Page:Works of William Blake; poetic, symbolic, and critical (1893) Volume 2.djvu/87

Rh called, is all that the mind dwells in which, originally timid, submits its feebleness to domination by the system of another.

But the angel's lot must be considered more in detail. The space, an intellectual gap — for the stars belong to the pure reason in this symbology — peoples itself when contemplated. It is clearly the seat of religious war. The jarring sectaries who struggle with and consume each other are at the bottom of a pit into which those descend who read the Bible controversially. The bricks of the houses recall the twenty-second Proverb of Hell. They symbolize the dry-baked dogmas. The religious, — (for to Blake religion was a word seldom used as representing reverential emotions in the aggregate, but generally as bondage of non-mystic dogmatism and morality) that is the chained monkeys, — are books like the men were in the sixth chamber of the house of poetry. The skeleton of one is Aristotle's Analytics when brought from the Space to the Mill.

The twenty-first page and the twenty-second and third need no comment, being themselves commentary.

The promise of the Bible of Hell, with which the present book ends, was never redeemed. It has been supposed that this refers to Blake's version which had only reached as far as the book of Genesis, of the Bible itself "as understood by a Christian visionary." This was shown to Mr. Crabb Robinson in 1826 (see "Memoir," p. 146), and was probably the first draft for the chapter-headings which Blake had begun to add to the MS. copy of the Bible in old English letters, left unfinished when death stopped his work the following year. It was begun for Mr. Linnell and only the first chapters were completed. The titles of them are given here (p. 169). The MS. shown to Mr. Robinson presumably was destroyed. (See "Memoir," p. 167.)

After this promise the book of the "Marriage of Heaven and Hell" closes with the definition of what Blake used to call the "indefinite," or the law not altered for each individual, but oppressive because forced on opposites.