"He who bends to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in Eternity's sun-rise."
In the welling up, out of the world's depths, of happiness like this,
there is a sense of calm, of serenity, of immortal repose and
full-brimmed ecstasy. It is the "energy without disturbance" which
Aristotle indicates as the secret of the life of the eternal Being
himself. It is beyond the ordinary pleasures of sex, as it is beyond
the ordinary difference between good and evil. It is human and yet
inhuman. It is the happiness of da Vinci, of Spinoza, of Goethe. It is
the happiness towards which Nietzsche all his life long struggled
desperately, and struggled in vain.
One touches the fringe of the very mystery of human symbols--of
the uttermost secret of _words_ in their power to express the soul of
a writer--when one attempts to analyse the child-like simplicity of
William Blake's style. How is it that he manages with so small, so
limited a vocabulary, to capture the very "music of the spheres"? We
all have the same words at our command; we all have the same
rhymes; where then lies this strange power that can give the simplest
syllables so original, so personal, a shape?
"What the hammer? What the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? What dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?"
Just because his materials are so simple and so few--and this applies
to his plastic art as well as to his poetry--we are brought to pause
more sharply and startlingly in his case than that of almost any other,
before the primordial mystery of human expression and its
malleableness under the impact of personality. Probably no poet
ever lived who expressed his meaning by the use of such a limited
number of words, or of words so simple and childish. It is as though
William Blake had actually transformed himself into some living
incarnation of his own Virgilian child-saviour, and were stammering
his oracles to mankind through divine baby-lips.
What matter? It is the one and the same Urbs Beata, Calliopolis,
Utopia, New Rome, New Atlantis, which these child-like syllables
announce, trumpet heralded by the angels of the Revelation, chanted
by the high-souled Mantuan, sung by David the King, or shouted
"over the roofs of the world" by Walt Whitman.
It is the same mystery, the same hope for the human race.
"I will not cease from mental strife
Nor shall my sword sink from my hand
Till I have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant Land!"
One of the most curious and interesting things in Blake's work is the
value he places upon tears. All his noble mythological figures,
gathering in verse after verse, for the great battle against brutality
and materialism, come "weeping" to the help of their outraged little
ones. Gods and beasts, lions and lambs, Christ and Lucifer, fairies
and angels, all come "weeping" into the struggle with the forces of
stupidity and tyranny.
He seems to imply that to have lost the power of shedding tears is to
have dehumanized oneself and put oneself outside the pale. "A tear
is an intellectual thing," and those who still have the power of
"weeping" have not quite lost the key to the wisdom of the eternal
gods. It is not only the mysterious and foreordained congruity of
rhyme that leads him to associate in poem after poem--until for the
vulgar mind, the repetition becomes almost ludicrous--this symbolic
"weeping" with the sweet sleep which it guards and which it brings.
The poet of the veiled child at the heart of the world is naturally a
poet of the mystery of tears and the mystery of sleep. And William
Blake becomes all this without the least tincture of sentimentality.
That is where his genius is most characteristic and admirable. He
can come chanting his strange gnomic tunes upon tears and upon
sleep, upon the loveliness of children, upon life and death, upon the
wonder of dews and clouds and rain and the soft petals of flowers
which these nourish, without--even for one moment--falling into
sentiment or pathos.
All through his strange and turbulent life he was possessed of the
power of splendid and terrible anger. His invectives and
vituperations bite and flay like steel whips. The "buyers and sellers"
in the temple of his Lord are made to skip and dance. He was afraid
of no man living--nor of any man's god.
Working with his own hands, composing his poems, illustrating
them, engraving them, printing them, and binding them in his own
workshop, he was in a position to make Gargantuan sport of the
"great" and the "little" vulgar.
He went his own way and lived as he pleased; having something
about him of that shrewd, humorous, imperturbable "insouciance"
which served Walt Whitman so well, and which is so much wiser,
kindlier and more human a shield for an artist's freedom, than the
sarcasms of a Whistler or the insolence of a Wilde.
Careless and nonchalant, he "travelled the open road," and gave all
obscurantists and oppressors to ten million cart-loads of horned
devils!
It is my privilege to live, on the South Coast, not so many miles
from that village of Felpham where he once saw in his child-like
fantasies, a fairy's funeral. That funeral must have been followed
after Blake's death by many others; for there are no fairies in
Felpham now. But Blake's cottage is there still--to be seen by any
who care to see it--and the sands by the sea's edge are the "yellow
sands," flecked with white foam and bright green sea-weed of
Ariel's song; and on the sea-banks above grow tufts of Homeric
Tamarisk.
It is astonishing to think that while the laconic George Crabbe,
"Nature's sternest painter," was writing his rough couplets in the
metre of Alexander Pope, and while Doctor Johnson was still
tapping the posts of his London streets, as he went his way to buy
oysters for his cat, William Blake--in mind and imagination a
contemporary of Nietzsche and Whitman--should have been
asserting the artist's right (why should we not say the individual's
right, artist or no artist?) to live as he pleases, according to the
morals, manners, tastes, inclination and caprices, of his own
absolute humour and fancy.
This was more than one hundred years ago. What would William
Blake think of our new world,--would it seem to him to resemble his
New Jerusalem of child-like happiness and liberty?--our world
where young ladies are fined five dollars if they go into the sea
without their stockings? Well! at Felpham they do not tease them
with stockings.
What makes the genius of William Blake so salutary a revolutionary
influence is the fact that while contending so savagely against
puritanical stupidity, he himself preserves to the end, his
guilelessness and purity of heart.
There are admirable writers and philosophers, whose work on behalf
of the liberation of humanity is rendered less disinterested by the
fact that they are fighting for their personal inclinations rather than
for the happiness of the world at large. This could never be said of
William Blake. A more unselfish devotion to the spiritual interests
of the race than that which inspired him from beginning to end could
hardly be imagined. But he held it as axiomatic that the spiritual
interests of the race can only be genuinely served by means of the
intellectual and moral freedom of the individual. And certainly in his
own work we have a beautiful and anarchical freedom.
No writer or artist ever succeeded in expressing more completely the
texture and colour of his thoughts. Those strange flowing-haired old
men who reappear so often in his engravings, like the "splendid and
savage old men" of Walt Whitman's fancy, seem to incorporate the
very swing and sweep of his elemental earth-wrestling; while those
long-limbed youths and maidens, almost suggestive of El Greco in
the way their bodies are made, yearn and leap upwards towards the
clear air and the cloudless blue sky, in a passion of tumultuous
escape, in an ecstasy of resurrection.
It is extraordinary how Blake's peculiar use of very simple rhymes,
with the same words repeated over and over again, enhances the
power of his poetry--it does more than enhance it--it is the body of
its soul. One approaches here the very mystery of style, in the poetic
medium, and some of its deepest secrets. Just as that "metaphysic in
sensuality" which is the dominant impulse in the genius of Remy de
Gourmont expresses itself in constant echoes and reiterated
liturgical repetitions--such as his famous "fleur hypocrite, fleur du
silence"--until one feels that the "refrain" in poetry has become, in
an especial sense, his predominant note, so these constantly
recurring rhymes in the work of Blake, coming at the end of very
short lines, convey, as nothing else could do, the child-like quality
of the spirit transfused through them. They are childlike; and yet
they could not have been written by any one but a grown man, and a
man of formidable strength and character.
The psychology of the situation is doubtless the same as that which
we remark in certain very modern artists--the ones whose work is
most of all bewildering to those who, in their utter inability to
become as "little children," are as completely shut out from the
kingdom of art as they are from the kingdom of heaven.
The curious spell which these simple and in some cases infantile
rhymes cast over us, ought to compel the more fanatical adherents of
"free verse" to rearrange their ideas. Those who, without any
prejudice one way or the other, are only anxious to enjoy to the full
every subtle pleasure which the technique of art is able to give,
cannot help finding in the unexpected thrill produced by these sweet,
soft vibrations of verbal melody--like the sound of a golden bell
rung far down under the humming waters--a direct revelation of the
tender, strong soul behind them, for whose hidden passion they find
a voice.
After all, it is in the final impression produced upon our senses and
intellect by a great artist, and not in any particular quality of a
particular work of art, that--unless we are pedantic virtuosos--we
weigh and judge what we have gained. And what we have gained by
William Blake cannot be over-estimated.
His poems seem to associate themselves with a thousand evanescent
memories of days when we have been happy beyond the power of
calamity or disappointment. They associate themselves with those
half-physical, half-spiritual trances--when, suddenly in the outskirts
of a great city perhaps, or on the banks of some inland river, we
have remembered the long line of breaking surf, and the murmurs
and the scents of the sea. They associate themselves with the dreamy
indescribable moments when crossing the wet grass of secluded
misty meadows, passing the drowsy cattle and the large cool early
morning shadows thrown by the trees, we have suddenly come upon
cuckoo flowers or marigolds, every petal of which seems burdened
with a mystery almost intolerably sweet.
Like the delicate pictures of early Italian art, the poems of Blake
indicate and suggest rather than exhaust or satiate. One is never
oppressed by too heavy a weight of natural beauty. A single tree
against the sky--a single shadow upon the pathway--a single petal
fallen on the grass; these are enough to transport us to those fields of
light and "chambers of the sun" where the mystic dance of creation
still goes on; these are enough to lead us to the hushed
dew-drenched lawns where the Lord God walks in the garden "in the cool
of the day."
One associates the poetry of William Blake, not with the mountain
peaks and gorgeous foliage and rushing torrents of a landscape that
clamours to be admired and would fain overpower us with its
picturesque appeal, but with the quietest, gentlest, softest, least
assuming background to that "going forth" to our work, "and our
labour until the evening," which is the normal destiny of man.
The pleasant fields of Felpham with their hawthorne hedges, the
little woods of Hertfordshire or Surrey with their patches of
bluebells, were all that he needed to set him among the company of
the eternal gods.
For this is the prerogative of imagination, that it can reconcile us to
life where life is simplest and least adorned; and this is the
reluctance and timidity of imagination that it shrinks away into
twilight and folds its wings, when the pressure of reality is too heavy,
and the materials of beauty too oppressive and tyrannous.