The new edition of Blake's poetical works, published by the Clarendon
Press, will be welcomed by every lover of English poetry. The volume is
worthy of the great university under whose auspices it has been
produced, and of the great artist whose words it will help to
perpetuate. Blake has been, hitherto, singularly unfortunate in his
editors. With a single exception, every edition of his poems up to the
present time has contained a multitude of textual errors which, in the
case of any other writer of equal eminence, would have been well-nigh
inconceivable. The great majority of these errors were not the result of
accident: they were the result of deliberate falsification. Blake's text
has been emended and corrected and 'improved,' so largely and so
habitually, that there was a very real danger of its becoming
permanently corrupted; and this danger was all the more serious, since
the work of mutilation was carried on to an accompaniment of fervent
admiration of the poet. 'It is not a little bewildering,' says Mr.
Sampson, the present editor, 'to find one great poet and critic
extolling Blake for the "glory of metre" and "the sonorous beauty of
lyrical work" in the two opening lyrics of the _Songs of Experience_,
while he introduces into the five short stanzas quoted no less than
seven emendations of his own, involving additions of syllables and
important changes of meaning.' This is Procrustes admiring the exquisite
proportions of his victim. As one observes the countless instances
accumulated in Mr. Sampson's notes, of the clippings and filings to
which the free and spontaneous expression of Blake's genius has been
subjected, one is reminded of a verse in one of his own lyrics, where he
speaks of the beautiful garden in which--
Priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,
And binding with briers my joys and desires;
and one cannot help hazarding the conjecture, that Blake's prophetic
vision recognised, in the lineaments of the 'priests in black gowns,'
most of his future editors. Perhaps, though, if Blake's prescience had
extended so far as this, he would have taken a more drastic measure; and
we shudder to think of the sort of epigram with which the editorial
efforts of his worshippers might have been rewarded. The present
edition, however, amply compensates for the past. Mr. Sampson gives us,
in the first place, the correct and entire text of the poems, so printed
as to afford easy reading to those who desire access to the text and
nothing more. At the same time, in a series of notes and prefaces, he
has provided an elaborate commentary, containing, besides all the
variorum readings, a great mass of bibliographical and critical matter;
and, in addition, he has enabled the reader to obtain a clue through the
labyrinth of Blake's mythology, by means of ample quotations from those
passages in the _Prophetic Books_, which throw light upon the
obscurities of the poems. The most important Blake document--the
Rossetti MS.--has been freshly collated, with the generous aid of the
owner, Mr. W.A. White, to whom the gratitude of the public is due in no
common measure; and the long-lost Pickering MS.--the sole authority for
some of the most mystical and absorbing of the poems--was, with deserved
good fortune, discovered by Mr. Sampson in time for collation in the
present edition. Thus there is hardly a line in the volume which has not
been reproduced from an original, either written or engraved by the hand
of Blake. Mr. Sampson's minute and ungrudging care, his high critical
acumen, and the skill with which he has brought his wide knowledge of
the subject to bear upon the difficulties of the text, combine to make
his edition a noble and splendid monument of English scholarship. It
will be long indeed before the poems of Blake cease to afford matter for
fresh discussions and commentaries and interpretations; but it is safe
to predict that, so far as their form is concerned, they will
henceforward remain unchanged. There will be no room for further
editing. The work has been done by Mr. Sampson, once and for all.
In the case of Blake, a minute exactitude of text is particularly
important, for more than one reason. Many of his effects depend upon
subtle differences of punctuation and of spelling, which are too easily
lost in reproduction. 'Tiger, tiger, burning bright,' is the ordinary
version of one of his most celebrated lines. But in Blake's original
engraving the words appear thus--'Tyger! Tyger! burning bright'; and who
can fail to perceive the difference? Even more remarkable is the change
which the omission of a single stop has produced in the last line of one
of the succeeding stanzas of the same poem.
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?
So Blake engraved the verse; and, as Mr. Sampson points out,'the
terrible, compressed force' of the final line vanishes to nothing in the
'languid punctuation' of subsequent editions:--'What dread hand and what
dread feet?' It is hardly an exaggeration to say, that the re-discovery
of this line alone would have justified the appearance of the present
edition.
But these considerations of what may be called the mechanics of Blake's
poetry are not--important as they are--the only justification for a
scrupulous adherence to his autograph text. Blake's use of language was
not guided by the ordinarily accepted rules of writing; he allowed
himself to be trammelled neither by prosody nor by grammar; he wrote,
with an extraordinary audacity, according to the mysterious dictates of
his own strange and intimate conception of the beautiful and the just.
Thus his compositions, amenable to no other laws than those of his own
making, fill a unique place in the poetry of the world. They are the
rebels and atheists of literature, or rather, they are the sanctuaries
of an Unknown God; and to invoke that deity by means of orthodox
incantations is to run the risk of hell fire. Editors may punctuate
afresh the text of Shakespeare with impunity, and perhaps even with
advantage; but add a comma to the text of Blake, and you put all Heaven
in a rage. You have laid your hands upon the Ark of the Covenant. Nor is
this all. When once, in the case of Blake, the slightest deviation has
been made from the authoritative version, it is hardly possible to stop
there. The emendator is on an inclined plane which leads him inevitably
from readjustments of punctuation to corrections of grammar, and from
corrections of grammar to alterations of rhythm; if he is in for a
penny, he is in for a pound. The first poem in the Rossetti MS. may be
adduced as one instance--out of the enormous number which fill Mr.
Sampson's notes--of the dangers of editorial laxity.
I told my love, I told my love,
I told her all my heart;
Trembling, cold, in ghastly fears,
Ah! she doth depart.
This is the first half of the poem; and editors have been contented with
an alteration of stops, and the change of 'doth' into 'did.' But their
work was not over; they had, as it were, tasted blood; and their version
of the last four lines of the poem is as follows:
Soon after she was gone from me,
A traveller came by,
Silently, invisibly:
He took her with a sigh.
Reference to the MS., however, shows that the last line had been struck
out by Blake, and another substituted in its place--a line which is now
printed for the first time by Mr. Sampson. So that the true reading of
the verse is:
Soon as she was gone from me,
A traveller came by,
Silently, invisibly--
O! was no deny.
After these exertions, it must have seemed natural enough to Rossetti
and his successors to print four other expunged lines as part of the
poem, and to complete the business by clapping a title to their
concoction--'Love's Secret'--a title which there is no reason to suppose
had ever entered the poet's mind.
Besides illustrating the shortcomings of his editors, this little poem
is an admirable instance of Blake's most persistent quality--his
triumphant freedom from conventional restraints. His most characteristic
passages are at once so unexpected and so complete in their effect, that
the reader is moved by them, spontaneously, to some conjecture of
'inspiration.' Sir Walter Raleigh, indeed, in his interesting
Introduction to a smaller edition of the poems, protests against such
attributions of peculiar powers to Blake, or indeed to any other poet.
'No man,' he says, 'destitute of genius, could live for a day.' But even
if we all agree to be inspired together, we must still admit that there
are degrees of inspiration; if Mr. F's Aunt was a woman of genius, what
are we to say of Hamlet? And Blake, in the hierarchy of the inspired,
stands very high indeed. If one could strike an average among poets, it
would probably be true to say that, so far as inspiration is concerned,
Blake is to the average poet, as the average poet is to the man in the
street. All poetry, to be poetry at all, must have the power of making
one, now and then, involuntarily ejaculate: 'What made him think of
that?' With Blake, one is asking the question all the time.
Blake's originality of manner was not, as has sometimes been the case,
a cloak for platitude. What he has to say belongs no less distinctly to
a mind of astonishing self-dependence than his way of saying it. In
English literature, as Sir Walter Raleigh observes, he 'stands outside
the regular line of succession.' All that he had in common with the
great leaders of the Romantic Movement was an abhorrence of the
conventionality and the rationalism of the eighteenth century; for the
eighteenth century itself was hardly more alien to his spirit than that
exaltation of Nature--the 'Vegetable Universe,' as he called it--from
which sprang the pantheism of Wordsworth and the paganism of Keats.
'Nature is the work of the Devil,' he exclaimed one day; 'the Devil is
in us as far as we are Nature.' There was no part of the sensible world
which, in his philosophy, was not impregnated with vileness. Even the
'ancient heavens' were not, to his uncompromising vision, 'fresh and
strong'; they were 'writ with Curses from Pole to Pole,' and destined to
vanish into nothingness with the triumph of the Everlasting Gospel.
There are doubtless many to whom Blake is known simply as a charming and
splendid lyrist, as the author of _Infant Joy_, and _The Tyger_, and the
rest of the _Songs of Innocence and Experience_. These poems show but
faint traces of any system of philosophy; but, to a reader of the
Rossetti and Pickering MSS., the presence of a hidden and symbolic
meaning in Blake's words becomes obvious enough--a meaning which
receives its fullest expression in the _Prophetic Books_. It was only
natural that the extraordinary nature of Blake's utterance in these
latter works should have given rise to the belief that he was merely an
inspired idiot--a madman who happened to be able to write good verses.
That belief, made finally impossible by Mr. Swinburne's elaborate Essay,
is now, happily, nothing more than a curiosity of literary history; and
indeed signs are not wanting that the whirligig of Time, which left
Blake for so long in the Paradise of Fools, is now about to place him
among the Prophets. Anarchy is the most fashionable of creeds; and
Blake's writings, according to Sir Walter Raleigh, contain a complete
exposition of its doctrines. The same critic asserts that Blake was 'one
of the most consistent of English poets and thinkers.' This is high
praise indeed; but there seems to be some ambiguity in it. It is one
thing to give Blake credit for that sort of consistency which lies in
the repeated enunciation of the same body of beliefs throughout a large
mass of compositions and over a long period of time, and which could
never be possessed by a, madman or an incoherent charlatan. It is quite
another thing to assert that his doctrines form in themselves a
consistent whole, in the sense in which that quality would be ordinarily
attributed to a system of philosophy. Does Sir Walter mean to assert
that Blake is, in this sense too, 'consistent'? It is a little difficult
to discover. Referring, in his Introduction, to Blake's abusive notes on
Bacon's _Essays_, he speaks of--
The sentimental enthusiast, who worships all great men
indifferently, [and who] finds himself in a distressful position
when his gods fall out among themselves. His case [Sir Walter
wittily adds] is not much unlike that of Terah, the father of
Abraham, who (if the legend be true) was a dealer in idols among
the Chaldees, and, coming home to his shop one day, after a brief
absence, found that the idols had quarrelled, and the biggest of
them had smashed the rest to atoms. Blake is a dangerous idol for
any man to keep in his shop.
We wonder very much whether he is kept in Sir Walter Raleigh's.
It seems clear, at any rate, that no claim for a 'consistency' which
would imply freedom from self-contradiction can be validly made for
Blake. His treatment of the problem of evil is enough to show how very
far he was from that clarity of thought without which even prophets are
liable, when the time comes, to fall into disrepute. 'Plato,' said
Blake, 'knew of nothing but the virtues and vices, and good and evil.
There is nothing in all that. Everything is good in God's eyes.' And
this is the perpetual burden of his teaching. 'Satan's empire is the
empire of nothing'; there is no such thing as evil--it is a mere
'negation.' And the 'moral virtues,' which attempt to discriminate
between right and wrong, are the idlest of delusions; they are merely
'allegories and dissimulations,' they 'do not exist.' Such was one of
the most fundamental of Blake's doctrines; but it requires only a
superficial acquaintance with his writings to recognise that their whole
tenour is an implicit contradiction of this very belief. Every page he
wrote contains a moral exhortation; bad thoughts and bad feelings raised
in him a fury of rage and indignation which the bitterest of satirists
never surpassed. His epigrams on Reynolds are masterpieces of virulent
abuse; the punishment which he devised for Klopstock--his impersonation
of 'flaccid fluency and devout sentiment'--is unprintable; as for those
who attempt to enforce moral laws, they shall be 'cast out,' for they
'crucify Christ with the head downwards.' The contradiction is indeed
glaring. 'There is no such thing as wickedness,' Blake says in effect,
'and you are wicked if you think there is.' If it is true that evil does
not exist, all Blake's denunciations are so much empty chatter; and, on
the other hand, if there is a real distinction between good and bad, if
everything, in fact, is _not_ good in God's eyes--then why not say so?
Really Blake, as politicians say, 'cannot have it both ways.'
But of course, his answer to all this is simple enough. To judge him
according to the light of reason is to make an appeal to a tribunal
whose jurisdiction he had always refused to recognise as binding. In
fact, to Blake's mind, the laws of reason were nothing but a horrible
phantasm deluding and perplexing mankind, from whose clutches it is the
business of every human soul to free itself as speedily as possible.
Reason is the 'Spectre' of Blake's mythology, that Spectre, which, he
says,
Around me night and day
Like a wild beast guards my way.
It is a malignant spirit, for ever struggling with the 'Emanation,' or
imaginative side of man, whose triumph is the supreme end of the
universe. Ever since the day when, in his childhood, Blake had seen
God's forehead at the window, he had found in imaginative vision the
only reality and the only good. He beheld the things of this world 'not
with, but through, the eye':
With my inward Eye, 'tis an old Man grey,
With my outward, a Thistle across my way.
It was to the imagination, and the imagination alone, that Blake yielded
the allegiance of his spirit. His attitude towards reason was the
attitude of the mystic; and it involved an inevitable dilemma. He never
could, in truth, quite shake himself free of his 'Spectre'; struggle as
he would, he could not escape altogether from the employment of the
ordinary forms of thought and speech; he is constantly arguing, as if
argument were really a means of approaching the truth; he was subdued to
what he worked in. As in his own poem, he had, somehow or other, been
locked into a crystal cabinet--the world of the senses and of reason--a
gilded, artificial, gimcrack dwelling, after 'the wild' where he had
danced so merrily before.
I strove to seize the inmost Form
With ardour fierce and hands of flame,
But burst the Crystal Cabinet,
And like a Weeping Babe became--
A weeping Babe upon the wild....
To be able to lay hands upon 'the inmost form,' one must achieve the
impossible; one must be inside and outside the crystal cabinet at the
same time. But Blake was not to be turned aside by such considerations.
He would have it both ways; and whoever demurred was crucifying Christ
with the head downwards.
Besides its unreasonableness, there is an even more serious objection to
Blake's mysticism--and indeed to all mysticism: its lack of humanity.
The mystic's creed--even when arrayed in the wondrous and ecstatic
beauty of Blake's verse--comes upon the ordinary man, in the rigidity of
its uncompromising elevation, with a shock which is terrible, and
almost cruel. The sacrifices which it demands are too vast, in spite of
the divinity of what it has to offer. What shall it profit a man, one is
tempted to exclaim, if he gain his own soul, and lose the whole world?
The mystic ideal is the highest of all; but it has no breadth. The
following lines express, with a simplicity and an intensity of
inspiration which he never surpassed, Blake's conception of that ideal:
And throughout all Eternity
I forgive you, you forgive me.
As our dear Redeemer said:
'This the Wine, & this the Bread.'
It is easy to imagine the sort of comments to which Voltaire, for
instance, with his 'wracking wheel' of sarcasm and common-sense, would
have subjected such lines as these. His criticism would have been
irrelevant, because it would never have reached the heart of the matter
at issue; it would have been based upon no true understanding of Blake's
words. But that they do admit of a real, an unanswerable criticism, it
is difficult to doubt. Charles Lamb, perhaps, might have made it;
incidentally, indeed, he has. 'Sun, and sky, and breeze, and solitary
walks, and summer holidays, and the greenness of fields, and the
delicious juices of meats and fishes, and society, and the cheerful
glass, and candle-light, and fire-side conversations, and innocent
vanities, and jests, and _irony itself_'--do these things form no part
of your Eternity?
The truth is plain: Blake was an intellectual drunkard. His words come
down to us in a rapture of broken fluency from impossible intoxicated
heights. His spirit soared above the empyrean; and, even as it soared,
it stumbled in the gutter of Felpham. His lips brought forth, in the
same breath, in the same inspired utterance, the _Auguries of Innocence_
and the epigrams on Sir Joshua Reynolds. He was in no condition to chop
logic, or to take heed of the existing forms of things. In the imaginary
portrait of himself, prefixed to Sir Walter Raleigh's volume, we can see
him, as he appeared to his own 'inward eye,' staggering between the
abyss and the star of Heaven, his limbs cast abroad, his head thrown
back in an ecstasy of intoxication, so that, to the frenzy of his
rolling vision, the whole universe is upside down. We look, and, as we
gaze at the strange image and listen to the marvellous melody, we are
almost tempted to go and do likewise.
But it is not as a prophet, it is as an artist, that Blake deserves the
highest honours and the most enduring fame. In spite of his hatred of
the 'vegetable universe,' his poems possess the inexplicable and
spontaneous quality of natural objects; they are more like the works of
Heaven than the works of man. They have, besides, the two most obvious
characteristics of Nature--loveliness and power. In some of his lyrics
there is an exquisite simplicity, which seems, like a flower or a child,
to be unconscious of itself. In his poem of _The Birds_--to mention, out
of many, perhaps a less known instance--it is not the poet that one
hears, it is the birds themselves.
O thou summer's harmony,
I have lived and mourned for thee;
Each day I mourn along the wood,
And night hath heard my sorrows loud.
In his other mood--the mood of elemental force--Blake produces effects
which are unique in literature. His mastery of the mysterious
suggestions which lie concealed in words is complete.
He who torments the Chafer's Sprite
Weaves a Bower in endless Night.
What dark and terrible visions the last line calls up! And, with the aid
of this control over the secret springs of language, he is able to
produce in poetry those vast and vague effects of gloom, of foreboding,
and of terror, which seem to be proper to music alone. Sometimes his
words are heavy with the doubtful horror of an approaching thunderstorm:
The Guests are scattered thro' the land,
For the Eye altering alters all;
The Senses roll themselves in fear,
And the flat Earth becomes a Ball;
The Stars, Sun, Moon, all shrink away,
A desart vast without a bound,
And nothing left to eat or drink,
And a dark desart all around.
And sometimes Blake invests his verses with a sense of nameless and
infinite ruin, such as one feels when the drum and the violin
mysteriously come together, in one of Beethoven's Symphonies, to predict
the annihilation of worlds:
On the shadows of the Moon,
Climbing through Night's highest noon:
In Time's Ocean falling, drowned:
In Aged Ignorance profound,
Holy and cold, I clipp'd the Wings
Of all Sublunary Things:
But when once I did descry
The Immortal Man that cannot Die,
Thro' evening shades I haste away
To close the Labours of my Day.
The Door of Death I open found,
And the Worm Weaving in the Ground;
Thou'rt my Mother, from the Womb;
Wife, Sister, Daughter, to the Tomb:
Weaving to Dreams the Sexual strife,
And weeping over the Web of Life.
Such music is not to be lightly mouthed by mortals; for us, in our
weakness, a few strains of it, now and then, amid the murmur of ordinary
converse, are enough. For Blake's words will always be strangers on this
earth; they could only fall with familiarity from the lips of his own
Gods:
above Time's troubled fountains,
On the great Atlantic Mountains,
In my Golden House on high.
They belong to the language of Los and Rahab and Enitharmon; and their
mystery is revealed for ever in the land of the Sunflower's desire.
1906.