Some Sources of "Tiriel"

THE HUNTINGTON LIBRARY QUARTERLY NUMBER 1 NOVEMBER, 1957 COPYRIGHT 1957 BY THE HENRY E. HUNTINGTON LIBRARY AND ART GALLERY Some Sources of Tiriel By KATHLEEN-RAINE TIRIEL, written about 1789, is the first of Blake's Prophetic Books and his first essay in myth-making. This formless, angry phantasmagoria on the theme of the death of an aged king and tyrant-father may be-indeed must be read at several levels. Ellis and Yeats call it "a treatise on Old Age written in the form of a myth, with the purpose of showing the decline of life as it appears in the mirror of symbolic poetry, and of using senility in its turn, as itself a symbol."' At the opposite extreme, Professor Erdman2 reads Tiriel as an historical allegory upon the English kingship, with George III as the model of Tiriel, the king who has lost his kingdom in the "west," the American colonies. Pro- fessor Erdman's evidence is both convincing in detail and likely from all that we know of Blake's intense preoccupation with political events. In tracing other elements in the poem, I am proposing not alternative, but additional meanings. Blake's interest in politics and history was of a peculiar kind, and in this he can be most justly compared to the Hebrew prophets; for he saw all human events, private or public, as the expression of supematural forces, in time and place-forces that operate in and through man himself, but are none the less daimonic, 1)Works of WilliaUn Blake, ed. Edwin J. Ellis and William B. Yeats (London, 1893), II, 81. 2David V. Erdman, Blake: Prophet Against Empire (Princeton, 1954), p. 122. 2 HUNTINGTON LIBRARY QUARTERLY since man may not be conscious of these or in control of them. Therefore the correspondence of history with myth is to be ex- pected, and in writing of history in symbolic terms-or in plac- ing in the margin of universal myth personal or historical events -Blake is never allegorizing, but, rather, entering imaginatively into the daimonic causes, and revealing the part that these are playing in events. It is in the nature of myth and symbol to carry correspondences through several levels of meaning. The figures and actions are of such a kind as to make statements simul- taneously applicable at all these levels. Far from being an abstrac- tion from history, Blake's use of myth gives history a spiritual context, relates it to the human soul and the daimonic powers-be these what they may-that move mankind to action. The peculiar value of this kind of symbolic narrative is that it makes an implicit affirmation that the same forces are in fact manifesting themselves on all the multiple levels of being. Tiriel, then, we may justly regard as symbolizing the state of senility as it may be found in a human individual-that in man that selfishly resists its own dissolution; or we may see him as tyrannous kingship in decadence; or, beyond both these, as the principle of a blind, unspiritual materialism, "the mental error of belief in matter"-so Ellis and Yeats define Tiriel's nature. The name, Blake seems to have found in Comelius Agrippa's Three Books of Occult Philosophy,' where "Tiriel" is given as the name signifying "the intelligence of mercury."' Erdman ingeni- ously points out the aptness of mercury as a symbol of English trade and commerce (p. 124); but the more obvious significance of mercury in alchemical tradition is the crude, untransmuted prima materia, a meaning that fits well Ellis's and Yeats's defini- tion of Tiriel's nature. In Agrippa, also, Blake would find support for his purpose of writing a symbolic narrative to be understood on several levels. Agrippa knew both the Platonic and cabalistic traditions of the Four Worlds that form a series in which the lower is controlled by the higher, each in its turn, the lowest order (that of physical na- 3English translation by J. F. (London, 1651). Large extracts from Agrippa were published by Francis Barrett in The Magus, but not until 1L80. Blake evidently knew Agnppa earlier than that. SOME SOURCES OF TIRIEL 3 ture) being the merely passive recipient of spiritual forces acting upon it. ". there is a threefold world, Elementary, Celestial, and Intellectual, and every inferior is governed by its superior, and receiveth the influence of the vertues thereof." Blake probably found this doctrine in Agrippa before he discovered the same teaching in Plato; and he knew the same from Swedenborg before he read Agrippa. He had read and annotated Swedenborg's Divine Love and Wisdom in the previous year, and there the same teaching of three worlds (confusingly termed celestial, spiritual, and natural, in descending order) is expounded at great length. In fact Agrippa lists more than three, for above the intellectual he placed "the exemplary world" of essence. Tiriel, however, is not, like some of Blake's later writings, so much an action occurring in four worlds as a symbolic representa- tion of man confined within the lowest. In form, Tiriel resembles nothing so much as Swedenborg's "memorable relations" of hap- penings seen in the spiritual worlds. In those worlds, Swedenborg is at pains to explain, all objects (landscapes, garments, animals, and occurrences) exist as correspondences to states of mind. Each mental state creates its appropriate surroundings, which are as flexible as dreams. Swedenborg's correspondences would certainly apply to dreams, as Freud has demonstrated. The landscape of Tiriel is of this kind; the forests and deserts over which he passes, the animals, personages, and events which he encounters are all appropriate to his mental state, by correspondence. The logic of Tiriel is dream-logic, inconsequent in terms of natural cause and effect, but not so if we accept a sudden change of scene as an inevitable accompaniment of a change of thought. This Blake learned from Swedenborg; and given this key, there is nothing particularly obscure about the sequence of events in Tiriel. It is necessary to remember that as a Swedenborgian (as he then was), Blake was accustomed to symbolic and mythological thought of this kind. If we suppose that, like the majority of Englishmen, he began with a literary education and later (because of his unique visionary powers) departed from the norm in order to write myths and prophecies, we shall be wide of the mark. On the contrary, he early received a symbolic education through Swedenborg, to which he later added literary knowledge acquired by his reading. Thus 4 HUNTINGTON LIBRARY QUARTERLY it is that, considered as a piece of symbolic construction, Tiriel is masterly; as a work of literature, it lacks structure, and the lan- guage moves from the over-violent and Ossianic to clumsy flatness. But this discrepancy, far from causing any surprise, is just what we ought to expect, if we remember that Blake was a practicing Swedenborgian who had never been to school. Ellis and Yeats are misleading in their attempt to fit Tiriel into what they call the "system" of Blake's symbolic thought. Margoli- outh comes nearer to the truth when he says that there never was a system, only kaleidoscopic bits of system.4 It is useless, for example, to attempt to equate the cardinal points as they are used in Tiriel with the elaborate correspondences that appear in the later fourfold symbolism of The Four Zoas. The way to approach Tiriel is in terms of the elements that were in Blake's possession at the time when he wrote it. If we can make an accurate guess at what Blake had read in the year 1788-1789, then we may follow up many of the clues we find in the poem. Tiriel is very different from all the later writings in one important respect. We do not find in it any of those elements of thought that Blake later derived from his readings of Plotinus, Porphyry, and other translations and essays by Thomas Taylor, for these had not yet appeared in 1789. There is no evidence that he had yet read Apuleius, or Boehme, or The Divine Pymander; but there are evidences of Blake's reading of Swedenborg and Agrippa, Ossian, and Mallet's Northern Antiquities, King Lear, and the Theban tragedies of both So- phocles and Aeschylus; and all these strangely assorted elements have gone into the making of a poem that, superficially, resembles none of them. What was the impulse that caused Blake to write such a poem at all? I am rather inclined to Erdman's view that the inspiration was political rather than personal. In 1789 the year of the fall of the French kings, the theme of tottering thrones and senile ty- ranny was not a strange choice for a young poet of revolutionary sympathies. But it is also possible that the publication, in 1788, of 4Herschel M. Margoliouth, Blake's Vala (Oxford, 1956), Introduction. SOME SOURCES OF TIRIEL 5 Potter's translation of Sophocles5 served as an imaginative stimu- lus to write a play on the theme of the descent of an aged king into the grave. Oedipus is the prototype of Tiriel; not Freud's Oedipus, the young man who murdered Laius and married Jocasta, but the banished tyrant of Thebes who from the edge of the grave cursed his sons and called down ruin upon his kingdom. Blake, so far as we know, was treated by his father with mild- ness and understanding; he had no personal neurosis to vent in his denunciation of the figure of the father-tyrant.

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