THE DEATH OF A CULTURE

By L. H. ALLEN*

When Nations grow old the Arts grow cold

Blake was born in 1757, the year which Swedenborg announced as beginning the Last Judgment. In The Marriage ofHeaven and a Hell Blake pronounced that new heaven had begun. The Marriage was evidently itsmanifesto,1 and Blake itsprophet. "Whenever any individual rejects error and embraces truth a last Judgment passes upon that individual."2 It is the passing of old values, the finding of new; and Blake has expanded the theme in his Vision of thehast Judgment. We may call it the death of a culture and the birth of a new one; or, variantly, the passing of an epoch in a culture and the birth of its successor. This, in the main, is the theme of Tiriel, and I shall give, as brieflyas I can, the story:Old Tiriel stands before his ruined palace which once dominated theWestern Plains. In his arms is the dying Myratana, his wife?"soul, spirit, fire." He calls on his rebellious sons, the eldest of whom mocks him, saying that,until they rebelled, theywere the slaves of his cruelty. Tiriel curses them, accusing them of having drained theirmother dry, and declaring that he will bury her. But his sonHeuxos calls on a son of Zazel, TiriePs brother, to dig the grave, reviling his fatherbecause he has enslaved ZazePs sons and rejected his own. Tiriel replies: "Bury your mother, but you cannot bury the curse of Tiriel." over Thereupon he wanders the "dark and pathless mountains," with blinded eyes, being aware of the sun, but unable to feel the in * Professor of English literature, University College, Canberra. 1 "It is now thirty-three years since its advent," says Blake. This would date the Marriage at 1790; but Foster Damon gives good reason for regarding Blake as having spoken in round numbers, the more acceptable date being 1793. (, his Philosophy and Symbols, p. 07.) I think he took thirty-three years as being approxi mately a third of a century?a generation. 2 M.S. Book, Foster Damon, p. 340. 58

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fluence of themoon, which is now a "useless globe." He arrives at a valley, thedwelling ofHar andHeva, once so splendid, now dwindled to shadows of themselves, delighting in childish things. The aged Mnetha waits on them. At the sight of the strickenold man and Heva rush in fear toMnetha's arms. When Tiriel announces his name Mnetha cannot recognize in such decrepitude theKing of theWest, a on and thinks masquerader is imposing her. "No matter who I am," saysTiriel, and asks for food to stay him on his long journey. Har and Heva, in terror, beseech Mnetha not to go near the "King of rottenwood" who "wanders without eyes." Tiriel replies only by begging piteously for food. Mnetha allays the fears of Har and Heva, who now bless Tiriel, imagining they see in him "TiriePs old father." He tells them that he was "once father of a race far in theNorth," a race destroyed for itswickedness. Mnetha gives him milk and fruit. Har then blesses the stranger, recognizing him as Tiriel, who now denies his identity,saying: "Tiriel I never saw but once." He desires to resume his journey, but Heva urges him to see their singingbirds, to hearHar sing in the great cage, and to sleep on theirfleeces. But Tiriel, because of madness and despair,must take his way over rocks and mountains. There he meets his brother Ijim who takes him for a fiend in TiriePs shape and threatens to use him as a slave. The old man asks a for "a littlewater from brook" to save him from death. Ijim, an though stillmaintaining that he is imposter,allows him to drink, and bears him on his shoulders toTiriePs palace. He cries toHeuxos: "I have brought the fiend that troubles Ijim." He describesTiriel as a Proteus who turned into every shape until he was caught in that of Tiriel. Heuxos is bidden bring forthTiriel and Myratana. Tiriel tauntinglyrepeats Ijim's command, and then sternly tells them: blind is "poor Tiriel returned." Ijim is bewildered, thinking that sons and are all, father alike, illusions,and stridesgloomily away. Then, in words of terror and magnificence, Tiriel curses his sons and his five daughters. Four of his daughters perish, and of his sons only thirty remain. Tiriel then calls on , his youngest daughter, to lead him away. Henceforth she is to be at his command because he has saved her from death. Hela replies that she has been preserved to act as for her eyes father?another instanceof his cruelty. Tiriel protests that, though he loves her, she "glories in rebellion." He commands her to lead him to Har andHeva. She obeys, not because of fear, but because this murderer of his helpless childrenwill be cursed byHar 1 2 * CO June, 1940 THE AUSTRALIAN QUARTERLY and Heva. As retributionfor thisTiriel causes snakes to rise from his at on daughter's hair. Howling in terror this sorcery, Hela leads him until they reach the caves of Zazel, a brother of Tiriel. Zazel mocks his senility, saying: "Thou wilt be as foolish as thy foolish brother Zazel." But the blind old man, holding on undeterred, reaches the mountains of Har. While Har and Heva are sleeping like infants Mnetha hears the howling ofHela and rushes out to threaten the pair with her bow. Tiriel, now directly claiming to be King of theWest, demands to be led toHar and Heva. Then, bemoaning the thrustof fate which has driven him to this sad decay, and governs human life with such inscrutableparadox, he falls in "awful death." The image of a blind old man led by his daughter immediately evokes two great figures of literature?Oedipus led by Antigone; and Milton, helped in his literarywork by his daughter when his eyesight had gone. Of these two there is little doubt thatMilton is the prototype of Tiriel. Blake regardedMilton and Swedenborg in very much the same light. They were grand souls, impregnatedwith divine fire which they had quenched by misuse of their faculties. The latter had been granted the vision of the spiritual world only to constricthimself to within the "angelic" conventions, whereas, Blake, the only real world was "demonic" dynamism. Similarly, to Milton had been opened theworld of theDaughters of Beulah, but he had chosen to bind himself within the classic canons and had become a slave to the Muses, the Daughters of Memory. In the same way, when, under the guidance of Inspiration, he might have beheld God as a Spirit, he preferred to limitHim within the restrictionsof classicReason. Thus, forMilton, saysBlake, "The Father isDestiny, the Son a ratio3of the a five senses, and the Holy Ghost vacuum." Yet Blake had the deepest reverence forMilton, regarding him self, indeed, as the inheritorof his spirit.He spoke of Swedenborg as a "Samson shorn by the churches" (Milton 20.50), and the same was even more image applicable to the creator of Samson Agonistes. For what was the result ofMilton's effort? The exaltation of Puritanism, the negative aspect of virtue, the glorification of Thou Shalt Not! And the decadence of the classic formwhich Milton gave it was Augustan enervation?elegant scepticism in mechanical echo. Blake regardedMilton as being at least tremendouslyserious, whereas the Augustans had nothing serious in them to be tremendous about. 3 By "ratio" Blake means the perception of the finite, instead of the infinite, in things. (Cf. There is no Natural Religion. Second series.) 6o

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Neither satire nor translation,which formed so large a part of Augustanism, appealed to Blake. What he regarded as the only Art was creation. Miltonism and Augustanism are the nucleus of Tiriel: and I shall now try to give a brief sketchof themain significancesof the poem. Tiriel4 isKing of theWest. The points of the compass play an or important part in Blake's system since they represent "states," attitudes of the soul towardsGod. Generally theWest is for Blake the region of the Instincts (the Shepherd Tharmas). But there seems here to be a variation. The West seems to represent the region where the Sun, which should be theGnosis, the immediate apprehension of God, declines into the hardness of intellectusing matter, the food of the senses, to constructthe deity of the Syllogism. Har calls him the "King of rottenwood," theGreek Hyle (Matter). When such arts and religions are in their prime, however, they do mean something real; but when the "matter" rots,nothing is left but the pretence of a senile sacerdotalism?in other words, the hypocrisy of formalism dis guising poverty of form. That iswhy, at the end of the poem, Tiriel a confesses that he is hypocrite.5 The poem opens with the senile epoch conscious of its lost inspir ation. Myratana, theWife, themoon (Enitharmon, the inspirational reflex of Los, the creative spirit), is dead. The sons (schisms in seem religion, "movements" in art) to have forgotten that they ever owed theirbeing to her, and are glad to bury her. They are rebellious against the petrified authority of the parent system; but they are its inferiors,without its dignity, without its consciousness of greatness, even if a lost one. So Tiriel wanders away from them,blind, like the old man called Aged Ignorance, in the Gates of Paradise. He cannot see the moon of inspirationat all because perceptive Organs closed their objects close. The Sun of the Gnosis is only felt in the dim shadows of reason.

4 Foster Damon warns us not to confuse Tiriel with Thiriel. "Tiriel never reappears in Blake's works" (p. 306). Ellis, in his edition of Blake's poems, makes this confusion, regarding Tiriel, or Thiriel, as a modification of Ithuriel (1.292). Foster Damon is probably right in regarding the name as taken from Cornelius Agrippa. It is possible, however, that Blake, not yet having fixed definitely the outlines of his myth, did conceive Tiriel as being, like Thiriel, (the Element Air), a son of Urizen. What does Heva mean by speaking of Tiriel*s old father} Urizen surely, since Tiriel can say that he came from the North which had been usurped by Urizen. When Blake had developed his myth it is probable that he no longer regarded Tiriel as necessary to his an scheme, and that Thiriel, entirely different character, supplanted him, having this in common with Tiriel, that both were sons of Urizen. 5 "This is a Last Judgment?when Men of Real Art Govern and Pretenders Fall." (V.L.]., pp. 81-84.) 6i

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Now he comes to the Vales of Har. "Har" is the Hebrew for "mountain": "Heva" is the Latin form of Eve. We can easily see thatwe are in the region of Paradisial Man, but with what a change! man The "mountain" has descended to the valley. Har and Heva, Poetry and Painting, are in senility,but a differentone from that of Tiriel, for theyhave reached dotage, infantilism,the shunning of the serious. This was the difference for Blake between the majesty of Paradise Lost (even if a dying and erring one) and the superficiality of the Popeian era, particularly the simpering "pastorals," and the reasoned "Essays" where the structure of "rotten wood" took the place of form,which is structureimpregnated by spirit, the indivisibleunion of body and soul.6 No longer do the degenerateHar and Heva hear theLord's voice inEden; no longer the strains of theDaughters of Beulah, the heavenly sirens of Inspiration. They hear only the voice of Mnetha?Memory,7 mother of the classic Muses. Between Mnetha and theDaughters of Beulah the same differenceexists as thatbetween memory and anamnesis (recollection of the soul's pre-incarnate purity). And now Mnetha is old. She, too, is growing senile, for was a echo pseudo-classicism only diminishing of what, for Horace and Virgil, was real. Har and Heva are frightenedof Tiriel. They dare not face the burning despair of one conscious of a lost inspirationwhich they them selves have forgotten. For sustenance they can give him only milk and craves fruits?"pastoral" food?when he the bread and wine of eternity,of which Blake so mightily sings in The Four Zoas. They inviteTiriel to hear theirbirds singing their songs in the golden cage of the classic canons. They entice him to "sleep on theirfleeces," by which image Blake skilfully blends the idea of that sleep by which "pastoral" poetry shuts itself to life, and of Greek oneiromancy, one form of which was the evocation of dreams by sleeping on the fleece of a sacrificialvictim. But the dreams of theGreek were true dreams sent by theGod ofHealing. The dreams thatHar and Heva enticed were only those of the Ivory Gate ("infant dreams"). Leaving decadent art Tiriel finds Ijim, Rousseau's natural man,8

6 Blake was four-dimensional. He sought the Eternal Form of which he speaks in his Vision of the Last Judgment (pp. 69-70.) We may say that Milton was three dimensional, the form of most great art. Decadent art becomes two-dimensional. 7 Foster Damon thinks Mnetha, "a near anagram of Athena," "the intelligence which preserves Poetry and Painting" (p. 307). But the two initial letters incline me to believe that Blake connected Mnetha with Mnemosyne (Mother of the Muses), shorten a on of ing it, for metrical reasons, to dissyllable the analogy Mneme. 8 Foster Damon regards Ijim as "the religion of the common people" (p. 72). Wright, in his life of Blake (1-32), thinks he is Superstition. 62

THE AUSTRALIAN QUARTERLY June, 1940 a false form of theAdam thatHar once was. Blake believes inman's original paradisaical condition,but thatwas in the stateof theArchetype, before Albion, man as conceived by God, forgot hisMaker, and sank into the sleep of Incarnation. He would have nothing to do with Rousseau's theory of Original Virtue. "There is no Natural Religion" he says: and there is no Natural Man inRousseau's sense. With all his radiant optimismBlake believes thatman is evil, that even theWill is evil.9Man would not be in incarnationat all ifhe had not willed him self from spirit intomatter. Just as Shakespeare gave the brutal truth of Montaigne's fancy picture of the savage, so Blake gives us a Calibanesque vision of man in his original Rousseauesque state. Ijim, likeHar and Heva, is unable to recognize Tiriel in his decay. Primitive man is by no means wholly bad even if he is not wholly good. His instinctsgive him a rude apprehension of the verities, so thathe can feel something touchinghis unorganized mind when he meets dynamic belief. When, however, he is confrontedonly with the shell, his instinctmisses thevitalizing touch,and he is sensible of falseness. So Ijim carriesTiriel back to his palace to shame him by confrontinghim with the real Tiriel. When, however, he discovers that the real has become the false, the dynamic the static,he is dumb founded. Such is the real Natural Man, and, by implication,Blake condemns that into which Rousseauism can reticulate?archaism, fool's paradisism, arcadianism, and all those dainty avoidances of the real which are so common a mark of decadent art. The most tremendous thing in the poem isTiriel's curse. Itmay be called the Dark Night of the Soul in the Satanic sense, not the terrible test before the granting of Illumination, but the last blight seems before the Outer Darkness. Sterility to set in on the imagin even senses ation; the seem dead to anything ideal. So, when the sons die, one by one every schism, every sect, every seems to were activity of art, sink into incapacity. They glad to bury Inspiration; now they find they cannot live without her. But of the Daughters, the senses,10 one survives?Hela, the sense of Touch, which includes the contact of Sex, and is, therefore, that sense by which an ideal thing can be kindled?love, symbol of the uniting of Los and Enitharmon, Energy and Inspiration: symbol of that ultimate re-union of Man with his Emanation when all things

9 Annotations to Swedenborg's Wisdom of Angels?page i. 10Elsewhere Blake describes the senses as windows for the "caverned Soul," an image which may have been suggested by the "gates" of Mansoul. ?3

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anew. can an a shall be made Through this alone art, religion, a culture, resurrect itself. name Yet the Blake gives to this sense?Hela?is suggestive. Love, of which Sex is the incarnate shadow, cannot, and must not, die. the force that sustains the without it there can Itjs binding cosmos; be only disintegration. But between that expansive and creative force and the rigid outlines of Thou Shalt Not! there is conflict. Love is driven in on herself so that she is forced to becomeHela,11 the Con cealer, theRepresser, Goddess of themind's under-world. Old faiths do not die without a struggle, and the very fight for survival drives them to a self-protectiveattack on all thingsnew. Blake saw just that in the languishing ofman under puritanic shackles, and regarded him self as destined to give him the freedom of the new Jerusalem. Because Hela resists her father his curse descends upon her. Serpents start from her hair. She chills where she should irradiate. as She is to petrify and terrify,Gorgonwise, her fatherhas done. caves The journey back toHar andHeva takes the pair past the now of Zazel, the brotherwhom Tiriel has cast out, and who repays him with derision: "Thou shalt be as foolish as thy foolish brother, Zazel." Zazel represents the old dead cultures ousted by the new comers, the faiths and arts which become "paganism," wilderness cul ture, to their vanquishers. to At last Medusa?Hela?brings her father Har and Heva, his last he falls in where, as we have seen, after uttering plaint, death. He has now realized thatnothing is to be gained fromHar and Heva come but the mock comfort of forgetfulness. Rejuvenation would to none of them. Individuality, the personal contact of the soul with the cosmos, is gone, and that is the burden of TiriePs final speech: our "Why is one law given to the lion and the patient ox!" With systemswe stereotypethe mind till, as with Tiriel, itbecomes spiritless extinction of reaction. automatism, or, as with Har and Heva, virtual Yet Tiriel remembersa timewhen he had been "father of a race far in theNorth," which had been destroyed for itswickedness.12 That is to say, he had been through his stage of revolt againstwhat then to him had been the dead and the cold; for theNorth is the region of the rebel spirits?the new fermentation opposing the old rigidity. a Thus, Tiriel, regarded now as the symbol of whole culture rather

11 Scandinavian Goddess of the under-world. 12 He says this to Mnetha "dissemblinglyas Blake tells us, not, I think, because of classicism he was not telling her the truth, but because the aged and failing memory had never known him in the days of his romantic vigour. To speak the truth was, therefore, his best disguise. 64

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than any specificpart of it, has run the natural course from youth to age. This is no matter for despair. The human spirit is undying, and Blake isdoing no more than trace the leap from ridge to ridge of the sea. waves that make the phenomenal This Blake has shown in three ways. In the firstplace, Tiriel differs from his degenerate echoes in that he realizes what emptiness has come into his breast with the loss ofMyratana, while his sons are glad of her death. With her alone? divine Inspiration?he will be satisfied. He would rather remember his paradise was lost than live in the hashish paradise regained of Har and Heva; so that, through the tempests of self-vindication, which is all that his cursing amounts to, there is working the sub conscious ferment of self-clarification,until he can die seeing himself as he is, and that is the beginning of regeneration,one of Blake's most significantwords. Foster Damon puts it terselyand pointedly: "Error recognized expires of itself." This was just what Blake believed of Milton, whose spirit is represented in the poem of that name, as being anxious to repair the error of his doctrine, and as descending into Blake's body for thatpurpose. Next, Blake uses a most subtle motive. When Tiriel caused serpents to spring fromHela's hair, he thought he had created a Gorgon. She thought that herself in her terror,but in her, too,was a as as working ferment. Maenads, well Gorgons, have snaky hair.13 Tiriel cannot petrify life: it resistsand turns into the inspireddevotee of Dionysus, bringer of wine's inspiration.Hela, who, alone of the to a new Enitharmon for daughters, escapes the curse, is ready become a new Los. Blake does not specificallysay this, it is true,but he often means expanded the significanceof his words by of his illustrations. This bringsus to his thirdmotive. In the twelfth illustrationof the poem Tiriel dies ina vineyard.14This, no doubt, isprimarily Jesus, the True Vine, the Perfect Artist, who gave thewine of Eternity. But never where its ramifi Blake's symbolism is all-embracing. One knows cationswill wander; and I feel it is not far-fetched to see a secondary ismistaken to think that Blake suggestion of the Bacchic wine. It abhorred theClassics root and branch. What he hated principallywas on the fasteningof classical fetters the romanticmind. Yet quite early are in his career he proclaimed that"all religions one," and, for Blake,

13 of whereas Maenads concealed Gorgon hair, of course, consisted serpents, merely will serve. serpents in their hair; but the analogy 14 I have seen no reproductionof this illustration.Gilchrist (Life of Blake, p. 480) describes it. Foster Damon (p. 309) says: "The series has been dispersed." 65 E

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there was no essential difference between religion and art. "The Reli gions of theNations," saysBlake, "are derived fromeach Nation's dif ferent reception of the Poetic Genius." Will not, then, the vineyard includeDionysus's wine, in intent the same symbol as the Christian, according toGreece's "differentreception" of the truth? If such a suggestion carry any conviction it seems not unlikely that Blake's illustration,which portraysHela contemplatingthe dead Tiriel amid the vines of regeneration, represents the conversion of repression into assertion, of terror into ecstasy, of Gorgon into Bacchant. Blake lived in times of terribledisillusion; Tiriel was conceived, and probably written in part, in the firstflush of the French Revolu tion. At that time he must have seen in theRevolution all thatTiriel meant to him. Yet, though the course of theRevolution, with itsfinal outcome?Napoleon?must have shattered his young hopes, it never paralysed his faith. The old Blake died as the young Blake had lived, no hardened Tiriel, but still the radiant Los. He never forgot that earth's fractured effortswere only shadows of Eternal and Cosmic energies.

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