possible comment on the practical side of Blake's character. No man ever
lived and laboured in hotter earnest; and the native energy in him had the
property of making all his atmosphere of work intense and keen as
fire--too sharp and rare in quality of heat to be a good working element
for any more temperate intellect. Into every conceivable channel or byway
of work he contrived to divert and infuse this overflowing fervour of
mind; the least bit of engraving, the poorest scrap or scratch of drawing
or writing traceable to his hands, has on it the mark of passionate labour
and enjoyment; but of all this devotion of laborious life, the only upshot
visible to most of us consists in a heap of tumbled and tangled relics,
verse and prose mainly inexplicable, paintings and engravings mainly
unacceptable if not unendurable. And if certain popular theories of the
just aims of life, duties of an earnest-minded man, and meritorious nature
of practical deeds and material services only, are absolutely correct--in
that case the work of this man's life is certainly a sample of deplorable
waste and failure. A religion which has for Walhalla some factory of the
Titans, some prison fitted with moral cranks and divine treadmills of all
the virtues, can have no place among its heroes for the most energetic of
mere artists. To him, as to others of his kind, all faith, all virtue, all
moral duty or religious necessity, was not so much abrogated or superseded
as summed up, included and involved, by the one matter of art. To him, as
to other such workmen, it seemed better to do this well and let all the
rest drift than to do incomparably well in all other things and dispense
with this one. For this was the thing he had to do; and this once well
done, he had the assurance of a certain faith that other things could not
be wrong with him. As long as two such parties exist among men who think
and act, it must always be some pleasure to deal with a man of either
party who has no faith or hope in compromise. These middle-men, with some
admirable self-sufficient theory of reconciliation between two directly
opposite aims and forces, are fit for no great work on either side. If it
be in the interest of facts really desirable that "the poor Fine Arts
should take themselves away," let it be fairly avowed and preached in a
distinct manner. That thesis, so delivered, is comprehensible, and
deserves respect. One may add that if art can be destroyed it by all means
ought to be. If for example the art of verse is not indispensable and
indestructible, the sooner it is put out of the way the better. If
anything can be done instead better worth doing than painting or poetry,
let that preferable thing be done with all the might and haste that may
be attainable. And if to live well be really better than to write or paint
well, and a noble action more valuable than the greatest poem or most
perfect picture, let us have done at once with the meaner things that
stand in the way of the higher. For we cannot on any terms have
everything; and assuredly no chief artist or poet has ever been fit to
hold rank among the world's supreme benefactors in the way of doctrine,
philanthropy, reform, guidance, or example: what is called the artistic
faculty not being by any means the same thing as a general capacity for
doing good work, diverted into this one strait or shallow in default of a
better outlet. Even were this true for example of a man so imperfect as
Burns, it would remain false of a man so perfect as Keats. The great men,
on whichever side one finds them, are never found trying to take truce or
patch up terms. Savonarola burnt Boccaccio; Cromwell proscribed
Shakespeare. The early Christians were not great at verse or sculpture.
Men of immense capacity and energy who do seem to think or assert it
possible to serve both masters--a Dante, a Shelley, a Hugo--poets whose
work is mixed with and coloured by personal action or suffering for some
cause moral or political--these even are no real exceptions. It is not as
artists that they do or seem to do this. The work done may be, and in such
high cases often must be, of supreme value to art; but not the moral
implied. Strip the sentiments and re-clothe them in bad verse, what
residue will be left of the slightest importance to art? Invert them,
retaining the manner or form (supposing this feasible, which it might be),
and art has lost nothing. Save the shape, and art will take care of the
soul for you:[11] unless that is all right, she will refuse to run or
start at all; but the shape or style of workmanship each artist is bound
to look to, whether or no he may choose to trouble himself about the moral
or other bearings of his work. This principle, which makes the manner of
doing a thing the essence of the thing done, the purpose or result of it
the accident, thus reversing the principle of moral or material duty, must
inevitably expose art to the condemnation of the other party--the party of
those who (as aforesaid) regard what certain of their leaders call an
earnest life or a great acted poem (that is, material virtue or the mere
doing and saying of good or instructive deeds and words) as infinitely
preferable to any possible feat of art. Opinion is free, and the choice
always open; but if any man leaning on crutches of theory chooses to halt
between the two camps, it shall be at his own peril--imminent peril of
conviction as one unfit for service on either side. For Puritanism is in
this one thing absolutely right about art; they cannot live and work
together, or the one under the other. All ages which were great enough to
have space for both, to hold room for a fair fighting-field between them,
have always accepted and acted upon this evident fact. Take the
Renaissance age for one example; you must have Knox or Ronsard, Scotch or
French; not both at once; there is no place under reformers for the
singing of a "Pleiade." Take the mediaeval period in its broadest sense;
not to speak of the notably heretical and immoral Albigeois with their
exquisite school of heathenish verse, or of that other rebellious
gathering under the great emperor Frederick II., a poet and pagan, when
eastern arts and ideas began to look up westward at one man's bidding and
open out Saracenic prospects in the very face and teeth of the
Church--look at home into familiar things, and see by such poems as
Chaucer's _Court of Love_, absolutely one in tone and handling as it is
with the old Albigensian _Aucassin_ and all its paganism,[12] how the
poets of the time, with their eager nascent worship of beautiful form and
external nature, dealt with established opinion and the incarnate
moralities of church or household. It is easy to see why the Church on its
own principle found it (as in the Albigensian case) a matter of the
gravest necessity to have such schools of art and thought cut down or
burnt out. Priest and poet, all those times through, were proverbially on
terms of reciprocal biting and striking. That magnificent invention of
making "Art the handmaid of Religion" had not been stumbled upon in the
darkness of those days. Neither minstrel nor monk would have caught up the
idea with any rapture. As indeed they would have been unwise to do; for
the thing is impossible. Art is not like fire or water, a good servant and
bad master; rather the reverse. She will help in nothing, of her own
knowledge or freewill: upon terms of service you will get worse than
nothing out of her. Handmaid of religion, exponent of duty, servant of
fact, pioneer of morality, she cannot in any way become; she would be none
of these things though you were to bray her in a mortar. All the battering
in the world will never hammer her into fitness for such an office as
that. It is at her peril, if she tries to do good: one might say,
borrowing terms from the other party, "she shall not try that under
penalty of death and damnation." Her business is not to do good on other
grounds, but to be good on her own: all is well with her while she sticks
fast to that. To ask help or furtherance from her in any extraneous good
work is exactly as rational as to expect lyrical beauty of form and flow
in a logical treatise. The contingent result of having good art about you
and living in a time of noble writing or painting may no doubt be this;
that the spirit and mind of men then living will receive on some points a
certain exaltation and insight caught from the influence of such forms and
colours of verse or painting; will become for one thing incapable of
tolerating bad work, and capable therefore of reasonably relishing the
best; which of course implies and draws with it many other advantages of a
sort you may call moral or spiritual. But if the artist does his work with
an eye to such results or for the sake of bringing about such
improvements, he will too probably fail even of them. Art for art's sake
first of all, and afterwards we may suppose all the rest shall be added to
her (or if not she need hardly be overmuch concerned); but from the man
who falls to artistic work with a moral purpose, shall be taken away even
that which he has--whatever of capacity for doing well in either way he
may have at starting. A living critic[13] of incomparably delicate insight
and subtly good sense, himself "impeccable" as an artist, calls this "the
heresy of instruction" (_l'heresie de l'enseignement_): one might call it,
for the sake of a shorter and more summary name, the great moral heresy.
Nothing can be imagined more futile; nothing so ruinous. Once let art
humble herself, plead excuses, try at any compromise with the Puritan
principle of doing good, and she is worse than dead. Once let her turn
apologetic, and promise or imply that she really will now be "loyal to
fact" and useful to men in general (say, by furthering their moral work or
improving their moral nature), she is no longer of any human use or value.
The one fact for her which is worth taking account of is simply mere
excellence of verse or colour, which involves all manner of truth and
loyalty necessary to her well-being. That is the important thing; to have
her work supremely well done, and to disregard all contingent
consequences. You may extract out of Titian's work or Shakespeare's any
moral or immoral inference you please; it is none of their business to see
after that. Good painting or writing, on any terms, is a thing quite
sufficiently in accordance with fact and reality for them. Supplant art by
all means if you can; root it out and try to plant in its place something
useful or at least safe, which at all events will not impede the noble
moral labour and trammel the noble moral life of Puritanism. But in the
name of sense and fact itself let us have done with all abject and
ludicrous pretence of coupling the two in harness or grafting the one on
the other's stock: let us hear no more of the moral mission of earnest
art; let us no longer be pestered with the frantic and flatulent
assumptions of quasi-secular clericalism willing to think the best of all
sides, and ready even, with consecrating hand, to lend meritorious art
and poetry a timely pat or shove. Philistia had far better (always
providing it be possible) crush art at once, hang or burn it out of the
way, than think of plucking out its eyes and setting it to grind moral
corn in the Philistine mills; which it is certain not to do at all well.
Once and again the time has been that there was no art worth speaking of
afloat anywhere in the world; but there never has been or can have been a
time when art, or any kind of art worth having, took active service under
Puritanism, or indulged for its part in the deleterious appetite of saving
souls or helping humanity in general along the way of labour and
progress.[14] Let no artist or poet listen to the bland bark of those
porter dogs of the Puritan kingdom even when they fawn and flirt with
tongue or tail. _Cave canem._ That Cerberus of the portals of Philistia
will swallow your honey-cake to no purpose; if he does not turn and rend
you, his slaver as he licks your hand will leave it impotent and palsied
for all good work.
Thus much it seemed useful to premise, by way of exposition rather than
excursion, so as once for all to indicate beyond chance of mistake the
real point of view taken during life by Blake, and necessary to be taken
by those who would appreciate his labours and purposes. Error on this
point would be ruinous to any student. No one again need be misled by the
artist's eager incursions into grounds of faith or principle; his design
being merely to readjust all questions of such a kind by the light of art
and law of imagination--to reduce all outlying provinces, and bring them
under government of his own central empire--the "fourfold spiritual city"
of his vision. Power of imaginative work and insight--"the Poetic Genius,
as you now call it"--was in his mind, we shall soon have to see, "the
first principle" of all things moral or material, "and all the others
merely derivative;" a hazardous theory in its results and corollaries, but
one which Blake at all events was always ready to push to its utmost
consequences and defend at its extreme outworks. Against all pretensions
on the part of science or experimental reasoning to assume this post he
was especially given to rebel and recalcitrate. Whether or no he were
actually prepared to fight science in earnest on its own pitched field--to
dispute seriously the conquest of facts achieved by it--may be
questionable; I for one am inclined to disbelieve this, and to refer much
of his verbal pugnacity on such matters to the strong irregular humour,
rough and loose as that of children, and the half simple half scornful
love of paradox, which were ingrained in the man. For argument and proof
he had the contempt of a child or an evangelist. Not that he would have
fallen back in preference upon the brute resource of thaumaturgy; the
coarse and cheap machinery of material miracle was wholly insufficient and
despicable to him. No wonder-monger of the low sort need here have hoped
for a pupil, a colleague, or an authority. This the biographer has acutely
noted, and taken well into account; as we must all do under pain of waste
time and dangerous error. Let this too be taken note of; that to believe a
thing is not necessarily to heed or respect it; to despise a thing is not
the same as to disbelieve it. Those who argue against the reality of the
meaner forms of "spiritualism" in disembodied life, on the ground
apparently that whatever is not of the patent tangible flesh must be of
high imperishable importance, are merely acting on the old ascetic
assumption that the body is of its nature base and the soul of its nature
noble, and that between the two there is a great gulf fixed, neither to be
bridged over nor filled up. Blake, as a mystic of the higher and subtler
kind, would have denied this superior separate vitality of the spirit; but
far from inferring thence that the soul must expire with the body, would
have maintained that the essence of the body must survive with the essence
of the soul: accepting thus (as we may have to observe he did), in its
most absolute and profound sense, the doctrine of the Resurrection of the
Flesh. As a temporary blind and bar to the soul while dwelling on earth,
fit only (if so permitted) to impede the spiritual vision and hamper the
spiritual feet, he did indeed appear to contemn the "vegetable" and
sensual nature of man; but on no ascetic grounds. Admitting once for all
that it was no fit or just judge of things spiritual, he claimed for the
body on its own ground an equal honour and an equal freedom with the soul;
denying the river's channel leave to be called the river--refusing to the
senses the license claimed for them by materialism to decide by means of
bodily insight or sensation questions removed from the sphere of sensual
evidence--and reserving always the absolute assurance and certain faith
that things do exist of which the flesh can take no account, but only the
spirit--he would grant to the physical nature the full right to every form
of physical indulgence: would allow the largest liberty to all powers and
capacities of pleasure proper to the pure bodily life. In a word,
translated into crude practical language, his creed was about this: as
long as a man believes all things he may do any thing; scepticism (not
sin) is alone damnable, being the one thing purely barren and negative; do
what you will with your body, as long as you refuse it leave to disprove
or deny the life eternally inherent in your soul. That we believe is what
people call or have called by some such name as "antinomian mysticism:" do
anything but doubt, and you shall not in the end be utterly lost. Clearly
enough it was Blake's faith; and one assuredly grounded not on mere
contempt of the body, but on an equal reverence for spirit and flesh as
the two sides or halves of a completed creature: a faith which will allow
to neither license to confute or control the other. The body shall not
deny, and the spirit shall not restrain; the one shall not prescribe doubt
through reasoning; the other shall not preach salvation through
abstinence. A man holding such tenets sees no necessity to deny that the
indulged soul may be in some men as ignoble as the indulged body in others
may be noble; and that a spirit ignoble while embodied need not become
noble or noticeable by the process of getting disembodied; in other words,
that death or change need not be expected to equalize the unequal by
raising or lowering spirits to one settled level. Much of the existing
evidence as to baser spiritual matters, Blake, like other men of candid
sense and insight, would we may suppose have accepted--and dropped with
the due contempt into the mass of facts worth forgetting only, which the
experience of every man must carry till his memory succeeds in letting go
its hold of them. Nothing, he would doubtless have said, is worth
disputing in disproof of, which if proved would not be worth giving thanks
for. Let such things be or not be as the fates of small things please; but
will any one prove or disprove for me the things I hold by warrant of
imaginative knowledge? things impossible to discover, to analyze, to
attest, to undervalue, to certify, or to doubt?
This old war--not (as some would foolishly have it defined) a war between
facts and fancies, reason and romance, poetry and good sense, but simply
between the imagination which apprehends the spirit of a thing and the
understanding which dissects the body of a fact--this strife which can
never be decided or ended--was for Blake the most important question
possible. He for one, madman or no madman, had the sense to see that the
one thing utterly futile to attempt was a reconciliation between two sides
of life and thought which have no community of work or aim imaginable.
This is no question of reconciling contraries. Admit all the implied
pretensions of art, they remain simply nothing to science; accept all the
actual deductions of science, they simply signify nothing to art. The
eternal "Apres?" is answer enough for both in turn. "True, then, if you
will have it; but what have we to do with your good or bad poetries and
paintings?" "Undeniably; but what are we to gain by your deductions and
discoveries, right or wrong?" The betrothal of art and science were a
thing harder to bring about and more profitless to proclaim than "the
marriage of heaven and hell." It were better not to fight, but to part in
peace; but better certainly to fight than to temporize, where no
reasonable truce can be patched up. Poetry or art based on loyalty to
science is exactly as absurd (and no more) as science guided by art or
poetry. Neither in effect can coalesce with the other and retain a right
to exist. Neither can or (while in its sober senses) need wish to destroy
the other; but they must go on their separate ways, and in this life their
ways can by no possibility cross. Neither can or (unless in some fit of
fugitive insanity) need wish to become valuable or respectable to the
other: each must remain, on its own ground and to its own followers, a
thing of value and deserving respect. To art, that is best which is most
beautiful; to science, that is best which is most accurate; to morality,
that is best which is most virtuous. Change or quibble upon the simple and
generally accepted significance of these three words, "beautiful,"
"accurate," "virtuous," and you may easily (if you please, or think it
worth while) demonstrate that the aim of all three is radically one and
the same; but if any man be correct in thinking this exercise of the mind
worth the expenditure of his time, that time must indeed be worth very
little. You can say (but had perhaps better not say) that beauty is the
truthfullest, accuracy the most poetic, and virtue the most beautiful of
things; but a man of ordinary or decent insight will perceive that you
have merely reduced an affair of things to an affair of words--shifted the
body of one thing into the clothes of another--and proved actually
nothing.
To attest by word or work the identity of things which never can become
identical, was no part of Blake's object in life. What work it fell to his
lot to do, that, having faith in the fates, he believed the best work
possible, and performed to admiration. It is in consequence of this belief
that, apart from all conjectural or problematic theory, the work he did is
absolutely good. Intolerant he was by nature to a degree noticeable even
among freethinkers and prophets; but the strange forms assumed by this
intolerance are best explicable by the singular facts of his training--his
perfect ignorance of well-known ordinary things and imperfect quaint
knowledge of much that lay well out of the usual way. He retained always
an excellent arrogance and a wholly laudable self-reliance; being
incapable of weak-eyed doubts or any shuffling modesty. His great
tenderness had a lining of contempt--his fiery self-assertion a kernel of
loyalty. No one, it is evident, had ever a more intense and noble
enjoyment of good or great works in other men--took sharper or deeper
delight in the sense of a loyal admiration: being of his nature noble,
fearless, and fond of all things good; a man made for believing. This
royal temper of mind goes properly with a keen relish of what excellence
or greatness a man may have in himself. Those must be readiest to feel and
to express unalloyed and lofty pleasure in the great powers and deeds of
a neighbour, who, while standing clear alike of reptile modesty and
pretentious presumption, perceive and know in themselves such qualities as
give them a right to admire and a right to applaud. If a man thinks meanly
of himself, he can hardly in reason think much of his judgment; if he
depreciates the value of his own work, he depreciates also the value of
his praise. Those are loyallest who have most of a just self-esteem; and
their applause is best worth having. It is scarcely conceivable that a man
should take delight in the real greatness or merit of his own work for so
pitiful and barren a reason as merely that it _is_ his own; should be
unable to pass with a fresh and equal enjoyment from the study and relish
of his own capacities and achievements to the study and relish of another
man's. A timid jealousy, easily startled into shrieks of hysterical malice
and disloyal spite, is (wherever you may fall in with it) the property of
base men and mean artists who, at sight of some person or thing greater
than themselves, are struck sharply by unconscious self-contempt, and at
once, whether they know it or not, lose heart or faith in their own
applauded work. To recognize their equal, even their better when he does
come, must be the greatest delight of great men. "All the gods," says a
French essayist, "delight in worship: is one lesser for the other's
godhead? Divine things give divine thanks for companionship; the stars
sang not one at once, but all together." Like all men great enough to
enjoy greatness, Blake was born with the gift of admiration; and in his
rapid and fervent nature it struck root and broke into flower at the
least glimpse or chance of favourable weather. Therefore, if on no other
ground, we may allow him his curious outbreaks of passionate dispraise and
scorn against all such as seemed to stand in the way of his art. Again, as
we have noted, he had a faith of his own, made out of art for art's sake,
and worked by means of art; and whatever made against this faith was as
hateful to him as any heresy to any pietist. In a rough and rapid way he
chose to mass and sum up under some one or two types, comprehensible at
first sight to few besides himself, the main elements of opposition which
he conceived to exist. Thus for instance the names of Locke and Newton, of
Bacon and Voltaire, recur with the most singular significance in his
writings, as emblems or incarnate symbols of the principles opposite to
his own: and when the clue is once laid hold of, and the ear once
accustomed to the curious habit of direct mythical metaphor or figure
peculiar to Blake--his custom of getting whole classes of men or opinions
embodied, for purposes of swift irregular attack, in some one
representative individual--much is at once clear and amenable to critical
reason which seemed before mere tempestuous incoherence and clamour of
bodiless rhetoric. There is also a certain half-serious perversity and
wilful personal humour in the choice and use of these representative
names, which must be taken into account by a startled reader unless he
wishes to run off at a false tangent. After all, it is perhaps impossible
for any one not specially qualified by nature for sympathy with such a
man's kind of work, to escape going wrong in his estimate of Blake; to
such excesses of paradox did the poet-painter push his favourite points,
and in such singular attire did he bring forward his most serious
opinions. But at least the principal and most evident chances of error may
as well be indicated, by way of warning off the over-hasty critic from
shoals on which otherwise he is all but certain to run.
It is a thing especially worth regretting that Balzac, in his
Swedenborgian researches, could not have fallen in with Blake's
"prophetic" works. Passed through the crucible of that supreme
intellect--submitted to the test of that supple practical sense, that
laborious apprehension, so delicate and so passionate at once, of all
forms of thought or energy, which were the great latent gifts of the
deepest and widest mind that ever worked within the limits of inventive
prose--the strange floating forces of Blake's instinctive and imaginative
work might have been explained and made applicable to direct ends in a way
we cannot now hope for. The incomparable power of condensing apparent
vapour into tangible and malleable form, of helping us to handle air and
measure mist, which is so instantly perceptible whenever Balzac begins to
open up any intricate point of physical or moral speculation, would here
have been beyond price. He alone who could push analysis to the verge of
creation, and with his marvellous clearness of eye and strength of hand
turn discovery almost to invention; he who was not "a prose Shakespeare"
merely, but rather perhaps a Shakespeare complete in all but the lyrical
faculty; he alone could have brought a scale to weigh this water, a sieve
to winnow this wind. That wonderful wisdom, never at fault on its own
ground, which made him not simply the chief of dramatic story, but also
the great master of morals,[15] would not have failed of foothold or
eyesight even in this cloudy and noisy borderland of vision and of faith.
Even to him too, the supreme student and interpreter of things, our
impulsive prophet with his plea of mere direct inspiration might have been
of infinite help and use: to such an eye and brain as his, Blake might
have made straight the ways which Swedenborg had left crooked, set right
the problems which mesmerism had set wrong. As however we cannot have
this, we must do what share of interpreter's work falls to our lot as well
as we can.