William Blake and the Human Abstract

Author(s): Robert F. Gleckner

Source: PMLA, Vol. 76, No. 4 (Sep., 1961), pp. 373-379
Published by: Modern Language Association
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 WILLIAM BLAKE AND
By Robert
IS well-known that in Songs of Experience
IT several of the poems are direct contraries to
some of the Songs of Innocence, the precise nature
of this opposition being reflected in the subtitle of
the combined Songs of Innocence and of Experi?
ence: "Shewing the Two Contrary States of the
Human Soul." And Blake emphasized this essential
organic unity of the contraries by giving four of
the opposing poems identical titles: "Holy Thurs-
day," "The Chimney Sweeper," "Nurse's Song,"
and "A Cradle Song."1 Occasionally he changed
the title almost imperceptibly: "The Little Boy
Lost" becomes "A Little Boy Lost," "The Little
Girl Lost" becomes "A Little Girl Lost," and "The
Divine Image" becames "A Divine Image."2 The
great majority of Songs of Experience, however,
have either totally new titles or changes of the
Songs of Innocence titles which make more ex?
plicit the nature of the opposition between the two
states. Thus in the two introductory poems the
piper yields to the bard, in others "The Lamb" be?
comes "The Tyger," "The Blossom" becomes "The
Sick Rose," "The Ecchoing Green" becomes "The
Garden of Love" or "London," "The School Boy"
becomes "The Little Vagabond," and "The Divine
Image" becomes "The Human Abstract."
Admittedly it is dangerous to set up explicit con?
trasts in this way, but such a procedure can pro-
vide valuable clues to part of Blake's poetic tech?
nique in Songs of Experience. Where the titles are
identical with those in Songs of Innocence Blake
clearly intended the song of experience to be a
parody of its counterpart in Innocence ("Nurse's
Song" and "A Cradle Song") or to be a direct per?
version ("Holy Thursday" and "The Chimney
Sweeper"). In either case the point of view has
obviously changed (reflecting the shift from piper
to bard), the characters of the respective speakers
have been altered to reflect their fall from inno?
cence into experience, and the vision has shrunk
from an imaginative "whole" view of the world
to a sense-bound, limited, partial view. Those songs
of experience which have only a change of article
in the title dramatize the move away from an es-
sentially homogeneous, unified, individual-less
world to one over-run with egocentric individuals;
or, to put it another way, from a world of uncon?
scious selves to one of conscious selves whose
sense of differentness is acute and militant. Thus
the generic little boy lost of Innocence becomes
373
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THE HUMAN ABSTRACT
F. Gleckner
"A Little Boy Lost," "The Little Girl Lost" be?
comes "A Little Girl Lost," and "The Divine
Image" becomes, individualized and separate, "A
Divine Image." Finally, those poems whose titles
are completely transformed in Songs of Experience
introduce the reader immediately to thematic
changes consonant with the change of scene or
state?for unlike innocence, experience is a raven-
ing world of the devourer; an adult world of respon?
sibility, decisions, sex, and disease; a dark, confined,
dirty, urban world of palpable, not evanescent,
blackness; a world of wandering and lostness, ale-
houses and churches; a world of "humanity caught
in the act" with none of the defiant joy of Burns's
Jolly Beggars.
The three major kinds of title change, then, sug?
gest a good deal about Blake's poetical strategy in
Songs of Experience, his shift from "open" narra?
tive or song to irony and parody, his turning away
from the representative to focus sharply on the
diverse particulars, and his crucial manipulation of
key symbols. Of all the songs of experience the one
which provides the greatest insight into Blake's
concern with his titles, his struggle to define the
two contrary states of the human soul, and his
poetic technique (especially in Songs of Experi?
ence), is "The Human Abstract." Although he
apparently had little of the philosophical difficulty
he experienced in shaping "The Tyger,"3 he had a
good deal of trouble hammering the idea of "The
Human Abstract" into a satisfying poem. For in
addition to the finished product there are extant a
manuscript draft of it called "The Human Image,"
the fairly superficial "A Divine Image" (which he
etched but did not include in Songs of Experience),
and another manuscript poem which begins, "I
heard an Angel singing."
In "The Divine Image" (Innocence) Blake set
forth his four great virtues, mercy, pity, peace, and
love, the last of which is the greatest including as
it does the other three. More important, he identi?
fied man and God (the four virtues "Is God" and
"Is Man," the ungrammatical singular verbs ac-
1 "A Cradle
Song" appears in Blake's notebookalong with
draftsof othersongs of experience,but he never etchedor
includedit among the Songs of Experience.
a"A Divine Image" was etched by Blake but never in?
cluded among Songs of Experience.
?See Martin K. Nurmi, "Blake's Revisions of The
Tyger',"PMLA, lxxi (1956), 669^-685.
374 William Blake
centing the fusion)4 and emphasized the funda-
mental humanity of the virtues:
For Mercy has a human heart
Pity, a human face:
And Love, the human form divine,
And Peace, the human dress. (117)
In the world of experience such a human-divine
imaginative unity is shattered, for the Blakean
fall, as is well known, is a fall into division, frag-
mentation, each fragment assuming for itself the
importance (and hence the benefits) of the whole.
Experience, then, is fundamentally hypocritical
and acquisitive, rational and non-imaginative. In
such a world virtue cannot exist except as a ra-
tionally conceived opposite to vice. There are no
longer single entities participating harmoniously in
one divine unity; there are only, in effect, pairs,
opposites, contraries, and they are at war. To dra-
matize this vividly Blake was faced with the prob?
lem of making the virtues at once less human and
more human. That is, if in the world of innocence
"all must love the human form" and all pray "to
the human form divine," in experience all must
love only part of the human form, what I have
called elsewhere the "human form human." It is a
dissociated form, a collection of fragments that no
longer informs (in the fullest sense of that word)
the human but rather deforms it. Thus, in The
Book of Urizen, the fallen "Eternals" are seen as
vast enormities
Frightning,Faithless, fawning
Portions of life: similitudes
Of a foot, or a hand, or a head
Or a heart, or an eye. (234)
But, and this is the important point, the human
form still pretends to be integrated, to be "or-
ganiz'd" as Blake himself called it, to be "The
Divine Image." This pretense involves the viciously
hypocritical and rationally conceived plan of in-
venting "vices" so that equally artificial virtues
may oppose them. As Hobbes, Mandeville, and
others had shown, virtues, "selfless" and charitable
activity, altruistic thoughts, were all indulged in
by man because basically they gave him pleasure.
Blake's firstattempt to dramatize this perversion
is in the manuscript poem, "I heard an Angel sing-
ing," with its devastatingly matter-of-fact lines:
Mercy could be no more
If there was nobody poor
And pity no more could be
If all were as happy as we (164)
Except for a reversal of mercy and pity, Blake
retained these crucial lines in the finished version
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and the Human Abstract
of the poem ("The Human Abstract") engraved
for Songs of Experience. Before he was satisfied
with the total poem, however, he tried a number
of other experiments.
The key to the problem Blake faced lies in the
poem he clearly intended originally for Songs of
Experience:
A Divine Image
Cruelty has a Human Heart
And Jealousy a Human Face
Terror the Human Form Divine
And Secrecy the Human Dress
The Human Dress is forgedIron
The Human Form a fieryForge
The Human Face a Furnace seald
The Human Heart its hungryGorge
(221)
An alignment of the lucid antitheses in this poem
and "The Divine Image" has been made compe-
tently by Stephen Larrabee.5 Of much more sig?
nificance, however, is an understanding of how
"A Divine Image" is complexly operative in "The
Human Abstract," the poem Blake finally settled
upon for Songs of Experience.
Although the order of composition of the four
"drafts" of Blake's idea in the final analysis may
be less important than we might expect, some
comment on the problem is in order here. In
Blake's notebook, which he used as a workbook for
about eighteen years (1793-1811), "I heard an
Angel singing" is the eighth entry and hence clear?
ly Blake's first attempt to write the contrary to
"The Divine Image."6 Seven pages and about
twenty poems later in the same notebook appears
"The Human Image," from which "The Human
Abstract" is directly taken. "A Divine Image" on
the other hand does not exist in any manuscript
form known; according to Geoffrey Keynes it was
etched about 1794, well after Blake had begun
writing in his notebook. Several alternative con-
4
Similarlyin his Annotationsto Dr. Thornton's "New
Translation of the Lord's Prayer" (1827) Blake wrote:
"The Greek & Roman Classics is the Antichrist. I say Is &
not Are as mostexpressive& correcttoo" (GeoffreyKeynes,
ed., The CompleteWritingsof WilliamBlake, London and
New York, 1957, p. 786). All subsequentpage references
in my text and notes will be to Keynes's 1957 edition.Ex?
cept for The EverlastingGospel (the manuscriptof which
I have not seen), however,throughoutthis paper I have
used Blake's punctuation(in manuscriptor etchedpoems)
ratherthan Keynes's misleadingemendations.
8 "An
Interpretationof Blake's 'A Divine Image'," MLN,
xlvii (1932), 305-308.
6 It should be
noted,however,that many of the notebook
poems seem to be fair copies; but no earliermanuscripts
have come to light.
 Robert
clusions suggest themselves: (1) that "A Divine
Image" was written, quickly I should say, inspired
by the simple idea of perverting "The Divine
Image" in obvious fashion, soon after Blake com?
pleted Songs of Innocence, or at least soon after he
conceived of another song series to contrast with
the first; (2) that it was written after the failure
of "I heard an Angel singing," perhaps even after
"The Human Image" and/or "The Human Ab?
stract," thus representing a return to the openness
of narrative characteristic of Songs of Innocence
after an essay into the complex ambiguity of the
notebook poems; (3) that it was written and
etched after Blake issued his Songs of Experience
in 1794, and contemplated by Blake as a possible
substitute for "The Human Abstract" in later
issues. With no real evidence to the contrary, be?
sides Keynes's conjectural date of etching, the first
of these possibilities seems to me the most attrac-
tive. The poem's discursiveness, its rather me?
chanical, almost mathematical simplicity make it
unlike other songs of experience; the obviousness
of the contrast suggests a hasty, impulsive compo?
sition; the close relationship, to be explored further
below, between the other three versions militates
against a date of composition at any time between
"I heard an Angel singing" and "The Human Ab?
stract"; and finally the absence of "A Divine
Image" from the notebook and the context of other
drafts for Songs of Experience suggests an earlier
rather than a later date of composition, for Blake's
development, from the early Poetical Sketches to
Jerusalem, was toward greater complexity, am?
biguity, denser texture, and even obscurity.
In any case I am convinced that the kind of open
statement represented by "A Divine Image" dis-
turbed Blake; perhaps indeed it smacked too much
of the single vision of Newton's sleep he so de-
spised. And while the poem in this sense might
have stood as a symbol of the very thing it con-
demned, Blake was more concerned with imagina-
tively exposing such blindness via irony and other
subtleties and at the same time enlarging the
capacity of his song form to encompass the multi-
valent horror of the state of experience. "I heard
an Angel singing" was the immediate result. In it
a dual point of view is explored, but by making
the contrast between angel and devil so explicit and
by channeling his attack into dialogue form Blake
lost a good deal of the direct power of "A Divine
Image." "The Human Image" (and finally "The
Human Abstract"), then, is his attempt to com-
bine the shock of "A Divine Image" with the
alternating point of view of "I heard an Angel
singing."
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F. Gleckner 375
The other major technical problem involved was
semantic. After establishing "The Divine Image"
and the "human form divine" as workable terms in
Songs of Innocence, Blake immediately hit upon
"A Divine Image" as a possible contrast. But he
also thought of the conventional figures of angels
as in some way synonymous with the general ideas
of "The Divine Image" (he had used angels in this
way in "A Dream," "The Chimney Sweeper,"
"Night," "A Cradle Song," and "The Little Black
Boy," all in Songs of Innocence). The contrary to
angel of course is devil, and it is this trite duo
which forms the substance of "I heard an Angel
singing." With the composition of The Marriage
of Heaven and Hell (1790-93), however, such
orthodox terms were no longer valid: in a rage at
Swedenborg's religious dichotomy of good and
evil, soul and body, angel and devil, Blake boldly
upset the fundamentals of doctrinaire religion.
"Good" is now seen as "the passive that obeys
Reason. Evil is the active springing from Energy.
Good is Heaven. Evil is Hell" (149). Angels "have
the vanity to speak of themselves as the only
wise; this they do with a confident insolence
sprouting from systematic reasoning" (157). But
in the reality of Blake's vision, of the non-Sweden-
borgian imaginative world, devils are the only wise,
the purveyors of the "Proverbs of Hell," the lead?
ers of the party of poetic and prophetic characters,
to which Milton belonged without knowing it. In
the light of this semantic revolution, the angel-
devil antithesis of "I heard an Angel singing" col-
lapsed, came very near indeed to perpetuating the
error for which Blake so chastised Swedenborg:
Thus Swedenborg boasts that what he writes is
new: tho' it is only the Contents or Index of already
publish'd books
Now hear a plain fact: Swedenborg has not written
one new truth: Now hear another: he has written all
the old falshoods.
And now hear the reason. He conversed with Angels
who are all religious. & conversed not with Devils who
all hate religion. (157)
Thus what Blake retained from this early manu?
script draft was only the idea of the perverted
virtues, the early "equivalents" of the divine vir?
tues, plus four lines spoken by the devil, who does
not appear in the final version as a character at all.
Upon a second look, then, Blake saw "a divine
image" as clearly the better term for fallen man;
for all men, even the fallen, are still images of the
divine and each man is a particle of the total divine
image. But the effective irony of relating the in?
finite divine image to the physical, finite form of
376 William Blake and
earthly man Blake submerged beneath the un-
concealed anger of his poem "A Divine Image."
And after writing in the notebook drafts of
such poems as "Infant Sorrow," "Earth's Answer,"
"London," "Nurse's Song," and "The Tyger,"
Blake saw the divine aspect of the shining human
form fade into the light of a much too common
day.
The solution seemed to lie in making the titular
contrast to "The Divine Image" simpler, sharper,
while exploring the complexity and irony of the
contrast in the poem itself. "The Human Image"
thus evolved. The title itself satisfactorily mirrored
the fall, fragmentation, obscuring of vision, con-
traction to finiteness, and the rest. There remained
only one refinement to be made, again based upon
Blake's realization that the image of the divine had
been all but eradicated in the human. "The Human
Abstract" was precisely right: man had indeed
given dubious form to that which he had abstracted
from its essential form. "This Corporeal life's a
fiction," Blake wrote in The Everlasting Gospel,
"And is made up of Contradiction"; the human
abstract is, to paraphrase The Marriage of Heaven
and Hell, that portion of soul perceived by the
five senses of fallen, "religious" man, a human
form abstracted from divinity (and hence its real
humanity), what Blake calls later a "spectre." It
is what I have called the human form human.
This perversion is immediately apparent in the
first stanza of "The Human Abstract." Pity, one of
Blake's great virtues in innocence, is now manu-
factured by man in his blind egomania by creating
an object for that pity;7 and mercy is spawned by
a condition calculated to elicit its moral force. The
absolutes which were Blake's erstwhile divine vir?
tues have now become dependent for their very ex?
istence upon the vices against which they war.
Earthbound man sees as real only that portion of
existence which makes sense to his corporeal under-
standing. He sees only a ratio, as Blake called it
in There Is No Natural Religion. Imaginative
vision is dead. Hence Blake's label, "Contradic?
tion," on this life: virtue is the same as vice, for
without a vice there can be no virtue. It is like
saying a man is a man because he is not a woman,
or a man is the same as a woman because without
woman man would be indistinguishable.
Blake's divine image was not conditional or sepa-
rate; it incorporated the human as we have seen,
the human heart, face, form, and dress. Abstracted
from the corpus of the divine, however, the "vir?
tues" not only become selfish but also hypocritical-
ly disguise their true natures?cruelty, jealousy,
terror, and secrecy?under the old names (mercy,
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the Human Abstract
pity, peace, and love) and the old form (heart,
face, human form, and dress). Blake's intention in
"The Human Abstract" then was to analyze the
perversion while making it clear at the same time
that imaginatively (to the poet) it was a perver?
sion, rationally (to fallen man) it was not. In "A
Divine Image" he had simply done the former. "I
heard an Angel singing" was his firstattempt to do
both, the angel speaking for "The Divine Image,"
the devil for "A Divine Image":
I heard an Angel singing
When the day was springing
Mercy Pity Peace
Is the worlds release
Thus he sung all day
Over the new mown hay
Till the sun went down
And haycocks looked brown
I heard a Devil curse
Over the heath & the furze
Mercy could be no more
If there was nobody poor
And pity no more could be
If all were as happy as we
At his curse the sun went down
And the heavens gave a frown
And Miseries increase
Is Mercy Pity Peace
This was a step forward, as I have said, not only
in the addition of a second point of view but in
the balance of the first and last stanzas, a balance
he had great difficulty arriving at as the manu?
script shows (164). In the first stanza mercy, pity,
and peace "Is the worlds release." This is, of
course, a re-evoking of the efficacy of "The Divine
Image," whose corporate virtues (note the singu?
lar "Is") will effect a release from the bondage of
experience. In the last stanza, however, which
Blake carefully linked to the first with a rhyme,
mercy, pity, and peace no longer effect a release
but, in the devil's dialectic, rather subsist upon the
very miseries they presumably exist to prevent or
counteract. Interestingly Blake first thought of this
reversal in terms of practical effects, poverty and
ruin. Thus in the deleted fifth stanza of "I heard
an Angel singing" the normally beneficial rain,
which would have fallen before the harvest in the
angel's universe, in the devil's universe perversely
TBlake
changed the early version of the line, "If there
was nobody poor," to introducethe importantelementof
human will.
 Robert
falls hard on "the new reapd grain" and ruins the
farmers (the rain being ironically compared, in
line 3 of this stanza, to the descent of "Mercy &
Pity & Peace"). Therefore,
. . . Mercy Pity Peace
Joyd at their increase,
that is, the increase of ruined farmers, for such an
increase provides the raison dyetre for the world's
(the devil's) version of these virtues (Blake de?
leted the second line above and substituted "With
Povertys Increase" to make the point clear). As
yet Blake had not focused clearly on the real
enemy, the source of such cruelty and the cause of
such poverty, "the human brain" itself. But even
here, in "I heard an Angel singing," the contra-
diction The Everlasting Gospel speaks of is evi?
dent: whereas in "The Divine Image" love (the
human form divine) is made up of the other three
virtues, according to the worldly devil's rationale,
mercy, pity, and peace make up the human form
human and love is absent; the creation, instead of
being an act of mercy to provide man the oppor?
tunity to regain the divine unity from which he
fell, becomes a curse, the sun goes down with a
frown, and man is ruined in order to provide a
reason for Virtue's very existence. The forests of
experience and the tiger are imminent. The transi-
tion from this basic ambiguity, which may have
been too blatant for Blake, to the extreme subtlety
of the same ambiguity in "The Human Abstract"
is effected by a daring departure from conventional
handling of point of view, by symbolizing in the
tree of mystery the enslavement from which re?
lease is needed, and by focusing sharply upon the
source of all the worldly "evil," man's own self-
manacled brain.
Yet the transition is not without confusion. In "I
heard an Angel singing" the devil speaks of mercy
in terms of the poor and of pity in terms of hap-
piness; in "The Human Abstract" this is reversed:
Pity would be no more
If we did not make somebody Poor:
And Mercy no more could be,
If all were as happy as we:
The change is unsatisfactory, I think, but Blake's
reason for it was a good one. He simply did not
consider all the possibilities. Since he was no doubt
concerned with establishing the vices in their
proper places in the poem?as he had so meticu-
lously arranged them in "A Divine Image"?
jealousy (the contrary of pity) seemed to him the
natural earthly reaction of the poor to the rich,
and cruelty (the contrary of mercy) the logical
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F. Gleckner 377
cause for unhappiness. What he did not take into
consideration is the fact that pity and jealousy, as
represented by the human face, are more closely
allied to an expression of happiness or unhappi?
ness, and that mercy and cruelty, as the human
heart, are related more closely to poverty. In
either case, however, the virtues have been made
relative: pity has nothing really to do with poverty
but is only one manifestation of love; and mercy,
as a creative force, is an act of love. Without love
each becomes its opposite, cruel, selfish, uncreative,
and thoroughly "humanized."
Similarly, in the second stanza of "The Human
Abstract," peace depends not on human love but
on human fear and secrecy. The latter is the natu?
ral "dress" for life in experience?related of course
to Adam and Eve's shame, to "the little curtain of
flesh upon the bed of our desire" in The Book of
Thel, to the preference for clandestine love in ex?
perience, and to the covering up of the human
form divine by the human form human. Finally,
love itself is completely inverted: with the creation
of poverty, the causing of unhappiness, and the
stasis of mutual fear, selfish love increases and the
Urizenic night of terror takes over.
This method seems to have solved Blake's prob?
lem of subverting superficiality while at the same
time retaining power and even shock. The point of
view, however, is another thing again. In that re?
spect the poem creaks dangerously, for Blake has
asked it to hold too much. In fact it is difficultat
first to see clearly what Blake has done with the
ambiguous point of view, especially since, with
the discarding of the angel and devil of "I heard an
Angel singing," no speaker is mentioned. Closer
scrutiny of the stanza progression, however, re?
veals a subtle refinement of the over-all contra-
puntal structure so obvious in the earlier poem.
"The Human Abstract" has no repetition of phrase
or handy rhyme tie; Blake relies totally on atti?
tude and adjective.
The two points of view may be described as
man's (the earthly, unimaginative human) and the
poet's (the visionary bard who "Present, Past, &
Future sees"). In the first stanza man speaks, his
tone matter-of-fact as if his statement were in-
controvertibly true: "obviously" is understood.
But in the second stanza the tone, attitude, and
diction change, almost imperceptibly at first. The
"fact" of stanza one is now not pure fact but rather
fact valid only in the state of experience; and
added to this is an implicit comment by the bard.
The phrase "mutual fear" is the keynote, fol?
lowed by "selfish" (certainly not a word man, even
fallen man, would use to describe his own char-
378 William Blake and
acter), "Cruelty," "snare," and "baits" in quick
succession. Thus man speaks in the first stanza
and the bard in the second, but with a kind of
aside which subverts the "truth" of man's atti?
tudes and conclusions. Stanzas three and four carry
this on. In three, although "fears" is repeated it is
qualified by "holy," man's supreme adjective of
approbation,8 and the recounting of the tears and
the birth of "Humility" is sober, calm, and
straightforward.9 Stanza four again gives voice to
the bard's vision, which can see through this ap-
palling hypocrisy, with the mention of "dismal
shade," "Mystery," and the devouring caterpillar.
Stanza five reports on the blindness of man, to
whom the tree is merely a tree, and regardless of
name?apple, pear, or "Deceit"?its fruit is "ruddy
and sweet." Birds even nest in the tree, and it
does not matter to man whether they are doves or
ravens. It is, indeed, almost an idyllic picture of
man living in his false garden of Eden, something
like the infantile Har and Heva in Tiriel (100-
103). The bard closes the poem with his devastat-
ing comment on the whole business.
It is not difficult to see what Blake hoped to
accomplish by this kind of arrangement: every
other stanza brings the reader up short, forcing him
to re-read the previous stanza in the brighter light
of the bard's imagination. Thus after reading the
second stanza, one can translate the firstinto some?
thing like this:
Jealousy would never be
If poverty wasn't created;
And Cruelty will always be
Where there's happiness.
The fault with this kind of structure is obvious:
the poem becomes disconnected, jerky, and despite
the tight structure somehow uncoordinated. The
result is that the point of view ceases to operate?
it has been consistently overlooked?whereas it is
all-important; "A Divine Image" would do just
as well after all.
Yet Blake was aware that the thematic develop?
ment of "The Human Abstract" was infinitely su?
perior to that of "A Divine Image." After listing
in the first two stanzas the earthly counterparts
of the virtues of "The Divine Image"?jealousy,
cruelty, secrecy, and terror?Blake chose the core
of the Human, the human heart, to be the nexus of
the poem. The heart is no longer divine as it was
in innocence, but rather inhumanly cruel as stanza
one suggests.
Then Cruelty knits a snare,
And spreads his baits with care.
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the Human Abstract
The heart no longer evinces the selfless love that
leads to the higher innocence of wisdom, but rather
prepares a trap for all mankind, a "hungry Gorge"
as Blake called it in "A Divine Image." The heart
is a devourer; prolific love is dead.10 This situation
has come about through the cold war of mutual
fear and selfish love in the previous line, the love
which traps the joy instead of kissing it as it
flies.11"What is the Accusation of Sin / But Moral
Virtues' deadly Gin?" Blake asked in The Ever-
lasting Gospel; and moral virtue is, of course, the
product of selfhood, of the separation of body and
soul, of the abstraction of man from the human
form divine.
Still, after coldly baiting his trap, Cruelty un-
accountably seems to have twinges of conscience
and suddenly weeps tears of repentance. Such an
interpretation, however, is obviated by a net of
relationships set up in the previous stanza. "Mu?
tual fear" presupposes "selfish love," and if these
contradictory adjectives are interchangeable, the
one modifying "fears" in stanza three ("holy")
takes on new meaning. Fear is holy only on the
basis of rational analysis, because it is "mutual,"
because, finally, it is selfish. Consequently Cruelty's
8In stanza two Blake originallyhad Crueltyspreading
his "nets" to enslave man. This idea, in conjunctionwith
the "holiness" inculcatedby religionas the supremegood,
looks forwardto a strikingpassage in The Book of Urizen,
in which Urizen, fallen, wanders in his monster-ridden
world:
Till a Web dark & cold, throughoutall
The tormentedelement stretch'd
From the sorrows of TJrizenssoul.
And the Web is a Female in embrio.
None could break the Web, no wings of fire
So twistedthe cords & so knotted
The meshes: twisted like to the human brain
And all calld it The Net of Religion (235)
9
Again Blake's later developmentof the idea of humility
is helpful here. Man accepts humilityas a prime virtue
because it implies his similarityto the meek and mild
Christ. Again it is a result of man's fragmentednature,
his acceptance of his finiteness,his relegationof himself
to a lower order of things.Blake's attack upon this mis-
taken notionis implicitin manyof the Songs of Experience,
but is nowhereso clear as it is in The EverlastingGospel.
10Blake introducesthese
key terms,prolificand devourer,
in The Marriageof Heaven and Hell.
111 referhere to Blake's manuscriptpoem "Eternity":
He who binds to himselfa joy
Does the wingedlife destroy
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternityssun rise (179)
AlthoughKeynes reads "bends" for "binds'*Blake clearly
intendedthe latter as the manuscriptreveals.
 Robert
tears in the next line are immediately suspect and
serve only to nurture the Blakean sin of doubt:
Humility is only doubt,
And does the Sun & Moon blot out. {The Everlasting
Gospel)
The crucial perversion of rightful pride in one's
human form divine to a humbling of that human
form is made even clearer in another passage from
The Everlasting Gospel:
God wants not Man to humble himself:
This is the Trick of the Ancient Elf.
Humble toward God, Haughty toward Man,
This is the Race that Jesus ran,
And when he humbled himself to God,
Then descended the cruel rod.
"If thou humblest thyself, thou humblest me;
Thou also dwelst in Eternity.
Thou art a Man, God is no more,
Thine own Humanity learn to Adore."
In "The Human Abstract" that lesson is never
learned, and God exists in the Tree of Mystery
instead of the human breast.12
The rest of the poem follows logically from this
and is noteworthy mainly for its consistent, effec?
tive use of natural imagery, from the fertilization
of the ground to the bearing of fruit. Ironically
this natural cultivation leads to the intricacy of the
human brain?Blake's comment on the perversion
of man's natural instincts and processes by the god
of this world and his iron-clad "Thou shalt nots."
In the third stanza, then, Humility (the religion of
doubt) grows to produce Mystery (permanent
doubt grounded on false, unimaginative belief).
The light of innocence and true vision is shut out
by the "dismal shade," just as in "I heard an Angel
singing" at the devil's curse, the sun went down.
The divinely human level of "The Divine Image"
has thus been gradually lowered to the natural. Like
the fly, the "fruit of Deceit" is lovely to look at but
at best insubstantial, certainly sour, and at worst
even deadly, as the mention of the raven suggests.
Mercy, pity, peace are there if one loves the hu?
man; if one does not, the virtues must be simu?
lated in other terms by the perverted, enslaved
human brain. Those other terms are "Gods of the
earth and sea," not unlike those mentioned by
Blake in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell:
The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with
Gods or Geniuses, calling them by the names and
adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers,
mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their
enlarged & numerous senses could perceive.
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F. Gleckner 379
And particularly they studied the genius of each
city & country. placing it under its mental deity.
Till a system was formed, which some took advan-
tage of & enslav'd the vulgar by attempting to realize
or abstract the mental deities from their objects; thus
began Priesthood.
Choosing forms of worship from poetic tales.
And at length they pronouncd that the Gods had
orderd such things. (153)
Priesthood and "The Human Abstract" and "The
Gods of the earth and sea" all seek for the tree of
mystery in vain, for just as "all deities reside in
the human breast," so too all perversions of true
deity reside in man's manacled brain.
The bard, then, in the last stanza of "The
Human Abstract," makes his comment explicit in
one great imaginative burst of anger which calls
together all of the inflections, attitudes, and impli?
cations of the previous five stanzas. In manuscript,
however, Blake was apparently not quite satisfied
with this stanza's climactic capacity, and he im?
mediately tried another stanza to solidify his point:
They said this mysterynever shall cease
The priest [loves del.] promotes war & the soldier peace
There souls of men are bought & sold
And [cradled del.] milk fed infancy [is sold del."] for
gold
And youth to slaughter houses led
And [maidens del.'] beauty for a bit of bread (174)
Before etching the poem for Songs of Experience,
however, Blake came to see that specific social,
economic, religious, and political miseries were but
symptoms of the real disease, the cancerous tree
of mystery. What needed to be attacked, then,
were not devils, priests, merchants, kings, etc, but
man's own thinking processes, his refusal to ac-
knowledge the growth in his own skull, his all too
willing assumption that it lay only in the skulls of
others. Thus when Blake etched "The Human Ab?
stract" the image of the human has been totally
destroyed; rational abstraction and the brain which
manufactures such abstraction dominate the poem.
And if the etched last stanza doesn't quite pull the
whole poem into its vortex of bardic rage, the
poem as a whole is still a remarkably ambitious ex-
periment in progressive enrichment, and a reveal-
ing document for the study of Blake's two con?
trary states of the human soul.
Wayne State University
Detroit 2, Mich.
12Cf. The
Marriage of Heaven and Hell, plate 11 (153).