Page:Works of William Blake; poetic, symbolic, and critical (1893) Volume 2.djvu/72

58 This is coherent with the following, also a scrap, for "pride" is satanic.


 * " What can be done with those desperate fools
 * Who follow alter the heathen schools?
 * I was standing by when Jesus died.
 * What they called humility I called pride."

It accounts for the expression — " seeing this false Christ," &c. Both the true and the false are to be found indicated in different parts of the poem. But here, again, we are pulled up short at the edge of a cliff.

As for the meaning, glancing back at the table of good and bad pride we gather as doctrine that Christ's two natures impelled Him to crucifixion. He went to " humble Himself to God," and also to proudly destroy the serpent in himself; his own spectre, or Satan. This Satan is the false (view of) Christ worshipped still. The pride that led to Satan's destruction by his Owner, Who was incarnated in him, was Satan's pride. It was the emotion of adoration rightly applied by Christ to His Humanity, wrongly to His personality, just as His humility was wrong when it humbled His Humanity to His personality when supposing itself to do the reverse. The paradox is of the richest. Truth flies both ways along the course of one figure of speech, as messages and answers in the mysterious action of electricity go in opposite directions at one moment along one wire.

There remains a section of forty-eight lines, printed in the Aldine edition, which are still to be found on a separate piece of paper stuck into the end of the MS. book. It is not certain what position Blake intended to give them. Mr. Rossetti has placed them nearly at the beginning, and in this seems to follow the sense of the lines. They appear to have been written later than the rest by the handwriting. Perhaps they were an afterthought intended to supersede much of the rest of the poems, but rejected by the author before he made up his mind how to fix them in.