The strange and mysterious figure of William Blake seems
continually to appear at the end of almost every vista of intellectual
and aesthetic interest down which we move in these latter days.
The man's genius must have been of a unique kind; for while writers
like Wordsworth and Byron seem now to have stiffened into
dignified statues of venerated and achieved pre-eminence, he--the
contemporary of William Cowper--exercises now, half way through
the second decade of the twentieth century, an influence as fresh, as
living, as organic, as palpable, as that of authors who have only just
fallen upon silence.
His so-called "Prophetic Books" may be obscure and arbitrary in
their fantastic mythology. I shall leave the interpretation of these
works to those who are more versed in the occult sciences than I am,
or than I should greatly care to be; but a prophet in the most true
sense of that distinguished word, Blake certainly was--and to prove
it one need not touch these Apocalyptic oracles.
Writing while Cowper was composing evangelical hymns under the
influence of the Rev. Dr. Newton, and while Burns was celebrating
his Highland Mary, Blake anticipates many of the profoundest
thoughts of Nietzsche, and opens the "charmed magic casements"
upon these perilous fairy seas, voyaged over by Verlaine and
Hauptmann and Maeterlinck and Mallarmé.
When one considers the fact that he was actually writing poems and
engraving pictures before the eighteenth century closed and before
Edgar Allan Poe was born, it is nothing short of staggering to realise
how, not only in literature but in art, his astounding genius
dominates our modern taste.
It might almost seem as if every single one of the poets and painters
of our age--all these imagists and post-impressionists and symbolists
and the rest--had done nothing during the sensitive years of their life
but brood over the work of William Blake. Even in music, even in
dancing--certainly in the symbolic dancing of Isadora Duncan--even
in the stage decorations of our Little Theatres, one traces the
mystical impulse he set in motion, and the austere lineaments, not
exactly classical or mediaeval, but partaking of the nature of both, of
his elemental evocations.
It were, of course, not really possible to suppose that all these
people--all the most imaginative and interesting artists of our
day--definitely subjected themselves to the influence of William Blake.
The more rational way of accounting for the extraordinary
resemblance is to conceive that Blake, by some premonitory
inspiration of the world-spirit "brooding upon things to come,"
anticipated in an age more emotionally alien to our own than that of
Apuleius or of St. Anselm, the very "body and pressure" of the
dreams that were to dominate the earth.
When one considers how between the age of Blake and the one in
which we now live, extend no less than three great epochs of
intellectual taste, the thing becomes almost as strange as one of his
own imaginations.
The age of Sir Walter Scott and Jane Austen, of Wordsworth and
Byron, followed immediately upon his. Then we have the age of
Thackeray and Tennyson and the great Mid-Victorians. Then finally
at the end of the nineteenth century we have the epoch dominated in
art by Aubrey Beardsley, and in literature by Swinburne and Oscar
Wilde.
Now in our own age--an age that feels as though Wilde himself were
growing a little old-fashioned--we find ourselves returning to
William Blake and discovering him to be more entirely in harmony
with the instincts of our most secret souls than any single genius we
could name actually working in our midst. It is as though to find our
completest expression, the passionate and mystical soul of our
materialistic age were driven back to an author who lived a hundred
years ago. This phenomenon is by no means unknown in the history
of the pilgrimage of the human spirit; but it has never presented
itself in so emphatic a form as in the case of this extraordinary
person.
In the early ages of the world, the result without doubt would be
some weird deification of the clairvoyant prophet. William Blake
would become a myth, a legend, an avatar of the divine Being, a
Buddha, a Zoroaster, a wandering Dionysus. As it is, we are forced
to confine ourselves to the fascinating pleasure of watching in
individual cases, this or that modern soul, "touched to fine issues,"
meeting for the first time, as it may often happen, this
century-buried incarnation of their own most evasive dreams.
I myself, who now jot down these fragmentary notes upon him, had
the privilege once of witnessing the illumination--I can call it by no
other name--produced upon the mind of the greatest novelist of
America and the most incorrigibly realistic, by a chance encounter
with the "Songs of Innocence."
One of the most obvious characteristics of our age is its cult of
children. Here--in the passion of this cult--we separate ourselves
altogether, both from our mediaeval ancestors who confined their
devotion to the divine child, and from the classical ages, who kept
children altogether in the background.
"When I became a man," says the apostle, "I put away childish
things," and this "putting away of childish things" has always been a
special note of the temper and attitude of orthodox Protestants for
whom these other Biblical words, spoken by a greater than St. Paul,
about "becoming as little children," must seem a sort of pious
rhetoric.
When one considers how this thrice accursed weight of Protestant
Puritanism, the most odious and inhuman of all the perverted
superstitions that have darkened man's history, a superstition which,
though slowly dying, is not yet, owing to its joyless use as a
"business asset," altogether dead, has, ever since it was spawned in
Scotland and Geneva, made cruel war upon every childish instinct in
us and oppressed with unspeakable dreariness the lives of
generations of children, it must be regarded as one of the happiest
signs of the times that the double renaissance of Catholic Faith and
Pagan Freedom now abroad among us, has brought the "Child in the
House" into the clear sunlight of an almost religious appreciation.
Let me not, however, be misunderstood. It would be a grievous and
ludicrous mistake to associate the child-cult which runs like a thread
of filmy star-light through the work of William Blake with the
somewhat strained and fantastic attitude of child-worship which
inspires such poetry as Francis Thompson's "Love in Dian's Lap,"
and gives a ridiculous and affected air to so many of our little ones
themselves. The child of Blake's imagination is the immortal and
undying child to be found in the heart of every man and every
woman. It is the child spoken of in some of his most beautiful
passages, by Nietzsche himself--the child who will come at the last,
when the days of the Camel and the days of the Lion are over, and
inaugurate the beginning of the "Great Noon."
"And there the lion's ruddy eyes
Shall flow with tears of gold
And pitying the tender cries
And walking round the fold,
Saying, 'Wrath by his weakness
And by his health sickness
Are driven away
From our immortal day.'"
Using boldly and freely, and with far more genuine worship than
many orthodox believers, the figure and idea of Christ; it is not
exactly the Christ we know in traditional Catholic piety, to whom in
association with this image of the man-child, Blake's mind is
constantly turning.
With a noble blasphemy--dearer, one may hope, to God, than the
slavishness of many evangelical pietists--he treats the Christian
legend with the same sort of freedom that the old Greek poets used
in dealing with the gods of Nature.
The figure of Christ becomes under his hands, as we feel sometimes
it does under the hands of the great painters of the Renaissance, a
god among other gods; a power among other powers, but one
possessed of a secret drawn from the hidden depths of the universe,
which in the end is destined to prevail. So far does Blake stray from
the barriers of traditional reverence, that we find him boldly
associating this Christ of his--this man-child who is to redeem the
race--with a temper the very opposite of an ascetic one.
What makes his philosophy so interesting and original is the fact
that he entirely disentangles the phenomena of sexual love from any
notion or idea of sin or shame. The man-child whose pitiful heart
and whose tenderness toward the weak and unhappy are drawn from
the Christ-Story, takes almost the form of a Pagan Eros--the
full-grown, soft-limbed Eros of later Greek fancy--when the question of
restraint or renunciation or ascetic chastity is brought forward.
What Blake has really done, be it said with all reverence, and far
from profane ears--is to steal the Christ-child out of his cradle in the
church of his worshippers and carry him into the chambers of the
East, the chambers of the Sun, into the "Green fields and happy
groves" of primitive Arcadian innocence, where the feet of the
dancers are light upon the dew of the morning, and where the
children of passion and of pleasure sport and play, as they did in the
Golden Age.
In that wonderful picture of his representing the sons of God
"shouting together" in the primal joy of creation, one has a vision of
the large and noble harmony he strove after between an emancipated
flesh and a free spirit. William Blake, in his Adamic innocence of
"sin," has something in him that suggests Walt Whitman, but unlike
Whitman he prefers to use the figure of Christ rather than any vague
"ensemble" of nature-forces to symbolise the triumphant nuptials of
soul and body.
Sometimes in his strange verses one has the impression that one is
reading the fragmentary and broken utterances of some great ancient
poet-philosopher--some Pythagoras or Empedocles--through whose
gnomic oracles runs the rhythm of the winds and tides, and for
whose ears the stars in their courses have a far-flung harmony.
He often seems to make use of the Bible and Biblical usages, very
much as the ancient poets made use of Hesiod or of Homer, treating
such writings with reverence, but subordinating what is borrowed
from them to new and original purpose.
"Hear the voice of the Bard,
Who present, past and future sees,
Whose ears have heard
The Holy Word
That walked among the ancient trees.
"Calling the lapsed soul
And weeping in the evening dew,
That might control The starry pole
And fallen, fallen light renew!
"O Earth, O Earth, return!
Arise from out the dewy grass!
Night is worn
And the Morn
Rises from the slumbrous mass.
"Turn away no more;
Why wilt thou turn away?
The starry floor
The watery shore
Is given thee till break of day."
If I were asked to name a writer whose work conveys to one's mind,
free of any admixture of rhetoric or of any alloy of cleverness,
thevery impact and shock of pure inspired genius, I would
unhesitatingly name William Blake. One is strangely conscious in
reading him of the presence of some great unuttered power--some
vast demiurgic secret--struggling like a buried Titan just below the
surface of his mind, and never quite finding vocal expression.
Dim shapes--vast inchoate shadows--like dreams of forgotten worlds
and shadows of worlds as yet unborn, seem to pass backwards and
forwards over the brooding waters of his spirit. There is no poet
perhaps who gives such an impression of primordial creative
force--force hewing at the roots of the world and weeping and laughing
from sheer pleasure at the touch of that dream stuff whereof life is
made. Above his head, as he laughs and weeps and sings, the
branches of the trees of the forest of night stir and rustle under the
immense spaces, and, floating above them, the planets and the stars
flicker down upon him with friendly mysterious joy.
No poet gives one the impression of greater strength than William
Blake; and this is emphasised by the very simplicity and
childishness of his style. Only out of the strength of a lion could
come such honeyed gentleness. And if he is one of the strongest
among poets he is also one of the happiest.
Genuine happiness--happiness that is at the same time intellectual
and spontaneous--is far rarer in poetry than one might suppose. Such
happiness has nothing necessarily to do with an optimistic
philosophy or even with faith in God. It has nothing at all to do with
physical well-being or the mere animal sensations of eating and
drinking and philandering. It is a thing of more mysterious import
and of deeper issues than these. It may come lightly and go lightly,
but the rhythm of eternity is in the beating of its wings, and deep
calls to deep in the throbbing of its pulses.