lost their heads over themselves. The word itself expresses a common
misunderstanding. The prophet is not a tipster--if he has any power of
foretelling, it is only a part of his wisdom; he is a man in whom the
universal man speaks, not the lower or generic or animal universal,
but that higher universal to which individuals and societies sometimes
attain. You may, of course, disbelieve in it altogether, in which case
the prophet is to you merely one who talks nonsense; but he himself is
aware of it when it speaks in him, and it makes him vehement, hasty,
impatient both of his own medium of language and of all opposition or
failure to understand. It is to him an absolute which forces him to
utter that, true always and everywhere; but he has to express it in
human language, a medium relative to human wants and human conditions.
So his expression is always imperfect and cannot be understood except
with the goodwill of the hearer. This goodwill he demands, not from
egotism, but because he is uttering the universal, and the refusal of
it exasperates him. I have piped to you and you have not danced--is
always the cry of the prophet. Argument he hates and the dialectic of
Dons, because his universal is not to be proved, its convincing power
is in itself. It is the truth which, like beauty, is believed when
seen; and, if you will not believe it, that is because you refuse to
see or hear it. You are like the deaf adder that stoppeth its ears, and
you are refusing to see your own truth as well as his; you are refusing
to find yourself in the universal. Who are you, says Whitman, that
wanted a book to encourage you in your nonsense? Your nonsense is your
private opposition to the universal, the obstacle which you set up in
yourself to your own wisdom and happiness; and with this the prophet
has no patience. He will make no terms with it; he will not attempt a
worldly lucidity or even the contrivance of the artist. It is not he
who speaks but the universal that speaks in him, often beautifully but
careless even of beauty, finding what human words it can; and men must
not look this gift-horse in the mouth, must not criticise him, for it
is not he who speaks as an individual but--my father that speaketh in
me.
So many men, whether they stone the prophet or accept him,
misunderstand him always; after they have stoned or ignored him, they
worship him as a magician. In the past he was to them one who foretold
the future; now they find an equal value in all that he says and does.
Any words of his have a biblical authority, and he is the one genuine
prophet, compared with whom all others are impostors. They do not know
that the chief reason for believing prophets is that they all say the
same thing, that this universal of theirs is a real universal, _quod
semper_, _quod ubique_, _quod ab omnibus_. When they assert that their
particular prophet has a monopoly of the truth, they are depriving
him of his chief authority, turning his universal into a particular;
and this they do because they will not be at the pains to seek the
universal in his works. It must be recognised by its own quality, and
every man must recognise it for himself; but they, flinching from the
effort of recognition, seek a gospel made authentic by the name of its
author; the prophet has said it and it must be true.
Unfortunately the prophet himself often shares this infirmity and
believes that he is always a prophet; he becomes a disciple of himself,
and sets himself above criticism, not from mere egotism and conceit so
much as because he too flinches from the task of discerning his own
universal. The prophetic vehemence becomes a habit with him; and he
despises the artist's patience and contrivance; he may even believe
that he is a prophet because he himself does not clearly understand
what he says; he may mistake the automatism, which lies in wait for
everyone who constantly practises any art, for the universal speaking
in him and imperiously snatching at language to express itself.
Now Blake was artist as well as prophet, a great artist in two arts;
but everything conspired to make him confuse the functions of artist
and prophet, which indeed are easily confused. A man is helped to
understand himself by the understanding of others; and Blake had no
one to understand him, as artist or as prophet. His masters were in
the past; his own achievements belonged to the future; he lacked that
contemporary education which is best worth having. There was no one
even for him to talk to, but only a few listeners who were not sure
that he was sane. As artist, he was a prophet in the literal sense;
he did what men were going to do as well as what they had done long
ago. Naturally he believed that, as artist, he was always right, while
Reynolds and the other popular ones of his own time were always wrong.
He had a blood-feud with them, and was in love with his own work; he
believed that the universal, which sometimes possessed him, possessed
him always, because his writing and his drawing were unlike those of
other men of his time. So he made a myth about himself to express his
lack of criticism, namely, that his works were dictated to him by an
angel, they were not his, and it was not his business to improve or
judge them.
In his own time he was neglected; but now he is subject to the other
kind of misunderstanding. He has disciples who are as uncritical of his
works as he was, for whom he is always prophet, never artist, or rather
an infallible artist because a prophet. They tell us that, if we enjoy
his poems as poems or his pictures as pictures, we have not found the
key to them. With the key of his symbolism we can enter a sanctuary
beyond beauty in which the secrets of the universe are revealed. But
they cannot tell us what these secrets are any more than Blake could;
and I would rather believe that he told us all he could by the methods
proper to a writer, and that the faults of the artist are not the
virtues of the prophet; that where in verse that begins beautifully
he becomes incoherent, uses catchwords not to be understood except by
reference to other writings and often not then, he is himself confusing
the artist with the prophet and making the mistake of his disciples.
If you are in danger of believing in the magic of Blake, of treating
him as our pious grandparents treated the Hebrew prophets, you may
recover your senses by considering his other art; for in that the
difference between his artistic failures and successes is plain. I
myself believe that Blake was the greatest master of design among all
modern artists, that for the shaping imagination you must go back to
Tintoret to find his equal. But, whereas in poetry he freed himself
easily from all influences foreign to his own character and genius, in
his other art he was free only intermittently and blindly. There are
two kinds of drawing which I will call rhythmical and constructional,
although, of course, there is rhythm in all good constructional
drawing and some construction in all good rhythmical drawing. But the
difference is one of kind, it is the difference between Cimabue and
Michelangelo. Cimabue expresses himself mainly in rhythm to which the
descriptive shapes of things are subordinate--it is enough if you can
recognise them. Michelangelo's line itself constructs, it tells us
how things are made and insists upon their functions. It is the line
natural to an age eager for consecutive thought; it is, as it were,
an arguing line. Now, Blake was by nature, by conviction, by habit,
a rhythmical draughtsman, and all his best work is rhythmical rather
than constructive; he is not arguing with us, he is telling us, in line
as in words. It is enough for him if we can recognise his shapes for
what they are; he expresses his real content in the sway of lines, as
if it were a dance or a gesture, and he is most at his ease when his
shapes are like flames blown in the wind, almost transformed by his own
emotion. And yet he was not often at his ease in drawing, for all his
life he was, like Fuseli, haunted by the ghost of Michelangelo, whose
actual works he had never seen. Even he was subdued by the prestige of
a master whose method was poison to his genius. In poetry he could be
inspired by the past art of his own country, and in his earliest poems
alone does he speak for a few words, in the language of his time. "And
Phœbus fired my vocal rage"; but his drawings are infested by formulæ
taken second-hand from Michelangelo. It is only now and then, in the
decorations to books which he printed himself, in the magnificent
woodcuts for Thornton's Pastorals, in some of the Dante illustrations,
that he quite frees himself from a pretence of constructional drawing.
If you would excel in that, you must study the particular fact
passionately, you must get your construction from the fact, not from
your own mind; but Blake, like so many imitators of Michelangelo, did
not study the fact; he gives us a pretence of constructional drawing
in formulæ often struggling to be rhythmical and failing because they
are formulæ of construction. There he is like St. Paul, who sometimes
spoils matter that should be prophetic with a pretence of Greek
dialectic, who makes a bad argument for the Resurrection out of an
image. Even in his most famous design, the Morning Stars of the Book of
Job, the rhythm of the wings and garments is cramped by the drawing,
anatomical without freshness, of the bodies. Compare this with the last
drawing but one of the series, where rhythm is master of all, and you
will see how Blake, even in his great maturity, only practised his true
method by accident, and when there was no association to mislead him;
the nude was a snare to him, and seldom could he find a method of his
own for it. Often he was merely an inferior Fuseli; and bits of Fuseli
obtrude even in his finer works. Nothing could be more tiresome than
the drawing of some of his faces, and no one could for a moment suppose
that there was any prophetic infallibility in these failures; they are
as dull as late Roman sculpture or the efforts of Reynolds in the grand
style.
But, if Blake is not infallible as a draughtsman, he is not infallible
at all; for he himself would sometimes claim infallibility in all
his works; by the common infirmity of prophets, when they cease to
be prophetic, he assumed a status different from that of the artist,
and so was induced to set down whatever came into his mind, as if an
angel were dictating to him or he had command of the pencil of the Holy
Ghost. But the artist and the prophet are both what they are by effort
not by status; if they rely on status they become bores or charlatans;
and that is true of all human beings, of Blake no less than of
Habakkuk. If ever he seems to have written nonsense, then we must take
it to be nonsense until we find sense in it; we must pay no heed if we
are told that the seeming nonsense is symbolism.
Even in his finest poems we must not assume a clearer purpose than we
find. Take, for instance, the third verse of the Tiger:
And what shoulder, and what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? and what dread feet?
We may persuade ourselves that there is some peculiar virtue in the
two broken questions of the last line; but the original draft of the
poem[9] proves that Blake did not at first mean them to be broken
questions at all. They were continued in the next stanza:
[9] _The original draft is given in the excellent Oxford
edition of Blake's _Poetical Works_, published by Mr.
Milford, and edited by Mr. John Sampson, at the price,
in 1913, of 1s. 6d. net. In spite of the price, it is
the most complete edition of the poems, and contains
all the shorter Prophetic Books, including the French
Revolution, with extracts from the longer ones._
Could fetch it from the furnace deep
And in thy horrid ribs dare steep
In the well of sanguine woe, etc.
Blake seeing, what was obvious, that this did not promise well and
was leading nowhere, gave it up and changed the punctuation of the
preceding stanza which had run simply--"What dread hand and what dread
feet"--to its present form, so as to finish off the stanza to the eye,
if not to the mind.
It is a masterful way out of a difficulty, but it takes the risk that
we shall ask what the dread hand and feet are there to do? The original
draft tells us--to fetch the tiger's heart from the furnace deep;
but in the poem as we know it we may guess for ourselves, and there
is no answer. This is not the dark sublimity of the prophet, but the
wilfulness of the poet, who, having hit upon a fine sounding line,
prefers it to sense. (There is also another reading which may come
from Blake himself--"What dread hand forged thy dread feet?" It is not
"prophetic," but it does make sense.)
It does not matter much, for the rhythm of the poem carries one through
obscurities of detail; but the broken questions are not an added beauty
or sublimity, they are merely Blake's way out of a difficulty that may
beset any poet.
So I come, gradually and cautiously, to the Prophetic Books themselves,
and to my contention that they too are to be judged, like the works
of the Hebrew Prophets, as literature, since they were written for
men to read. We must make a reasonable allowance for all mystics;
they try to say what is very hard to say, what they have seen as in a
glass darkly. If you think them worth reading at all, you believe that
they are concerned with a reality men do not perceive naturally and
immediately with the senses, a reality that we are aware of, if at all,
only by hints and whispers. There are no commonly accepted sense-data
for this reality, upon which we can reason as we can reason about the
movements of the stars. Men are most fully aware of it when they are
in an exalted state of mind--a state which expresses itself in images
rather than in syllogisms. You may say, of course, that this state
of mind is "purely subjective" and therefore only of artistic value;
but the mystic himself denies that. He believes that he is aware of a
reality not himself, though himself is a part of it; and aware of it,
not by the normal use of the senses, but by a more immediate perception
of the spirit. He knows it, perhaps, through sense perceptions, but by
means of a faculty beyond them; he knows it with the whole of himself,
that self which is not often enough of a unity to attain to this kind
of knowledge. This you too must believe, or at least not refuse to
believe, if you are to take him seriously; but the mystic, even if he
does speak to us of an independent reality, speaks with a personal
expression of his own, like the artist. Lâo-tsze has put it better
than anyone: "It is the way of Heaven not to speak, but it knows how
to obtain an answer." When he says Heaven he implies an independent
reality; but men make other men aware of it by the answer they give to
it, and this answer is personal to them.
So a man must convince us of his experience of this Heaven, this
reality not perceived by the senses, by his own expression of it,
his own answer. He must say what moves us by the ordinary means of
expression; he must not pretend that he has a secret to tell us which
we can understand only if he will play his game with his counters, his
symbols, and allegories. If he has seen heaven, then it knows how to
obtain an answer from him, exoteric in its power if esoteric in its
meaning, and leading men into its meaning by its power. The power is
in the answer, if the meaning is in the heaven he has seen, and that
heaven is to be known by its fruits.
You must, of course, read a mystic with attention; but you should be
able to gather his meaning as you read; it is to be found in each
sentence and in the whole of each work, not by reference to some
other work; for it is the mark of a bad writer not to be able to say
what he has to say in the sentence he is writing, to give us always
jam yesterday, or jam to-morrow, but never jam to-day. Yet that is
what the Blake-fanatics offer us in the Prophetic Books. You cannot
understand this unless you know that the key to it is in that. You must
grasp Blake's "system" if you are to profit by him. They are like the
Gnostics for whom nothing in the Gospels meant what it seemed to mean;
they alone could give you the key to Christ's inner meaning.
Master Eckhart says that the eternal birth which God the father bore
and bears unceasingly in eternity is now born in time and in human
nature. "St. Augustine says this birth is always happening. But, if it
happen not in me, what does it profit me? What matters is that it shall
happen in me." So what matters for the mystic, and his readers, is that
the eternal truth shall happen and be expressed in him, in his actual
words. We must not be told that we can find it by turning from one work
to another and by piecing them all together. He must utter it sentence
by sentence, and it must happen in his sentences, with pain and labour
perhaps, but still here and now and in these very words.
In Blake's Prophetic Books sometimes it happens and sometimes it does
not, and often Blake by his very method seems to prevent it from
happening. He has the weakness of many mystics, the desire for a vast
geometrical system equivalent to the reality he believes himself to be
aware of. Such a system, if once a man will abandon his mind to it,
can unroll itself almost automatically, like a fugue. But many fugues
are empty of content; they persuade the composer that he is saying
something with the mechanical inevitability of their form; and they
may also persuade the hearer. It is the very mechanism that prevents
him from saying anything and the hearer from seeing its emptiness. We
do not yet understand that automatism of the mind which can produce
form without content so easily; the automatism of improvisation in
many arts, which you find in some cubist pictures, in much music,
and in Prophetic Books of all ages, especially in the Bible. Blake
himself speaks of it, with seeming inconsistency, in his preface to
_Jerusalem_: "When this verse was first dictated to me, I considered a
monotonous cadence like that used by Milton and Shakespeare, and all
writers of English Blank Verse, derived from the modern bondage of
Riming, to be a necessary and indispensable part of verse. But I soon
found that in the mouth of a true Orator such monotony was not only
awkward but as much a bondage as rime itself. I therefore have produced
a variety in every line, both of cadences and number of syllables.
Every word and every letter is studied and put into its fit place."
You may ask how there could be this choice and study where the verse
was dictated; but Blake means, no doubt, to describe a process of
writing half-conscious and half-unconscious, as a composer might choose
to write a fugue and then let it write itself. We may use Sheridan's
words of this method: "Easy writing makes damned hard reading"; and
_Jerusalem_ is not easy to read.
Yet it contains great passages and ideas, of which Messrs. Maclagan
and Russell give a very clear account in their edition of it. Like all
the great mystics, Blake was a foreteller of the discoveries of modern
psychology; he knew the evils of "suppression"--Sooner murder an infant
in its cradle than nurse unacted desires--and his story, in so far as
there is one, is the story of the human mind in its effort to reach
unity, not by suppression but by "sublimation." Yet it seems to me that
his ideas often lost their way in the myth which he made about them;
it is like allegorical painting in which there is a conflict between
the allegory and the people and things represented, and a sacrifice
of one conflicting element to the other. In Blake's story you have
to remember that the characters are not men and women but different
parts or faculties of the human mind; this requires a kind of double
attention fatal in itself to the experience of a work of art, a double
attention like that sometimes demanded by symphonic poems, in which you
have to remember the story while you are listening to the music. If you
are writing about the faculties of the human mind it must be best, both
for yourself and for your readers, to call them by their names and to
see them as themselves; so will you think most clearly and so will the
reader understand most easily.
The subject-matter of _Jerusalem_ is really philosophy and psychology,
and it is better expressed in the prose sentences of the _Marriage of
Heaven and Hell_ than in myth. This should be read first by those who
wish to understand Blake's ideas. Like Nietzsche, he went "beyond good
and evil." Good according to the religious, he says, is the passive
that obeys reason; evil is the active that springs from energy; but for
Blake himself the conflict between this active and passive is the real
evil; it is what makes men prefer dreams to reality. By the _Marriage
of Heaven and Hell_ he means the reconciliation of reason and energy
and the destruction of the delusive, dreamer's, sense of a sin which
yet allures. He who desires but acts not breeds pestilence. If the
fool would persist in his folly he would become wise. The pride of the
Peacock is the glory of God. Exuberance is beauty. Energy is eternal
delight. "Those who restrain Desire," he says, "do so because theirs is
weak enough to be restrained; and the restrainer or Reason usurps its
place and governs the unwilling." To Blake Christ means the harmonious
man in whom desire is master, and uses reason as an instrument. From
this follows his belief, which is the belief underlying all religion,
that true, supreme and harmonious desire is for reality, and that from
it alone can reality be discovered. "Everything possible to be believed
is an image of the truth." But, of course, belief to Blake means real
belief, belief of the whole self, belief that is acted upon, not the
acceptance of anything on authority. "I asked--Does a firm persuasion
that a thing is so, make it so? He replied--All poets believe that
it does, and in ages of imagination this firm persuasion removed
mountains; but many are not capable of a firm persuasion of anything."
Firm persuasion is that unity of the self which, for Blake as for all
mystics, is salvation.
Blake is united to Christianity by his mystical doctrine of
forgiveness; that is what makes him one of the great designers or
creators of Christianity, those who know what Christ himself meant,
in whom his passion is born anew, and to whom his theology is natural
truth. This doctrine expresses itself in Blake's poetry without symbol;
we need no key to understand it, and, whenever it possesses him, it
lifts him to its own height and clearness. The evil of unforgivingness,
to him, is in the remembrance of sin which keeps the sin itself alive:
To record the sin for a reproach, to let the Sun go down
In a remembrance of the sin, is a woe and a horror,
A brooder of an evil day, and a Sun rising in blood.
Come then, O Lamb of God, and take away the remembrance of sin.
That is so, whether a man remembers the sin of others or his own; and
he who remembers the sin of others will remember his own. The sense
of sin comes of the conflict between reason and desire; what we have
to do is to end that conflict and attain to supreme desire and firm
persuasion; thinking of the conflict only perpetuates it. The religion
of Jesus was for Blake freedom from the past, and we attain to it by
forgetting the sins of others; then we can forgive, and forget, our
own past selves. Hence his doctrine that Jesus, the child of desire,
was born in the forgiveness of sin; and the most beautiful passage in
_Jerusalem_ is the forgiveness of Mary by Joseph and her song that
follows, "O Forgiveness and Pity and Compassion! If I were pure I
should never have known Thee: If I were unpolluted I should never have
glorified thy Holiness, or rejoiced in thy great Salvation." There is
the same doctrine in the last section of the Everlasting Gospel, and
it runs all through the Songs of Innocence and Experience. God Himself
for Blake, as for Christ, is, by the very logic of the idea God, He
who pities and forgives, He who blots out the past; the divine energy
pours itself out in pity and forgiveness, making life and growth and
beauty out of sin itself, justifying even evil, since, by the forgiving
and forgetting of it, it is changed into a good more subtle, more
entrancing, more assured of an infinite increase than any pure good
that needs no change or forgiveness.
In his expressions of this doctrine Blake rises above all our poets
by reason of the richness of his mastered content. He is simpler and
deeper, more passionate and more philosophic, and attains in art to
that harmony which he foretells in life. When I think of it, I am in
danger myself of seeing in him the one prophet, the one poet, the
infallible. I am sure, at least, that he will seem greater through all
the new discoveries and enlarged experience of posterity.
SHELLEY AND HIS PUBLISHERS
(_With Some New Letters_)
By ROGER INGPEN