young soldiers to fight in pointless wars in France, and carries enslaved Africans across the Atlantic to the Americas. As in the Chapter One and Two iterations, Albion’s misguided implementation of the moral law leads to appalling suffering in his world, and ultimately his own death. The account is made more nuanced here in the third chapter via a division in the figuration of Albion himself. The nonreasoning components of Albion—love, passion, desire, from which Albion’s ‘spectre’ has separated—are consolidated in the form of ‘Luvah’ and brought to judgement. He is sentenced to death and crucified on Albion’s tree, whose perpetual enrooting throughout Albion is likened both to the parasitic mistletoe, and the cancerous ‘Polypus’ (66:48, E219) whose invasive and uncontrolled growth is both an emblem for sickness and imaginative poverty, and (as Wright has shown) for imperial expansion.24 The ‘Stone of trial’ is associated with the supposed ‘altar’ at the centre of Stonehenge, imagined here as a ‘labyrinthine’ legal building of ‘Reasonings: of unhewn Demonstrations’ designed by Urizen himself. In its innermost sanctuary, its Holy of Holies, sits the malevolent form of Vala ‘turning the iron Spindle of destruction’ (66:3–4, 10, 19, E218). The altar is the mercy seat of a monstrous ark, whose Covering Cherubs are none other than Voltaire and Rousseau, emblems for Blake of deist thinking. It is conflated by Blake with a relocated London Stone, itself for Anne Janowitz ‘a site of trial’ which ‘asserts that the harshness of contemporary justice is born out of a tradition of juridical tyranny’.25 As darkness falls across the land, the apparent victory of reason and morality is expressed through the emergence of a formless creative horror, ‘the Great Polypus

 Sklar, Visionary Theatre, 210; Doskow, William Blake’s Jerusalem, 129–30.  Wright, 156–67. 25  Janowitz, England’s Ruins, 167. 23 24

186 

M. MAUGER

of Generation’ which ‘covered the earth’, anticipating the final vision of the Covering Cherub in Chapter Four (67:34, E220). The sense of desperation is palpable as the chapter ends. The crucifixion and death of Albion following his trial under the terms of the moral law anticipates (in terms of its biblical parallels) a resurrection which seems a forlorn hope at this stage. This narrative continues in the opening of the final chapter, as the spectres of the sons of Albion are seen contemplating Albion’s inert body in his tomb, ‘ravning to devour / The Sleeping Humanity’ (78:2–3, E233). Amid the gathering darkness, the poem’s speaker intervenes on the final two pages of the third chapter, contemplating the horrific landscape of desolation that his vision has produced, in which a poverty-stricken Jerusalem is seen begging, ‘in ruins wandering about from house to house’. He cries out ‘Teach me O Holy Spirit the Testimony of Jesus! let me / Comprehend wonderous things out of the Divine Law’ (74:14–17, E229). This seems an unlikely, isolated invocation of an optimistic legal perspective, reminiscent perhaps of the ‘Laws of Eternity’ to which Milton appeals at the climax of Blake’s earlier epic. Hitherto in Jerusalem, as we have seen, Jesus seems to be represented in antinomian terms that are closer to The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Indeed, he is glimpsed in the prophetic video of Los’s furnaces ‘Saving those who have sinned from the punishment of the Law’ (31[35]:6, E177). Before considering the surprising developments of the final chapter, however, I turn now to Blake’s dramatization, in his unfinished notebook poem The Everlasting Gospel, of a key New Testament story: the account of Jesus’s interaction with the woman taken in adultery. Here we see Blake, at a period roughly contemporary with Jerusalem, focussing his attention on a specific instance in which he reads a confrontation between secular and divine law.

The Covenant of Jehovah When the terrified visionary speaker that we meet in the verse component of the Chapter Four preface asks for further information about the ‘Wheel / Of fire’ which is consuming creation, he is told that ‘it is the Wheel of Religion’. Unexpectedly, however, he is also told that the wheel has a name: ‘Caiaphas, the dark Preacher of Death / Of sin, of sorrow, & of punishment’ (77:18–19, E232). Caiaphas is named in the New Testament accounts as the high priest who, in the terms of John 18, ‘gave counsel to

7  CREATING NATURE FROM THIS FIERY LAW: TOWARDS VISIONARY… 

187

the Jews, that it was expedient that one man should die for the people’. He arranged for the arrest of Jesus, and presided over the trial before the Sanhedrin at which he was found guilty. Blake extrapolates Caiaphas’s role, making him emblematic of not only the Roman and Jewish legal procedures that led to the crucifixion, but also the Old Testament law and its enforcement. His only other appearance in Blake’s corpus is in the various disconnected manuscript fragments which Blake’s twentieth- and twenty-first-century editors have assembled as The Everlasting Gospel (taking the title, in the absence of anything more concrete, from a heading which Blake scribbled at one point in the notebook drafts). As in the Jerusalem lyric, Caiaphas is closely associated with the application of a moral code which stands in opposition to Jesus’s example. Often paired by Blake in an unholy alliance with the Roman governor Pontius Pilate, Caiaphas is destructive, manipulative, and wedded to an absolutist reading of doctrine. Blake’s ambition for The Everlasting Gospel is to challenge the popular association of moral virtue with Christianity. The reification of the principles of morality predates the New Testament, the poem argues, and— accordingly—is not a part of the gospel legacy. We might then ask more radically, ‘What can this Gospel of Jesus be?’. The Heathen Deities wrote them all These Moral Virtues great and small. What is the Accusation of Sin But Moral Virtues deadly Gin[?] The Moral Virtues in their Pride Did … the World triumphant ride In Wars & Sacrifice for Sin And Souls to Hell ran trooping in (b:5–12, E875–76)

The moral virtues that are raised up by contemporary Christians were, according to this potted history, the creation of ‘heathen deities’. Under the supremacy of this doctrine, the labelling of transgressive behaviour as ‘sin’ has sent souls ‘trooping in’ to Hell, establishing Satan as the ‘Holy God of All’. But the arrival of Jesus upsets this status quo via a single declaration: ‘Thy Sins are all forgiven thee’. In her study of forgiveness in The Everlasting Gospel, Jeanne Moskal emphasises the disruptive impact of this pronouncement. This is not the ‘obligation excusing’ forgiveness which is

188 

M. MAUGER

complicit in a ‘false system of justice’, but rather a radical act that disempowers such a system.26 Whereas nine of the fragments of the poem are to be found scattered throughout Blake’s notebook, the lines quoted above are taken from a separate manuscript sheet containing a short prose statement and several verse portions. These are closely related thematically to the segments located in the notebook, and written in the same unusual loose iambic tetrameter. The 1818 watermark found on this sheet is typically used as a tentative basis on which to date all the fragments. David Erdman’s argument that these sections should be considered the poem’s opening, and the prose statement as some kind of ‘preface’ or ‘argument’ to the whole, generally informs its arrangement in modern editions (although they are included as ancillary material in his influential edition of Blake’s poetry).27 This prose preface—described by Moskal as ‘the “seedbed” of the entire effort’—underscores the significance of ‘Forgiveness of Sins’ as the key New Testament principle: ‘this alone is the Gospel & this is the Life & Immorality brought to light by Jesus’ (a, E875). Pilate and Caiaphas howl in dismay as trumpets herald the arrival of a new age based on ‘Mutual forgiveness of each Vice’, and the ‘Gates of Paradise’ swing open. In a striking (and ultimately contradictory) exercise in damage limitation, the Moral Virtues coalesce as a ‘Cross & Nails & Spear’ by which the ‘Sinners Friend’ is to be ‘destroyed’ (b:28, 36, E876). In doing so, they ensure not only the death of Jesus, but also the future celebration of his ‘virtue’ and the emergence of a cult built around a belief that he was somehow ‘sinless’. A ‘sinless’ Jesus, of course, is deemed ‘innocent’ under the doctrines of the moral law, and his conviction and punishment a flagrant miscarriage of justice that is conventionally understood as the vindictive action of a jealous and fearful state and religious authority. But such a Jesus is nevertheless useful to that authority, in the way that he is then raised up as a paragon of the very ‘virtues’ under which he was tried. Blake strives to expose this contradiction: ‘The Moral Christian is the Cause / Of the Unbeliever & his Laws’ the speaker proclaims (c:7–8, E877). Indeed, if Christianity is conceived as based in moral 26  Jeanne Moskal, “Forgiveness, Love, and Pride in Blake’s ‘The Everlasting Gospel’,” Religion and Literature 20 (1988): 22–25; Moskal, Blake, Ethics and Forgiveness, 38–39. 27  See David Erdman, “‘Terrible Blake in His Pride’: An Essay on The Everlasting Gospel,” in From Sensibility to Romanticism: Essays Presented to Frederick A.  Pottle, ed. Frederick W. Hilles and Harold Bloom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), 335.

7  CREATING NATURE FROM THIS FIERY LAW: TOWARDS VISIONARY… 

189

virtue, then we need to regard Caiaphas and Pilate as ‘praiseworthy men’, and promote the ‘lion’s den / And not the sheepfold’ as our governing ‘allegories / Of God and Heaven’ (c:3–4, E877). In a passage which bears strong resemblances to plate 23 of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (‘now hear how he has given his sanction to the law of ten commandments’), Blake places Jesus on trial once again, summoning Caiaphas to testify to his many sins. According to this testimony, Jesus ‘mocked the Sabbath’, released ‘evil spirits’, ‘stole’ the labour of the fishermen who became his disciples, tempted Jewish people to ignore the laws associated with food, dishonoured and disobeyed his parents before abandoning them, and used his followers to foment discontent at his instruction whilst avoiding personal liability. This is the undeniable evidence of Jesus’s sin, on which he was tried and (correctly, Blake would imply) convicted. The subsequent popularisation of the person of Jesus as an emblem of moral rectitude also explains, in the speaker’s view, the mything of his birth to ‘a Virgin Pure / With narrow Soul & looks demure’. The poem blasphemously conflates the person of Mary the mother of Jesus with Mary Magdalen: ‘If he intended to take on Sin / The Mother should an Harlot been / Just such a one as Magdalen’ (d:1–5, E877). The not-­ quite-­articulated implication is that Christian teaching has effectively sanitised the figure of Jesus’s mother by re-imagining her as two individuals: the one Mary repudiated as a morally transgressive prostitute, and the other revered for her purity and (most potently perhaps, for Blake) her virginity. It is this second figure who is celebrated as the mother of the son of God to service the account of Jesus the virtuous. The idea of Mary as a woman with sexual desires, human joys, and imaginative freedoms, meanwhile, has been refigured as a ‘sinful’ third party. Blake’s problematisation of Mary’s purity is also suggested via a vision described on plate 61 of Jerusalem, which imagines an argument between Jesus’s parents at some point during her pregnancy. For Paley, this exchange is a key example of Blake’s ‘language of pathos’ in this poem, ‘the language of brotherhood, of marital affection, of parental love’.28 When Joseph angrily demands to know why ‘Should I / Marry a Harlot & an Adulteress’, Mary does not reject the labels but rather admonishes him for passing moral judgement, concluding: ‘if I were pure, never could I taste the sweets /  Of the Forgiveness of Sins! if I were holy! I never could behold the tears / Of

 Morton D. Paley, Continuing City, 66–67; Sklar, Visionary Theatre, 207.

28

190 

M. MAUGER

love! of him who loves me in the midst of his anger’ (Jerusalem: 61:5–6, 11–13, E211). In The Everlasting Gospel, the person of Mary is conflated with a further biblical figure of sexual immorality.29 Successive fragments of the poem take as their subject chastity, gentility, and humility. The ‘chastity’ section is built around a re-telling of a well-known vignette from John 8. As Jesus teaches in the temple, the Pharisees bring before him a woman taken ‘in the very act’ of adultery. They ask him to stipulate the appropriate sanction, pointing out that the law of Moses requires that she be stoned. In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, as we have seen in Chapter Three, Blake uses this story as an example of how Jesus acts from ‘impulse’ rather than ‘from rules’. But he returned to study this encounter in more detail in his watercolour ‘The Woman Taken in Adultery’ (c. 1805), one of a large number of paintings of biblical subjects commissioned by Thomas Butts in the first decade of the nineteenth century (Fig. 7.1). In the background of the painting, a small crowd of gowned men are seen passing out through a stone archway (‘convicted by their own conscience’ according to the King James translation), presumably in the moments after Jesus has invited ‘he that is without sin among you’ to ‘first cast a stone at her’. The composition centres, however, on Jesus’s silent activity: bent forward, he writes with his finger in the dust on the ground. He is watched intently by the partially dressed young woman, hands still tied behind her back with rope. She looks to see what he is doing, sharing our perplexity as readers of the account in John where we search in vain for any clue about what he has written. Echoing the silence of the biblical account on this matter, any mark that Jesus may have made in the dust has left no discernible trace. In his verse treatment of this scene as part of The Everlasting Gospel, Blake gives the woman a name: Mary. Jesus himself is described as ‘sitting in Moses Chair’, a figurative position of legal authority based on his professed ability to interpret scripture (f:7, E521). As in the biblical text, Jesus is asked to pronounce judgement; and just as in the watercolour, the action of the scene is arrested at this moment. Here, however, the speaker becomes a prophetic visionary, disclosing the tectonic upheaval that Jesus’s silence (and that of John’s gospel) portends. The moral law ‘Writ with Curses from Pole to Pole / All away began to roll’. As it does so, the figure of Mary, caught on the ‘secret bed’ of her sin and presented for

 Moskal, Blake, Ethics and Forgiveness, 41.

29

7  CREATING NATURE FROM THIS FIERY LAW: TOWARDS VISIONARY… 

191

Fig. 7.1  William Blake, The Woman Taken in Adultery (c. 1805). (Photograph © 2023 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

judgement, is transformed into a vision of the mortal world in its entirety, ‘trembling & Naked’ without the covering of the moral law: The Earth trembling & Naked lay In secret bed of Mortal Clay On Sinai felt the hand Divine Putting back the bloody shrine And she heard the breath of God As she heard by Edens flood

192 

M. MAUGER

Good & Evil are no more Sinais trumpets cease to roar Cease finger of God to Write![’] (f:15–23, E521)

With these words, as Christopher Rowland observes, ‘Jesus pronounces the end of the era of law’.30 In refusing to condemn the woman under the terms of the moral law, Jesus (Blake argues) dismisses the law’s authority. The great power of the commandments of Sinai is disrupted. Judgements to determine ‘good and evil’ are suspended. The ‘finger of God’ will cease tracing the letters of the law. In the reference to God’s ‘finger’, Blake makes a connection between the gospel account of Jesus’s response to the woman taken in adultery, and the Old Testament narrative of the creation of the moral law in the book of Exodus, itself the subject of another of Blake’s biblical watercolours. At the end of the account of God’s revelation of the law on Mount Sinai, Moses is given ‘two tables of testimony, tables of stone, written with the finger of God’. This act is vividly depicted in Blake’s watercolour drawing ‘God Writing Upon the Tables of the Covenant’ (c. 1805) in which the forefinger of God’s right hand appears to be the instrument of inscription on the blank tablets, just as Jesus writes in the dust in the New Testament scene. It is tempting to relate the contrast between ‘stone’ and ‘dust’ to Blake’s pronouncement in ‘The Song of Liberty’ and America of a rebellious anti-law force that ‘stamps the stony law to dust’, although Blake chooses not to ascribe violent action to Jesus here. Accountability for the law’s creation is nevertheless shifted from God to an ‘Angel of the Presence Divine’, who by defining the moral law ‘Created Hells dark jaws’, separating the divine from the human (f:29, 32, E521). Hell and its punishments are created as a direct result of the naming of the law. Having assigned responsibility in this way, Jesus finishes writing in the dust, and the words of John 8 briefly come back into view: ‘Has no Man Condemned thee[?] / No Man Lord!’ (f:47–48, E522). The accusers have by now passed out of sight, and Jesus and Mary find themselves alone. The biblical account tells us only (at John 8.11) that Jesus dismisses the woman with a mild admonishment: ‘Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more’. By contrast, in The Everlasting Gospel, Blake once again opens out a key moment in this story. Playing with the biblical idea that  Rowland, Blake and the Bible¸ 186.

30

7  CREATING NATURE FROM THIS FIERY LAW: TOWARDS VISIONARY… 

193

sinful behaviour is induced through individual possession by evil spirits, Jesus summons the ‘Fallen Fiends of Heavnly birth’, the tangible forms of sin created through the act of establishing the law, and instructs them to ‘bow’ before the adulteress’s feet (f:50, 53, E522). Mary recognises these as the ‘Devils’ to whom she succumbed, who persuaded her that love— rightfully (she acknowledges) the dwelling-place of God—was ‘a shame & Sin’. Stripped of joy and intimate desire under a ‘dark pretence to Chastity’, sexual relationships are ‘Secret Adulteries’ directed towards the indulgence of destructive lusts (f:63, 70–73, E522). For Mary—adulteress, fallen Magdalen, mother of Jesus—satisfying sexual desire is a commodity she can sell ‘to Earn my bread’ (f:60, E522). It is this rejection of love in the name of law that Mary now recognises as the genuine ‘Blasphemy’ of which she is guilty, and she asks Jesus to renew his forgiveness of her mistakes. The immediate consequence of her plea is the emergence from Jesus’s body of a ‘shadowy Man’ (f:81, E522). This figure, familiar enough from Blake’s prophetic books as a ‘spectre’, seems horrified by the way in which Jesus’s anti-law rhetoric threatens the forms of control which the religious and state authorities have extended over individual behaviours. Unfortunately, this fragment of the poem loses momentum here, and we can only speculate about the way in which Blake might have brought his retelling of the gospel account to a close. It seems unlikely that Blake’s Jesus would tell the woman to ‘sin no more’, and nor would he withhold the forgiveness which she craves. But it is also clear that confronting her true error—embracing the law of chastity, and promoting an idea of sexual desire as shameful—is an important component of this forgiveness. As in the biblical account, she is not effectively given a free pass to continue as she was before. But rather than being told to ‘sin no more’, we might imagine the message to the woman being to ‘no longer indulge sin’ as a label or a moral standard on her own actions or those of others. This reframing of the story of the woman taken in adultery therefore reinforces the central message of the poem. Sin, emblem of the dominion of Satan, can be disempowered by a simple principle: forgiveness of sins. The prose component which may serve as an ‘argument’ for the poem adopts a remarkable phrase to embody this principle: Forgiveness of Sins[.] This alone is the Gospel & this is the Life & Immortality brought to light by Jesus. Even the Covenant of Jehovah, which is This[:] If you forgive one another your Trespasses so shall Jehovah

194 

M. MAUGER

forgive you That he himself may dwell among you[;] but if you Avenge you Murder the Divine Image & he cannot dwell among you[.] [B]ecause you Murder him he arises Again & you deny that he is Arisen & are blind to Spirit (a, E875)

It is striking that Blake favours the term ‘Covenant’ here, a term associated primarily with the separate discourses of biblical text and property law. The new dispensation revealed by Jesus may involve the dismissal of the ‘moral virtues’ and the laws of morality which define them, and in that sense he really is an ‘antinomian’ radical. But there nevertheless remains a foundational legal structure, a binding promise, a solemn agreement. Just as striking, perhaps, is that this is not the covenant of Jesus, but of ‘Jehovah’, whose finger wrote the tables of the moral law that—hidden beneath the mercy seat—have imprisoned humanity. Indeed, in some of the Old Testament sources, the Ark’s full name is the Ark of the Covenant of Jehovah. The agreement as presented here has a clear legal status, setting out the basis for the relationship between the divine and the human— but this is (clearly) a very different kind of law, based not on moral compulsion or coercion, but on the undiminished recognition of the Human Form Divine. Is this the Covenant, then, removed from the corruptions of the Covering Cherub and recovered to truth through the light of the ‘Gospel … brought to light by Jesus’? Has the all-engrossing obsession of the law with the business of morality been a part of the covering, rather than the content?

London, Law, and the Human Form Divine To return, then, to Jerusalem, and (once again) to the lyric ‘I stood among my valleys of the south’ which forms part of the Chapter Four preface ‘To the Christians’. As we have seen, the poem describes a visionary landscape within which the destructive Wheel of Religion moves ‘against the current of / Creation’. To the speaker, it signifies the approaching apocalypse, the unwinding of the material structures of the human world; but he is reassured by his companion that rather than being the ‘law of Jesus’, the Wheel represents the power of the destructive doctrine of moral virtue symbolised in the name ‘Caiaphas’, and that Jesus ‘died because he strove / Against the current of this Wheel’ (77:4–5, 14–18, E232). The visionary observer has further information for the poet, however. There is nevertheless a ‘law of Jesus’, a ‘fiery Law’ which he defines as ‘self-denial &

7  CREATING NATURE FROM THIS FIERY LAW: TOWARDS VISIONARY… 

195

forgiveness of Sin’ (77:22–23, E232). He enjoins the speaker to become an advocate for this new dispensation, to ‘cast out devils in Christs name’. But rather than ‘smite with terror & with punishments / Those that are sick, like to the Pharisees’, his mission is to be one of liberty, teaching ‘True Happiness’ to those in need rather than curses ‘to blight their peace’ (77:24–33, E233). In the terms of The Everlasting Gospel, the persecution of human life under the Wheel of Religion has produced a prison world in which ‘souls to Hell ran trooping in’. The collapse of morality’s rule, by contrast, heralds the opening of Hell and the freedom of sinners. The longing for the recovery of the divine form of Humanity from its impoverishment under the aeons of Albion’s sickness is one of the repeated motifs of Jerusalem. Its attainment in the final plates of Chapter Four, as Albion finally takes the imaginative leap required to set aside his spectrous selfhood and embrace the ‘Universal Humanity’, constitutes the poem’s thrilling, visionary climax. This ‘Resurrection’ of the ‘Body of Death’ on plate 98, the restoration of the divine perfection of the ‘Four Living Creatures’ of Humanity, arises under the terms of the ‘fiery law’ of Jesus defined in the lyric preface: ‘in Forgiveness of Sins which is Self Annihilation. it is the Covenant of Jehovah’ (98:23, E257). This specific deployment in Jerusalem of the framework defined in the prefatory manuscript fragment of The Everlasting Gospel makes explicit its connection with the prophetic machinery of Milton, in which self-annihilation is the key principle underpinning the ‘Laws of Eternity’. It is as though the idea of a binding covenant is increasingly attractive to Blake as the basis of a redeemed legality. Andrew Lincoln has suggested that there are traces of evangelical doctrine in Blake’s raising-up of ‘forgiveness’ in his nineteenth-­ century work (although he is careful to clarify that this ‘does not of course mean that Blake endorses institutional religion or its doctrines’).31 The determined rejection of codes of virtue that we find in these poems sits uneasily with such an identification; but it may be that the ‘Covenant of Jehovah’ is in some sense Blake’s corrective to debates with which he may have felt some sympathy. The term recurs later in this final vision:

31  Andrew Lincoln, “Restoring the Nation to Christianity: Blake and the Aftermyth of Revolution,” in Blake, Nation and Empire, ed. Steve Clark and David Worrall (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006), 153–66; see also in the same volume Steve Clark, “Jerusalem as Imperial Prophecy”, 167–85. For a more detailed study of Blake’s affinities with Methodism, see Michael Farrell, Blake and the Methodists (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

196 

M. MAUGER

  And I heard Jehovah speak Terrific from his Holy Place & saw the Words of the Mutual Covenant Divine On Chariots of gold & jewels with Living Creatures starry & flaming With every Colour, Lion, Tyger, Horse, Elephant, Eagle[,] Dove, Fly, Worm, And the all wondrous Serpent clothed in gems & rich array Humanize In the Forgiveness of Sins according to the Covenant of Jehovah. They Cry [“]Where is the Covenant of Priam, the Moral Virtues of the Heathen Where is the Tree of Good & Evil that rooted beneath the cruel heel Of Albions Spectre the Patriarch Druid![”] (98:40–48, E258)

This recovery is imagined as a final reconciliation between God and Man, the establishment of a ‘Mutual Covenant’ in which the startling, energetic, anthropomorphic components of divine form ‘Humanize’ under the governing principle of the new order. By contrast, the world of moral virtue, the law of chastity extended under the principle of mystery, the framework of legal doctrine established by Urizen / Satan and symbolised through the growth of Albion’s fatal tree, is associated with the evil ‘Covenant of Priam’, the only occurrence of this phrase in Blake’s writing. The ‘fiery law’ of Jesus—through its twin principles of self-­ annihilation and forgiveness of sins—has stripped away the authority of this false Covenant. The Living Creatures cry out in wonder at the apparently inexplicable disappearance of these frameworks, the forms of control that ‘Taxed the Nations into Desolation’ (98:53, E258). The visualisation of this ideological transition from the Covenant of Priam to the Covenant of Jehovah demonstrates the speaker’s augmented power in the final stages of the poem to ‘Comprehend wonderous things out of the Divine Law’ (74:14–17, E229), something that seemed beyond his imaginative grasp at the end of Chapter Three. The order of the Covenant of Jehovah which has been recovered is associated with an imaginative freedom and prophetic liberty that was almost unthinkable before, but it is not straightforwardly an ‘antinomian’ political theology, as it is characterised by Rosso.32 It is a dispensation based on community and shared humanity rather than self-indulgent individual antinomian sovereignty. It retains a structure and form. It enshrines the principles of self-­annihilation and forgiveness. In the restored Human Form Divine, the ‘Visionary forms dramatic’ participate ‘as One Man reflecting each in each & clearly seen / And seeing: according to fitness & order’ (98:28, 39–40, E257–58).  Rosso, The Religion of Empire, 216–17.

32

7  CREATING NATURE FROM THIS FIERY LAW: TOWARDS VISIONARY… 

197

We encounter articulations of this divine ‘fitness & order’ throughout Jerusalem, not least in the preface to the first chapter, in which the speaker insists that ‘every word and every letter’ of his long poem ‘is studied and put into its fit place’. Moreover, the insistence of the value of ‘form’ over ‘formlessness’ is a repeated theme. Amid these symbolic frameworks, there is a particular emphasis on construction and city building, which acquires a prominence similar to that observed in The Four Zoas. The city of Golgonooza, with Los its indefatigable builder, defender, renovator, and watchman is once again accorded a prominent role. But it is London itself which takes centre-stage in the poem’s troubled mythic transactions. As Janowitz has described, it is a poem ‘which images a nation born from and centered in the city’, producing an ‘urban sublime, in which London is figured as a terrible place of conflicting and contradictory impulses’.33 The city defines a terrain which operates as a temporal and spatial arena for humanity. Its narratives are profoundly human, and are both historically determined and materially quantifiable. Yet via its association with Los’s city of the imagination (Golgonooza, the poem insists, is ‘the spiritual fourfold London eternal’), the national capital is also a pivot between the mythological landscape of Jerusalem’s giant forms and the substantial contexts of the early-nineteenth century, anchoring the otherwise intangible mythic drama to the ‘real world’ solidity of the city. The London that coalesces within the poem is nevertheless inconstant and evolving, a space over which the core protagonists fight for constitutional control in their desire to build—or to corrupt—Jerusalem. In Janowitz’s terms, London is ‘a place of terror and waste, but also … a place of enormous activity and potential’.34 The most optimistic accounts of the city figure London as the physical embodiment of Jerusalem, whose arches and ‘golden pillars high’ are projected with psychogeographic incongruity onto a map of the expanding city in the lyric component of the  Chapter Two preface.35 The growth of the city to the north ‘from Islington to Marybone, / To Primrose Hill and Saint Johns Wood’ is fancifully imagined as the ascendant Jerusalem, ‘shining’ on the fields, farms, taverns and tea gardens forming the advancing northern frontier of London’s urban growth: ‘The Jews-harp-house & the Green Man / The Ponds where Boys to bathe delight / The fields of Cows by Willans farm’  Janowitz, England’s Ruins, 145.  Janowitz, England’s Ruins, 173. 35  Paley, Continuing City, 75–76. 33 34

198 

M. MAUGER

(27:1–2, 13–15, E171–72).36 For Jennifer Michael, Blake’s ‘layering of real and imagined cities on top of one another’ suggests not their convergence, but rather ‘how the historical, particular city provides the site and materials for building the ideal one’.37 At various moments in the poem, the sight of Jerusalem in London seems to be the memory of a paradise lost, of humanity’s perfection before Albion’s sickness. At the end of Chapter One, the daughters of Albion recall how ‘In the Exchanges of London every Nation walkd / And London walkd in every Nation mutual in love & harmony’ (24:42–43, E170), an overwhelmingly cheerful if somewhat disingenuous portrait of the role of global commerce in city life that brings to mind Joseph Addison’s celebratory account of the Royal Exchange over a century earlier in The Spectator.38 So beguiling is this portrait of the city that it is repeated in the Chapter Two prefatory lyric (27:85–86, E173). Here the description is transformed from a nostalgic memory of a lost past, into an optimistic vision of future harmony, associated by Paley with the ‘millennial future of the continuing city’.39 In Chapter Four, the daughters describe a similar memory: Highgates heights & Hampsteads, to Poplar Hackney & Bow: To Islington & Paddington & the brook of Albions river We builded Jerusalem as a City & a Temple; from Lambeth We began our foundations, lovely Lambeth! O lovely Hills Of Camberwell (84:1–5, E243)

This is a pan-London vision, with a clearly deliberate attempt to name-­ check areas at the city’s cardinal points. But whatever the status of these supposed memories, it is clear that the city that has taken shape within London is very far from the elegant symmetry of Jerusalem. The daughters describe how the building project was corrupted even as it took form. 36  Willan’s Farm and the Jews Harp House can be found on Richard Horwood’s Plan of the Cities of London and Westminster the Borough of Southwark (1792–1799), on Crown Estate land in Marylebone developed in the 1820s as Regents Park. The Green Man Inn, formerly known as the Farthing Pye House (and seen surrounded by fields in Rocque’s map of 1746), was by the 1790s located on the corner of Great Portland Street and the new road from Paddington (later named Marylebone Road). 37  Michael, 174–75. 38  Appeared in The Spectator, no. 69, for Saturday 19 May, 1711; see The Spectator, vol. 1 (London: S. Buckley and J. Tonson, 1712), 391–96. 39  Paley, Continuing City, 77–78; Michael, 194.

7  CREATING NATURE FROM THIS FIERY LAW: TOWARDS VISIONARY… 

199

‘Jerusalem lies in ruins’, and Albion’s children find themselves ‘compelld’ to build in its place the biblical city of evil: Babylon (84:6, 8, E243). Babylon has previously been described in the poem as the city built in ‘the Wastes of Moral Law’, and ‘founded in Human desolation’. Whereas Jerusalem’s elegant proportions express the Human Form Divine, Babylon’s shape is founded upon its degradation and collapse: ‘The Walls of Babylon are Souls of Men: her Gates the Groans / Of Nations: her Towers are the Miseries of once happy Families’. The streets of the city are ‘paved with Destruction’, the houses are ‘built with Death’, and the synagogues constructed from ‘Torments / Of ever-hardening Despair’ (24:24–35, E169).40 For readers of Blake this version of London—rather than the childlike naivety of the harmonious commercial exchanges—feels much more familiar. It is clear that Blake too had his earlier portrait of the city firmly in mind as he worked on Jerusalem, as plate 84 not only alludes to the design of the Songs of Experience ‘London’ plate but is also illuminated by a re-worked version of the illustration itself (Fig.  7.2): ‘I see London blind & age-bent begging through the Streets / Of Babylon, led by a child. his tears run down his beard’ (84:11–12, E243). As in the earlier poem, London is imagined as an old man struggling through the streets on crutches, his body (like the fabric of the city) able to stand only by artificial support. Other aspects of the composition are altered, however. The featureless grey door that the characters pass in the Songs of Experience design is replaced here with a distant view of St Paul’s. And whereas the child of the Songs of Experience plate is also glimpsed trying to keep warm by a makeshift bonfire, a participant in the representation of despair, in Jerusalem the child is more clearly in good health with a demeanour suggestive of gentle concern and care. Though unidentified in the text of the plate, the child’s presence—perhaps to be connected with the cathedral as the spiritual heart of the city, and with an association to the person of the Christ-child—lends some hope to this scene. The potential for London’s imaginative reconstruction as Jerusalem is present even at the heart of Babylon’s desolation, in Los’s perpetual construction of the city of Golgonooza. The lyric ‘The Fields from Islington to Marybone’ observes renovations underway in the most unlikely of city spaces: the Tyburn gallows tree at the corner of Hyde Park. ‘What are those golden builders doing?’, the speaker asks in apparent wonder, perhaps making reference to the repurposing of the Tyburn site which had  Sklar, Visionary Theatre, 168.

40

200 

M. MAUGER

Fig. 7.2  William Blake, Jerusalem, the Emanation of the Giant Albion, Copy E (c. 1821). (Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection)

7  CREATING NATURE FROM THIS FIERY LAW: TOWARDS VISIONARY… 

201

not been used for public executions since the early 1780s. More detail is offered in the longer lines of the prophetic vision on plate 12: What are those golden buildings doing? where was the burying-place Of soft Ethinthus? near Tyburns fatal Tree? Is that Mild Zions hills most ancient promontory; near mournful Ever weeping Paddington? Is that Calvary & Golgotha? Becoming a building of pity and compassion? Lo! The stones are pity, and the bricks, well wrought affections: Enameld with love & kindness, & the tiles engraven gold Labour of merciful hands (12:25–32, E155)

Although at some distance from Paddington, the topographic features that Blake has in mind are presumably the hills of Highgate and Hampstead, also imagined rather fancifully by William Hogarth to be towering over the execution day crowds at Tyburn on the penultimate plate of the Industry and Idleness sequence. Blake maps these London hills imperfectly onto the biblical geography of Jerusalem, with a particular alignment between the place of Christ’s crucifixion (associated with the names of both ‘Calvary’ and ‘Golgotha’), and the Tyburn gallows. Astonishingly this site of intense suffering, of state-sanctioned murder in the name of the law, is taking on a new appearance based on ‘love & kindness’. The description continues in wondrous detail: the ‘beams & rafters are forgiveness: / The mortar & cement of the work, tears of honesty: the nails, / And the screws & iron braces, are well wrought blandishments’. Critically, the process described is not one of demolition and rebuilding, but one of ‘becoming’ (12:29, 32–34, E155). The gallows tree is the architectural site associated with the excesses of the eighteenth-century legal code. The law’s authority over human life is enacted on its wooden framework. Its transformation via the ‘merciful hands’ of Los and his children into a space of ‘forgiveness’, ‘love’ and ‘kindness’ is nothing less than the enactment of the Covenant of Jehovah, the ‘fiery law of Jesus’ which forgives where the ‘Wheel of Religion’ condemned. The vision of London’s renovation is fleeting (though the construction of Golgonooza never ends), but it is also clearly sincere, heartfelt, a longed-for idea of the recovery of the city. The speaker urges the builders to continue their work: ‘Go on, builders in hope: tho Jerusalem wanders far away’ (12:43, E156). It is in Chapter Four, however, that the Blake makes his most strident case for the assertion of form as a hallmark of his conflation of divinity and

202 

M. MAUGER

humanity. The much anticipated ‘Human Form Divine’ arises only when the artificial frameworks—including the literal framework of Milton’s Wicker Man of Scandinavia (which, as we have seen, enjoys a cameo appearance earlier in the poem)—are recognised as essentially formless, dehumanising instantiations of the ‘polypus’ whose uncontrolled and shapeless growth terrifies the visionary speaker in  Chapter Three. Unlike the first three chapters, constructed (at least in part) around the narrative of the growth of the moral law in the land of Albion, materialising in Albion’s sickness and ultimately his death, Chapter Four opens with the sight of Albion’s body (‘the sleeping Humanity’) lying in its tomb following his crucifixion at the end of Chapter Three, preyed upon by the spectres of Albion’s sons. Against the backdrop of Jerusalem’s lamentations, the further scheming of Vala and the daughters of Albion, and the ongoing labour of Los, the first sixteen plates describe the period following the crucifixion of ‘humanity’, culminating (on plates 92–94) in the increasingly insistent signs of a resurrection that seems to astonish even Los. Vala, under whose authority Albion had been condemned, understands the potential for resurrection. She seems committed both to the permanent deferral of such a development, and also to the preservation of his bodily form in death. She will keep his body ‘embalmd in moral laws / With spices of sweet odours of lovely jealous stupefaction’ in case ‘he arise to life’ (80:27–29, E236). Rosso is right to note that the laws ‘delude and stupefy’ Albion; but by ‘embalming’ Albion, the moral laws also prevent his body’s decay and deformation.41 Either way, the land of Albion remains permanently fixed within the framework of Vala’s laws of chastity. We see this artificial constitutional form enacted in Albion, as all definite forms are labelled ‘sin’, and two of Albion’s sons (Hand and Hyle) are assigned material bodies which limit their actions. Hyle in particular finds that he is ‘Compelld into a shape of Moral Virtue’, a form which is ‘against the Lamb of God opposd to Mercy’ (80:76, 78, E238). Los’s physical exertions continue throughout the chapter as a perpetual background noise in creative dissonance with these exchanges, as he tries to limit the damage produced by the evil with which he is surrounded. Los, we must remember, is a committed system-builder: the only way to avoid becoming subject to a ‘system’ imposed externally, he opines memorably, is to implement your own. Confronted with the unendingly reproducing instantiations of the moral law under the aegis of ‘Albion’s fatal  Rosso, The Religion of Empire, 185.

41

7  CREATING NATURE FROM THIS FIERY LAW: TOWARDS VISIONARY… 

203

Tree’, Los keeps watch over Golgonooza, repairing, patching, rebuilding and extending as necessary. His labour is explicitly aligned with the principles of the Covenant of Jehovah, the ‘fiery law’ of Jesus: ‘The blow of his Hammer is Justice. the swing of his Hammer: Mercy. / The force of Los’s Hammer is eternal Forgiveness’ (88:49–50, E247). Notwithstanding Los’s exertions, however, the inexorable growth of destructive forces of evil and cruelty—forces that derive strength and promulgation from the mistaken principles of moral law—coalesce as a horrifying vision of the Covering Cherub, ‘a terrible indefinite Hermaphroditic form’, as the poem reaches its climax (89:3, E248): Thus was the Covering Cherub reveald majestic image Of Selfhood, Body put off, the Antichrist accursed Coverd with precious stones, a Human Dragon terrible And bright, stretchd over Europe & Asia gorgeous (89:9–12, E248)

Blake’s pejorative insistence on the ‘hermaphroditic form’ of this beast relates to one of his favoured metaphors for the corruption of the divine human body in his epic writings. For Blake, the division of the human form into sexual components—male and female—was itself a symptom of the sickness of the ‘Universal Humanity’. He deploys the ‘hermaphrodite’ as the monstrous attempt to generalise a single idea of Man amidst this corruption and wickedness. It is thus a pastiche of the Universal Humanity. For Blake it is a false structure, a form that is fundamentally formless, an emblem of the decay and corruption of humanity in thrall to the restrictive codes of mystery, chastity, and imaginative blindness. In the equivalent passage in Milton (plate 37), the Covering Cherub is a ‘Human Form’ that embodies ‘monstrous dishumanized terrors’. It is simultaneously the horrific embodiment of humanity carried to its worst fallen extreme, whilst also powerfully de-humanising. In this passage from Jerusalem, the Covering Cherub is both the epitome of human ‘Selfhood’, and the antithesis of the Human Form Divine: ‘the Antichrist accursed’. Indeed, the human body is ‘put off’ (dispensed with, like unwanted clothes), suggesting a level of corruption at which the human form itself is impossible to maintain. This essential formlessness is nevertheless concealed through its adornment with the material beauties of ‘precious stones’. Across plates 89 and 90, the organs of the monster are scrutinised by the visionary speaker. Suffering, enslavement and sorrow are discovered everywhere. Its head contains a landscape of a perverted Eden: ‘Minute Particulars in

204 

M. MAUGER

slavery I behold among the brick-kilns / Disorganizd’; in its loins ‘martyrdoms & slavery I behold’; in its stomach, where Jerusalem is imprisoned, is a ‘Tabernacle’ in which a ‘Double Female’ holds court ‘sitting upon Horeb’, the source of the law contained on the Mosaic tablets (89:17–18, 40, 52, 55, E248–49). In the face of overwhelming odds, but confronting a dehumanised terror that is now (at least) definite and tangible, Los continues undaunted, addressing the legions who rally at the command of the Covering Cherub as ‘Hermaphroditic worshippers of a God of cruelty & law’ (90:55, E250). Amid his endless work at the furnaces and on his anvil, he argues passionately against the haunting vision of humanity as a decaying body, a ‘Swelld & bloated Form’, the Antichrist of the Covering Cherub, and offers in its place the ‘Divine Jesus’ as a human form rooted in the endless diversity of human personality (91:28,30, E251):   he who wishes to see a Vision; a perfect Whole Must see it in its Minute Particulars; Organized & not as thou O Fiend of Righteousness pretendest; thine is a Disorganized And snowy cloud: brooder of tempests & destructive War. … But General Forms have their vitality in Particulars: & every Particular is a Man; a Divine Member of the Divine Jesus. (91:20–23, 29–30, E251)

The ‘perfect Whole’ of Humanity is not the corrupt sponsor of conflict and division embodied in the Covering Cherub, the ‘Fiend’ whose ‘disorganisation’ suggests not only confusion and disarray but also a disintegrating body whose vital organs are coming apart. But Los’s imaginative achievement also determinedly rejects any idea of an ‘upward’ reaching towards some theistic notion of divine perfection. Rather the ‘divine form’ is found to be rooted in the ‘perfect Whole’ of the ‘Particulars’ of human individuals. As Saree Makdisi and Mark Ferrara have observed, the salvation towards which Jerusalem reaches is not a future Christian millennial utopia, but a profoundly human achievement anchored in the present.42 It is made evident in the fine detail, in each individual. It is complex and 42  See Saree Makdisi, “Blake and the Communist Tradition,” in Palgrave Advances in William Blake Studies, ed. Nicholas Williams (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 235–53; Mark S.  Ferrara, “Blake’s Jerusalem as Perennial Utopia,” Utopian Studies 22 (2011): 20, 30–31.

7  CREATING NATURE FROM THIS FIERY LAW: TOWARDS VISIONARY… 

205

intricate, each particular ‘organized’ with precision, and contributing to the ‘vitality’ of the whole. Indeed, Deen reads this ‘recovery of identity’ as underpinning Albion’s awakening: Los, in discerning the Divine Jesus, ‘shows Albion how to regain the identity he barely remembers’.43 With a final crash of his hammer on the anvil to underscore the veracity of his ‘demonstrations’, Los dispatches his horrified Spectre as his envoy. And finally, through the visionary apparatus of the furnaces, Los sees the first signs of the recovery of Albion: ‘The Briton Saxon Roman Norman amalgamating / In my Furnaces into One Nation the English’ (92:1–2, E252). Even though he is still a cold corpse at the opening of Plate 94, on the following plate—roused by the cries of his awakened emanation (Vala and Jerusalem united in the form of Britannia)—Albion (the speaker reports) ‘rose / In anger’, uttering ‘the Words of Eternity in Human Forms’, and awakening the four Zoas (95:5–6, 9, E255). As in each of the earlier chapters, Albion is now confronted by the awful truth: that he is responsible for the enslavement of his world within a moral law that develops from his own selfhood, a selfhood rooted in Sinai, and which has taken monstrous form as the bejewelled Covering Cherub. But now, through the labours of Los, he is supported by Jesus, the ‘perfect Whole’: ‘Albion knew that it / Was the Lord the Universal Humanity, & Albion saw his Form / A Man: & they conversed as Man with Man, in Ages of Eternity’ (96:4–6, E255). The visionary speaker observes in astonishment that ‘the Divine Appearance was the likeness & similitude of Los’, a fact repeated by Albion himself a few lines later, a moving moment of recognition in which he sees Jesus ‘in the likeness and similitude of Los my friend’ (96:7, 22, E255–56). As the Covering Cherub bears down on them, Jesus reassures Albion by stating the fundamental principle of the Covenant of Jehovah, in words that echo Milton’s invocation of the Laws of Eternity at the climax of the earlier epic: Jesus replied [‘]Fear not Albion[,] unless I die thou canst not live But if I die I shall arise again & thou with me This is Friendship & Brotherhood without it Man is Not.[’] So Jesus spoke! the Covering Cherub coming on in darkness Overshadowd them & Jesus said [‘]Thus do men in Eternity One for another to put off by forgiveness, every sin[’] (96:14–19, E255)  Deen, Conversing in Paradise, 200.

43

206 

M. MAUGER

Observing Jesus’s sacrifice, Albion follows suit ‘& threw himself into the Furnaces of affliction’, Jerusalem’s fourth and final account of his death (96.35, E256). His annihilation of selfhood, his ultimate act of forgiveness under the terms of the fiery law of Jesus, allows the final vision of the Humanity Divine to arise ‘Fourfold among the Visions of God in Eternity’, driving out the ‘Druid Spectre’ that has stalked Albion during his sickness, a ‘Fourfold Annihilation’ (96:43, E256; 98:6–7, E257). The visionary speaker of Jerusalem grasps valiantly for the words to describe this sight: the Divine Humanity may be ‘Incomprehensible’, but it is also glorious, majestic, and ‘dramatic’. Its beauty derives not from external adornment (like the jewels of the Covering Cherub), but from a fourfold symmetry that defines its form: ‘in the Outline the Circumference & Form’. The form itself is the embodiment of the laws of eternity: ‘it is the Covenant of Jehovah’ (98:22–24, 28, E257). As such, it is also the divine perfection of humanity, not a reductionist ‘essence’ but a glorious dazzling noisy brilliance, an ebullient outpouring of energy and imaginative power in which ‘every Word & Every Character / Was Human’, a visionary symphony whose parts ‘reflecting each in each & clearly seen / And seeing: according to fitness & order’ (98:35–36, 39–40, E258).

CHAPTER 8

Conclusion

The noisy, vibrant celebration of ‘fitness & order’ towards which Jerusalem reaches in its final plates may seem a surprising outcome for a prophetic narrative geared towards imaginative and sensory freedom, the contemplation of the infinite, and the recognition of the Human Form Divine. The longing for a life which is ‘ordered’ does not immediately strike modern readers as a Blakean trope, conjuring as it does the ‘chartered’ streets of ‘London’, the Satanic structures of Time and Space in Milton’s Bard’s Song, and the monarchical principles of stony law that are stamped to dust in America. But when it is conceived as Blake’s attempt to render through verse his prophetic understanding of the emergence and implementation of a visionary law, a prophetic system which underpins and recovers to sight the elegance and symmetry of the Human Form Divine, its significance as a prophetic climax becomes easier to grasp. Blake may long for the infinite, for the energetic liberation of the imagination and the faculties of sensation from the universal restriction of the ‘One Law’, but he also despises the indefinite. This is a tension to which he returns throughout his work. In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, the orthodox association of Energy with ‘evil’ and Reason as ‘good’ is revised not by switching these polarities, but by acknowledging that whilst the ‘Eternal Delight’ of Energy is ‘the only life’, Reason is ‘the bound or outward circumference of Energy’ (Marriage, 4, E34). This apparent commitment to an idea of a fundamental human definition informs Los’s advice to his sons, ploughing © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Mauger, William Blake and the Visionary Law, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37723-5_8

207

208 

M. MAUGER

against the odds among the fields of desolation in the midst of Jerusalem: ‘the Infinite alone resides in Definite & Determinate Identity’ (55:65, E205). The law, of course, deals in the definite. When the metal books of the law are opened in The Book of Urizen, they create a fundamentally human space within the apparent blankness of ‘Eternity’, a space within which the passionate exuberance of human form and feeling—feeling which somehow embodies joy and pain, beauty and desolation—becomes tangible. Urizen’s determination in Nights VI and VII of The Four Zoas to gather the ruined fragments of human existence together in a set of constitutional documents is born from the longing to restore order and identity. Indeed law—as a discourse, a habit, and an ontology—is consistently connected to what ‘being human’ means in Blake’s work. Legal authority is the terrain over which Albion’s Angel struggles against the revolutionary uprisings described in America and Europe, and while Orc’s radical antinomian energy has the power to shatter empire by stamping ‘to dust’ its stony law, its power is short-lived, and it does not in itself establish a new foundation for human society. Orc may be the focal point of Blake’s experimentation with antinomianism, a radical revolutionary impulse which has power to shatter the false frameworks which imprison the human imagination within habitual relationships of cause-and-effect, yet he is not straightforwardly the ‘hero’ even of the Lambeth books. In fact, as we have seen in the later chapters of this book, he becomes an increasingly marginal figure in Blake’s nineteenth-century work. The promise of legal constitutional documents to defend hard-won freedoms from the insidious re-emergence of pre-revolutionary forms of decay and corruption may have seemed compelling in the early 1790s. By wresting legal authority from the exhausted structures of monarchical, historical, and religious jurisdiction, the constituent power of the people to define the architecture of human society might be reasserted. Nevertheless, by the later 1790s Blake seems to have acquired renewed scepticism. In the aftermath of the revolutionary antinomian devastation of structure and foundation, a fearful humanity—terrified of ‘non-entity’, and lacking the frameworks which, however painfully, had nevertheless conferred purpose and meaning—turns to legal form for sanctuary. Paradoxically, law’s status as a discourse of the definite makes it susceptible to corruption associated with forms of obfuscation and secrecy: superstition, priesthood, commerce, and empire. These narratives underpin the spread of the ‘laws of Urizen’ charted in The Song of Los, instrumented through their

8 CONCLUSION 

209

remarkable ability to adapt themselves parasitically to local contexts of knowledge and meaning. Blake reserves his most devastating account of legal failure and corruptibility for The Four Zoas. The rejection of legal structure and foundation leads to the collapse of the flawed beauty of the Golden Hall; but Orc offers no meaningful pathway to recovery. The fanfare of revolution is short-lived, and its idealism fleeting. Law’s infection with Mystery and its subsequent transformation into a constricting framework of denial and prohibition mirror the poem’s representation of the sickness, imprisonment, and imaginative death of humanity. This is the law codified in Satan’s ‘infernal scroll, / Of Moral laws’, his list of ‘Punishments & deaths musterd and number’d’, whose creation is memorialised in the Bard’s Song which opens Milton (9:21–22, 25, E103). Jerusalem offers another account of the consolidation of this cold framework of denial: the veil of Vala, cast by Albion over the human world, a Law of Chastity. As he travels through the ‘darkness & horrid solitude’ of London in Chapter Two of the poem, Los recognises how these strict codes of law recommend that we ‘punish the already punishd’ (45[31]:34, 39: E194–95). They are a stimulus for further criminality, not less. This restrictive law of imprisonment and imaginative poverty conjures in literal terms a ‘Definite & Determinate Identity’ for humanity in these nineteenth-­century poems: the desolate outline of the Wicker Man of Scandinavia, the artificial frame within which human individuals are forced into the fixed ‘human’ shape defined by the ‘Moral laws’. The Wicker Man, then, is the static human form of the Law of Chastity in which the ‘Captives … howl in flames’. But this outline, Blake asserts, is ‘an outside which is fallacious! … / Beyond the outline of Identity’ (Milton, 37[41]: 9–12, E137). The Human Form Divine comprises ‘Visionary forms dramatic’, a dynamic structure in which humanity’s essential visionary figure is established in its ‘conversant’ parts (Jerusalem, 98:28, E257). This is the form defined under the terms of the visionary law, the ‘Covenant of Jehovah’, ‘rejoicing in Unity / In the Four Senses in the Outline the Circumference & Form’ (98:21–22, E257). It is a form established in notions of community, of conversation. It is mobile, and prophetic, and imaginative, and infinite. The ‘Definite & Determinate Identity’ does not reside in the strict moral outlines of the Wicker Man, but in the noise and colour of the visionary form. The emergence of the visionary law at the climax of Jerusalem suggests that Blake has found a way to reconcile his commitment to law as a discourse of certainty and sanctuary associated with human self-­determination,

210 

M. MAUGER

with his innate antinomian suspicion of constraining legal frameworks that ordain limits for behaviour, knowledge, sensory engagement, and imaginative potential. The moral structures arising from the (at best) misconceived celebration of ‘virtue’ are shown repeatedly to result in enclosure, desolation, and imaginative death; but the Covenant of Jehovah is based on a ‘fiery law’ of Jesus that promises the dismissal of the corrupt structures of denial, and the recognition of the Human Form Divine. We might be suspicious of this teleology—but given the vast intellectual, practical, and financial investments involved in the production of his illuminated books, especially those conceived at epic scale, it is perhaps not out-of-the-­ question that Blake might have understood Jerusalem to be the final long epic that he was likely to produce. Moreover, amid the prophetic exuberance of the poem’s account of Humanity’s recovery, the poem pointedly withholds any kind of ‘legislative programme’ for this visionary law. To do so would be to contradict Blake’s vision of prophetic legislation, to lay down a set of architectural drawings for Jerusalem which would lead humanity back to the destructive cycles which are so compelling in his long poems. As we have seen, law is a broad and flexible category for Blake, and he moves sometimes dizzyingly between associations with constitutional texts, moral frameworks, the laws established through natural philosophical enquiry, secular laws established across centuries of customary practice, Parliamentary statute, and biblical law. Throughout his work, however, law is consistently found operating on the interface of humanity and divinity. The frameworks of moral law encode the exercise of a distant divine authority over mortal life. The legal impulses of Los and even Urizen, by contrast, use law (not always effectively) as a means of asserting human autonomy against the forces that seem directed towards its disintegration or assimilation. The visionary law glimpsed in The Four Zoas, and evidenced through the imaginative dramas of Milton and Jerusalem, bring the human and the divine into a harmonious dynamism. The ‘form’ that it contemplates is, both linguistically and prophetically, the connective tissue of the ‘Human Form Divine’, a formulation which can clearly be read in both directions. Humanity and the Divine, in Blake’s account, are inseparable. The true constitutionalism is a work of prophecy, a redeemed legality which opens up to the universal Divine Form of Humanity, rather than closing down to a barren secular redaction of that form. In his nineteenth-century epics, Blake withdraws almost completely into his own mythological world, perhaps to the frustration of scholars of

8 CONCLUSION 

211

literary historicism who search by instinct for those moments of negotiation between the literary text and the phenomenal world in which it was produced, and to which (we insist) it responds. The narrative of law constitutes, in my view, a tenuous fabric that connects Blake’s cosmology with that of early nineteenth-century Britain, and instruments the psychogeographic layering of Golgonooza, Babylon, Jerusalem, and London which is a striking feature of Blake’s final long poem. As we have seen, the walls and gateways of Jerusalem are mapped onto London’s streets. Hidden within is the entrance to Los’s city of Golgonooza, the ‘Spiritual Fourfold London’ (Milton, 20[22]:40, E114; Jerusalem, 53:18–19, E203). The competing legal frameworks of Jerusalem project differing accounts of London life within the imaginative space of the city, both accounts familiar to some extent for the poem’s imagined readers. The ‘Covenant of Priam’, the self-serving legal doctrine of sensory denial and moral control, transforms the landscape of London into a Babylon of crime, sickness, and desolation, the London of street poverty, riots, and political repression. Under the terms of the ‘Covenant of Jehovah’, by contrast, London emerges in the light of the celestial city; this is the London of human activity and energy, modernity, wealth, tolerance and exchange.

Bibliography

Adams, Hazard. Blake’s Margins: An Interpretive Study of the Annotations. Jefferson: McFarland, 2009. Aers, David. “Blake: Sex, Society and Ideology.” In Romanticism and Ideology: Studies in English Writing 1765–1830, edited by David Aers, Jonathon Cook and David Punter, 27–43. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981. Ault, Donald. Narrative Unbound: Re-Visioning William Blake’s The Four Zoas. New York: Station Hill, 1987. Bacon, Francis. The Elements of the Common Lawes of England … Contayning a Collection of some Principall Rules and Maxims of the Common Law. London: I. More, 1630. Barr, Mark L. “Practicing Resistance: Blake, Milton, and the English Jury.” European Romantic Review 3 (2007): 367–79. Barr, Mark L. “Prophecy, the Law of Insanity, and ‘The [First] Book of Urizen’.” Studies in English Literature 46 (2006): 739–62. Barrell, John. Imagining the King’s Death: Figurative Treason, Fantasies of Regicide 1793–1796. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Beart, John. Truth Defended: or, a Vindication of the Eternal Law, and Everlasting Gospel, 3rd ed. 2 vols. London: J. Mathews, 1779. Beer, John. Blake’s Visionary Universe. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1969. Behrendt, Stephen C. “History When Time Stops: Blake’s America, Europe, and The Song of Los.” Papers on Language and Literature 28 (1992a): 379–97. Behrendt, Stephen C. The Moment of Explosion: Blake and the Illustration of Milton. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983. Behrendt, Stephen C. Reading William Blake. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992b. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Mauger, William Blake and the Visionary Law, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37723-5

213

214 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Behrendt, Stephen C. “‘The Worst Disease’: Blake’s Tiriel.” Colby Library Quarterly 15 (1979): 175–87. Bell, Robert, ed. The Palladium of Conscience: or, the Foundation of Religious Liberty Displayed, Asserted, and Established. Philadelphia: Robert Bell, 1773. Bentham, Jeremy. A Comment on the Commentaries: A Criticism of William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England. Edited by Charles Warren Everett. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1928. Bentham, Jeremy. A Fragment on Government: Being an Examination of what is Delivered on the Subject of Government in General in the Introduction to Sir William Blackstone’s Commentaries. London: T. Payne, 1776. Bentham, Jeremy. An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. London: T. Payne, 1789. Bentham, Jeremy. Management of the Poor; or, a Plan containing the Principle and Construction of an Establishment, in which Persons of Any Description are to be Kept under Inspection. Dublin: James Moore, 1796. Bentham, Jeremy. Of Laws in General. Edited by H.  L. A.  Hart. University of London: Athlone, 1970. Bentley, G.  E. Blake Books: Annotated Catalogues of William Blake’s Writings. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977. Bentley, G. E. Blake Records, 2nd ed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. Bentley, G.  E. The Stranger From Paradise: A Biography of William Blake. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. Bindman, David. Blake as an Artist. Oxford: Phaidon, 1977. Blackstone, William. An Analysis of the Laws of England. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1756. Blackstone, William. A Reply to Dr. Priestley’s Remarks on the Fourth Volume of the Commentaries on the Laws of England. London: C. Bathurst, 1769. Blackstone, William. Commentaries on the Laws of England. 4 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1765–69. Bloom, Harold. Blake’s Apocalypse: A Study in Poetic Argument. London: Victor Gollancz, 1963. [Branch, Thomas]. Principia Legis & Æquitatis: being an Alphabetical Collection of Maxims, Principles or Rules, Definitions and memorable Sayings in Law and Equity. London: Henry Lintot, 1753. Bruder, Helen. William Blake and the Daughters of Albion. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997. Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France, and on the Proceedings in Certain Societies in London Relative to that Event. London: J. Dodsley, 1790. Caesar, Gaius Julius. Seven Commentaries on the Gallic War, with an Eighth Commentary by Aulus Hirtius. Translated by Carolyn Hammond. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

215

Cairns, John W. “Blackstone, an English Institutist: Legal Literature and the Rise of the Nation State.” Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 4 (1984): 318–60. Carretta, Vincent. George III and the Satirists from Hogarth to Byron. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990. Chamberlain, Jeffrey S. “Moralism, Justification, and the Controversy over Methodism.” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 44 (1993): 652–78. Chaplin, Sue. “Law and Literature in the Romantic Era: The Law’s Fictions.” Literature Compass 3/4 (2006): 804–17. Christ, the End of the Law, for Righteousness: A Sermon on Rom x. 4. London: Button, Conder, Chapman and Mathews, 1797. Christian Prudence: consisting of Maxims and Proverbs, Divine and Moral; Collect from the Sacred Scriptures; the Writings of Primitive Fathers, Heathen Philosophers, and eminent Divines. London: J. Johnson and B. Davenport, 1766. Clark, Steve. “Jerusalem as Imperial Prophecy.” In Blake, Nation and Empire, edited by Steve Clark and David Worrall, 167–85. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006. Clark, Steve, and David Worrall, eds. Blake, Nation and Empire. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006. Cohen, Adam Max. “Genius in Perspective: Blake, Einstein, and Relativity.” The Wordsworth Circle 31 (2000): 164–69. Coke, Edward. The First Part of the Institutes of the Laws of England, or, a Commentary upon Littleton. London: Richard Atkins and Edward Atkins, 1684. Colley, Linda, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837, new ed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. Cooper, Andrew. “Freedom from Blake’s Book of Urizen.” Studies in Romanticism 48 (2009): 187–218. Cosgrove, Richard. Scholars of the Law: English Jurisprudence from Blackstone to Hart. New York: New York University Press, 1996. Coyle, Sean. From Positivism to Idealism: A Study of the Moral Dimensions of Legality. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. Crehan, Stewart. Blake in Context. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1984. Crosby, Mark. “‘A Fabricated Perjury’: the [Mis]Trial of William Blake.” Huntington Library Quarterly 72 (2009): 29–47. Curran, Stuart. “The Structures of Jerusalem.” In Blake’s Sublime Allegory: Essays on The Four Zoas, Milton, Jerusalem, edited by Stuart Curran and Joseph Anthony Wittreich, 329–46. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1973. Curtis, Dennis E., and Judith Resnik. “Images of Justice.” Yale Law Journal, 96 (1987), 1726–72. Damon, S. Foster. William Blake: His Philosophy and Symbols. London: Constable and Company, 1924 Davis, John. Les Reports de Cases & Matters en Ley, Resolves & Adjudges en les Courts del Roy en Ireland. London: Richard Atkyns and Edward Atkyns, 1674.

216 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

de Bolla, Peter. “The Time of Law: Eighteenth-Century Speculations.” SubStance 109 (2006): 52–68. Deen, Leonard W. Conversing in Paradise: Poetic Genius and Identity-as-­ Community in Blake’s Los. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1983. di Spigna, Christian. Founding Martyr: The Life and Death of Dr. Joseph Warren, the American Revolution’s Lost Hero. New York: Penguin, 2018. Doskow, Minna. ‘William Blake’s America: The Story of a Revolution Betrayed’. Blake Studies 8 (1978–79): 167–86. Doskow, Minna, William Blake’s Jerusalem: Structure and Meaning in Poetry and Picture. Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1982. Duerksen, Ronald A. “The Life of Love: Blake’s Oothoon.” Colby Library Quarterly 13 (1977): 186–94. Durham, James. The Law Unsealed, or, a Practical Exposition of the Ten Commandments. Glasgow, John Bryce, 1777. Easson, Kay Parkhurst, and Roger R. Easson, The Book of Urizen. London: Thames and Hudson, 1979. Eaves, Morris. “The Title-Page of The Book of Urizen.” In William Blake: Essays in Honour of Sir Geoffrey Keynes, edited by Morton D. Paley and Michael Phillips, 29–49. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973. Edwards, Pamela. The Statesman’s Science: History, Nature, and Law in the Political Thought of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. New  York: Columbia University Press, 2004. Ellis, Helen B. “Added and Omitted Plates in The Book of Urizen.” Colby Library Quarterly 23 (1987), 99–107. Ellis, Kate Ferguson. The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989. Ellis, Markman. The History of Gothic Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000. Epstein, James. Radical Expression: Political Language, Ritual, and Symbol in England, 1790–1850. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Erdman, David. The Illuminated Blake. London: Oxford University Press, 1975. Erdman, David. Prophet Against Empire: A Poet’s Interpretation of the History of His Own Times, rev. ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969. Erdman, David. “The Symmetries of The Song of Los.” Studies in Romanticism 16 (1977), 179–88. Erdman, David. “‘Terrible Blake in His Pride’: An Essay on The Everlasting Gospel.” In From Sensibility to Romanticism: Essays Presented to Frederick A. Pottle, edited by Frederick W. Hilles and Harold Bloom, 331–56. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965. Erdman, David and Donald K.  Moore. The Notebook of William Blake: A Photographic and Typographical Facsimile. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973.

 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

217

Essick, Robert. “William Blake, Thomas Paine, and Biblical Revolution.” Studies in Romanticism, 30 (1991): 189–212. Essick, Robert, and Joseph Viscomi, eds. Milton a Poem, and the Final Illuminated Works, Blake’s Illuminated Books 5. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. Evans, Caleb. The Law Established by the Gospel: A Sermon preached before the Ministers and Messengers of the Baptist Western Association, assembled at Exon, June 3 1779. Bristol: W. Pine, [1779]. Fallon, David. “Homelands: Blake, Albion, and the French Revolution.” In Home and Nation in British Literature from the English to the French Revolutions, edited by A. D. Cousins and Geoffrey Payne, 202–18. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Farrell, Michael. Blake and the Methodists. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Ferber, Michael. “The Finite Revolutions of Europe.” In Blake, Politics, and History, edited by Jackie DiSalvo, G. A. Rosso, and Christopher Z. Hobson, 212–34. New York: Garland, 1998. Ferber, Michael. The Social Vision of William Blake. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985. Ferrara, Mark S. “Blake’s Jerusalem as Perennial Utopia.” Utopian Studies 22 (2011): 19–33. Forbes, Alexander M. “Johnson, Blackstone, and the Tradition of Natural Law.” Mosaic 27 no. 4 (December 1994): 81–98. Frye, Northrop, Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947. Fuller, David. Blake’s Heroic Argument. London: Croom Helm, 1988. Fuller, David. “Milton and the Development of Blake’s Thought.” In An Infinite Complexity: Essays in Romanticism, edited by J. R. Watson, 46–94. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1983. Furneaux, Phillip. Letters to the Honourable Mr Justice Blackstone, concerning his Exposition of the Act of Toleration, 2nd ed. London: T. Cadell, 1771. Gibbon, Edward. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. 6 vols. London: Strahan and Cadell, 1776–88. Glen, Heather. Vision and Disenchantment: Blake’s Songs and Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Goldsmith, Stephen. Unbuilding Jerusalem: Apocalypse and Romantic Representation. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993. Green, Georgina. The Majesty of the People: Popular Sovereignty and the Role of the Writer in the 1790s. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Grose, Francis. A Provincial Glossary, with a collection of Local Proverbs and Popular Superstitions. London: S. Hooper, 1787. Haivry, Ofir. John Selden and the Western Political Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.

218 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hale, Matthew, The History of the Common Law of England. London: John Walthoe, 1716. Halkerston, Peter. A Collection of Latin Maxims & Rules, in Law and Equity, Selected from the Most Eminent Authors. Edinburgh: John Anderson, 1823. Hampton, Jean. Hobbes and the Social Contract Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Helms, “Randel. ‘Proverbs of Heaven and Proverbs of Hell.” Paunch 38 (March 1974): 51–58. Hempton, David. “Evangelicalism in English and Irish Society, 1780–1840.” In Evangelicalism: Comparative Studies of Popular Protestantism in North America, the British Isles, and Beyond, 1700–1900, edited by Mark A.  Noll, David W.  Bebbington, and George A.  Rawlyk, 156–76. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). Hewitt, Regina. “Romanticism and the Law: A Selective Introduction.” European Romantic Review 18 (2007): 299–315. Hilton, Nelson. “An Original Story.” In Unnam’d Forms: Blake and Textuality, edited by Nelson Hilton and Thomas A. Vogler, 69–104. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. Hoagwood, Terence Allan. Prophecy and the Philosophy of Mind: Traditions of Blake and Shelley. University: University of Alabama Press, 1985. Hobson, Christopher Z. The Chained Boy: Orc and Blake’s Idea of Revolution. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1999. Hoerner, Fred. “Prolific Reflections: Blake’s Contortion of Surveillance in Visions of the Daughters of Albion.” Studies in Romanticism 35 (1996): 119–50. Holstein, Michael E. “Crooked Roads without Improvement: Blake’s ‘Proverbs of Hell’.” Genre 8 (1975): 26–41. Hoppit, Julian. “Patterns of Parliamentary Legislation, 1660–1800.” The Historical Journal 39 (1996): 109–31. Hough, Barry, and Howard Davis. Coleridge’s Laws: A Study of Coleridge in Malta. Cambridge: OpenBook, 2010. Howard, John. Blake’s Milton: A Study in the Selfhood. Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1976. Howard, John. Infernal Poetics: Poetic Structures in Blake’s Lambeth Prophecies. Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1984. Huntington, William. The Moral Law not Injured by the Everlasting Gospel. A Sermon preached in substance at Providence Chapel. London: G. Terry, 1792. Jackson, H. J. Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. Janowitz, Anne. England’s Ruins: Poetic Purpose and the National Landscape. Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1990. Johnson, James William. “Gibbon’s Architectural Metaphor.” Journal of British Studies 13 (1973), 44–62.

 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

219

Johnson, Mary Lynn, and John E. Grant, Blake’s Poetry and Designs. New York: Norton, 1979. Johnson, Nancy E.  Introduction to Impassioned Jurisprudence: Law, Literature, and Emotion, 1760–1848, ix–xxv. Edited by Nancy E.  Johnson. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2015. Johnson, Nancy E. The English Jacobin Novel on Rights, Property and the Law: Critiquing the Contract. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004. Jones, William. An Essay on the Law of Bailments. London: J. Nichols, 1781. Keane, John. Tom Paine: A Political Life. London: Bloomsbury, 1995. Kemp, Martin. “Thornton, Robert John (1767–1837)’. In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Last modified 14 November 2018. https://doi. org/10.1093/ref:odnb/27361. Keynes, Geoffrey. America: A Prophecy. London: Trianon Press, 1963. Kilgore, John. “The Order of Nights VIIa and VIIb in Blake’s The Four Zoas.” Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly 12 (1978–79): 107–113. Kiralis, Karl. “The Theme and Structure of William Blake’s Jerusalem.” In The Divine Vision, edited by V. de Sola Pinto, 141–62. London: Gollancz, 1957. Kuiken, Kir. Shared Sovereignties: Toward a New Political Romanticism. New York: Fordham University Press, 2014. Larrissy, Edward. “Blake’s Orient.” Romanticism 11 (2005): 1–13. Lattin, Vernon E. “Blake’s Thel and Oothoon: Sexual Awakening in the Eighteenth Century.” Literary Criterion 16 (1981): 11–24. Layos, Mátyás. “The Reader’s Struggle: Intellectual War in The Four Zoas.” Eger Journal of English Studies 19 (2019): 25–46. Lee, Haram. “The Critique of Reason and Biopolitics in William Blake’s The Four Zoas.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 63 (2021): 53–77. Lefebvre, Mark S. “A Note on the Structural Necessity of Night VIIb.” Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly 12 (1978–79): 134. Lemmings, David. Law and Government in England during the Long Eighteenth Century. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Lieberman, David. The Province of Legislation Determined: Legal Theory in Eighteenth-century England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Lincoln, Andrew. “Alluring the Heart to Virtue: Blake’s Europe.” Studies in Romanticism 38 (1999): 621–39. Lincoln, Andrew. “Restoring the Nation to Christianity: Blake and the Aftermyth of Revolution.” In Blake, Nation and Empire, edited by Steve Clark and David Worrall, 153–66. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006. Lincoln, Andrew. “The Revision of the Seventh and Eighth Nights of The Four Zoas.” Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly 12 (1978–79), 115–33. Lincoln, Andrew. Spiritual History: A Reading of William Blake’s Vala or The Four Zoas. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995.

220 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Lindsay, David W. “The Song of Los: An Interpretation of the Text.” Forum for Modern Language Studies 13 (1977): 1–5. Linkin, Harriet Kramer. “Revisioning Blake’s Oothoon.” Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly 23 (1989–90): 184–94. Lobban, Michael. The Common Law and English Jurisprudence 1760–1850. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. Lobban, Michael. “Thomas Hobbes and the Common Law.” In Thomas Hobbes and the Law, edited by David Dyzenhaus and Thomas Poole, 39–67. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Lorenz, Matt. “Blakean Wonder and the Unfallen Tharmas: Health, Wholeness, and Holarchy in The Four Zoas.” In Disabling Romanticism, edited by Michael Bradshaw, 127–45. London: Macmillan, 2016. Loughlin, Martin. “Constituent Power Subverted: From English Constitutional Argument to British Constitutional Practice.” In The Paradox of Constitutionalism: Constituent Power and Constitutional Form, edited by Martin Loughlin and Neil Walker, 27–48. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Makdisi, Saree. “Blake and the Communist Tradition.” In Palgrave Advances in William Blake Studies, edited by Nicholas Williams, 235–53. New  York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006a. Makdisi, Saree. “Blake and the Ontology of Empire.” In Blake and Conflict, edited by Sarah Haggarty and Jon Mee, 12–26. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009. Makdisi, Saree. “Immortal Joy: William Blake and the Cultural Politics of Empire.” In Blake, Nation and Empire, edited by Steve Clark and David Worrall, 20–39. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006b. Makdisi, Saree. William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Marshall, Bridget M. “Romanticism, Gothic, and the Law.” In Law and Literature, edited by Kieran Dolin, 142–56. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Matthews, Susan. “Jerusalem and Nationalism.” In Beyond Romanticism: New Approaches to Texts and Contexts, 1780–1832, edited by Stephen Copley and John Whale, 79–100. London: Routledge, 1992. Mauger, Matthew. “‘Observe how parts with parts unite / In one harmonious rule of right’: William Blackstone’s Verses on the Laws of England.” Law and Humanities 6 (2012): 179–96 McCord, James. “West of Atlantis: William Blake’s Unromantic View of the American War.” Centennial Review 30 (1986): 383–99. McGann, Jerome J. “The Idea of an Indeterminate Text: Blake’s Bible of Hell and Dr. Alexander Geddes.” Studies in Romanticism 25 (1986): 303–24. Mann, Paul. “The Final State of The Four Zoas.” Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly 18 (1985): 204–15.

 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

221

Mee, Jon. Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. Mee, Jon. “Is There an Antinomian in the House? William Blake and the After-­ Life of a Heresy.” In Historicizing Blake, edited by Steve Clark and David Worrall, 43–58. London: Palgrave, 1994. Mee, Jon and Mark Crosby, “‘This Soldierlike Danger’: The Trial of William Blake for Sedition.” In Resisting Napoleon: The British Response to the Threat of Invasion, 1797–1815, edited by Mark Philp, 111–24. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. Mellor, Anne K. “Blake, Gender and Imperial Ideology: A Response.” In Blake, Politics, and History, edited by Jackie DiSalvo, G. A. Rosso, and Christopher Z. Hobson, 350–53. New York: Garland, 1998. Mellor, Anne K. “Blake’s Portrayal of Women.” Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly 16 (1982–83): 148–55. Mellor, Anne K. “The Human Form Divine and the Structure of Blake’s Jerusalem.” Studies in English Literature 11 (1971), 595–620. Michael, Jennifer Davis. Blake and the City. Lewisburg: University of Bucknell Press, 2006. Mitchell, W.  J. T. “Visible Language: Blake’s Wond’rous Art of Writing.” In Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism, edited by Morris Eaves and Michael Fischer, 46–86. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986. Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de. The Spirit of the Laws. Translated and edited by Anne M.  Cohler, Basia Carolyn Miller and Harold Samuel Stone. Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. More, Hannah. Village Politics, Addressed to all the Mechanics, Journeymen, and Day Labourers, in Great Britain. 2nd ed. London: F. and C. Rivington, 1792. Morton, A.  L. The Everlasting Gospel: A Study in the Sources of William Blake. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1958. Moskal, Jeanne. Blake, Ethics and Forgiveness. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1994. Moskal, Jeanne. “Forgiveness, Love, and Pride in Blake’s ‘The Everlasting Gospel’.” Religion and Literature 20 (1988): 19–39. Mueller, Judith C. “Creatures Against the Law: Blake’s Antinomian Renderings of Paul.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 19 (2012): 123–41. Munteanu, Anca. “Visionary and Artistic Transformations in Blake’s Visions of the Daughters of Albion.” Journal of European Studies 36 (2006): 61–83. Niimi, Hatsuko. “The Book of Ahania: A Metatext.” Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly 34 (2000–2001): 46–54. Nixon, Cheryl. “Gender, Law, and the Birth of Bourgeois Society.” In Law and Literature, edited by Kieran Dolin, 121–41. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.

222 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

O’Gorman, Frank. The Long Eighteenth Century: British Political & Social History 1688–1832. London: Arnold, 1997). Owen, A. L. The Famous Druids. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962. Page, Anthony. “Rational Dissent and Blackstone’s Commentaries.” In Blackstone and his Critics, edited by Anthony Page and Wilfrid Prest, 77–96. Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2018. Paine, Thomas. The Age of Reason. Part the Second. Being an Investigation of True and Fabulous Theology. London: H. D. Symonds, 1795. Paine, Thomas. Common Sense: Addressed to the Inhabitants of America. Philadelphia: W. and T. Bradford, 1776. Paine, Thomas. Rights of Man: Being an Answer to Mr Burke’s Attack on the French Revolution. London: J. Johnson, 1791. Paine, Thomas. Rights of Man: Part the Second, combining Principle and Practice. London: for the booksellers, 1792. Paley, Morton D. Apocalypse and Millennium in English Romantic Poetry. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999. Paley, Morton D. The Continuing City: William Blake’s Jerusalem. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983a. Paley, Morton D. Energy and the Imagination: A Study of the Development of Blake’s Thought. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970. Paley, Morton D. “The Fourth Face of Man: Blake and Architecture.” In Articulate Images: The Sister Arts from Hogarth to Tennyson, edited by Richard Wendorf, 184–215. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983b. Paley, Morton D. “‘To Defend the Bible in This Year 1798 Would Cost a Man His Life.” Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly 32 (1998–99): 32–43. Paley, Morton D. The Traveller in the Evening: the Last Works of William Blake. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Paley, Morton D. “‘Wonderful Originals’—Blake and Ancient Sculpture.” In Blake in His Time, edited by Robert N.  Essick and Donald Pearce, 170–97. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978. Parker, Kunal M. “Historicising Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England.” In Law Books in Action: Essays on the Anglo-American Legal Treatise, edited by Angela Fernandez and Markus D.  Dubber, 22–43. Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2012). Philp, Mark. “English Republicanism in the 1790s.” The Journal of Political Philosophy 6 (1998): 235–63. Philp, Mark. “The Fragmented Ideology of Reform.” In The French Revolution and British Popular Politics, edited by Mark Philp, 50–77. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Pierce, John B. Flexible Design: Revisionary Poetics in Blake’s Vala or The Four Zoas. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1998. Plato. The Republic. Translated by Desmond Lee. 2nd ed. London: Penguin, 2003.

 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

223

Pocock, J. G. A. The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century (1957). Rev. ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Pocock, J. G. A. “Burke and the Ancient Constitution—A Problem in the History of Ideas.” Historical Journal 3 (1960): 125–43. Postema, Gerald. Bentham and the Common Law Tradition. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986. Prest, Wilfrid. “Law, Lawyers and Rational Dissent.” In Enlightenment and Religion: Rational Dissent in Eighteenth-century Britain, edited by Knud Haakonssen, 169–192. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Prest, Wilfrid. William Blackstone: Law and Letters in the Eighteenth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Prickett, Stephen, and Christopher Strathman. “Blake and the Bible.” In Palgrave Advances in William Blake Studies. Edited by Nicholas M. Williams, 109–31. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Priestley, Joseph. Lectures on History and General Policy; to which is Prefixed, an Essay on a Course of Liberal Education for Civil and Active Life. Birmingham: Pearson and Rollason, 1788. Priestley, Joseph. Remarks on Some Paragraphs in the Fourth Volume of Dr. Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, Relating to The Dissenters. London: J. Johnson and J. Payne, 1769. Priestman, Martin. Romantic Atheism: Poetry and Freethought, 1780–1830. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Punter, David. Gothic Pathologies: The Text, the Body and the Law. London: Macmillan, 1998). Rahe, Paul A. “Montesquieu’s Natural Rights Constitutionalism.” Social Philosophy and Policy 29 (2012): 51–81. Rawlinson, Nick. William Blake’s Comic Vision. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Ray, John. A Compleat Collection of English Proverbs. 4th ed. London: W. Otridge, 1768. Richey, William. “‘The Lion & Wolf shall cease’: Blake’s America as a Critique of Counter-Revolutionary Violence.” In Blake, Politics, and History, edited by Jackie DiSalvo, G. A. Rosso, and Christopher Z. Hobson, 196–211. New York: Garland, 1998. Rivers, David. The Gospel a Law of Liberty: A Sermon preached at Highgate, Middlesex, on Sunday the 17th of July 1796. London: R. Hindmarsh, 1797. Rix, Robert. William Blake and the Cultures of Radical Christianity. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. Rose, E. J. “The Structure of Blake’s Jerusalem.” Bucknell Review 11 (1963): 35–54. Rosso, G. A. Blake’s Prophetic Workshop: A Study of The Four Zoas. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1993.

224 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Rosso, G.  A. The Religion of Empire: Political Theology in Blake’s Religious Symbolism. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2016. Rowland, Christopher. Blake and the Bible. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. Rudé, George. Hanoverian London, 1714–1808. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971. Schmidgen, Wolfram. Eighteenth-century Fiction and the Law of Property. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Schofield, Philip. “Jeremy Bentham: Legislator of the World.” Current Legal Problems 51 (1998): 115–47. Schofield, Philip. “The ‘Least Repulsive’ Work on a ‘Repulsive Subject’: Jeremy Bentham on William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England.” In Blackstone and his Critics, edited by Anthony Page and Wilfrid Prest, 23–40. Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2018. Schofield, Philip. “‘Professing Liberal Opinions’: The Common Law, Adjudication and Security in Recent Bentham Scholarship.” Journal of Legal History 16 (1995): 350–67. Schuhard, Marsha Keith. “Blake’s Tiriel and the Regency Crisis: Lifting the Veil on a Royal Masonic Scandal.” In Blake, Politics, and History, edited by Jackie DiSalvo, G.  A. Rosso, and Christopher Z.  Hobson, 115–35. New  York: Garland, 1998. Scrivener, Michael. “Trials in Romantic-Era Writing: Modernity, Guilt, and the Scene of Justice.” The Wordsworth Circle, 35 (2004): 128–33. Shaw, Peter, ed. The Philosophical Works of Francis Bacon. 3 vols. London: J. J. and P. Knapton, and others, 1733. Simpson, A.  W. B. Legal Theory and Legal History: Essays on the Common Law. London: Hambledon, 1987). Sklar, Susanne. Blake’s Jerusalem as Visionary Theatre: Entering the Divine Body. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Smalley, John. The Law in All Respects Satisfied by our Saviour … A Second Sermon, preached at Wallingford, with a view to the Universalists. Hartford: Hudson and Goodwin, 1786. Snart, Jason. “Recentering Blake’s Marginalia.” Huntington Library Quarterly 66 (2003): 134–53. Stanlis, Peter J. “Burke, Rousseau, and the French Revolution.” In Burke and the French Revolution: Bicentennial Essays, edited by Steven Blakemore, 97–119. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992). Stauffer, Andrew M. “Blake’s Poison Trees.” Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly 35 (2001–02): 36–39. Stevenson, W.  H., ed. Blake: The Complete Poems. 3rd ed. Longman Annotated English Poets. London: Routledge, 2007.

 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

225

Stewart, David. “The Context of Blake Contraries in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.” Essays in Literature 21 (1994): 43–54. Stern, Simon. “Blackstone’s Legal Actors: the Passions of a Rational Jurist.” In Impassioned Jurisprudence: Law, Literature, and Emotion, 1760–1848, edited by Nancy E. Johnson, 1–19. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2015. Stieg, Elizabeth. “Reinterpreting the Old Testament: Blake’s Tiriel as Prophet.” Studies in Romanticism 29 (1990): 273–96. Sutherland, John. “Blake and Urizen”. In Blake’s Visionary Forms Dramatic, edited by David V. Erdman and John E. Grant, 244–62. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970. Tannenbaum, Leslie. Biblical Tradition in Blake’s Early Prophecies: The Great Code of Art. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982. Tannenbaum, Leslie. “Transformations of Michelangelo in William Blake’s The Book of Urizen.” Colby Library Quarterly 16 (1980): 19–50. Thompson, E.  P. Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Tilly, Charles. Popular Contention in Great Britain, 1758–1834. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995. Tolley, Michael. “Europe: ‘to those ychain’d in sleep’.” In Blake’s Visionary Forms Dramatic, edited by David V. Erdman and John E. Grant, 115–45. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970). Tomkies, J. The Believer Nothing to do with the Law of the Ten Commandments … Observations on some of Mr Thomas’s Remarks on Mr Bradford’s Reflections upon the Baptist Circular Letter dated at Aulcester in June 1786. Oswestry: J. Salter, [1786]. Tomkinson, Thomas. The Harmony of the Three Commissions; or, None but Christ. [London?], 1757. Turner, James. The Covenants of Works and Grace, —God’s writing his Law in the Hearts of his People—and engaging to be their God, explained in a Sermon on Jeremiah xxxi, 33. Preached in Cannon-Street, Birmingham, November 11 1770. Birmingham: Luckman and Lisson, 1770. van Lieshout, Jules. Within and Without Eternity: The Dynamics of Interaction in William Blake’s Myth and Poetry. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994. Villalobos, John. “William Blake’s ‘Proverbs of Hell’ and the Tradition of Wisdom Literature.” Studies in Philology 87 (1990): 246–59. Viscomi, Joseph. “In the Caves of Heaven and Hell: Swedenborg and Printmaking in Blake’s Marriage.” In Blake in the Nineties, edited by Steve Clark and David Worrall, 27–60. London: Macmillan, 1999. Watson, Richard. A Collection of Theological Tracts. 6 vols. 2nd ed. London: T. Evans, 1791. Watson, Richard. An Apology for the Bible, in a Series of Letters addressed to Thomas Paine, 8th ed. London: T. Evans, 1797.

226 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Watts, Ruth. “Joseph Priestley and Education.” Enlightenment and Dissent 2 (1983): 83–100. Webster, Brenda S. Blake’s Prophetic Psychology. London: Macmillan, 1983. Welch, Dennis. “Blake and the Web of Interest and Sensibility.” South Atlantic Review 71 (2006): 29–56. Whitehead, Angus. “‘A Wise Tale of the Mahometans’: Blake and Islam, 1819–26.” In Blake and Conflict, edited by Sarah Haggarty and Jon Mee, 27–47. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009. Wingate, Edmond. Maximes of Reason: Or, the Reason of the Common Law of England. London: R & W. L., 1658. Witke, Joan, William Blake’s Epic: Imagination Unbound. London: Croom Helm, 1986. Worrall, David, ed. The Urizen Books: The First Book of Urizen, The Book of Ahania, The Book of Los. Blake’s Illuminated Books 6. London: Tate Gallery Publications, 1995. Julia M. Wright. Blake, Nationalism, and the Politics of Alienation. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004. Youngquist, Paul. Madness and Blake’s Myth. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989.

Index

A Adams, Hazard, 148 Addison, Joseph, 198 Adultery, 59, 66–67, 73, 186, 189–194 Aers, David, 65, 134 American Revolutionary War, 37, 39, 71, 73, 80, 95–101, 104, 107, 109 Antinomianism, 4–9, 14–15, 33–36, 47–48, 98, 99, 109, 115, 123, 127, 130, 147, 170, 174, 179–180, 186, 194, 196, 208 Anti-Semitism, 59, 147 Apocalypse, 43, 72, 98–99, 108, 137–138 Architectural construction, 21–23, 75, 86, 87, 98, 104, 112, 115–122, 132, 197–201 Atonement, 152, 169 Ault, Donald, 110 B Babylon, 198–201, 211 Bacon, Francis, 25, 29 Barr, Mark, 10, 84, 89, 155

Basire, James, 116 Beart, John, 33 Bentham, Jeremy, 19, 22, 40–42, 95 Biblical frameworks, 45–47, 56–60, 68, 73, 134, 143–147, 174, 179, 186–194 Blackstone, William, 11, 13, 18–32, 38–44, 65, 85–87, 119–121 Blake, Robert, 71 Blake, William America: A Prophecy, 7, 18, 71, 79, 91–104, 106, 107, 112, 122, 125, 139, 141, 145, 192, 207–208 Annotations to Thornton’s Lord’s Prayer, 171–173 Annotations to Watson’s Apology, 144–150 ‘The Approach of Doom,’ 71 The Book of Ahania, 24, 78–80, 92, 126, 132, 182 The Book of Los, 79, 90–92, 113 The Book of Thel, 47, 53–55, 92, 95, 110, 175

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Mauger, William Blake and the Visionary Law, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37723-5

227

228 

INDEX

Blake, William (cont.) The Book of Urizen, 1, 10, 30, 39, 47, 63, 71, 75–94, 97, 101–102, 109–117, 123, 124, 129, 139, 152–154, 183, 208 Europe: A Prophecy, 23, 75, 79, 102–108, 139, 145, 208 The Everlasting Gospel, 7, 33, 67, 173–174, 182, 186–196 For Children, 173 For the Sexes: The Gates of Paradise, 173, 179 The Four Zoas, 1, 7, 14, 18, 24, 27, 30, 39, 110–139, 145, 150, 155, 157, 166, 167, 174, 177, 179, 182, 185, 205, 208, 209 The French Revolution, 47, 64, 122 ‘God Writing upon the Tables of the Covenant,’ 192 An Island in the Moon, 17–20, 39, 47 Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion, 13–14, 18, 24, 33, 35, 111–113, 116, 151, 175–192, 194–209 The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 6–7, 26, 28, 40, 46–48, 56–65, 79, 85, 92, 97, 110, 147, 152, 186, 188–190 Milton: A Poem in 2 Books, 1–4, 10, 14, 27, 33, 39, 111–113, 116, 139–145, 150–170, 174, 176–177, 195, 209 ‘A Song of Liberty,’ 7, 41, 71–73, 145, 192 The Song of Los, 1, 7, 27, 59, 79, 93–98, 104, 112, 132 Songs of Experience, 71; ‘Earth’s Answer,’ 70; ‘The Garden of Love,’ 53, 70, 137; ‘The Human Abstract,’ 70, 78, 126; ‘Infant Sorrow,’ 51–52;

‘Introduction,’ 70; ‘London,’ 69–71, 128, 139, 199; ‘The Voice of the Ancient Bard,’ 71 There is No Natural Religion, 61 Tiriel, 7, 30, 45–47, 85, 116 ‘To Nobodaddy,’ 55–56 Vala (see Blake, William, The Four Zoas) Visions of the Daughters of Albion, 7, 46, 48, 56, 64, 66–71, 85, 92, 95, 132 The Woman Taken in Adultery, 190 Bloom, Harold, 66, 90 Books and book production, 26, 62–63, 75–80, 82, 86–88, 104, 105, 111, 129–134, 161 Boorstin, David, 19 Bruder, Helen, 53, 66–67 Burke, Edmund, 22, 36–37 Butts, Thomas, 150, 154 C Caiaphas, 186–189, 194 Calvinism, 152 Chain of Jealousy, 90–91, 96, 124, 169 Clark, Steve, 12 Cock, John, 154–155, 178 Cohen, Adam, 61 Coke, Edward, 25, 36 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 10–11 Constitutionalism, 13–15, 19, 36–42, 80–93, 99–101, 117, 138, 150, 154, 167, 197 Cooper, Andrew, 101 Cosgrove, Richard, 31 Courtrooms, see Trials and courtrooms Creation, 30, 32, 42, 44, 55, 78–80, 84–93, 101–107, 119–122, 129, 135, 136, 151, 152, 154, 172, 175–176, 186–188, 192

 INDEX 

Crosby, Mark, 9–10, 154–155 Cumberland, George, 102 Curran, Stuart, 181 D Damon, S. Foster, 67 Davies, John, 25–26, 37–39, 42, 94 de Bolla, Peter, 13 Deen, Leonard, 142, 153, 205 Divine Humanity, see Human Form Divine Doskow, Minna, 181, 182 Durham, James, 33 E Ellis, Helen B., 86 Ellis, Markman, 22 Empire and imperialism, 12–15, 73, 127–129, 185, 208–209 Epstein, James, 39 Erdman, David, 12, 82, 105, 125, 139, 188 Eternity, 1–4, 81–84, 86–89, 93, 101, 104, 107, 151–153, 167–170, 205, 206 Evans, Caleb, 35 Event horizon, 88, 89 F Felpham, 3, 14, 150, 151, 154–156, 164–166, 178 Ferber, Michael, 4, 5, 98 Ferrara, Mark, 204 Franklin, Benjamin, 99 French Revolution, 47–49, 64, 80, 111, 146, 171 Frye, Northrop, 54–55, 66, 85 Fuller, David, 106 Furneaux, Phillip, 19

229

G George III, 49, 58, 105 Gerrald, Joseph, 88 Gibbon, Edward, 22 Golgonooza, 116, 124, 144, 152, 157–162, 168–169, 175, 177, 183, 197, 199, 201–203, 211 Grant, John E., 78 H Hale, Matthew, 26–28 Halverson, Peter, 28 Hayley, William, 150, 155 Hobbes, Thomas, 37 Hobson, Christopher, 112, 124, 131 Hoerner, Fred, 68 Hogarth, William, 201 Howard, John, 144 Human Form Divine, 8–9, 13, 15, 43, 162, 163, 168, 170, 174, 181, 194–197, 199, 201–204, 207 Huntington, William, 34–35 I Imagination, 1–2, 43, 89, 95, 98, 116, 124, 144, 152, 160, 162–164, 167, 181, 197, 207–208 J Jackson, H. J., 148 Janowitz, Anne, 185, 197–198 Jerusalem, 159, 175, 197–201 Johnson, Mary Lynn, 78 Johnson, Nancy, 10, 11 Justice, 18, 28, 30, 38, 99, 132, 136, 145, 158, 185, 203

230 

INDEX

K Kilgore, John, 125 Kuiken, Kir, 81–84, 90 L Law architectural metaphor, 21–24, 124 common law, 13, 21–30, 38, 39 the Gagging Acts, 3, 122, 136, 154–155 law and humanity, 2, 30, 42, 84–86, 107, 109–112, 194–198, 208 law and nationhood, 13–14, 18, 24–30, 39, 42–44 maxims, 25–30, 63–64 moral law, 1–5, 30–36, 43–44, 50–53, 73, 86, 93–95, 98, 134, 142, 143, 146, 147, 153, 176–186, 188–193, 201–204 myth of the ancient constitution, 24–30, 36–37, 42 natural law, 30–32, 37, 43, 86 revolutionary destruction, 7, 23, 97–101, 107, 109, 110, 127, 142 Satanic law, 10, 27 statute law, 17–18, 37–38, 210 visionary law, 1–4, 14, 114, 132–134, 143, 150, 166–168, 186, 194–199, 203–209 Lawmakers, 1, 2, 17–19, 30, 42, 44, 52–53, 55–56, 75, 86, 112, 145 Layos, Mátyás, 114 Lee, Haram, 131 Lefevbre, Mark, 125, 128 Lemmings, David, 38 Lieberman, David, 19, 41 Lincoln, Andrew, 111, 117, 125, 129, 195

Lobban, Michael, 19 Locke, John, 61 London, 3, 5–7, 9, 36, 69, 104–105, 143, 150–153, 155, 159–160, 167, 174, 175, 183, 185–186, 197–200, 209 Lorenz, Matt, 113 Loughlin, Martin, 85 M Makdisi, Saree, 6, 12, 15, 47, 94, 147, 204 Malthus, Thomas, 132 Matthews, Susan, 12 Measurement, 44, 47, 68, 84–85, 91, 93, 116–117, 173 Mee, Jon, 5, 6, 88, 147 Mellor, Anne, 59 Michael, Jennifer, 117, 198 Milton, John, 2, 3, 62, 93, 102, 141, 157 Mitchell, W. J. T., 86 Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de, 13, 20, 32, 42, 92 More, Hannah, 22, 121 Morton, A. L., 4 Moskal, Jeanne, 8, 187 Munteanu, Anca, 68 Mystery, 24, 55, 65, 70, 78–79, 112, 115, 119, 124–129, 131–134, 137, 138, 155, 181, 182, 196, 203, 209 N Newton, Isaac, 61, 172 O Orc cycle, 85

 INDEX 

P Paine, Thomas, 6, 42, 44, 80, 84, 95, 98–101, 147–150 Age of Reason, 145–148 Common Sense, 39 Rights of Man, 40, 99–101, 121, 148 Paley, Morton, 116, 117, 131, 147, 171, 176, 189 Peterloo, 179 Philp, Mark, 6 Pierce, John, 111 Pitt, William, 106 Plato, 62 Pocock, J. G. A., 24 Postema, Gerald, 31 Prest, Wilfrid, 19 Priestley, Joseph, 19, 31–32 Prophecy, 1–4, 10, 12–15, 23, 42–43, 47–48, 56, 71, 80, 89, 107, 110–111, 120, 144–151, 167–168, 183, 186, 190, 195–197, 207–209 Q Quantock, John, 154–155 R Rawlinson, Nick, 17, 18 Rivers, David, 36 Rix, Robert, 73, 148 Rosso, G. A., 12, 15, 111, 126, 202 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 185 Rowland, Christopher, 12, 192 S Scolfield, John, 154–155, 178 Selfhood, 2, 3, 15, 141, 144, 162–166, 168–170, 195, 203, 205, 206 Sklar, Susanne, 179, 182 Smalley, John, 35, 36 Snart, Jason, 146

231

Spence, Thomas, 6, 39 Stevenson, W. H., 178 Stewart, David, 61 T Thelwall, John, 6 Thompson, E. P., 5–6 Thornton, Robert, 171–173 Thurlow, Edward, 106 Tomkies, J., 34 Tomkinson, Thomas, 143, 164 Trade and commerce, 23, 69, 128, 160, 184, 197–198 Trials and courtrooms Blake’s trial, 2–4, 9–10, 14, 154–155, 178 courtrooms in Blake’s myth, 9, 17–19, 67, 152–153, 161, 185–186 Treason Trials, 136 Turner, James, 35 Tyburn, 79, 182, 183, 199, 201 V Villalobos, John, 63 Void, 79, 81–83, 87, 101, 112, 115, 120, 168 Voltaire, 185 W Warren, Joseph, 99 Warrington Academy, 31–32 Washington, George, 95, 99 Watson, Richard, 144–150, 163 Watts, Ruth, 32 Wicker Man of Scandinavia, 164, 184, 202, 209 Wingate, Edmond, 29 Worrall, David, 12 Wright, Julia M., 12, 185