Page:Works of William Blake; poetic, symbolic, and critical (1893) Volume 2.djvu/35

 Rh "This," he adds, "is but too true a picture of my present state. I pray God to keep you from it and to deliver me in his own good time."

Mary, after uttering the lament of the first two lines, says that to be weak and smooth and not raise envy is "called Christian love." But that if you raise envy and plant spite in the tame and weak, "your merit" is to blame. She goes on : —


 * "I will humble my beauty, I will not dress fine,
 * I will keep from the ball and my eyes shall not shine.
 * If any girl's lover forsake her for me,
 * I'll refuse him my hand and from envy be free."

Then Mary went out, "plain and neat" in her dress, and people said she had gone mad. She returned at evening bespattered with mire. She sat trembling on her bed, forgetting night and morning, absorbed with the memory of scornful faces. Her own face is a face of sweet, despairing love, mild sorrow and care, wild terror and fear. In this life it shall know no quiet.

This is the "naked and outcast Mary Green," and not Mrs. Blake, but a phase of Blake's own personality that he chastised and cast out in order not to raise envy. He learns from it that not merely art and fame are worthy of love. Then he enlarges the lesson, and loves the spiritually naked and outcast. Here comes the biographical element, for Mrs. Blake's artistic helplessness might perhaps have been among the rejected "states and spaces "who merited love in their humbleness. But "Mary Green" is more than a personage disguised. She is a mood expressed, a State and, as such, of much more universal interest and artistic importance than an individual. "States are combinations of Individuals."

Less quaint than either of these poems is that called the "Crystal Cabinet," with regard to whose meaning the reader of to-day has once again a standard but erroneous interpretation to clear away from the entrance before he can enter in. The "maiden" in the "Crystal Cabinet" has not, it is true, been supposed to be this terrible but nameless female who has