Page:Works of William Blake; poetic, symbolic, and critical (1893) Volume 2.djvu/82

68 The forty-fifth proverb explains the symbolic use of the images, tiger and horse, in all the Books.

The fifty-fourth proverb — " The soul of sweet delight can never be defiled " — anticipates the argument of Oothoon, as this soul is named, in the "Visions of the Daughters of Albion," p. 3.

The sixty-seventh proverb shows Blake in rebellion against the art of his day, and in rebellion also against what he knew to be the art of all days, simply because he had learned to hate the word "improvement." That improvement does not mean merely the straightening of crooked roads, but rather the making of a discordant curve into a harmonious curve by altering it until it can enter its true place in a sequence, he himself knew perfectly well, when he was not angry. But on questions of art-criticism he was generally angry. The sixty-ninth — " Where man is not, Nature is barren " — sketches the thought afterwards completed when he described nature as "the void outside existence which, when entered into, becomes a womb.-" ("Milton/' p. 44, 1. 1.) It is identified with the symbol of the rock, being also called the Satanic Void, and the false Centre, thus connected with the symbol of the blood-vessels, the net, &c. ("Jerusalem," p. 33, 1. 19.)

On p. 11, Blake is still seen searching for some word by which to describe the mental personalities to whose influence we owe what is more than the experience which comes from moment to moment. Later on he called them States, — " combinations of Individuals " (" Milton," extra page, 32, 1. 10), the highest form of combination beneath the ultimate Unity being that called the Council of God. They are called Zoas, Princes, Angels, Geniuses, and (also in the plural) Gods, as here.

All reside in the Human Breast because all beyond is the "void outside existence." But the time came when Blake grasped the idea of omnipresence in its final paradox by which it includes not only presence in that which exists but