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Title: William Blake
Author: Chesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith)
Language: English
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*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "William Blake" ***
The Popular Library of Art
ALBRECHT DÜRER (37 Illustrations).
By LINA ECKENSTEIN.
ROSSETTI (53 Illustrations).
By FORD MADOX HUEFFER.
REMBRANDT (61 Illustrations).
By AUGUSTE BRÉAL.
FRED. WALKER (32 Illustrations and Photogravure).
By CLEMENTINA BLACK.
MILLET (32 Illustrations).
By ROMAIN ROLLAND.
LEONARDO DA VINCI (44 Illustrations).
By Dr GEORG GRONAU.
GAINSBOROUGH (55 Illustrations).
By ARTHUR B. CHAMBERLAIN.
THE FRENCH IMPRESSIONISTS (50 Illustrations).
By CAMILLE MAUCLAIR.
BOTTICELLI (37 Illustrations).
By JULIA CARTWRIGHT (Mrs ADY).
VELAZQUEZ (51 Illustrations).
By AUGUSTE BRÉAL.
WATTS (33 Illustrations).
By G. K. CHESTERTON.
RAPHAEL (50 Illustrations).
By JULIA CARTWRIGHT (Mrs ADY).
HOLBEIN (50 Illustrations).
By FORD MADOX HUEFFER.
ENGLISH WATER COLOUR PAINTERS (42 Illustrations).
By A. J. FINBERG.
WATTEAU (35 Illustrations).
By CAMILLE MAUCLAIR.
PERUGINO (50 Illustrations).
By EDWARD HUTTON.
THE PRE-RAPHAELITE BROTHERHOOD (38 Illustrations).
By FORD MADOX HUEFFER.
CRUIKSHANK (55 Illustrations).
By W. H. CHESSON.
WHISTLER (26 Illustrations).
By BERNHARD SICKERT.
HOGARTH (48 Illustrations).
By EDWARD GARNETT.
WILLIAM BLAKE (33 Illustrations).
By G. K. CHESTERTON.
[Illustration: FROM “SONGS OF INNOCENCE”
1789]
WILLIAM BLAKE
BY
G. K. CHESTERTON
AUTHOR OF “ROBERT BROWNING,” ETC.
[Illustration]
=LONDON=: DUCKWORTH & CO.
NEW YORK =E. P. DUTTON & CO.=
PRINTED BY
TURNBULL AND SPEARS,
EDINBURGH
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
THE LAMB _Frontispiece_
THE LILLY (1789) 13
THE DIVINE IMAGE (1789) 21
THE LITTLE BLACK BOY (1789) 27
THE SWAN (1789) 35
SPACE (1793) 43
OOTHOON (1793) 49
SPELLS OF LAW (1793) 55
FRONTISPIECE TO “AMERICA” (1793) 63
PRELUDIUM (1793) 69
A PROPHECY (1793) 77
A FEMALE DREAM (1793) 84
THE TYGER (1794) 91
HOLY THURSDAY (1794) 97
ARIEL 105
PRELUDIUM TO URIZEN (1794) 112
HAR AND HEVA (1795) 117
PHILANDER’S DUST (1796) 121
A GROUP (1804) 129
THE WATERS OF LIFE (1804) 136
PLOUGHING THE EARTH (1804) 141
THE EAGLE (1804) 147
“ALBION! AROUSE THYSELF!” (1804) 153
THE CRUCIFIXION (1804) 159
THE JUDGMENT DAY (1806) 165
THE TOMB (1806) 171
THE SELFHOOD OF DECEIT (1807) 177
THE SHEPHERDS (1821) 183
THE MORNING STARS (1821) 189
THE WHIRLWIND (1825) 195
THE JUST UPRIGHT MAN (1825) 202
FOR HIS EYES ARE UPON THE WAYS OF MAN (1825) 207
William Blake would have been the first to understand that the
biography of anybody ought really to begin with the words, “In the
beginning God created heaven and earth.” If we were telling the story
of Mr Jones of Kentish Town, we should need all the centuries to
explain it. We cannot comprehend even the name “Jones,” until we have
realised that its commonness is not the commonness of vulgar but of
divine things; for its very commonness is an echo of the adoration of
St John the Divine. The adjective “Kentish” is rather a mystery in that
geographical connection; but the word Kentish is not so mysterious as
the awful and impenetrable word “town.” We shall have rent up the roots
of prehistoric mankind and seen the last revolutions of modern society
before we really know the meaning of the word “town.” So every word
we use comes to us coloured from all its adventures in history, every
phase of which has made at least a faint alteration. The only right
way of telling a story is to begin at the beginning--at the beginning
of the world. Therefore all books have to be begun in the wrong way,
for the sake of brevity. If Blake wrote the life of Blake it would not
begin with any business about his birth or parentage.
Blake was born in 1757, in Carnaby Market--but Blake’s life of Blake
would not have begun like that. It would have begun with a great deal
about the giant Albion, about the many disagreements between the spirit
and the spectre of that gentleman, about the golden pillars that
covered the earth at its beginning and the lions that walked in their
golden innocence before God. It would have been full of symbolic wild
beasts and naked women, of monstrous clouds and colossal temples; and
it would all have been highly incomprehensible, but none of it would
have been irrelevant. All the biggest events of Blake’s life would have
happened before he was born. But, on consideration, I think it will
be better to tell the tale of Blake’s life first and go back to his
century afterwards. It is not, indeed, easy to resist temptation here,
for there was much to be said about Blake before he existed. But I will
resist the temptation and begin with the facts.
* * * * *
WILLIAM BLAKE was born on the 28th of November 1757 in Broad
Street, Carnaby Market. Like so many other great English artists and
poets, he was born in London. Like so many other starry philosophers
and flaming mystics, he came out of a shop. His father was James Blake,
a fairly prosperous hosier; and it is certainly remarkable to note how
many imaginative men in our island have arisen in such an environment.
Napoleon said that we English were a nation of shopkeepers; if he had
pursued the problem a little further he might have discovered why we
are a nation of poets. Our recent slackness in poetry and in everything
else is due to the fact that we are no longer a nation of shopkeepers,
but merely a nation of shop-owners. In any case there seems to be no
doubt that William Blake was brought up in the ordinary atmosphere
of the smaller English bourgeoisie. His manners and morals were
trained in the old obvious way; nobody ever thought of training his
imagination, which perhaps was all the better for the neglect. There
are few tales of his actual infancy. Once he lingered too long in the
fields and came back to tell his mother that he had seen the prophet
Ezekiel sitting under a tree. His mother smacked him. Thus ended the
first adventure of William Blake in that wonderland of which he was a
citizen.
His father, James Blake, was almost certainly an Irishman; his
mother was probably English. Some have found in his Irish origin an
explanation of his imaginative energy; the idea may be admitted,
but under strong reservations. It is probably true that Ireland, if
she were free from oppression, would produce more pure mystics than
England. And for the same reason she would still produce fewer poets.
A poet may be vague, and a mystic hates vagueness. A poet is a man
who mixes up heaven and earth unconsciously. A mystic is a man who
separates heaven and earth even if he enjoys them both. Broadly the
English type is he who sees the elves entangled in the forests of
Arcady, like Shakespeare and Keats: the Irish type is he who sees the
fairies quite distinct from the forest, like Blake and Mr W. B. Yeats.
If Blake inherited anything from his Irish blood it was his strong
Irish logic. The Irish are as logical as the English are illogical. The
Irish excel at the trades for which mere logic is wanted, such as law
or military strategy. This element of elaborate and severe reason there
certainly was in Blake. There was nothing in the least formless or
drifting about him. He had a most comprehensive scheme of the universe,
only that no one could comprehend it.
If Blake, then, inherited anything from Ireland it was his logic. There
was perhaps in his lucid tracing of a tangled scheme of mysticism
something of that faculty which enables Mr Tim Healy to understand
the rules of the House of Commons. There was perhaps in the prompt
pugnacity with which he kicked the impudent dragoon out of his front
garden something of the success of the Irish soldier. But all such
speculations are futile. For we do not know what James Blake really
was, whether an Irishman by accident or by true tradition. We do not
know what heredity is; the most recent investigators incline to the
view that it is nothing at all. And we do not know what Ireland is; and
we shall never know until Ireland is free, like any other Christian
nation, to create her own institutions.
Let us pass to more positive and certain things. William Blake grew
up slight and small, but with a big and very broad head, and with
shoulders more broad than were natural to his stature. There exists a
fine portrait of him which gives the impression of a certain squareness
in the mere plan of his face and figure. He has something in common, so
to speak, with the typically square men of the eighteenth century; he
seems a little like Danton, without the height; like Napoleon, without
the mask of Roman beauty; or like Mirabeau, without the dissipation
and the disease. He had abnormally big dark eyes; but to judge by this
plainly sincere portrait, the great eyes were rather bright than dark.
If he suddenly entered the room (and he was likely to have entered it
suddenly) I think we should have felt first a broad Bonaparte head
and broad Bonaparte shoulders, and then afterwards realised that the
figure under them was frail and slight.
His spiritual structure was somewhat similar, as it slowly built
itself up. His character was queer but quite solid. You might call
him a solid maniac or a solid liar; but you could not possibly call
him a wavering hysteric or a weak dabbler in doubtful things. With
his big owlish head and small fantastic figure he must have seemed
more like an actual elf than any human traveller in Elfland; he was
a sober native of that unnatural plain. There was nothing of the
obviously fervid and futile about Blake’s supernaturalism. It was not
his frenzy but his coolness that was startling. From his first meeting
with Ezekiel under the tree he always talked of such spirits in an
everyday intonation. There was plenty of pompous supernaturalism in the
eighteenth century; but Blake’s was the only natural supernaturalism.
Many reputable persons reported miracles; he only mentioned them. He
spoke of having met Isaiah or Queen Elizabeth, not so much even as if
the fact were indisputable, but rather as if so simple a thing were not
worth disputing. Kings and prophets came from heaven or hell to sit to
him, and he complained of them quite casually, as if they were rather
troublesome professional models. He was angry because King Edward I.
would blunder in between him and Sir William Wallace. There have been
other witnesses to the supernatural even more convincing, but I think
there was never any other quite so calm. His private life, as he laid
its foundations in his youth, had the same indescribable element; it
was a sort of abrupt innocence. Everything that he was destined to
do, especially in these early years, had a placid and prosaic oddity.
He went through the ordinary fights and flirtations of boyhood; and
one day he happened to be talking about the unreasonable ways of
some girl to another girl. The other girl (her name was Katherine
Boucher) listened with apparent patience until Blake used some phrase
or mentioned some incident which (she said) she really thought was
pathetic or, popularly speaking, “hard on him.” “Do you?” said William
Blake with great suddenness. “Then I love you.” After a long pause the
girl said in a leisurely manner, “I love you too.” In this brief and
extraordinary manner was decided a marriage of which the unbroken
tenderness was tried by a long life of wild experiments and wilder
opinions, and which was never truly darkened until the day when Blake,
dying in an astonishing ecstasy, named her only after God.
To the same primary period of his life, boyish, romantic, and
untouched, belongs the publication of his first and most famous books,
“Songs of Innocence and Experience.” These poems are the most natural
and juvenile things Blake ever wrote. Yet they are startlingly old and
unnatural poems for so young and natural a man. They have the quality
already described--a matured and massive supernaturalism. If there is
anything in the book extraordinary to the reader it is clearly quite
ordinary to the writer. It is characteristic of him that he could write
quite perfect poetry, a lyric entirely classic. No Elizabethan or
Augustan could have moved with a lighter precision than--
“O sunflower, weary of time,
That countest the steps of the sun.”
But it is also characteristic of him that he could and would put into
an otherwise good poem lines like--
“And modest Dame Lurch, who is always at church,
Would not have bandy children, nor fasting nor birch”;
lines that have no sense at all and no connection with the poem
whatever. There is a stronger and simpler case of contrast. There is
the quiet and beautiful stanza in which Blake first described the
emotions of the nurse, the spiritual mother of many children.
“When the voices of children are heard in the vale,
And laughter is heard on the hill,
My heart is at rest within my breast
And everything else is still.”
And here is the equally quiet verse which William Blake afterwards
wrote down, equally calmly--
“When the laughter of children is heard on the hill,
And whisperings are in the dale,
The days of my youth rise fresh in my mind,
My face turns green and pale.”
That last monstrous line is typical. He would mention with as easy
an emphasis that a woman’s face turned green as that the fields were
green when she looked at them. That is the quality of Blake which is
most personal and interesting in the fixed psychology of his youth.
He came out into the world a mystic in this very practical sense,
that he came out to teach rather than to learn. Even as a boy he was
bursting with occult information. And all through his life he had the
deficiencies of one who is always giving out and has no time to take
in. He was deaf with his own cataract of speech. Hence it followed that
he was devoid of patience while he was by no means devoid of charity:
but impatience produced every evil effect that could practically have
come from uncharitableness: impatience tripped him up and sent him
sprawling twenty times in his life. The result was the unlucky paradox,
that he who was always preaching perfect forgiveness seemed not to
forgive even imperfectly the feeblest slights. He himself wrote in a
strong epigram--
“To forgive enemies Hayley does pretend,
Who never in his life forgave a friend.”
[Illustration: THE LILLY (1789)]
But the effect of the epigram is a little lost through its considerable
truth if applied to the epigrammatist. The wretched Hayley had himself
been a friend to Blake--and Blake could not forgive him. But this was
not really lack of love or pity. It was strictly lack of patience,
which in its turn was due to that bursting and almost brutal mass of
convictions with which he plunged into the world like a red-hot cannon
ball, just as we have already imagined him plunging into a room with
his big bullet head. His head was indeed a bullet; it was an explosive
bullet.
Of his other early relations we know little. The parents who are often
mentioned in his poems, both for praise and blame, are the abstract
and eternal father and mother and have no individual touches. It might
be inferred, perhaps, that he had a special emotional tie with his
elder brother Robert, for Robert constantly appeared to him in visions
and even explained to him a new method of engraving. But even this
inference is doubtful, for Blake saw the oddest people in his visions,
people with whom neither he nor any one else has anything particular to
do; and the method of engraving might just as well have been revealed
by Bubb Doddington or Prester John or the oldest baker in Brighton.
That is one of the facts that makes one fancy that Blake’s visions
were genuine. But whoever taught him his own style of engraving, an
ordinary mortal engraver taught him the ordinary mortal style, and
he seems to have learnt it very well. When apprenticed by his father
to a London engraving business he was diligent and capable. All his
life he was a good workman, and his failures, which were many, never
arose from that common idleness or looseness of life attributed to the
artistic temperament. He was of a bitter and intolerant temper, but not
otherwise unbusiness-like; and he was prone to insult his patrons, but
not, as a rule, to fail them. But with this part of his character we
shall probably have to deal afterwards. His technical skill was very
great. This and a certain original touch also attracted to the young
artist the attention and interest of the sculptor Flaxman.
The influence of this great man on Blake’s life and work has been
gravely underrated. The mistake has arisen from causes too complex
to be considered, at any rate at this stage; but they resolve
themselves into a misunderstanding of the nature of classicism and
of the nature of mysticism. But this can be said decisively: Blake
remained a Flaxmanite to the day of his death. Flaxman as a sculptor
and draughtsman stood, as everybody knows, for classicism at its
clearest and coldest. He would admit no line into a modern picture
that might not have been on a Greek bas-relief. Even foreshortening
and perspective he avoided as if there were something grotesque
about them--as, indeed, there is. Nothing can be funnier, properly
considered, than the fact that one’s own father is a pigmy if he stands
far enough off. Perspective really is the comic element in things.
Flaxman vaguely felt this; Flaxman shrank from the almost insolent
foreshortenings of Rubens or Veronese as he would have shrank from the
gigantic boots in the foreground of an amateur photograph. For him high
art was flat art in painting or drawing, everything could be done by
pure line upon a single plane. Flaxman is probably best known to the
existing public by his illustrations in line to Pope’s “Homer,”--which
have certainly copied most exquisitely the austere limitations of Greek
vases and reliefs. Anger may be uttered by the lifted arm or sorrow by
the sunken head, but the faces of all those gods and heroes are, as
you may think them, beautiful or foolish, like the faces of the dead.
Above all, the line must never falter and come to nothing; Flaxman
would regard a line fading away in such a picture as we should regard a
railway line fading away upon a map.
This was the principle of Flaxman; and this remained to the day of
his death one of the firmest principles of William Blake. I will not
say that Blake took it from the great sculptor, for it formed an
integral part of Blake’s individual artistic philosophy; but he must
have been encouraged to find it in Flaxman and strengthened in it by
the influence of an older and more famous man. No one can understand
Blake’s pictures, no one can understand a hundred allusions in his
epigrams, satires, and art criticism who does not first of all realise
that William Blake was a fanatic on the subject of the firm line. The
thing he loved most in art was that lucidity and decision of outline
which can be seen best in the cartoons of Raphael, in the Elgin
Marbles, and in the simpler designs of Michael Angelo. The thing he
hated most in art was the thing which we now call Impressionism--the
substitution of atmosphere for shape, the sacrifice of form to tint,
the cloudland of the mere colourist. With that cyclopean impudence
which was the most stunning sign of his sincerity, he treated the
greatest names not only as if they were despicable, but as if they were
actually despised. He reasons mildly with the artistic authorities,
saying--
“You must admit that Rubens was a fool,
And yet you make him master in your school,
And give more money for his slobberings
Than you will give for Raphael’s finest things.”
And then, with one of those sudden lunges of sense which made him a
swordsman after all, he really gets home upon Rubens--
“I understood Christ was a carpenter
And not a brewer’s drayman, my good sir.”
In another satire he retells the fable of the dog, the bone, and the
river, and permits (with admirable humour) the dog to expatiate upon
the vast pictorial superiority of the bone’s reflection in the river
over the bone itself; the shadow so delicate, suggestive, rich in tone,
the real bone so hard and academic in outline. He was the sharpest
satirist of the Impressionists who ever wrote, only he satirised the
Impressionists before they were born.
[Illustration: THE DIVINE IMAGE (1789)]
The ordinary history of Blake would obviously be that he was a man
who began as a good engraver and became a great artist. The inner
truth of Blake could hardly be better put than this: that he was a
good artist whose idea of greatness was to be a great engraver. For
him it was no mere technical accident that the art of reproduction
had to cut into wood or bite into stone. He loved to think that even
in being a draughtsman he was also a sculptor. When he put his lines
on a decorative page he would have much preferred to carve them out
of marble or cut them into rock. Like every true romantic, he loved
the irrevocable. Like every true artist, he detested india-rubber.
Take, for the sake of example, all the designs to the Book of Job.
When he gets the thing right he gets it suddenly and perfectly right,
as in the picture of all the sons of God shouting for joy. We feel
that the sons of God might really shout for joy at the excellence of
their own portrait. When he gets it wrong he gets it completely and
incurably wrong, as in the preposterous picture of Satan dancing among
paving-stones. But both are equally final and fixed. If one picture
is incurably bad, the other picture is incurably good. Courage (which
is, with kindness, the only fundamental virtue in man), is present and
prodigious in both. No coward could have drawn such pictures.
The chief movement of Blake either in art or literature was the first
publication of the batch of his own allegorical works. “The Gates of
Paradise” came first, and was followed by “Urizen” and the “Book of
Thel.” With these he introduced his own mode of engraving and began his
own style of decorative illustration. That style was steeped in the
Blake and Flaxman feeling for the hard line and the harsh and heroic
treatment. There were, of course, many other personalities besides
that of Flaxman which were destined to influence the art of William
Blake. Among others, the personality of William Blake influences it
not inconsiderably. But no influence ever disturbed the love of the
absolute academic line. If the reader will look at any of the designs
of Blake, many of which are reproduced in this book, he will see the
main fact which I mention here. Many of them are hideous, some of
them are outrageous, but none of them are shapeless; none of them are
what would now be called “suggestive”; none of them (in a word) are
timid. The figure of man may be a monster, but he is a solid monster.
The figure of God may be a mistake, but it is an unmistakable mistake.
About this same time Blake began to illustrate books, decorating
Blair’s “Grave” and the Book of Job with his dark but very definite
designs. In these plates it is quite plain that the artist, when he
errs, errs not by vagueness but by hardness of treatment. The beauty
of the angel upside down who blows the trumpet in the face of Blair’s
skeleton is the beauty of a perfect Greek athlete. And if the beauty
is the beauty of an athlete, so the ugliness is the ugliness of an
athlete--or perhaps of an acrobat. The contortions and clumsy attitudes
of some of Blake’s figures do not arise from his ignorance of the
human anatomy. They arise from a sort of wild knowledge of it. He is
straining muscles and cracking joints like a sportsman racing for a cup.
These book illustrations by Blake are among the simplest and strongest
designs of his pencil, which at its best (to do him justice) tended
to the simple and the strong. Nothing (for instance) could well be
more comic or more tragic than the fact that Blake should illustrate
Blair’s elephantine epic called “The Grave.” It was as well that Blake
and Blair should meet over the grave. It was about all they had in
common. The poet was full of the most crushing platitudes of eighteenth
century rationalism. The artist was full of a poetry that would have
seemed frightful to the poet, a poetry inherited from the mystics of
all ages and handed on to the mystics of to-day. Blake was the child
of the Rosy Cross and the Eleusinian Mysteries; he was the father of
the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and even of the “Yellow Book.” But of
all this the excellent Mr Blair was innocent, and so, indeed, in all
probability was the excellent Mr Blake. But the really interesting
point is this: that the illustrations were efficient and satisfactory,
from the Blair as well as the Blake point of view. The cut, for
instance, with the figure of the old man bowing his head to enter the
black grotto of the grave is a fine piece of drawing, apart from its
meaning, and is all the finer for its simplicity. But wherever he errs
it is always in being too hard and harsh, not too faint or fanciful.
Blake was a greater man than Flaxman, though a less perfectly poised
man. He was harder than his master, because he was madder. The figure
upside down blowing the trumpet is as perfect as a Flaxman figure: only
it is upside down. Flaxman upside down is almost a definition of Blake.
[Illustration: THE LITTLE BLACK BOY (1789)]
* * * * *
SUCH an elementary statement of Blake’s idea of art is not out
of place at this stage; for his convictions had formed and hardened
unusually early, and his career is almost unintelligible apart from his
opinions. It is fairly eccentric even with them. Flaxman had introduced
him to literary society, especially to the evening parties of a
Blue-stocking named Mrs Matthews. Here his force of mind was admitted;
but he was not personally very popular. Most of his biographers
attribute this to his “unbending deportment,” and a certain almost
babyish candour which certainly belonged to him. But I cannot help
thinking that the fact that he was in the habit of singing his own
poems to tunes invented by himself may perhaps have had something to
do with it. His opinions on all subjects were not only positive but
aggressive. He was a fierce republican and denouncer of kings. But Mrs
Matthews was probably accustomed to fierce republicans who denounced
kings. She may have been less accustomed to a gentleman who insisted on
wearing a red cap of liberty in ordinary society. It is due to Blake to
say that his politics showed nevertheless that eccentric practicality
which was mixed up with his unworldliness; it was certainly through his
presence of mind that Tom Paine did not perish on the scaffold.
But Blake had none of the marks of the poetical weakling, of the mere
moon-calf of mysticism. If he was a madman, one can emphasise the word
man as well as the word mad. For instance, in spite of his sedentary
trade and his pacific theories, he had extraordinary physical courage.
Not that reasonable minimum of physical courage which is guaranteed
by certain conventional sports, but intrinsic contempt of danger,
a readiness to put himself into unknown perils. He would suddenly
attack men much bigger and stronger than himself, and that with such
violence that they were often defeated by their own amazement. He
attacked a huge drayman who was harsh to some women and beat him in
the most excited manner. He leapt upon a Lifeguardsman who came into
his front garden, and ran that astonished warrior into the road by the
elbows. The vivacity and violence of these physical outbreaks must
be remembered and allowed for when we are judging some of his mental
outbreaks. The most serious blot (indeed, the only serious blot) on
the moral character of Blake was his habit of letting his rage get the
better not only of decency but of gratitude and truth. He would abuse
his benefactors as virulently as his enemies. He left epigrams lying
about in which he called Flaxman a blockhead and Hayley (as far as the
words can be understood) a seducer and an assassin. But the curious
thing is that he often did justice to the same people both before and
after such eruptions. The truth is, I fancy, that such writings were
like sudden attitudes or bodily movements. We talk of a word and a
blow; with Blake a word had the same momentary character as a blow. It
was not a judgment, but a gesture. He had little or no feeling of the
idea that “litera scripta manet.” He did not see any particular reason
why he should not be fond of a man merely because he had called the man
a murderer a few days before. And he was innocently surprised if the
man was not fond of him. In this he was perhaps rather feminine than
masculine.
He had many friends and acquaintances of distinction besides Flaxman.
Among them was the great Priestley, whose speculations were the life
of early Unitarianism and whose Jacobin sympathies led to something
not far from martyrdom; other friends were the wild optimist Godwin
and his daughter Mary Wollstonecraft. But although he gained many new
acquaintances he gained only one new helper. This was a Mr Thomas
Butts, who lived in Fitzroy Square, and ought to have a statue there,
for he is an eternal model and monument for all patrons of art. While
in all other respects apparently a sane and rational British merchant,
he conceived an affection for Blake’s allegorical designs. But he gave
no commissions for pictures; he simply gave Blake money for pictures
as fast as Blake chose to paint them. The subject and size and medium
were left entirely to the artist. One day Blake might leave at Fitzroy
Square a little water-colour of the “Soul of a Porcupine”; the next
day a gorgeous and intricate illumination in gold of the obstetrics
and birth of Cain; the next day an enormous mural painting of Hector
capturing the arms of Patroclus; the following day a simple pen and ink
drawing of the prophet Habbakuk taken from life. All these Mr Thomas
Butts of Fitzroy Square received with solid benevolence and paid for in
solid coin. Many modern writers and painters may think of such a patron
somewhat dreamily. He had his reward, though it was unique rather than
particularly practical. Blake regarded him with a serene affection
which was never ruffled by the flying storms that were too frequent
in his friendships. No allusions can be found in his poetry to the
effect that Thomas Butts was a Spectre from Satan’s Loins. No epigram
was discovered among Blake’s papers accusing Mr Butts of bereaving
anybody’s life. If to have kept one’s own temper with Blake was a large
achievement (and it was not a small one), it was certainly a truly
noble achievement to have kept Blake’s temper for him. And this Mr
Butts and Mrs Blake can alone really claim to have done. For Blake was
to pass under a patron who showed him how different is kindness from
sympathy.
In the year 1800 he effected a change of residence which was in many
ways an epoch in his life. He was a Londoner, though doubtless a
Londoner of the time when London was small enough to feel itself on
every side to be on the edge of the country. Still Blake had never in
any true sense been in the heart of the country. In his earliest poems
we read of seraphs stirring in the trees; but we have somehow a feeling
that they were garden trees. We read of saints and sages walking in
the fields, and we almost have the feeling that they were brickfields.
The perfect landscape is pastoral to the point of conventionality; it
has not in any sense the actual smell of England. The sights of the
town are evidently as native (one might say vital) with him as any
of the sights of the country. The black chimney-sweep is as obvious as
the white lamb. What is worse still, the white lamb of England is no
more natural or native than the alien golden lion of Africa. He was, in
fact, a Cockney, like Keats; and Cockneys as a class tend to have too
poetical and luxuriantly imaginative a view of life. Blake was about
as little affected by environment as any man that ever lived in this
world. Still he did change his environment, and it did change him.
[Illustration: THE SWAN (1789)]
There lived about this time near the little village of Eartham, in
Sussex, a simple, kind-hearted but somewhat consequential squire of the
name of Hayley. He was a landlord and an aristocrat; but he was not
one of those whose vanity can be wholly fulfilled by such functions.
He considered himself a patron of poetry; and indeed he was one; but,
alas! he had a yet more alarming idea. He also considered himself a
poet. Whether any one agreed with that opinion while he still ruled the
estates and hunted the country it is difficult now to discover. It is
sufficiently certain that nobody agrees with it now. “The Triumphs of
Temper,” the only poem by Hayley that any modern person can remember,
is probably only remembered because it was used to round off scornfully
one of the ringing sentences in Macaulay’s Essays. Nevertheless in his
own time Hayley was a powerful and important man, quite unshaken as yet
as a poet, quite unshakeable as a landed proprietor. But like almost
all quite indefensible English oligarchs, he had a sort of unreasonable
good nature which somehow balanced or protected his obvious unfitness
and ineptitude. His heart was in the right place, though he was in
the wrong one. To this blameless and beaming lord of creation, too
self-satisfied to be arrogant, too solemnly childish to be cynical,
too much at his ease to doubt either others or himself, to him Flaxman
introduced, at him rather Flaxman threw, the red-hot cannon-ball called
Blake. I wonder whether Flaxman laughed. But laughter convulses and
crumples up the pure outline of the Greek profile.
Hayley, who was in his way as munificent as Mæcenas (and I suspect
that Mæcenas was quite as stupid as Hayley), gave Blake a cottage in
Felpham, a few miles from his own house, a cottage with which Blake
almost literally fell in love. He writes as if he had never seen an
English country cottage before; and perhaps he never had. “Nothing,”
he cries in a kind of ecstasy, “can ever be more grand than its
simplicity and usefulness. Simple and without intricacy, it seems to
be the spontaneous expression of humanity, congenial to the wants of
man. No other formed house can ever please me so well.” It is probably
true that none ever did. All that was purest and most chivalrous in his
poetry and philosophy flowered in the great winds that pass and repass
between the noble Sussex hills and the sea. He was always a happy man,
since he had a God. But here he was almost a contented man.
By this time had passed over Blake’s head first the beginning and then
the growing blackness of the great French terror. Blake was now in a
world in which even he could not venture to walk about in a red cap.
Moreover, like most of the men of genius of that age and school, like
Coleridge and like Shelley, he seems to have been slightly sickened
with the full sensational actuality of the French tragedy; and
somewhat unreasonably having urged the rebels to fight, complained
because they killed people. If sincere revolutionists like Blake and
Coleridge were disappointed at the Revolution, the English Government
and governing class were against it with a solidity of desperation.
People talk about the reign of terror in France; but allowing for the
difference of national temperament and national peril, the two things
were twin; there was a reign of terror in England. A gentleman was
sent to penal servitude (which some gentlemen find worse than the
guillotine) if he said that the Prince Regent was fat. Our terror was
as cruel as Robespierre’s, but more cowardly, just as our press-gang
was as cruel as conscription, only more cowardly. Everywhere that the
Government could knock down an enemy as if by accident, could brain a
Jacobin with some brutal club of legal coincidence, the thing was done.
Many such blows were struck in that time, and one of them was struck at
Blake.
On a certain morning in the August of 1803 Blake walked out into his
garden and found standing there a trooper of the 1st Dragoons
in a scarlet coat, surveying the landscape with a satisfied air of
possession. Blake expressed a desire that the dragoon should leave the
garden. The dragoon expressed a desire to knock out Blake’s eyes, “with
many abominable imprecations.” Blake sprang upon the man with startling
activity, and catching him from behind by both elbows ran him out of
the garden as if he were a perambulator. The man, who was probably
drunk and must certainly have been surprised, went off with many verbal
accusations, but none of a political nature. A little while afterwards,
however, he turned up with a grave legal statement to the effect that
Blake had taken the opportunity to utter these somewhat improbable
words: “Damn the king, damn all his subjects, damn his soldiers,
they are all slaves: when Bonaparte comes it will be cut-throat for
cut-throat. I will help him.” The impartial critic will be inclined to
say that few persons would have even the breath to utter such political
generalisations while at the same time running one of the Dragoon
Guards bodily out of the gate; and it was not alleged that the incident
took more than half a minute. Blake may possibly or even probably have
said “damn,” but the rest of the sentence originated, I imagine, in the
mind of someone else. But although most of Blake’s biography treats the
case as a mere clumsy accident, I can hardly think that it was so. It
involves too much of a coincidence. Why did not the dragoon wander into
some other garden? Why did not some other poet have to deal with the
dragoon? It seems odd that the man of the red cap should be the one man
to wrestle with the man of the red coat. It was a time of tyranny, and
tyranny is always full of small intrigues. It is not at all impossible
that the police, as we should now put it, really tried to entrap
Blake. But there entered upon the scene something which in England is
stronger even than the police. Hayley, not the small Hayley who was
the author of the “Triumphs of Temper,” but the colossal Hayley, who
was the squire of Eartham and Bognor, entered the court with the extra
aristocratic charm of an accident in the hunting-field. He defended
Blake with generosity and good sense, such as seldom fail his class on
such occasions; and Blake was acquitted. It was said that the evidence
was incomplete; but I fancy that if Hayley had not come the evidence
would have been complete enough.
[Illustration: SPACE (1793)]
It is unfortunate that this excellent attitude of Hayley nevertheless
coincides to a great extent with the solution of the bonds that bound
him to Blake. “The Visions were angry with me at Felpham,” said the
poet, which was his way of stating that he was somewhat bored with the
benevolence of the English gentry. “Voices of celestial inhabitants
were _not_ more distinctly heard, nor their forms more distinctly
seen,” in the neighbourhood of the Squire of Eartham than in that of Mr
Butts of Fitzroy Square; and Blake abruptly returned to London, taking
lodgings just off Oxford Street. He started at once on a work with the
promising title, “Jerusalem, the Emanation of the Giant Albion.” I say
there is a certain pathos in this parting from Hayley, for he was now
to fall into the power of a much more unpleasant kind of capitalist.
Poor Blake fell indeed from bad to worse in the matter of patrons.
Butts was sensible and sympathetic, Hayley was honest and silly. And
his last protector seems to have been something very like a swindler.
The name of this benevolent being was Richard Hartley Cromek, a
Yorkshireman, and a publisher. He found Blake in bitter poverty after
his breach with Hayley (he and his wife lived on 10s. a week), and his
method of sweating was of the simplest and most artistic character. He
used to go to Blake, tell him that he would give him the engraving of
a number of designs; he would easily make Blake talk enthusiastically,
show his sketches and so on; then having got the sketches he would go
away and give the engraving to somebody else. This annoyed Blake. It
is pleasant to reflect that it was about Cromek that the best of his
epigrams was written--
“A petty sneaking knave I knew ...
Oh, Mr. Cromek, how do you do?”
Blake’s irritation broke out, as was common with him, not over the
clearest but over the most confused case of Cromek’s misconduct.
The publisher had seen a design by Blake of Chaucer’s “Canterbury
Pilgrims,” and commissioned Blake to complete it. A few days
afterwards Cromek found himself in the studio of the popular painter
Stothard, and suggested the subject to him. Stothard finished his
picture first and it appeared before Blake’s. Blake went into one of
his worst rages and wrote one of his best pieces of prose.
* * * * *
A BROTHER artist said of Blake, with beautiful simplicity,
“He is a good man to steal from.” The remark is as philosophical
as it is practical. Blake had the great mark of real intellectual
wealth; anything that fell from him might be worth picking up. What
he dropped in the street might as easily be half-a-sovereign as a
halfpenny. Moreover, he invited theft in this further sense, that his
mental wealth existed, so to speak, in the most concentrated form. It
is easier to steal half-a-sovereign in gold than in halfpence. He was
literally packed with ideas--with ideas which required unpacking. In
him and his works they were too compressed to be intelligible; they
were too brief to be even witty. And as a thief might steal a diamond
and turn it into twenty farms, so the plagiarist of Blake might steal
a sentence and turn it into twenty volumes. It was profitable to steal
an epigram from Blake for three reasons--first, that the original
phrase was small and would not leave a large gap; second, that it was
cosmic and synthetic and could be applied to things in general; third,
that it was unintelligible and no one would know it again. I could give
innumerable instances of what I mean; I will let one instance stand
for the rest. In the middle of that long poem which is so disconnected
that it may reasonably be doubted whether it is a long poem at all (I
mean that commonly bearing the title “The Auguries of Innocence”), he
introduces these two lines:
“When gold and gems adorn the plough
To peaceful arts shall envy bow.”
A careless and honest man would read these lines and make nothing of
them. A careful thief might make out of them a whole entertaining and
symbolic romance, like “Gulliver’s Travels” or “Erewhon.” The idea
obviously is this;--that we still for some reason admit the tools of
destruction to be nobler than the tools of production, because
decorative art is expended on the one and not on the other. The sword
has a golden hilt; but no plough has golden handles. There is such a
thing as a sword of state; there is no such thing as a scythe of state.
Men come to court wearing imitation swords; few men come to court
wearing imitation flails. It is fascinating to reflect how fantastic
a story might be written upon this hint by Blake. But Blake does not
write the story; he only gives the hint, and that so hurriedly that
even as a hint it may hardly be understood.
[Illustration: OOTHOON (1793)]
Most of Blake’s quarrels were trivial, and some were little short of
discreditable. But in his quarrel with Cromek and Stothard he does
really stand as the champion of all that is heroic and ideal, as
against all that is worldly and insincere. The celebrated Stothard was
at this time in the height of his earlier success; he occupied somewhat
the same relation to art and society that has been occupied within our
own time by Frederic Leighton. He was, like Leighton, an accomplished
draughtsman, a man of slight but genuine poetic feeling, an artist
who thoroughly realised that the aim of art was to please. Ruskin
said of him very truly (I forget the exact words) that there were no
thorns to his roses. At the same time, his smoothness was a smoothness
of innocence rather than a smoothness of self-indulgence; his work
has a girlish timidity rather than any real conventional cowardice;
he was a true artist in a somewhat effeminate style of art. Nor is
there any reason to doubt that his personal character was as clean and
good-natured as his pictures. It may be that he began his _Canterbury
Pilgrims_ without any commission from Cromek, or it may be that he took
the commission from Cromek without the least idea that the conception
had been borrowed from Blake. That Cromek treated Blake badly is beyond
dispute; that Stothard treated him badly is unproved; but Blake was
not much in the habit of waiting for proof in such cases. Stothard,
I say, may not have been morally in the wrong at all. But he was
intellectually and critically very much in the wrong; and Blake pointed
this out in a pamphlet which, though defaced here and there with his
fantastic malice, is a solid and powerful contribution to artistic and
literary criticism.
Stothard, the elegant gentleman, the man of sensibility, the eighteenth
century æsthete, cast his condescending eye upon the Middle Ages. He
was of that age and school that only saw the Middle Ages by moonlight.
Chaucer’s Pilgrims were to him a quaint masquerade of hypocrisy or
superstition, now only interesting from its comic or antiquated
costume. The monk was amusing because he was fat, the wife of Bath
because she was gay, the Squire because he was dandified, and so on.
Blake knew as little about the Middle Ages as Stothard did; but Blake
knew about eternity and about man; he saw the image of God under all
garments. And in a rage which may really be called noble he tore in
pieces Stothard’s antiquarian frivolity, and asked him to look with a
more decent reverence at the great creations of a great poet. Stothard
called the young Squire of Chaucer “a fop.” Blake points out forcibly
and with fine critical truth that the daintiness of the Squire’s dress
is the mere last touch to his youth, gaiety, and completeness; but
that he was no fop at all, but a serious, chivalrous, and many-sided
gentleman who enjoyed books, understood music, and was hardy and prompt
in battle. Moreover, he is definitely described as humble, reverent,
and full of filial respect. That such a man should be called a fop
because of a frill or a feather Blake rightly regarded as a sign of the
mean superficiality of his rival’s ideas. Stothard spoke of “the fair
young wife of Bath”; Blake placidly points out that she had had four
husbands, and was, as in Blake’s picture, a loud, lewd, brazen woman
of quite advanced age, but of enormous vitality and humour. Stothard
makes the monk the mere comic monk of commonplace pictures, shaped like
a wine barrel and as full of wine. Blake points out that Chaucer’s monk
was a man, and an influential man; not without sensual faults, but also
not without dignity and authority. Everywhere, in fact, he reminds his
opponent that in entering the world of Chaucer he is not entering a
fancy-dress ball, but a temple carved with colossal and eternal images
of the gods of good and evil. Stothard was only interested in Chaucer’s
types because they were dead; Blake was interested in them because
they cannot die. In many of Blake’s pictures may be found one figure
quite monotonously recurrent--the figure of a monstrously muscular old
man, with hair and beard like a snowstorm, but with limbs like young
trees. That is Blake’s root conception; the Ancient of Days; the thing
which is old with all the awfulness of its past, but young with all the
energies of its future.
[Illustration: SPELLS OF LAW (1793)]
I make no excuse for dwelling at length on this in a life of Blake;
it is the most important event. It is worth while to describe this
quarrel between Blake and Stothard, because it is really a symbolic
quarrel, interesting to the whole world of artists and important to
the whole destiny of art. It is the quarrel between the artist who is
a poet and the artist who is only a painter. In many of his merely
technical designs Blake was a better and bolder artist than Stothard;
still, I should admit, and most people who saw the two pictures would
be ready to admit, that Stothard’s _Canterbury Pilgrims_ as a mere
piece of drawing and painting is better than Blake’s. But this if
anything only makes the whole argument more certain. It is the duel
between the artist who wishes only to be an artist and the artist who
has the higher and harder ambition to be a man--that is, an archangel.
Or, again, it might be put thus: whether an artist ought to be a
universalist or whether he is better as a specialist. Now against the
specialist, against the man who studies only art or electricity, or
the violin, or the thumbscrew or what not, there is only one really
important argument, and that, for some reason or other, is never
offered. People say that specialists are inhuman; but that is unjust.
People say an expert is not a man; but that is unkind and untrue. The
real difficulty about the specialist or expert is much more singular
and fascinating. The trouble with the expert is never that he is not
a man; it is always that wherever he is not an expert he is too much
of an ordinary man. Wherever he is not exceptionally learned he is
quite casually ignorant. This is the great fallacy in the case of what
is called the impartiality of men of science. If scientific men had
no idea beyond their scientific work it might be all very well--that
is to say, all very well for everybody except them. But the truth is
that, beyond their scientific ideas, they have not the absence of
ideas but the presence of the most vulgar and sentimental ideas that
happen to be common to their social clique. If a biologist had no
views on art and morals it might be all very well. The truth is that
a biologist has all the wrong views of art and morals that happen to
be going about in the smart set in his time. If Professor Tyndall had
held no views about politics, he could have done no harm with his views
about evolution. Unfortunately, however, he held a very low order of
political ideas from his sectarian and Orange ancestry; and those
ideas have poisoned evolution to this day. In short, the danger of the
mere technical artist or expert is that of becoming a snob or average
silly man in all things not affecting his peculiar topic of study;
wherever he is not an extraordinary man he is a particularly stupid
ordinary man. The very fact that he has studied machine guns to fight
the French proves that he has not studied the French. Therefore he will
probably say that they eat frogs. The very fact that he has learnt
to paint the light on medieval armour proves that he has not studied
the medieval philosophy. Therefore he will probably suppose that
medieval barons did nothing but order vassals into the dungeons beneath
the castle moat. Now all through the eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries art, that is, the art of painting, suffered terribly from
this conventional and uncultured quality in the working artist. People
talk about something pedantic in the knowledge of the expert; but what
ruins mankind is the ignorance of the expert. In the period of which we
speak the experts in painting were bursting with this ignorance. The
early essays of Thackeray are full of the complaint, that the whole
trouble with painters was that they only knew how to paint. If they had
painted unimportant or contemptible subjects, all would have been well;
if they had painted the nearest donkey or lamp-post no one would have
complained. But exactly because they were experts they fell into the
mere snobbish sentimentalism of their times; they insisted on painting
all the things they had read about in the cheapest history books and
the most maudlin novels. As Thackeray has immortally described in the
case of Mr Gandish, they painted Boadishia and declared that they
had discovered “in their researches into ’istry” the story of King
Alfred and the Cakes. In other words, the expert does not escape his
age; he only lays himself open to the meanest and most obvious of the
influences of his age. The specialist does not avoid having prejudices;
he only succeeds in specialising in the most passing and illiterate
prejudices.
Of all this type of technical ignorance Stothard is absolutely typical.
He was an admirable instance of the highly cultivated and utterly
ignorant man. He had spent his life in making lines swerve smoothly and
shadows creep exactly into their right place; he had never had any time
to understand the things that he was drawing except by their basest and
most conventional connotation. Somebody suggested that he should draw
some medieval pilgrims--that is, some vigorous types in the heyday of
European civilisation in the act of accepting the European religion.
But he who alone could draw them right was especially likely to see
them wrong. He had learnt, like a modern, the truth from newspapers,
because he had no time to read even encyclopedias. He had learnt how
to paint armour and armorial bearings; it was too much to expect him
to understand them. He had learnt to draw a horse; it was too late to
ask him to ride one. His whole business was somehow or other to make
pictures; and therefore when he looked at Chaucer, he could see nothing
but the picturesque.
Against this sort of sound technical artist, another type of artist has
been eternally offered; this was the type of Blake. It was also the
type of Michael Angelo; it was the type of Leonardo da Vinci; it was
the type of several French mystics, and in our own country and recent
period, of Rossetti. Blake, as a painter among other things, belongs
to that small group of painters who did something else besides paint.
But this is indeed a very inadequate way of stating the matter. The
fuller and fairer way is this: that Blake was one of those few painters
who understood his subject as well as his picture. I have already
said that I think Stothard’s picture of the _Canterbury Pilgrims_ in
a purely technical sense better than his. Indeed, there is nothing
to be said against Stothard’s picture of the _Canterbury Pilgrims_,
except that it is not a picture of the _Canterbury Pilgrims_. Blake
(to summarise the whole matter as simply as it can be summarised) was
in the tradition of the best and most educated ideas about Chaucer;
Stothard was the inheritor of the most fashionable ideas and the worst.
The whole incident cannot be without its moral and effect for all
discussions about the morality or unmorality of art. If art could be
unmoral it might be all very well. But the truth is that unless art is
moral, art is not only immoral, but immoral in the most commonplace,
slangy, and prosaic way. In the future, the fastidious artists who
refuse to be anything but artists will go down to history as the
embodiment of all the vulgarities and banalities of their time. People
will point to a picture by Mr Sargent or Mr Shannon and say, “See, that
man had caught all the most middle class cant of the early twentieth
century.”
[Illustration: FRONTISPIECE TO “AMERICA”]
We can now recur, however, to the general relations of Blake with his
later patron. In a phrase of singular unconscious humour Mr Cromek
accused Blake of “a want of common politeness.” Common politeness
certainly can hardly be said to have been Blake’s strong point. But
Cromek’s politeness was certainly an uncommon sort of politeness.
One is tempted to be thankful that it is not a common sort. Cromek’s
notion of common politeness was to give the artist a guinea a drawing
on the understanding that he should get some more for engraving them,
and then give the engraving to somebody else who cost him next to
nothing. Blake, as we have said, resented this startling simplicity
of swindling. Blake was in such matters a singular mixture of madness
and shrewdness in the judgment of such things. He was the kind of man
whom a publisher found at one moment more vague and viewless than
any poet, and at the next moment more prompt and rapacious than any
literary agent. He was sometimes above his commercial enemy, sometimes
below him; but he never was on his level; one never knew where he was.
Cromek’s letter is a human document of extraordinary sincerity and
interest. The Yorkshire publisher positively breaks for once in his
life into a kind of poetry. He describes Blake as being “a combination
of the serpent and the dove.” He did not quite realise, perhaps, that
according to the New Testament he was paying Blake a compliment. But
the truth is, I fancy, that the painter and poet had been one too many
for the publisher. I think that on any occasion Cromek would have
willingly forgiven Blake for showing the harmlessness of the dove. I
fancy that on one occasion Blake must have shown the wisdom of the
serpent.
From the mere slavery of this sweater Blake was probably delivered by
the help of the last and most human of his patrons, a young man named
John Linnell, a landscape painter and a friend of the great Mulready.
It is extraordinary to think that he was young enough to die in 1882;
and that a man who had read in the Prophetic Books the last crusades
of Blake may have lived to read in the newspapers some of the last
crusades of Gladstone. This man Linnell covers the last years of Blake
as with an ambulance tent in the wilderness. Blake never had any ugly
relations with Linnell, just as he had never had any with Butts. His
quarrels had wearied many friends; but by this time I think he was too
weary even to quarrel. On Linnell’s commission he began a system of
illustrations to Dante; but I think that no one expected him to live to
finish it.
* * * * *
HIS last sickness fell upon him very slowly, and he does not
seem to have taken much notice of it. He continued perpetually his
pictorial designs; and as long as they were growing stronger he seems
to have cared very little for the fact that he was growing weaker
himself. One of the last designs he made was one of the strongest
he ever made--the tremendous image of the Almighty bending forward,
foreshortened in a colossal perspective, to trace out the heavens with
a compass. Nowhere else has he so well expressed his primary theistic
ideas--that God, though infinitely gigantic, should be as solid as
a giant. He had often drawn men from the life; not unfrequently he
had drawn his dead men from the life. Here, according to his own
conceptions, he may be said to have drawn God from the life. When he
had finished the portrait (which he made sitting up in his sick-bed)
he called out cheerfully, “What shall I draw after that?” Doubtless
he racked his brain for some superlative spirit or archangel which
would not be a mere bathos after the other. His rolling eyes (those
round lustrous eyes which one can always see roll in his painted
portraits) fell on the old frail and somewhat ugly woman who had been
his companion so long, and he called out, “Catherine, you have been
an angel to me; I will draw you next.” Throwing aside the sketch of
God measuring the universe, he began industriously to draw a portrait
of his wife, a portrait which is unfortunately lost, but which must
have substantially resembled the remarkable sketch which a friend drew
some months afterwards; the portrait of a woman at once plain and
distinguished, with a face that is supremely humorous and at once harsh
and kind. Long before that portrait was drawn, long before those months
had elapsed, William Blake was dead.
[Illustration: PRELUDIUM (1793)]
Whatever be the explanation, it is quite certain that Blake had more
positive joy on his death-bed than any other of the sons of Adam. One
has heard of men singing hymns on their death-beds, in low plaintive
voices. Blake was not at all like that on his death-bed: the room
shook with his singing. All his songs were in praise of God, and
apparently new: all his songs were songs of innocence. Every now and
then he would stop and cry out to his wife, “Not mine! Not mine!”
in a sort of ecstatic explanation. He truly seemed to wait for the
opening of the door of death as a child waits for the opening of the
cupboard on his birthday. He genuinely and solemnly seemed to hear
the hoofs of the horses of death as a baby hears on Christmas eve the
reindeer-hooves of Santa Claus. He was in his last moments in that
wonderful world of whiteness in which white is still a colour. He would
have clapped his hands at a white snowflake and sung as at the white
wings of an angel at the moment when he himself turned suddenly white
with death.
* * * * *
AND NOW, after a due pause, someone will ask and we must
answer a popular question which, like many popular questions, is really
a somewhat deep and subtle one. To put the matter quite simply, as the
popular instinct would put it, “Was William Blake mad?” It is easy
enough to say, of course, in the non-committal modern manner that it
all depends on how you define madness. If you mean it in its practical
or legal sense (which is perhaps the most really useful sense of all),
if you mean was William Blake unfit to look after himself, unable to
exercise civic functions or to administer property, then certainly the
answer is “No.” Blake was a citizen, and capable of being a very good
citizen. Blake, so far from being incapable of managing property, was
capable (in so far as he chose) of collecting a great deal of it. His
conduct was generally business-like; and when it was unbusiness-like
it was not through any subhuman imbecility or superhuman abstraction,
but generally through an unmixed exhibition of very human bad temper.
Again, if when we say “Was Blake mad?” we mean was he fundamentally
morbid, was his soul cut off from the universe and merely feeding on
itself, then again the answer is emphatically “No.” There was nothing
defective about Blake; he was in contact with all the songs and smells
of the universe, and he was entirely guiltless of that one evil element
which is almost universal in the character of the morbidly insane--I
mean secrecy. Yet again, if we mean by madness anything inconsistent
or unreasonable, then Blake was not mad. Blake was one of the most
consistent men that ever lived, both in theory and practice. Blake may
have been quite wrong, but he was not in the least unreasonable. He was
quite as calm and scientific as Herbert Spencer on the basis of his own
theory of things. He was vain to the last degree; but it was the gay
and gusty vanity of a child, not the imprisoned pride of a maniac. In
all these aspects we can say with confidence that the man was not at
least obviously mad or completely mad. But if we ask whether there was
not some madness about him, whether his naturally just mind was not
subject to some kind of disturbing influence which was not essential to
itself, then we ask a very different question, and require, unless I am
mistaken, a very different answer.
When all Philistine mistakes are set aside, when all mystical ideas
are appreciated, there is a real sense in which Blake was mad. It
is a practical and certain sense, exactly like the sense in which
he was not mad. In fact, in almost every case of his character and
extraordinary career we can safely offer this proposition, that if
there was something wrong with it, it was wrong even from his own best
standpoint. People talk of appealing from Philip drunk to Philip sober;
it is easy to appeal from Blake mad to Blake sane.
When Blake lived at Felpham angels appear to have been as native to
the Sussex trees as birds. Hebrew patriarchs walked on the Sussex
Downs as easily as if they were in the desert. Some people will be
quite satisfied with saying that the mere solemn attestation of such
miracles marks a man as a madman or a liar. But that is a short cut of
sceptical dogmatism which is not far removed from impudence. Surely we
cannot take an open question like the supernatural and shut it with a
bang, turning the key of the mad-house on all the mystics of history.
To call a man mad because he has seen ghosts is in a literal sense
religious persecution. It is denying him his full dignity as a citizen
because he cannot be fitted into your theory of the cosmos. It is
disfranchising him because of his religion. It is just as intolerant
to tell an old woman that she cannot be a witch as to tell her that
she must be a witch. In both cases you are setting your own theory of
things inexorably against the sincerity or sanity of human testimony.
Such dogmatism at least must be quite as impossible to anyone calling
himself an agnostic as to anyone calling himself a spiritualist. You
cannot take the region called the unknown and calmly say that though
you know nothing about it, you know that all its gates are locked. You
cannot say, “This island is not discovered yet; but I am sure that
it has a wall of cliffs all round it and no harbour.” That was the
whole fallacy of Herbert Spencer and Huxley when they talked about the
unknowable instead of about the unknown. An agnostic like Huxley must
concede the possibility of a gnostic like Blake. We do not know enough
about the unknown to know that it is unknowable.
If, then, people call Blake mad merely for seeing ghosts and angels,
we shall venture to dismiss them as highly respectable but very
bigoted people. But then, again, there is another line along which the
same swift assumption can be made. While he was at Felpham Blake’s
eccentricity broke out on another side. A quality that can frankly
be called indecency appeared in his pictures, his opinions, and to
some extent in his conduct. But it was an idealistic indecency. Blake’s
mistake was not so much that he aimed at sin as that he aimed at an
impossible and inhuman sinlessness. It is said that he proposed to his
wife that they should live naked in their back garden like Adam and
Eve. If the husband ever really proposed this, the wife succeeded in
averting it. But in his verse and prose, particularly in some of the
Prophetic Books, he began to talk very wildly. However far he really
meant to go against common morality, he certainly meant (like Walt
Whitman) to go the whole way against common decency. He professed
to regard the veiling of the most central of human relations as the
unnatural cloaking of a natural work. He was never at a loss for an
effective phrase; and in one of his poems on this topic he says finely
if fallaciously--
“Does the sower sow by night
Or the ploughman in darkness plough?”
[Illustration: A PROPHECY (1793)]
But his speculations went past decorum and at least touched the idea
of primary law. In some parts of the Prophetic Books (written in the
period which may fairly be called a paroxysm) he really seems to be
preaching the idea that sin is sometimes a good thing because it leads
to forgiveness. I cannot think this idea does much credit to Blake’s
power of logic, which was generally good. The very fact of forgiveness
implies that what led up to it was evil. But though the position is
hardly rational, it is quite unfair to say that it is insane. It is no
sillier or more untenable than a hundred sophistries that one may hear
at every tea-table or read in every magazine. A little while ago the
family of a young lady attempted to shut her up in an asylum because
she believed in Free Love. This atrocious injustice was stopped; but
many people wrote to the papers to say that marriage was a very fine
thing--as indeed it is. Of course the answer was simple: that if
everyone with silly opinions were locked up in an asylum, the asylums
of the twentieth century would have to be somewhat unduly enlarged. The
same common-sense applies to the case of Blake. That he did maintain
some monstrous propositions proves that he was not always right,
that he had even a fine faculty for being exceedingly wrong. But it
does not prove that he was a madman or anything remotely resembling
one. Nor is there any reason to suppose that he was carried into any
practice inconsistent with his strong domestic affections. Indeed, I
think that much of Blake’s anarchy is connected with his innocence. I
have noticed the combination more than once, especially in men of Irish
blood like Blake. Heavy, full-blooded men feel the need of bonds and
are glad to bind themselves. But the chaste are often lawless. They
are theoretically reckless, because they are practically pure. Thus
Ireland, while it is the island of rebels is also the island of saints,
and might be called the island of virgins.
* * * * *
BUT when we have reached this point--that this ugly element in
Blake was an intrusion of Blake’s mere theory of things--we have come,
I think, very close to the true principle to be pursued in estimating
his madness or his sanity. Blake the mere poet, would have been decent
and respectable. It was Blake the logician who was forced to be almost
blackguardly. In other words, Blake was not mad; for such part of him
as was mad was not Blake. It was an alien influence, and in a sense
even an accidental one; in an extreme sense it might even be called
antagonist. Properly to appreciate what this influence was, we must see
the man’s artistic character as a whole and notice what are its biggest
forces and its biggest defects when taken in the bulk--in the whole
mass of his poetry, his pictures, his criticism and his conversation.
Blake’s position can be summed up as a sufficiently simple problem.
Blake could do so many things. Why is it that he could do none of them
quite right?
Blake was not a frail or fairy-like sort of person; he had not the
light unity, the capering completeness of the entirely irresponsible
man. He had not the independence, one might almost say the omnipotence,
that comes from being hopelessly weak. There was nothing in him of Mr
Skimpole; he was not a puff of silver thistledown. He was not a reed
shaken in the wind in Jordan. He was rather an oak rooted in England,
but an oak half killed by the ivy. The interesting question of
spiritual botany is--What was the ivy that half killed him? Originally
his intellect was not only strong but strongly rational--one might
almost say strongly sceptical. There never was a man of whom it was
less true to say (as has been said) that he was a light sensitive
lyrist, a mere piper of pretty songs for children. His mind was like
a ruined Roman arch; it has been broken by barbarians; but what there
is of it is Roman. So it was with William Blake’s reason; it had
been broken (or cracked) by something; but what there was of it was
reasonable. In his art criticism he never said anything that was not
strictly consistent with his first principles. In his controversies,
in the many matters in which he argued angrily or venomously, he never
lost the thread of the argument. Like every great mystic he was also a
great rationalist. Read Blake’s attack upon Stothard’s picture of the
_Canterbury Pilgrims_, and you will see that he could not only write
a quite sensible piece of criticism, but even a quite slashing piece
of journalism. By nature one almost feels that he might have done
anything; have conducted campaigns like Napoleon or studied the stars
like Newton. But something, when all is said and done, had eaten away
whole parts of that powerful brain, leaving parts of it standing like
great Greek pillars in a desert. What was this thing?
[Illustration: A FEMALE DREAM (1793)]
* * * * *
MADNESS is not an anarchy. Madness is a bondage: a
contraction. I will not call Blake mad because of anything he would
say. But I will call him mad in so far as there was anything he _must_
say. Now, there are notes of this tyranny in Blake. It was not like the
actual disease of the mind that makes a man believe he is a cat or a
dog; it was more like the disease of the nerves, which makes a man say
“dog” when he means “cat.” One mental jump or jerk of this nature may
be especially remarked in Blake. He had in his poetry one very peculiar
habit, a habit which cannot be considered quite sane. It was the habit
of being haunted, one may say hag-ridden by a fixed phrase, which gets
itself written in ten separate poems on quite different subjects, when
it had no apparent connection with any of them. The amusing thing is
that the omnipresent piece of poetry is generally the one piece that is
quite incomprehensible. The verse that Blake’s readers can understand
least seems always to be the verse that Blake likes best. I give an
ordinary instance, if anything connected with Blake can be called
ordinary.
The harmless Hayley, who was a fool, but a gentleman and a poet (a
country gentleman and a very minor poet), provoked Blake’s indignation
by giving him commissions for miniatures when he wanted to do something
else, probably frescoes as big as the house. Blake wrote the epigram--
“If Hayley knows the thing you cannot do,
That is the very thing he’ll set you to.”
And then, feeling that there was a lack of colour and warmth in the
portrait, he lightly added, for no reason in particular, the lines--
“And when he could not act upon my wife,
Hired a villain to bereave my life.”
There is, apparently, no trace here of any allusion to fact. Hayley
never tried to bereave anybody’s life. He lacked even the adequate
energy. Nevertheless I should not say for a moment that this startling
fiction proved Blake to be mad. It proved him to be violent and
recklessly suspicious; but there was never the least doubt that he
was that. But now turn to another poem of Blake’s, a merely romantic
and narrative poem called “Fair Eleanor,” which is all about somebody
acting on somebody else’s wife. Here we find the same line repeated
word for word in quite another connection--
“Hired a villain to bereave my life.”
It is not a musical line; it does not resemble English grammar to
any great extent. Yet Blake is somehow forced to put it into a poem
about a real person exactly as he had put it into an utterly different
poem about a fictitious person. There seems no particular reason for
writing it even once; but he has to write it again and again. This is
what I do call a mad spot on the mind. I should not call Blake mad for
hating Hayley or for boiling Hayley (though he had done him nothing
but kindness), or for making up any statements however monstrous or
mystical about Hayley. I should not in the least degree think that
Blake was mad if he had said that he saw Hayley’s soul in hell, that
it had green hair, one eye, and a serpent for a nose. A man may have a
wild vision without being insane; a man may have a lying vision without
being insane. But I should smell insanity if in turning over Blake’s
books I found that this one pictorial image obsessed him apart from
its spiritual meaning; if I found that the arms of the Black Prince
in “King Edward III.” were a cyclops vert rampant, nosed serpentine;
if I found that Flaxman was praised for his kindness to a one-eyed
animal with green bristles and a snaky snout; if Albion or Ezekiel had
appeared to Blake and commanded him to write a history of the men in
the moon, who are one-eyed, green-haired, with long curling noses; if
any flimsy sketch or fine decorative pattern that came from Blake’s
pencil might reproduce ceaselessly and meaninglessly the writhing
proboscis and the cyclopean eye. I should call _that_ morbidity or even
madness; for it would be the triumph of the palpable image over its own
intellectual meaning. And there is something of that madness in the
dark obstinacy or weakness that makes Blake introduce again and again
these senseless scraps of rhyme, as if they were spells to keep off the
devil.
In four or five different poems, without any apparent connection with
those poems, occur these two extraordinary lines--
“The caterpillar on the leaf
Repeats to thee thy mother’s grief.”
In the abstract this might perhaps mean something, though it would,
I think, take most people some time to see what it could mean. In
the abstract it may perhaps involve some allusion to a universal law
of sacrifice in nature. In the concrete--that is, in the context--it
involves no allusion to anything in heaven or earth. Here is another
couplet that constantly recurs--
“The red blood ran from the grey monk’s side,
His hands and his feet were wounded wide.”
This is worse still; for this cannot be merely abstract. The ordinary
rational reader will naturally exclaim at last, with a not unnatural
explosion, “Who the devil is the grey monk? and why should he be always
bleeding in places where he has no business?” Now to say that this sort
of thing is not insanity of some kind is simply to play the fool
with the words. A madman who writes this may be higher than ordinary
humanity; so may any madman in Hanwell. But he is a madman in every
sense that the word has among men. I have taken this case of actual and
abrupt irrelevance as the strongest form of the thing; but it has other
forms almost equally decisive. For instance, Blake had a strong sense
of humour, but it was not under control; it could be eclipsed and could
completely disappear. There was certainly a spouting fountain of fierce
laughter in the man who could write in an epigram--
“A dirty sneaking knave I knew ...
Oh, Mr. Cromek, how do you do?”
[Illustration: THE TYGER (1794)]
Yet the laughter was as fitful as it was fierce; and it can suddenly
fail. Blake’s sense of humour can sometimes completely desert him. He
writes a string of verses against cruelty to the smallest creature as a
sort of mystical insult to the universe. It contains such really fine
couplets as these--
“Each outcry of the hunted hare
A fibre from the brain can tear.”
“A skylark wounded in the wing,
A cherubim does cease to sing.”
Or again, in a more fanciful but genuinely weird way--
“He who torments the chafer’s sprite
Weaves a bower in endless night.”
And then, after all this excellent and quite serious poetry, Blake can
calmly write down the following two lines--
“He who the ox to wrath has moved
Shall never be by woman loved.”
One could hardly find a more Gilbertian absurdity in the conjunction of
ideas in the whole of the “Bab Ballads” than the idea that the success
of some gentleman in the society of ladies depends upon whether he has
previously at some time or other slightly irritated an ox. Such sudden
inaccesibility to laughter must be called a morbid symptom. It must
mean a blind spot on the brain. The whole thing, of course, would prove
nothing if Blake were a common ranter incapable of writing well, or a
common dunce incapable of seeing a joke. Such a man might easily be
sane enough: he might be as sane as he was stupid. If Blake had always
written badly he might be sane. But a man who could write so well and
did write so badly must be mad.
What was it that was eating away a part of Blake’s brain? I venture
to offer an answer which in the eyes of many people will have nothing
to recommend it except the accident of its personal sincerity. I
firmly believe that what did hurt Blake’s brain was the reality of his
spiritual communications. In the case of all poets, and especially in
the case of Blake, the phrase “an inspired poet” commonly means a good
poet. About Blake it is specially instinctive. And about Blake, I am
quite convinced, it is specially untrue. His inspired poems were not
his good poems. His inspired poems were very often his particularly bad
ones; they were bad by inspiration. If a ploughman says that he saw a
ghost, it is not quite sufficient to answer merely that he is a madman.
It may have been seeing the ghost that drove him mad. His lunacy may
not prove the falsehood of his tale, but rather its terrible truth. So
in the same way I differ from the common or sceptical critics of a man
like Blake. Such critics say that his visions were false because he was
mad. I say he was mad because his visions were true. It was exactly
because he was unnaturally exposed to a hail of forces that were more
than natural that some breaches were made in his mental continuity,
some damage was done to his mind. He was, in a far more awful sense
than Goldsmith, “an inspired idiot.” He was an idiot because he was
inspired.
When he said of “Jerusalem” that its authors were in eternity, one can
only say that nobody is likely to go there to get any more of their
work. He did not say that the author of “The Tyger” was in eternity;
the author of that glorious thing was in Carnaby Market. It will
generally be found, I think, with some important exceptions, that
whenever Blake talked most about inspiration he was actually least
inspired. That is, he was least inspired by whatever spirit presides
over good poetry and good thinking. He was abundantly inspired by
whatever spirit presides over bad poetry or bad thinking. Whatever
god specialises in unreadable and almost unpronounceable verse
was certainly present when he invented the extraordinary history of
“William Bond” or the maddening metre of the lines “To Mr Butts.”
Whatever archangel rules over utter intellectual error had certainly
spread his wings of darkness over Blake when he came to the conclusion
that a man ought to be bad in order to be pardoned. But these
unthinkable thoughts are mostly to be found in his most unliterary
productions; notably in the Prophetic Books. To put my meaning broadly,
the opinions which nobody can agree with are mostly in the books that
nobody can read. I really believe that this was not from Blake, but
from his spirits. It is all very well for great men, like Mr Rossetti
and Mr Swinburne, to trust utterly to the seraphim of Blake. They may
naturally trust angels--they do not believe in them. But I do believe
in angels, and incidentally in fallen angels.
[Illustration: HOLY THURSDAY (1794)]
* * * * *
THERE is no danger to health in being a mystic; but there
may be some danger to health in being a spiritualist. It would be a
very poor pun to say that a taste for spirits is bad for the health;
nevertheless, oddly enough, though a poor pun it is a perfectly
correct philosophical parallel. The difference between having a
real religion and having a mere curiosity about psychic marvels is
really very like the difference between drinking beer and drinking
brandy, between drinking wine and drinking gin. Beer is a food as
well as a stimulant; so a positive religion is a comfort as well as
an adventure. A man drinks his wine because it is his favourite wine,
the pleasure of his palate or the vintage of his valley. A man drinks
alcohol merely because it is alcoholic. So a man calls upon his gods
because they are good or at any rate good to him, because they are
the idols that protect his tribe or the saints that have blessed his
birthday. But spiritualists call upon spirits merely because they
are spirits; they ask for ghosts merely because they are ghosts. I
have often been haunted with a fancy that the creeds of men might be
paralleled and represented in their beverages. Wine might stand for
genuine Catholicism and ale for genuine Protestantism; for these at
least are real religions with comfort and strength in them. Clean
cold Agnosticism would be clean cold water, an excellent thing, if
you can get it. Most modern ethical and idealistic movements might
be well represented by soda-water--which is a fuss about nothing. Mr
Bernard Shaw’s philosophy is exactly like black coffee--it awakens
but it does not really inspire. Modern hygienic materialism is very
like cocoa; it would be impossible to express one’s contempt for it in
stronger terms than that. Sometimes, very rarely, one may come across
something that may honestly be compared to milk, an ancient and heathen
mildness, an earthly yet sustaining mercy--the milk of human kindness.
You can find it in a few pagan poets and a few old fables; but it is
everywhere dying out. Now if we adopt this analogy for the sake of
argument, we shall really come back to the bad pun; we shall conclude
that a taste for spiritualism is very like a taste for spirits. The
man who drinks gin or methylated spirit does it only because it makes
him super-normal; so the man who with tables or planchettes invokes
supernatural beings invokes them only because they are supernatural.
He does not know that they are good or wise or helpful. He knows that
he desires the deity, but he does not even know that he likes him. He
attempts to invoke the god without adoring him. He is interested in
whatever he can find out touching supernatural existence; but he is not
really filled with joy as by the face of a divine friend, any more than
anyone actually likes the taste of methylated spirit. In such psychic
investigations, in a word, there is excitement, but not affectional
satisfaction; there is brandy, but no food.
Now Blake was in the most reckless, and sometimes even in the most
vulgar, sense a spiritualist. He threw the doors of his mind open to
what the late George Macdonald called in a fine phrase “the canaille
of the other world.” I think it is impossible to look at some of the
pictures which Blake drew, under what he considered direct spiritual
dictation, without feeling that he was from time to time under
influences that were not only evil but even foolishly evil. I give
one case out of numberless cases. Blake drew, from his own vision a
head which he called _The Man who built the Pyramids_. Anyone can
appreciate the size and mystery of the idea; and most people would form
some sort of fancy of how a great poetical painter, such as Michael
Angelo or Watts, would have rendered the idea; they can conceive a face
swarthy and secret, or ponderous and lowering, or staring and tropical,
or Appolonian and pure. Whatever was the man who built the pyramids,
one feels that he must (to put it mildly) have been a clever man. We
look at Blake’s picture of the man, and with a start behold the face
of an idiot. Nay, we behold even the face of an evil idiot, a leering,
half-witted face with no chin and the protuberant nose of a pig. Blake
declared that he drew this face from a real spirit, and I see no reason
to doubt that he did. But if he did, it was not really the man who
built the pyramids; it was not any spirit with whom a gentleman ought
to wish to be on intimate terms. That vision of swinish silliness was
really a bad vision to have, it left a smell of demoniac silliness
behind it. I am very sure that it left Blake sillier than it found him.
In this way, rightly or wrongly, I explain the chaos and occasional
weakness which perplexes Blake’s critics and often perplexed Blake
himself. I think he suffered from the great modern loneliness and
scepticism which is the root of the sorrows of the mere spiritualist.
The tragedy of the spiritualist simply is that he has to know his gods
before he loves them. But a man ought to love his gods before he is
sure that there are any. The sublime words of St John’s Gospel permit
of a sympathetic parody; if a man love not God whom he has not seen,
how shall he love God whom he has seen? If we do not delight in Santa
Claus even as a fancy, how can we expect to be happy even if we find
that he is a fact? But a mystic like Blake simply puts up a placard for
the whole universe, like an old woman letting lodgings. The mansion of
his mind was indeed a magnificent one; but no one must be surprised if
the first man that walked into it was “the man who built the pyramids,”
the man with the face of a moon-calf. And whether or no he built the
pyramids, he unbuilt the house.
But this conclusion touching Blake’s original sanity but incidental
madness brings us abruptly in contact with the larger question of
how far his soul and creed gained or suffered from his whole position;
his heterodoxy, his orthodoxy, his attitude towards his age. Properly
to do all this we must do now at the end of this book what ought (but
the form of the book forbade) more strictly to have been done at the
beginning; we must speak as shortly as possible about the actual age
in which Blake lived. And we cannot do it without saying something,
which we will say as briefly as possible, of that whole great western
society and tradition to which he belonged and we belong equally; that
Christendom or continent of Europe which is at once too big for us to
measure and too close for us to understand.
[Illustration: ARIEL]
What was the eighteenth century? Or rather (to speak less mechanically
and with more intelligence), what was that mighty and unmistakable
phase or mood through which western society was passing about the time
that William Blake became its living child? What was that persistent
trend or spirit which all through the eighteenth century lifted itself
like a very slow and very smooth wave to the deafening breaker of the
French Revolution? Of course it meant something slightly different to
all its different children. Let us here ask ourselves what it meant to
Blake, the poet, the painter, and the dreamer. Let us try to state the
thing as nearly as possible in terms of his spirit and in relation to
his unique work in this world.
Every man of us to-day is three men. There is in every modern European
three powers so distinct as to be almost personal, the trinity of our
earthly destiny. The three may be rudely summarised thus. First and
nearest to us is the Christian, the man of the historic church, of the
creed that must have coloured our minds incurably whether we regard it
(as I do) as the crown and combination of the other two, or whether
we regard it as an accidental superstition which has remained for two
thousand years. First, then, comes the Christian; behind him comes
the Roman, the citizen of that great cosmopolitan realm of reason and
order in the level and equality of which Christianity arose. He is the
stoic who is so much sterner than the anchorites. He is the republican
who is so much prouder than kings. He it is that makes straight roads
and clear laws, and for whom good sense is good enough. And the third
man--he is harder to speak of. He has no name, and all true tales of
him are blotted out; yet he walks behind us in every forest path and
wakes within us when the wind wakes at night. He is the origins--he
is the man in the forest. It is no part of our subject to elaborate
the point; but it may be said in passing that the chief claim of
Christianity is exactly this--that it revived the pre-Roman madness,
yet brought into it the Roman order. The gods had really died long
before Christ was born. What had taken their place was simply the god
of government--Divus Cæsar. The pagans of the real Roman Empire were
nothing if not respectable. It is said that when Christ was born the
cry went through the world that Pan was dead. The truth is that when
Christ was born Pan for the first time began to stir in his grave. The
pagan gods had become pure fables when Christianity gave them a new
lease of life as devils. I venture to wager that if you found one man
in such a society who seriously believed in the personal existence of
Apollo, he was probably a Christian. Christianity called to a kind
of clamorous resurrection all the old supernatural instincts of the
forests and the hill. But it put upon this occult chaos the Roman idea
of balance and sanity. Thus, marriage was a sacrament, but mere sex
was not a sacrament as it was in many of the frenzies of the forest.
Thus wine was a sacrament with Christ; but drunkenness was not a
sacrament as with Dionysus. In short, Christianity (merely historically
seen) can best be understood as an attempt to combine the reason of
the market-place with the mysticism of the forest. It was an attempt
to accept all the superstitions that are necessary to man and to be
philosophic at the end of them. Pagan Rome has sought to bring order or
reason among men. Christian Rome sought to bring order and reason among
gods.
* * * * *
GIVEN these three principles, the epoch we discuss can be
defined. The eighteenth century was primarily the return of reason--and
of Rome. It was the coming to the top of the stoic and civic element in
that triple mixture. It was full, like the Roman world, of a respect
for law. Note that the priest still wears, in the main, the popular
garb of the Middle Ages: but the lawyer still wears the head-dress of
the eighteenth century. Yet while the Roman world was full of rule it
was also full of revolution. But indeed the two things necessarily
go together. The English used to boast that they had achieved a
constitutional revolution; but every revolution must necessarily be a
constitutional revolution, in so far that it must have reference to
some antecedent theory of justice. A man must have rights before he
can have wrongs. So it may be constantly remarked that the countries
which have done most to spread legal generalisations and judicial
decisions are those most filled with political fury and potential
rebellion--Rome, for instance, and France. Rome planted in every tribe
and village the root of the Roman law at the very time when her own
town was torn with faction and bloody with partisan butcheries. France
forced intellectually on nearly all Europe an excellent code of law,
and she did it when her own streets were hardly cleared of corpses,
when she was in a panting pause between two pulverising civil wars.
And, on the other hand, you may remark that the countries where there
is no revolution are the countries where there is no law; where mental
chaos has clouded every intelligible legal principle--such countries as
Morocco and modern England.
[Illustration: PRELUDIUM TO URIZEN (1794)]
The eighteenth century, then, ended in revolution because it began in
law. It was the age of reason, and therefore the age of revolt. It is
needless to say how systematically it revived all the marks and motives
of that ancient pagan society in which Christianity first arose. Its
greatest art was oratory, its favourite affectation was severity. Its
pet virtue was public spirit, its pet sin political assassination. It
endured the pompous, but hated the fantastic; it had pure contempt for
anything that could be called obscure. To a virile mind of that epoch,
such as Dr Johnson or Fox, a poem or picture that did not at once
explain itself was simply like a gun that did not go off or a clock
that stopped suddenly: it was simply a failure, fit for indifference or
for a fleeting satire. In spite of their solid convictions (for which
they died) the men of that time always used the word “enthusiast”
as a term of scorn. All that we call mysticism they called madness.
Such was the eighteenth century civilisation; such was the strict and
undecorated frame from which look at us the blazing eyes of William
Blake.
So far Blake and his century are a mere contrast. But here we must
remember that the three elements of Europe are not the strata of a
rock, but the strands of a rope; since all three have existed not
one of them has ever appeared entirely unmixed. You may call the
Renascence pagan, but Michael Angelo cannot be imagined as anything
but a Christian. You may call Thomas Aquinas Christian, but you cannot
say exactly what he would have been without Aristotle the pagan. You
may, even in calling Virgil the poet of Roman dignity and good sense,
still ask whether he did not remember something older than Rome when
he spoke of the good luck of him who knew the field gods and the old
man of the forest. In the same way there was even in the eighteenth
century an element of the purely Christian and an element of the
purely primitive. And, as it happens, both these non-rational (or
non-Roman) strains in the eighteenth century are particularly important
in considering the mental make-up of William Blake. For the first alien
strain in this century practically represents all that is effective
and fine in this great genius, the second strain represents without
question all that is doubtful, all that is irritating, and all that is
ineffective in him.
* * * * *
IN the eighteenth century there were two elements not taken
from the Roman stoic or the Roman citizen. The first was what our
century calls humanitarianism--what that century called “the tear of
sensibility.” The old pagan commonwealths were democratic, but they
were not in the least humanitarian. They had no tears to spare for a
man at the mercy of the community; they reserved all their anger and
sympathy for the community at the mercy of a man. That individual
compassion for an individual case was a pure product of Christianity;
and when Voltaire flung himself with fury into the special case of
Calas, he was drawing all his energies from the religion that he
denied. A Roman would have rebelled for Rome, but not for Calas.
This personal humanitarianism is the relic of Christianity--perhaps
(if I may say so) the dregs of Christianity. Of this humanitarianism
or sentimentalism, or whatever it can best be called, Blake was the
enthusiastic inheritor. Being the great man that he was, he naturally
anticipated lesser men than himself; and among the men less than
himself I should count Shelley, for instance, and Tolstoy. He carried
his instinct of personal kindness to the point of denouncing war as
such--
“Naught can deform the human race
Like the Armourer’s iron brace.”
Or, again--
“The strongest poison ever known
Came from Cæsar’s iron crown.”
[Illustration: HAR AND HEVA (1795)]
No pagan republican, such as those on whom the eighteenth century ethic
was founded, could have made head or tail of this mere humanitarian
horror. He could not even have comprehended this idea--that war is
immoral when it is not unjust. You cannot find this sentiment in
the pagans of antiquity, but you can find it in the pagans of the
eighteenth century; you can find it in the speeches of Fox, the
soliloquies of Rousseau and even in the sniggering of Gibbon. Here
is an element of the eighteenth century which is derived darkly but
indubitably from Christianity, and in which Blake strongly shares.
Regulus has returned to be tortured and pagan Rome is saved; but
Christianity thinks a little of Regulus. A man must be pitied even when
he must be killed. That individual compassion provoked Blake to violent
and splendid lines--
“And the slaughtered soldier’s cry
Runs in blood down palace walls.”
The eighteenth century did not find that pity where it found its pagan
liberty and its pagan law. It took this out of the very churches
that it violated and from the desperate faith that it denied. This
irrational individual pity is the purely Christian element in the
eighteenth century. This irrational individual pity is the purely
Christian element in William Blake.
And second, there was another eighteenth century element that was
neither of Christian nor of pagan Rome. It was from the origins;
it had been in the world through the whole history of paganism and
Christianity; it had been in the world, but not of it. This element
appeared popularly in the eighteenth century in an extravagant
but unmistakable shape; the element can be summed up in one
word--Cagliostro. No other name is quite so adequate; but if anyone
desires a nobler name (a very noble one), we may say--Swedenborg.
There was in the eighteenth century, despite its obvious good sense,
this strain of a somewhat theatrical thaumaturgy. The history of
that element is, in the most literal sense of the word, horribly
interesting. For it all works back to the mere bogey feeling of the
beginnings. It is amusing to remark that in the eighteenth century for
the first time start up a number of societies which calmly announce
that they have existed almost from the beginning of the world. Of
these, of course, the best known instance is the Freemasons; according
to their own account they began with the Pyramids; but according to
everyone else’s account that can be effectively collected, they began
with the eighteenth century. Nevertheless the Freemasons are right in
the spirit even if they are wrong in the letter. There is a tradition
of things analogous to mystical masonry throughout all the historic
generations of Paganism and Christianity. There is a definite tradition
outside Christianity, not of rationalism, but of paganism, paganism in
the original and frightful forest sense--pagan magic. Christianity,
rightly or wrongly, always discouraged it on the ground that it was,
or tended to be, black magic. That is not here our concern. The point
is that this non-Christian supernaturalism, whether it was good or
bad, was continuous in spite of Christianity. Its signs and traces
can be seen in every age: it hung like a huge fume, in many monstrous
forms, over the dying Roman Empire: it was the energy in the Gnostics
who so nearly captured Christianity, and who were persecuted for their
pessimism; in the full sunlight of the living Church it dared to carve
its symbols upon the tombs of the Templars; and when the first sects
raised their heads at the Reformation, its ancient and awful voice was
heard.
[Illustration: PHILANDER’S DUST (1796)]
Now the eighteenth century was primarily the release (as its leaders
held) of reason and nature from the control of the Church. But when
the Church was once really weakened, it was the release of many
other things. It was not the release of reason only, but of a more
ancient unreason. It was not the release of the natural, but also
of the supernatural, and also, alas! of the unnatural. The heathen
mystics hidden for two thousand years came out of their caverns--and
Freemasonry was founded. It was entirely innocent in the manner of its
foundation; but so were all the other resurrections of this ancestral
occultism. I give but one obvious instance out of many. The idea of
enslaving another human soul, without lifting a finger or making a
gesture of force, of enslaving a soul simply by willing its slavery, is
an idea which all healthy human societies would regard and did regard
as hideous and detestable, if true. Throughout all the Christian ages
the witches and warlocks claimed this abominable power and boasted
of it. They were (somewhat excusably) killed for their boasting. The
eighteenth century rationalist movement came, intent, thank God, upon
much cleaner things, upon common justice and right reason in the state.
Nevertheless it did weaken Christianity, and in weakening Christianity
it uplifted and protected the wizard. Mesmer stepped forward, and
for the first time safely affirmed this infamous power to exist: for
the first time a warlock could threaten spiritual tyranny and not be
lynched. Nevertheless, if a mesmerist really had the powers which some
mesmerists have claimed, and which most novels give to him, there is (I
hope) no doubt at all that any decent mob would drown him like a witch.
The revolt of the eighteenth century, then, did not merely release
naturalism, but a certain kind of supernaturalism also. And of this
particular kind of supernaturalism, Blake is particularly the heir. Its
coarse embodiment is Cagliostro. Its noble embodiment is Swedenborg.
But in both cases it can be remarked that the mysticism marks an
effort to escape from or even to forget the historic Christian, and
especially the Catholic Church. Cagliostro, being a man of mean
spirituality, separated himself from Catholicism by rearing against it
a blazing pageant of mystical paganism, of triangles, secret seals,
Eleusinian initiation, and all the vulgar refinements of a secret
society. Swedenborg, being a man of large and noble spirituality,
marked his separation from Catholicism by inventing out of his own
innocence and genius nearly all the old Catholic doctrines, sincerely
believing them to be his own discoveries. It is startling to note how
near Swedenborg was to Catholicism--in his insistence on free will, for
instance, on the humanity of the incarnate God, and on the relative
and mystical view of the Old Testament. There was in Blake a great
deal of Swedenborg (as he would have been the first to admit), and
there was, occasionally, a little of Cagliostro. Blake did not belong
to a secret society: for, to tell the truth, he had some difficulty
in belonging to any society. But Blake did talk a secret language. He
had something of that haughty and oligarchic element in his mysticism
which marked the old pagan secret societies and which marks the
Theosophists and oriental initiates to this day. There was in him,
besides the beneficent wealth of Swedenborg, some touch of Cagliostro
and the Freemasons. These things Blake did inherit from that break up
of belief that can be called the eighteenth century: we will debit him
with these as an inheritance. And when we have said this we have said
everything that can be said of any debt he owed. His debts are cleared
here. His estate is cleared with this payment. All that follows is
himself.
If a man has some fierce or unfamiliar point of view, he must, even
when he is talking about his cat, begin with the origin of the cosmos;
for his cosmos is as private as his cat. Horace could tell his pupils
to plunge into the middle of the thing, because he and they were
agreed about the particular kind of thing; the author and his readers
substantially sympathised about the beauty of Helen or the duties of
Hector. But Blake really had to begin at the beginning, because it
was a different beginning. This explains the extraordinary air of
digression and irrelevancy which can be observed in some of the most
direct and sincere minds. It explains the bewildering allusiveness of
Dante; the galloping parentheses of Rabelais; the gigantic prefaces of
Mr Bernard Shaw. The brilliant man seems more lumbering and elaborate
than anyone else, because he has something to say about everything.
The very quickness of his mind makes the slowness of his narrative. For
he finds sermons in stones, in all the paving-stones of the street he
plods along. Every fact or phrase that occurs in the immediate question
carries back his mind to the ages and the initial power. Because he is
original he is always going back to the origins.
[Illustration: A GROUP (1804)]
Take, for instance, Blake’s verse rather than his pictorial art. When
the average sensible person reads Blake’s verse, he simply comes to
the conclusion that he cannot understand it. But in truth he has a
much better right to offer this objection to Blake than to most of the
slightly elusive or eccentric writers to whom he also offers it. Blake
is obscure in a much more positive and practical sense than Browning
is obscure--or, in another manner, Mr Henry James is obscure. Browning
is generally obscure through an almost brutal eagerness to get to big
truths, which leads him to smash a sentence and leave only bits of it.
Mr Henry James is obscure because he wishes to trace tiny truths by a
dissection for which human language (even in his exquisite hands) is
hardly equal. In short, Browning wishes almost unscrupulously to get to
the point. Mr James refuses to admit (on the mere authority of Euclid)
that the point is indivisible. But Blake’s obscurity is startlingly
different to both, it is at once more simple and more impenetrable. It
is not a different diction but a different language. It is not that we
cannot understand the sentences; it is that we often misunderstand the
words. The obscurity of Blake commonly consists in the fact that the
actual words used mean one thing in Blake and quite another thing in
the dictionary. Mr Henry James wants to split hairs; Browning wants to
tear them up by the roots. But in Blake the enigma is at once plainer
and more perplexing; it is simply this, that if Blake says “hairs” he
may not mean hairs, but something else--perhaps peacocks’ feathers.
To quote but one example out of a thousand; when Blake uses the word
“devils” he generally means some particularly exalted order of angels
such as preside over energy and imagination.
* * * * *
A VERBAL accident has confused the mystical with the
mysterious. Mysticism is generally felt vaguely to be itself vague--a
thing of clouds and curtains, of darkness or concealing vapours, of
bewildering conspiracies or impenetrable symbols. Some quacks have
indeed dealt in such things: but no true mystic ever loved darkness
rather than light. No pure mystic ever loved mere mystery. The mystic
does not bring doubts or riddles: the doubts and riddles exist
already. We all feel the riddle of the earth without anyone to point
it out. The mystery of life is the plainest part of it. The clouds and
curtains of darkness, the confounding vapours, these are the daily
weather of this world. Whatever else we have grown accustomed to, we
have grown accustomed to the unaccountable. Every stone or flower is
a hieroglyphic of which we have lost the key; with every step of our
lives we enter into the middle of some story which we are certain to
misunderstand. The mystic is not the man who makes mysteries but the
man who destroys them. The mystic is one who offers an explanation
which may be true or false, but which is _always_ comprehensible--by
which I mean, not that it is always comprehended, but that it always
can be comprehended, because there is always something to comprehend.
The man whose meaning remains mysterious fails, I think, as a mystic:
and Blake, as we shall see, did, for certain peculiar reasons of his
own, often fail in this way. But even when he was himself hard to
be understood, it was never through himself not understanding: it
was never because he was vague or mystified or groping, that he was
unintelligible. While his utterance was not only dim but dense, his
opinion was not only clear, but even cocksure. You and I may be a
little vague about the relations of Albion to Jerusalem, but Blake
is as certain about them as Mr Chamberlain about the relations of
Birmingham to the British Empire. And this can be said for his singular
literary style even at his worst, that we always feel that he is saying
something very plain and emphatic, even when we have not the wildest
notion of what it is.
There is one element always to be remarked in the true mystic, however
disputed his symbolism, and that is its brightness of colour
and clearness of shape. I mean that we may be doubtful about the
significance of a triangle or the precise lesson conveyed by a
crimson cow. But in the work of a real mystic the triangle is a hard
mathematical triangle not to be mistaken for a cone or a polygon. The
cow is in colour a rich incurable crimson, and in shape unquestionably
a cow, not to be mistaken for any of its evolutionary relatives,
such as the buffalo or the bison. This can be seen very clearly, for
instance, in the Christian art of illumination as practised at its best
in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The Christian decorators,
being true mystics, were chiefly concerned to maintain the reality
of objects. For the highest dogma of the spiritual is to affirm the
material. By plain outline and positive colour those pious artists
strove chiefly to assert that a cat was truly in the eyes of God a cat
and that a dog was preeminently doggish. This decision of tint and
outline belongs not only to Blake’s pictures, but even to his poetry.
Even in his descriptions there is no darkness, and practically, in
the modern sense, no distance. All his animals are as absolute as the
animals on a shield of heraldry. His lambs are of unsullied silver,
his lions are of flaming gold. His lion may lie down with his lamb, but
he will never really mix with him.
[Illustration: THE WATERS OF LIFE (1804)]
Really to make this point clear one would have to go back to the
twelfth century, or perhaps to Plato. Metaphysics must be avoided; they
are too exciting. But the root of the matter can be pretty well made
plain by one word. The whole difference is between the old meaning and
the new meaning of the word “Realist.” In modern fiction and science
a Realist means a man who begins at the outside of a thing: sometimes
merely at the end of a thing, knowing the monkey only by its tail or
the motor by its smell. In the twelfth century a Realist meant exactly
the opposite; it meant a man who began at the inside of a thing. The
mediæval philosopher would only have been interested in a motor because
it moved. He would have been interested (that is) only in the central
and original idea of a motor--in its ultimate motorishness. He would
have been concerned with a monkey only because of its monkeyhood;
not because it was like man but because it was unlike. If he saw an
elephant he would not say in the modern style, “I see before me a
combination of the tusks of a wild boar in unnatural development, of
the long nose of the tapir needlessly elongated, of the tail of the
cow unusually insufficient,” and so on. He would merely see an essence
of elephant. He would believe that this light and fugitive elephant
of an instant, as dancing and fleeting as the May-fly in May, was
nevertheless the shadow of an eternal elephant, conceived and created
by God. When you have quite realised this ancient sense in the reality
of an elephant, go back and read William Blake’s poems about animals,
as, for instance, about the lamb and about the tiger. You will see
quite clearly that he is talking of an eternal tiger, who rages and
rejoices for ever in the sight of God. You will see that he is talking
of an eternal and supernatural lamb, who can only feed happily in the
fields of Heaven.
It is exactly here that we find the full opposition to that modern
tendency that can fairly be called “Impressionism.” Impressionism is
scepticism. It means believing one’s immediate impressions at the
expense of one’s more permanent and positive generalisations. It puts
what one notices above what one knows. It means the monstrous heresy
that seeing is believing. A white cow at one particular instant of the
evening light may be gold on one side and violet on the other. The
whole point of Impressionism is to say that she really is a gold and
violet cow. The whole point of Impressionism is to say that there is
no white cow at all. What can we tell, it cries, beyond what we can
see? But the essence of Mysticism is to insist that there is a white
cow, however veiled with shadow or painted with sunset gold. Blessed
are they who have seen the violet cow and who yet believe in the white
one. To the mystic a white cow has a sort of solid whiteness, as if
the cow were made out of frozen milk. To him a white horse has a
solid whiteness as if he were cut out of the firm English chalk, like
the White Horse in the valley of King Alfred. The cow’s whiteness is
more important than anything except her cowishness. If Blake had ever
introduced a white cow into one of his pictures, there would at least
have been no doubt about either of those two elements. Similarly
there would have been no doubt about them in any old Christian
illumination. On this point he is at one with all the mystics and with
all the saints.
[Illustration: PLOUGHING THE EARTH (1804)]
This explanation is really essential to the understanding of Blake,
because to the modern mind it is so easy to understand him in the
opposite sense. In the ordinary modern meaning Blake’s symbols are
not symbols at all. They are not allegories. An allegory nowadays
means taking something that does not exist as a symbol of something
that does exist. We believe, at least most of us do, that sin does
exist. We believe (on highly insufficient grounds) that a dragon does
not exist. So we make the unreal dragon an allegory of the real sin.
But that is not what Blake meant when he made the lamb the symbol
of innocence. He meant that there really is behind the universe an
eternal image called the Lamb, of which all living lambs are merely
the copies or the approximation. He held that eternal innocence to be
an actual and even an awful thing. He would not have seen anything
comic, any more than the Christian Evangelist saw anything comic, in
talking about the Wrath of the Lamb. If there were a lamb in one of
Æsop’s fables, Æsop would never be so silly as to represent him as
angry. But Christianity is more daring than Æsop, and the wrath of the
Lamb is its great paradox. If there is an immortal lamb, a being whose
simplicity and freshness are for ever renewed, then it is truly and
really a more creepy idea to horrify that being into hostility than to
defy the flaming dragon or challenge darkness or the sea. No old wolf
or world-worn lion is so awful as a creature that is always young--a
creature that is always newly born. But the main point here is simpler.
It is merely that Blake did not mean that meekness was true and the
lamb only a pretty fable. If anything he meant that meekness was a
mere shadow of the everlasting lamb. The distinction is essential to
anyone at all concerned for this rooted spirituality which is the only
enduring sanity of mankind. The personal is not a mere figure for the
impersonal; rather the impersonal is a clumsy term for something more
personal than common personality. God is not a symbol of goodness.
Goodness is a symbol of God.
Some very odd passages in Blake become clear if we keep this in mind.
I do not wish in this book to dwell unduly on the other side of Blake,
the literary side. But there are queer facts worth remarking, and this
is one of them. Blake was sincere; if he was insane he was insane with
the very solidity and completeness of his sincerity. And the quaintest
mark of his sincerity is this, that in his poetry he constantly writes
things that look like mere mistakes. He writes one of his most colossal
convictions and the average reader thinks it is a misprint. To give
only one example not connected with the matter in hand, the fine though
somewhat frantic poem called “The Everlasting Gospel” begins exactly as
the modern humanitarian and essential Christian would like it to begin--
“The vision of Christ that thou dost see
Is my vision’s greatest enemy.”
It goes on (to the modern Christian’s complete satisfaction) with
denunciations of priests and praise of the pure Gospel Jesus; and then
comes a couplet like this--
“Thine is the friend of all mankind,
Mine speaks in parables to the blind.”
And the modern humanitarian Christian finds the orthodox Christ calmly
rebuked because he is the friend of all mankind. The modern Christian
simply blames the printer. He can only suppose that the words “Thine”
and “Mine” have been put in each other’s places by accident. Blake,
however, as it happens, meant exactly what he said. His private vision
of Christ was the vision of a violent and mysterious being, often
indignant and occasionally disdainful.
“He acts with honest disdainful pride,
And that is the cause that Jesus died;
Had he been Antichrist, creeping Jesus,
He would have done anything to please us,
Gone sneaking into their synagogues,
And not use the elders and priests like dogs.”
When the reader has fully realised this idea of a fierce and mysterious
Jesus, he may then see the sense in the statement that this Jesus
speaks in parables to the blind while the lower and meaner Jesus
pretends to be the friend of all men. But you have to know Blake’s
doctrine before you can understand two lines of his poetry.
Now in the point which is here prominently before us there is a
quotation (indeed there is more than one) which follows this same
fantastic line. Let the ordinary modern man, who is, generally
speaking, not a materialist and not a mystic, read first these two
lines from the poem falsely called “The Auguries of Innocence”--
“God appears and God is light
To those poor souls that dwell in night.”
[Illustration: THE EAGLE (1804)]
He will not find anything objectionable in that, at any rate; probably
he will bow his head slightly to a truism, as if he were in church.
Then he will read the next two lines--
“But does a human form display
To those that dwell in realms of day.”
And there the modern man will sit down suddenly on the sofa and come
finally to the conclusion that William Blake was mad and nothing else.
But those last two lines express all that is best in Blake and all
that is best in all the tradition of the mystics. Those two lines
explain perfectly all that I have just pointed out concerning the
palpable visions and the ponderous cherubim. This is the point about
Blake that must be understood if nothing else is understood. God for
him was not more and more vague and diaphanous as one came near to
Him. God was more and more solid as one came near. When one was far
off one might fancy Him to be impersonal. When one came into personal
relation one knew that He was a person. The personal God was the fact.
The impersonal God of the Pantheists was a kind of condescending
symbol. According to Blake (and there is more in the mental attitude
than most modern people will willingly admit) this vague cosmic view is
a mere merciful preparation for the old practical and personal view.
God is merely light to the merely unenlightened. God is a man to the
enlightened. We are permitted to remain for a time evolutionary or
pantheist until the time comes when we are worthy to be anthropomorphic.
Understand this Blake conception that the Divine is most bodily and
definite when we really know it, and the severe lines and sensational
literalism of his other and more pictorial work will be easily
understood. Naturally his divinities are definite, because he thought
that the more they were definite, the more they were divine. Naturally
God was not to him a hazy light breaking through the tangle of the
evolutionary undergrowth, nor a blinding brilliancy in the highest
place of the heavens. God was to him the magnificent old man depicted
in his dark and extraordinary illustrations of “Job,” the old man
with the monstrous muscles, the mild stern eyebrows, the long smooth
silver hair and beard. In the dialogues between Jehovah and Job there
is little difference between the two ponderous and palpable old men,
except that the vision of Deity is a little more solid than the human
being. But then Blake held that Deity is more solid than humanity. He
held that what we call the ideal is not only more beautiful but more
actual than the real. The ordinary educated modern person staring
at these “Job” designs can only say that God is a mere elderly twin
brother of Job. Blake would have at once retorted that Job was an image
of God.
* * * * *
ON consideration I incline to think that the best way to
summarise the art of Blake from its most superficial to its most
subtle phase would be simply to take one quick characteristic picture
and discuss it fully; first its title and subject, then its look and
shape, then its main principles and implications. Let us take as a good
working example the weird picture which is reproduced on one of the
pages of Gilchrist’s “Life of Blake.”
Now the obvious, prompt, and popular view of Blake is very well
represented by the mere title of the picture. The first thing any
ordinary person will notice about it is that it is called “The Ghost
of a Flea”; and the ordinary person will be very justifiably amused.
This is the first fact about William Blake--that he is a joke; and it
is a fact by no means to be despised. Simply considered as a puzzle
or parlour game, Blake is extraordinarily entertaining. I have known
many cultivated families made happy on winter evenings by trying to
understand the poem called “The Mental Traveller,” or wondering what
can be the significance of the stanza that runs:
“Little Mary Bell had a fairy in a nut,
Long John Brown had the devil in his gut;
Long John Brown loved little Mary Bell,
And the fairy drew the devil into the nutshell.”
[Illustration: “ALBION! AROUSE THYSELF!” (1804)]
The first fact is that we are puzzled and also honestly amused. It is
as if we had a highly eccentric neighbour in the next garden. Long
before we like him we like gossiping about him. And the mere title,
“The Ghost of a Flea,” represents all that makes Blake a centre of
literary gossip.
And now, having enjoyed the oddity of the title, let us look at the
picture. Let us attempt to describe, so far as it can be done in words
instead of lines, what Blake thought that the ghost of a flea would
be like. The scene suggests a high and cheerless corridor, as in some
silent castle of giants. Through this a figure, naked and gigantic, is
walking with a high-shouldered and somewhat stealthy stride. In one
hand the creature has a peculiar curved knife of a cruel shape; in
the other he has a sort of stone basin. The most striking line in the
composition is the hard long curve of the spine, which goes up without
a single flicker to the back of the brutal head, as if the whole back
view were built like a tower of stone. The face is in no sense human.
It has something that is aquiline and also something that is swinish;
its eyes are alive with a moony glitter that is entirely akin to
madness. The thing seems to be passing a curtain and entering a room.
With this we may mark the second fact about Blake--that if his only
object is to make our flesh creep, he does it well. His bogeys are
good reliable bogeys. There is really something that appeals to the
imagination about this notion of the ghost of a flea being a tall
vampire stalking through tall corridors at night. We have found Blake
an amusing madman and now an interesting madman; let us go on with the
process.
The third thing to note about this picture is that for Blake the ghost
of a flea means the idea or principle of a flea. The principle of a
flea (so far as we can see it) is bloodthirstiness, the feeding on the
life of another, the fury of the parasite. Fleas may have other nobler
sentiments and meditations, but we know nothing about them. The vision
of a flea is a vision of blood; and that is what Blake has made of
it. This is the next point, then, to be remarked in his make-up as a
mystic; he is interested in the ideas for which such things stand. For
him the tiger means an awful elegance; for him the tree means a silent
strength.
If it be granted that Blake was interested, not in the flea, but
in the idea of the flea, we can proceed to the next step, which is
a particularly important one. Every great mystic goes about with a
magnifying glass. He sees every flea as a giant--perhaps rather as an
ogre. I have spoken of the tall castle in which these giants dwell;
but, indeed, that tall tower is the microscope. It will not be denied
that Blake shows the best part of a mystic’s attitude in seeing that
the soul of a flea is ten thousand times larger than a flea. But the
really interesting point is much more striking. It is the essential
point upon which all primary understanding of the art of Blake really
turns. The point is this: that the ghost of a flea is not only larger
than a flea, the ghost of a flea is actually more solid than a flea.
The flea himself is hazy and fantastic compared to the hard and
massive actuality of his ghost. When we have understood this, we have
understood the second of the great ideas in Blake--the idea of ideas.
To sum up Blake’s philosophy in any phrase sufficiently simple and
popular for our purpose is not at all easy. For Blake’s philosophy was
not simple. Those who imagine that because he was always talking about
lambs and daisies, about Jesus and little children, that therefore he
held a simple gospel of goodwill, entirely misunderstand the whole
nature of his mind. No man had harder dogmas; no one insisted more
that religion must have theology. The Everlasting Gospel was far from
being a simple gospel. Blake had succeeded in inventing in the course
of about ten years as tangled and interdependent a system of theology
as the Catholic Church has accumulated in two thousand. Much of it,
indeed, he inherited from ancient heretics who were much more doctrinal
than the orthodoxy which they opposed. Notable among these were the
Gnostics, and in some degree the mad Franciscans who followed Joachim
de Flor. Very few modern people would know an Akamoth or an Æon if they
saw him. Yet one would really have to be on rather intimate terms
with these old mystical gods and demons before one could move quite
easily in the Cosmos which was familiar to Blake.
[Illustration: THE CRUCIFIXION (1804)]
Let us, however, attempt to find a short and popular statement of the
position of Blake and all such mystics. The plainest way of putting
it, I think, is this: this school especially denied the authority
of Nature. Some went the extreme length of the mad Manichæans, and
declared the material universe evil in itself. Some, like Blake, and
most of the poets considered it as a shadow or illusion, a sort of
joke of the Almighty. But whatever else Nature was, Nature was not our
mother. Blake applies to her the strange words used by Christ to Mary,
and says to Mother-Earth in many poems: “What have I to do with thee?”
It is common to connect Blake and Wordsworth because of their ballads
about babies and sheep. They were utterly opposite. If Wordsworth
was the Poet of Nature, Blake was specially the Poet of Anti-Nature.
Against Nature he set a certain entity which he called Imagination; but
the word as commonly used conveys very little of what he meant by it.
He did not mean something shadowy or fantastic, but rather something
clear-cut, definite, and unalterable. By Imagination, that is, he meant
images; the eternal images of things. You might shoot all the lions on
the earth; but you could not destroy the Lion of Judah, the Lion of the
Imagination. You might kill all the lambs of the world and eat them;
but you could not kill the Lamb of the Imagination, which was the Lamb
of God, that taketh away the sins of the world. Blake’s philosophy, in
brief, was primarily the assertion that the ideal is more actual than
the real: just as in Euclid the good triangle in the mind is a more
actual (and more practical) than the bad triangle on the blackboard.
Many of Blake’s pictures become intelligible (or as intelligible as
they can become) if we keep this principle in mind. For instance, there
is a fine design representing a naked and heroic youth of great beauty
tracing something on the sand. The reader, when he looks at the title
of it, is interested to discover that this is a portrait of Sir Isaac
Newton. It was not so much of an affectation as it seems. Blake from
his own point of view really did think that the Eternal Isaac Newton as
God beheld him was more of an actuality than the terrestrial gentleman
who happened to be elderly or happened by some sublunary accident to
wear clothes. Therefore, when he calls it a “portrait” he is not, from
his own point of view, talking nonsense. It is the form and feature of
someone who exists and who is different from everyone else, just as if
it were the ordinary oil-painting of an alderman.
The most important conception can be found in one sentence which he let
fall as if by accident, “Nature has no outline, but imagination has.”
If a clear black line when looked at through a microscope was seen to
be a ragged and confused edge like a mop or a doormat, then Blake would
say, “So much the worse for the microscope.” If pure lines existed
only in the human mind, then Blake would say, “So much the better for
the human mind.” If the real earth grew damp and dubious when it met
and mixed itself with the sea, so much the worse for the real earth.
If the idea of clean-cut truth existed only in the intellect, that was
the most actual place in which anything could exist. In short, Blake
really insisted that man as the image of God had a right to impose form
upon nature. He would have laughed to scorn the notion of the modern
evolutionist--that Nature is to be permitted to impose formlessness
upon man. For him the lines in a landscape were boundaries which he
drew like frontiers, by his authority as the plenipotentiary ambassador
of heaven. When he drew his line round Leviathan he was drawing the
divine net around him; he tamed his bulls and lions even by creating
them. And when he made in some picture a line between sea and land that
does not exist in Nature, he was saying by supernatural right, “Thus
far shalt thou come, and no farther, and here shall thy proud waves be
stayed.”
* * * * *
I SELECT the symbol of the sea partly because Blake was
himself fond of such elemental images, and partly because it is an
image especially appropriate to Blake’s great conception of the outline
in the eternal imagination. Nearly all phrases about the sea are
specially and spiritually false. People talk of the sea as vast and
vague, drifting and indefinite; as if the magic of it lay in having
no lines or boundaries. But the spell of the sea upon the eye and the
soul is exactly this: that it is the one straight line in nature. They
talk of the infinite sea. Artistically it would be far truer to talk
of an infinite haystalk; for the haystalk does slightly fade into a
kind of fringe against the sky. But the horizon line is not only hard
but _tight_, like a fiddle-string. I have always a nervous fear that
the sea-line will snap suddenly. And it is exactly this mathematical
decision in the sea that makes it so romantic a background for fighting
and human figures. England was called in Catholic days the garden of
Mary. The garden is all the more beautiful because it is enclosed in
four hard angular walls of sapphire or emerald. Any mere tuft or twig
can curve with a curve that is incalculable. Any scrap of moss can
contain in itself an irregularity that is infinite. The sea is the one
thing that is really exciting because the sea is the one thing that is
flat.
[Illustration: THE JUDGMENT DAY (1806)]
Whether, however, these conclusions can be accepted by the reader as
true, they can at least be accepted as typifying the kind of thing
which William Blake believed to be true. He would have felt the sea not
as a waste but as a wall. Nature had no outline, but imagination had.
And it was imagination that was trustworthy.
This definition explains other things. Blake was enthusiastically in
favour of the French Revolution; yet he enthusiastically hated that
school of sceptics which, in the opinion of many, made the Revolution
possible. He did not mind Marat; but he detested Voltaire. The reason
is obvious in the light of his views on Nature and Imagination. The
Republican Idealists he liked because they were Idealists, because
their abstract doctrines about justice and human equality were abstract
doctrines. But the school of Voltaire was naturalistic; it loved to
remind man of his earthly origin and even of his earthly degradation.
The war, which Blake loved, was a war of the invisible against the
visible. Valmy and Arcola were part of such a war; it was a war between
the visible kings and the invisible Republic. But Voltaire’s war was
exactly the opposite; it was a discrediting of the invisible Church by
the indecent exhibition of the real Church, with its fat friars or its
foolish old women. Blake had no sympathy with this mere flinging of
facts at a great conception. In a really powerful and exact metaphor he
describes the powerlessness of this earthly and fragmentary sceptical
attack.
Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau,
Mock on, mock on, ’tis all in vain,
You throw the sand against the wind
And the wind blows it back again.
An excellent image for a mere attack by masses of detail.
There were some of Blake’s intellectual conceptions which I have not
professed either to admire or to defend. Some of his views were really
what the old mediæval world called heresies and what the modern world
(with an equally healthy instinct but with less scientific clarity)
calls fads. In either case the definition of the fad or heresy is not
so very difficult. A fad or heresy is the exaltation of something
which, even if true, is secondary or temporary in its nature against
those things which are essential and eternal, those things which always
prove themselves true in the long run. In short, it is the setting up
of the mood against the mind. For instance: it is a mood, a beautiful
and lawful mood, to wonder how oysters really feel. But it is a fad,
an ugly and unlawful fad, to starve human beings because you will
not let them eat oysters. It is a beautiful mood to feel impelled to
assassinate Mr Carnegie; but it is a fad to maintain seriously that
any private person has a right to do it. We all have emotional moments
in which we should like to be indecent in a drawing-room; but it is
faddist to turn all drawing-rooms into places in which one is indecent.
We all have at times an almost holy temptation suddenly to scream out
very loud; but it is heretical and pedantic really to go on screaming
for the remainder of your natural life. If you throw one bomb you are
only a murderer; but if you keep on persistently throwing bombs you are
in awful danger of at last becoming a prig. It has been this trouble
that has partly poisoned the people from which William Blake inherited,
if not his blood, at least his civilization. The real trouble with
Puritanism was not that it was a senseless prejudice nor yet altogether
(as would seem superficially obvious) that it was a mere form of
devil-worship. It was none of these things in its first and freshest
motive.
[Illustration: THE TOMB (1806)]
Puritanism was an honourable mood; it was a noble fad. In other words,
it was a highly creditable mistake. We have all felt the frame of mind
in which one wishes to smash golden croziers and mitres merely because
they are golden. We all know how natural it is at certain moments
to feel a profound thirst to kick clergymen simply because they are
clergymen. But if we seriously ask ourselves whether in the long run
humanity is not happier with gold in its religion rather than mere
drab, then we come to the conclusion that the gold on cross or cope
does give more pleasure to most men than it gives pain, for a moment,
to us. If we really ask ourselves if religions do not work better with
a definite priesthood to do the drudgery of religion, we come to the
conclusion that they do work better. Anti-clericalism is a generous and
ideal mood; clericalism is a permanent and practical necessity. To put
the matter in an easier and more everyday metaphor, it is natural for
any poor Londoner to feel at times an abstract aspiration to beat the
Lord Mayor of London. But it does not follow that it would really have
been a kindness to poor Londoners to abolish the Lord Mayor’s Show.
Now it is in this sense that we may truly say that Blake (upon one side
of his mind) was something worse than a maniac--he was a faddist. He
did permit aspirations or prejudices which are accidental or one-sided
to capture and control him at the expense of things really more human
and enduring: things which he shared with all the children of men. I
do not allude to his supernaturalism; for on that he is in no sense
alone, nor even specially eccentric. I do not refer to his love of the
gorgeous, the terrible or even the secretive of temples, initiations,
and hieroglyphic religion. For that sort of mystery is really quite
popular and even democratic. That sort of secrecy is a very open secret.
It is usual to hear a man say in modern England that he has too much
common sense to believe in ghosts. But common sense is in favour of
a belief in ghosts, the common sense of mankind. It is usual to hear
a man say that he likes common sense and does not like the mummeries
and flummeries of church ritual. But common sense is in favour of
mummery and ritualism, the common sense of mankind. The man who
attempts to do without symbols is a prophet so austere and isolated
as to be dangerously near to a madman. The man who does not believe
in ghosts is a solitary fanatic and lonely dreamer among the sons of
men. Therefore I do not in any sense count even his craziest visions
or wildest symbols among the real fads or eccentricities of Blake. But
he had mental attitudes which were really fads and eccentricities, in
this essential sense, that they were not exaggerations of a general
human feeling but definite denials of it. He did not lead humanity,
but attacked or even obstructed it. Many instances might be given
of the kind of thing I mean; there was something of it in Blake’s
persistent and even pedantic insistence that war as war is evil. There
was something of Tolstoy in Blake; and that means something that is
inhuman as well as something that is heroic. But his allusions to this
were occasional and perhaps even accidental, and better cases could
certainly be found. The essential of all the cases is, however, that
when he went wrong it was as an intellectual and not as a poet.
Take, for example, his notion of going naked. Here I think Blake is
merely a sort of hard theorist. Here, in spite of his imagination
and his laughter, there was even a touch of the prig about him. He
was obscene on principle. So to a great extent was Walt Whitman. A
dictionary is supposed to contain all words, so it has to contain
coarse words. “Leaves of Grass” was planned to praise all things, so
it had to praise gross things. There was something of this pedantic
perfection in Blake’s escapades. As the hygienist insists on wearing
Jäger clothes, he insisted on wearing no clothes. As the æsthete must
wear sandals, he must wear nothing. He is not really lawless at all; he
is bowing to the law of his own outlawed logic.
There is nothing at all poetical in this revolt. William Blake was a
great and real poet; but in this point he was simply unpoetical. Walt
Whitman was a great and real poet; but on this point he was prosaic and
priggish. Two extraordinary men are not poets because they tear away
the veil from sex. On the contrary it is because all men are poets
that they all hang a veil over sex. The ploughman does not plough by
night, because he does not feel specially romantic about ploughing. He
does love by night, because he does feel specially romantic about sex.
In this matter Blake was not only unpoetical, but far less poetical
than the mass of ordinary men. Decorum is not an over-civilised
convention. Decorum is not tame, decorum is wild, as wild as the wind
at night.
“Mysterious as the moons that rise
At midnight in the pines of Var.”
[Illustration: THE SELFHOOD OF DECEIT (1807)]
Modesty is too fierce and elemental a thing for the modern pedants to
understand; I had almost said too savage a thing. It has in it the joy
of escape and the ancient shyness of freedom. In this matter Blake and
Whitman are merely among the modern pedants. In not admiring sexual
reticence these two great poets simply did not understand one of the
greatest poems of humanity.
I have given as an instance his disregard of the idea of mystery and
modesty as involved in dress; it was an unpoetical thought that there
should be no curtains of gold or scarlet round the shrine of the Holy
Spirit. But there is stronger instances in his theology and philosophy.
Thus he imbibed the idea common among early Gnostics and not unknown to
Christian Science speculators of our day, that it was a confession of
weakness in Christ to be crucified at all. If he had really attained
divine life (so ran the argument) he ought to have attained immortal
life; he ought to have lived for ever upon the earth. With an excess
of what can only be called impudence, he even turned Gethsemane into a
sort of moral breakdown; the sudden weakness which accepted death. The
general claim that vices are poetical is largely unfounded; and this
is an excellent example of how unpoetical is the vice of profanity.
Blasphemy is not wild; blasphemy is in its nature prosaic. It consists
in regarding in a commonplace manner something which other and happier
people regard in a rapturous and imaginative manner. This is well
exemplified in poor Blake and his Gnostic heresy about Jesus. In
holding that Christ was weakened by being crucified he is certainly a
pedant, and certainly not a poet. If there is one point on which the
spirit of the poets and the poetic soul in all peoples is on the side
of Christianity, it is exactly this one point on which Blake is against
Christianity--“was crucified, dead and buried.” The spectacle of a God
dying is much more grandiose than the spectacle of a man living for
ever. The former suggests that awful changes have really entered the
alchemy of the universe; the latter is only vaguely reminiscent of
hygienic octogenarians and Eno’s Fruit Salts. Moreover, to the poet
as to the child, death must be dreadful even if it is desirable. To
talk (as some modern theosophists do) about death being nothing, the
mere walking into another room, to talk like this is not only prosaic
and profoundly un-Christian; it is decidedly vulgar. It is against the
whole trend of the secret emotions of humanity. It is indecent, like
persuading a decent peasant to go without clothes. There is more of
the song and music of mankind in a clerk putting on his Sunday clothes
than in a fanatic running naked down Cheapside. And there is more real
mysticism in nailing down a coffin lid than in pretending, in mere
rhetoric, to throw open the doors of death.
I have given two cases of the presence in Blake of these anti-human
creeds which I call fads--the case of clothes and the case of the
crucifixion. I could give a much larger number of them, but I think
their nature is here sufficiently indicated. They are all cases in
which Blake ceased to be a poet, through becoming entirely, instead
of only partially, separated from the people. And this, I think, is
certainly connected with that quality in him to which I referred in
analysing the eighteenth century; I mean the element of oligarchy and
fastidiousness in the mystics and masonries of that epoch. They were
all founded in an atmosphere of degrees and initiations. The chief
difference between Christianity and the thousand transcendental schools
of to-day is substantially the same as the difference nearly two
thousand years ago between Christianity and the thousand sacred rites
and secret societies of the Pagan Empire. The deepest difference is
this: that all the heathen mysteries are so far aristocratic, that they
are understood by some, and not understood by others. The Christian
mysteries are so far democratic that nobody understands them at all.
[Illustration: THE SHEPHERDS (1821)]
When we have fairly stated this doubtful and even false element in
Blake’s philosophy, we can go on with greater ease and thoroughness
to state where the solid and genuine value of that philosophy lay. It
consisted in its placid and positive defiance of materialism, a work
upon which all the mystics, Pagan and Christian, have been employed
from the beginning. It is not unnatural that they should have fallen
into many errors, employed dangerous fallacies, and even ruined the
earth for the sake of the cloudland. But the war in which they were
engaged has been none the less the noblest and most important effort
of human history, and in their whole army there was no greater warrior
than Blake.
One of the strange and rooted contradictions of the eighteenth
century is a combination between profound revolution and superficial
conventionality. It might almost be said that the men of that time had
altered morals long before they thought of altering manners. The French
Revolution was especially French in this respect, that it was above
all things a respectable revolution. Violence was excused; madness
was excused; but eccentricity was inexcusable. These men had taken a
king’s head off his shoulders long before they had thought of taking
the powder off their own heads. Danton could understand the Massacres
of September, but he could not understand the worship of the Goddess
of Reason or all the antics of the German madman Clootz. Robespierre
grew tired of the Terror, but he never grew tired of shaving every
morning. It is impossible to avoid the impression that this is rather
a characteristic of the revolutions which really make a difference and
defy the world. The same is true of that fallacious but most powerful
and genuine English monument which was covered by the words Darwin and
Evolution. If there was one striking thing about the fine old English
agnostics, it was that they were entirely indifferent to alterations
in the externals of pose or fashion, that they seem to have supposed
that the huge intellectual overturn of agnosticism would leave the
obvious respectability of life exactly as it was. They thought that
one might entirely alter a man’s head without in the least altering
his hat. They thought that one might shatter the twin wings of an
archangel without throwing the least doubt upon the twin whiskers of
a mid-Victorian professor. And though there was undoubtedly a certain
solemn humour about such a position, yet, on the whole, I think the
mid-Victorian agnostics were employing the right kind of revolution.
It is broadly a characteristic of all valuable new-fashioned opinions
that they are brought in by old-fashioned men. For the sincerity of
such men is proved by both facts--the fact that they do care about
their new truth and the fact that they do not care about their old
clothes. Herbert Spencer’s philosophy is all the more serious because
his appearance (to judge by his photographs) was quite startlingly
absurd. And while the Tory caricatures were deriding Gladstone because
he introduced very new-fangled legislation, they were also deriding him
because he wore very antiquated collars.
But though this strange combination of convention in small things with
revolt in big ones is not uncommon in hearty and human reformers,
there is a quite special emphasis on this combination in the case of
the eighteenth century. The very men who did deeds which were more
dreadful and daring than we can dream to achieve, were the very men
who spoke and wrote with a mincing propriety and almost effeminate
fastidious distinction such as we should scarcely condescend to employ.
The eighteenth century man called the eighteenth century woman “an
elegant female”; but he was quite capable of saving her from a mad
bull. He described his ideal republic as a place containing all the
refined sensibilities of virtue with all the voluptuous seductions of
pleasure. But he would be hacked with an axe and blown out of a gun to
get it. He could pursue new notions with a certain solid and virile
constancy, as if they were old ones. And the explanation is partly
this: that however revolutionary, they were old ones--in this sense
at least, that they involved the pursuit of some primary human hope
to its original home. They powdered their hair because they really
thought that a civilized man should be civilized--or, if you will,
artificial. They spoke of “an elegant female” because they really
thought, with their whole souls, that a female ought to be elegant. The
old rebels preserved the old fashions--and among others the old fashion
of rebelling. The new rebels, the revolutionists of our time, are
intent upon introducing new fashions in boots, beds, food or furniture;
so they have no time to rebel. But if we have once grasped this
eighteenth century element of the insistence upon the elegant female
because she is elegant, we have got hold of a fundamental fact in the
relation of that century to Blake.
[Illustration: THE MORNING STARS (1821)]
It is instinctive to describe Blake as a fantastic artist; and yet
there is a very real sense in which Blake is conventional. If any
reader thinks the phrase paradoxical, he can easily discover that it
is true; he can discover it simply by comparing Blake even in his most
wild and arbitrary work with any merely modern artist who has the
name of being wild; with Aubrey Beardsley or even with Rossetti. All
Blake’s heroes are conventional heroes made unconventionally heroic.
All Blake’s heroines are elegant females without their clothes. But
in both cases they exaggerate and insist upon the traditional ideal
of the sexes--the broad shoulders of the god and the broad hips of
the goddess. Blake detested the sensuality of Rubens. But if he had
been obliged to choose between the women of Rubens and the women of
Rossetti, he would have flung himself on the neck of Rubens. For we
have a false conception of what constitutes exaggeration. The end of
the eighteenth century (being a dogmatic period) believed in certain
things and exaggerated them. The end of the nineteenth century simply
did not know what things to exaggerate; so it fell back upon merely
underrating them. Blake tried to make Wallace look even bolder
and fiercer than Wallace can possibly have looked. That was his
exaggeration of Wallace. But Burne-Jones’ exaggeration of Perseus is
not an exaggeration at all. It is an under-statement; for the whole
fascination of Burne-Jones’ Perseus is that he looks frightened.
Blake’s figure of a woman is aggressively and monstrously womanly. That
is its fascination, if it has any. But the fascination of a Beardsley
woman (if she has any) is exactly that she is not quite a woman. So
much of what we have meant by exaggeration is really diminution; so
much of what we have meant by fancy is simply falling short of fact.
The Burne-Jones’ man is interesting because he is not quite brave
enough to be a man. The Beardsley woman is interesting because she
is not quite pretty enough to be a woman. But Blake’s men are brave
beyond all decency: and Blake’s women are so swaggeringly bent on
being beautiful that they become quite ugly in the process. If anyone
wishes to know exactly what I mean, I recommend him to look at one of
those extraordinary designs of nymphs in which a woman (or, as Blake
loved to call it, the Female Form) is made to perform an impossible
feat of acrobatics. It is impossible, but it is quite female; perhaps
the words are not wholly inconsistent. A living serpent might perform
such a piece of athletics; but even then only a female living serpent.
But nobody would ask a Burne-Jones or Beardsley female to perform any
athletics at all.
Blake in pictorial art was not a mere master of the moonstruck or the
grotesque. On the contrary, he was, as artists go, exceptionally a
champion of the smooth and sensible. In so far as being “modern” means
being against the great conventions of mankind, indifferent to the
difference of the sexes, or inclined to despise doctrinal outline, then
there was never any man who was so little of a modern as Blake. He
may have been mad; but there are varieties even in madness. There are
madmen, like Blake, who go mad on health, and there are madmen who go
mad on sickness.
The distinction is a solid one. You may think the queerly and partially
clothed women of Aubrey Beardsley ugly. You may think the naked
women of William Blake ugly. But you must perceive this peculiar and
extraordinary effect about the women of William Blake, that they are
women. They are exaggerated in the direction of the female form; they
swing upon big hips; they let out and loosen long and luxuriant hair.
Now the queer females of Aubrey Beardsley are queerest of all in this,
that they are not even female. They are narrow where women have a curve
and cropped where women have a head of hair. Blake’s women are often
anatomically impossible. But they are so far women that they could
not possibly be anything else.
[Illustration: THE WHIRLWIND (1825)]
This comparison between Blake’s art and such art as Aubrey Beardsley’s
is not an invidious impertinence, it is really an important
distinction. Blake’s work may be fantastic; but it is a fantasia on
an old and recognisable air. It exaggerates characteristics. Blake’s
women are too womanish, his young men are too athletic, his old men
are too preposterously old. But Aubrey Beardsley does not really
exaggerate; he understates. His young men have less than the energy of
youth. His women fascinate by the weakness of sex rather than by its
strength. In short, if one is really to exaggerate the truth, one must
have some truth to exaggerate. The decadent mystic produces an effect
not by exaggerating but by distorting. True exaggeration is a thing
both subtle and austere. Caricature is a serious thing; it is almost
blasphemously serious. Caricature really means making a pig more like
a pig than even God has made him. But anyone can make him not like a
pig at all; anyone can create a weird impression by giving him the
beard of a goat. In Aubrey Beardsley the artistic thrill (and there is
an artistic thrill) consists in the fact that the women are not quite
women nor the men quite men. Blake had absolutely no trace of this
morbidity of deficiency. He never asks us to consider a tree magical
because it is a stunted tree; or a man a magician merely because he
has one eye. His form of fantasy would rather be to give a tree more
branches than it could carry and to give a man bigger eyes than he
could keep in his head. There is really a great deal of difference
between the fantastic and the exaggerative. One may be fantastic by
merely leaving something out. One might call it a fantasy if the
official portrait of Wellington represented him without a nose. But one
could hardly call it an exaggeration.
There is an everlasting battle in which Blake is on the side of the
angels, and what is much more difficult and dangerous, on the side of
all the sensible men. The question is so enormous and so important,
that it is difficult to state even by reason of its reality. For in
this world of ours we do not so much go on and discover small things;
rather we go on and discover big things. It is the details that we see
first; it is the design that we only see very slowly; and some men
die never having seen it at all. We all wake up on a battle-field.
We see certain squadrons in certain uniforms gallop past; we take an
arbitrary fancy to this or that colour, to this or that plume. But
it often takes us a long time to realise what the fight is about or
even who is fighting whom. One may say, to keep up the metaphor, that
many a man has joined the French army from love of the Horse Guards
Blue; many an old-fashioned eighteenth century sailor has gone over
to the Chinese merely because they wore pigtails. It is so easy to
turn against what is really yourself for the sake of some accidental
resemblance to yourself. You may envy the curled hair of Hercules; but
do not envy curly hair until you wish that you were a nigger. You may
regret that you have a short nose; but do not dream of its growing
longer and longer till it is like the trunk of an elephant. Wait until
you know what the battle is broadly about before you rush roaring after
any advancing regiment. For a battle is a complicated thing; each army
contains coats of different colour; each section of each army advances
at a different angle. You may fancy that the Greens are charging the
Blues exactly at the moment when both are combining to effect a fine
military manœuvre. You may conceive that two similar-looking columns
are supporting each other at the very instant when they are about to
blaze at each other with cannon, rifle, and revolver. So in the modern
intellectual world we can see flags of many colours, deeds of manifold
interest; the one thing we cannot see is the map. We cannot see the
simplified statement which tells us what is the origin of all the
trouble. How shall we manage to state in an obvious and alphabetical
manner the ultimate query, the primordial pivot on which the whole
modern problem turns? It cannot be done in long rationalistic words;
they convey by their very sound the suggestion of something subtle. One
must try to think of something in the way of a plain street metaphor or
an obvious analogy. For the thing is not too hard for human speech; it
is actually too obvious for human speech.
The fundamental fight in which, despite all this heat and headlong
misunderstanding, William Blake is on the right side, is one which
would require a book about the battle and not about William Blake.
By an accident at once convenient and deceptive, it can largely be
described as geographical as well as philosophical. It is crudely true
that there are two types of mysticism, that of Christendom and that
of Orientalism. Now this scheme of east and west is inadequate; but
it does happen to fit in with the working facts. For the odd thing is
this, not only are most of the merely modern movements of idealism
Oriental, but their Orientalism is all that they have in common. They
all come together, and yet their only apparent point of union is that
they all come from the East. Thus a modern vegetarian is generally
also a teetotaller, yet there is certainly no obvious intellectual
connection between consuming vegetables and not consuming fermented
vegetables. A drunkard, when lifted laboriously out of the gutter,
might well be heard huskily to plead that he had fallen there through
excessive devotion to a vegetable diet. On the other hand, a man
might well be a practised and polished cannibal and still be a strict
teetotaller. A subtle parallelism might doubtless be found; but the
only quite obvious parallelism is that vegetarianism is Buddhist and
teetotalism is Mahometan. In the same way, it is the cold truth that
there is no kind of logical connection between being an Agnostic and
being a Socialist. But it is the fact that the Chinese are as agnostic
as oxen; and it is the fact that the Japanese are as socialistic as
rats. These appalling ideas, that a man has no divine individual
destiny, that making a minute item in the tribe or hive, is his only
earthly destiny, these ideas do come all together out of the same
quarter; they do in practise blow upon us out of the East, as cold and
inhuman as the east wind.
[Illustration: THE JUST UPRIGHT MAN (1825)]
Nevertheless, I do not accept this dull definition by locality; I think
it is a spirit in Asia, and even a spirit that can be named. It is
approximately described as an insane simplicity. In all these cases we
find people attempting to perfect a thing solely by simplification;
by obliterating special features: this cosmos is full of wingless
birds, of hornless cattle, of hairless women, and colourless wine, all
fading into a formless background. There is a Christian simplicity,
of course, opposed to this pessimist simplicity. Both the western and
eastern mystic may be called children; but the eastern child treads
the sand-castle back into sand, and enjoys seeing the silver snow man
melt back into muddy water. This return to chaos and a comfortless
simplicity is the only intelligent meaning of the words reaction and
reactionary. In this sense much of modern science is reaction, and
most modern scientists are reactionaries. But where this reversion to
the void can be seen most clearly is in all the semi-oriental sects to
which I have referred. Teetotalism is a simplification; its objection
to beer is not really that beer makes a man like a beast. On the
contrary, its real objection is that beer most unmistakably separates
a man from a beast. Vegetarianism is a simplification; the herb-eating
Hindoo saint does not really dislike the carnivorous habit because
it destroys an animal. Rather, he dislikes it because it creates an
animal; renews the special aims and appetites of the separate animal,
man. Agnosticism, the ancient creed of Confucius, is a simplification;
it is a shutting out of all the shadowy splendours and terrors;
an Arcadian exclusiveness; _il faut cultiver son jardin_. Japanese
patriotism, the blind collectivism of the tribe, is a simplification;
it is an attempt to turn our turbulent and varied humanity into one
enormous animal, with twenty million legs, but only one head. There is
an utterly opposite kind of simplicity that springs from joy; but this
kind of simplicity certainly is rooted in despair.
Now, for practical purposes, there is an antagonistic order of
mysticism; that which celebrates personality, positive variety, and
special emphasis: just as in broad fact the mystery of dissolution
is emphasized and typified in the East, so in practice the mystery
of concentration and identity is manifest in the historic churches
of Christendom. Even the foes of Christianity would readily agree
that Christianity is “personal” in the sense that a vulgar joke is
“personal”: that is corporeal, vivid, perhaps ugly. This being so, it
has been broadly true that any mystic who broke with the Christian
tradition tended to drift towards the eastern and pessimist tradition.
In the Albigensian and other heresies the East crawled in with its
serpentine combination of glitter and abasement, of pessimism and
pleasure. Every dreamer who strayed outside the Christian order strayed
towards the Hindu order, and every such dreamer found his dream turning
to a nightmare. If a man wandered far from Christ he was drawn into
the orbit of Buddha, the other great magnet of mankind--the negative
magnet. The thing is true down to the latest and the most lovable
visionaries of our own time; if they do not climb up into Christendom,
they slide down into Thibet. The greatest poet now writing in the
English language (and it is surely unnecessary to say that I mean Mr
Yeats) has written a whole play round the statement, “Where there is
nothing there is God.” In this he sharply and purposely cuts himself
off from the real Christian position, that where there is anything
there is God.
[Illustration: FOR HIS EYES ARE UPON THE WAYS OF MAN (1825)]
But though, by an almost political accident, Oriental pessimism
has been the practical alternative to the Christian type of
transcendentalism, there is, and always has been, a third thing that
was neither Christian in an orthodox sense nor Buddhistic in any
sense. Before Christianity existed there was a European school of
optimist mystics; among whom the great name is Plato. And ever since
there have been movements and appearances in Europe of this healthier
heathen mysticism, which did not shrink from the shapes of things or
the emphatic colours of existence. Something of the sort was in the
Nature worship of Renaissance philosophers; something of the sort may
even have been behind the strange mixture of ecstacy and animality
in the isolated episode of Luther. This solid and joyful occultism
appears at its best in Swedenborg; but perhaps at its boldest and most
brilliant in William Blake.
The present writer will not, in so important a matter, pretend to the
absurd thing called impartiality; he is personally quite convinced
that if every human being lived a thousand years, every human being
would end up either in utter pessimistic scepticism or in the Catholic
creed. William Blake, in his rationalist and highly Protestant age,
was frequently reproached for his tenderness towards Catholicism; but
it would have surprised him very much to be told that he would join
it. But he would have joined it--if he had lived a thousand years, or
even perhaps a hundred. He was on the side of historic Christianity
on the fundamental question on which it confronts the East; the idea
that personality is the glory of the universe and not its shame; that
creation is higher than evolution, because it is more personal; that
pardon is higher than Nemesis, because it is more personal; that the
forgiveness of sins is essential to the communion of saints; and the
resurrection of the body to the life everlasting. It was a mark of the
old eastern initiations, it is still a mark of the grades and planes
of our theosophical thinkers, that as a man climbs higher and higher,
God becomes to him more and more formless, ethereal, and even thin. And
in many of these temples, both ancient and modern, the final reward of
serving the god through vigils and purifications, is that one is at
last worthy to be told that the god doesn’t exist.
Against all this emasculate mysticism Blake like a Titan rears his
colossal figure and his earthquake voice. Through all the cloud and
chaos of his stubborn symbolism and his perverse theories, through
the tempest of exaggeration and the full midnight of madness, he
reiterates with passionate precision that only that which is lovable
can be adorable, that deity is either a person or a puff of wind, that
the more we know of higher things the more palpable and incarnate we
shall find them; that the form filling the heavens is the likeness
of the appearance of a man. Much of what Blake thus wildly thundered
has been put quietly and quaintly by Coventry Patmore, especially in
that delicate and daring passage in which he speaks of the bonds, the
simpleness and even the narrowness of God. The wise man will follow a
star, low and large and fierce in the heavens; but the nearer he comes
to it the smaller and smaller it will grow, till he finds it the humble
lantern over some little inn or stable. Not till we know the high
things shall we know how lowly they are. Meanwhile, the modern superior
transcendentalist will find the facts of eternity incredible because
they are so solid; he will not recognise heaven because it is so like
the earth.
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Transcriber’s Note
In this file, text in _italics_ is indicated by underscores, and text
in =bold= is indicated by equals signs.
The following corrections were made to the text by the transcriber:
Page 30, “Mary Woolstonecroft” corrected to “Mary Wollstonecraft”.
Page 46, “Erywhon” corrected to “Erewhon”.
Page 60, “Leonardo de Vinci” corrected to “Leonardo da Vinci”.
Page 70, “rheindeer” corrected to “reindeer”.
Page 88, “four of five different poems” corrected to “four or five
different poems”.
Page 91, “Oh, Mr Cromek, how do you do?” corrected to “Oh, Mr. Cromek,
how do you do?”
Page 161, “If pure lines existed only on the human mind” corrected to
“If pure lines existed only in the human mind”.
*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "William Blake" ***
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