Page:William Blake, a critical essay (Swinburne).djvu/138

122 Experience. "Tirzah," in his mythology, represents the mere separate and human nature, mother of the perishing body and daughter of the "religion" which occupies itself with laying down laws for the flesh; which, while pretending (and that in all good faith) to despise the body and bring it into subjection as with control of bit and bridle, does implicitly overrate its power upon the soul for evil or good, and thus falls foul of fact on all sides by assuming that spirit and flesh are twain, and that things pleasant and good for the one can properly be loathsome or poisonous to the other. This "religion" or "moral law," the inexplicable prophet has chosen to baptize under the singular type of "Rahab"—the "harlot virgin-mother," impure by dint of chastity and forbearance from such things as are pure to the pure of heart: for in this creed the one thing unclean is the belief in uncleanness, the one thing forbidden is to believe in the existence of forbidden things. Of this mystical mother and her daughter we shall have to take some further account when once fairly afloat on those windy waters of prophecy through which all who would know Blake to any purpose must be content to steer with such pilotage as they can get. For the present it will be enough to note how eager and how direct is the appeal here made against any rule or reasoning based on reference to the mere sexual and external nature of man—the nature made for ephemeral life and speedy death, kept alive "to work and weep" only through that mercy which "changed death into sleep"; how intense the reliance on redemption from such a law by the grace of imaginative insight and spiritual freedom, typified in "the death of