HIS RELIGIOUS VIEWS
It seems to me that it would be quite vain and useless to go on to a
review of Blake's art, and, incidentally, his poetry, without a
preliminary examination--as concise as may be--of the fundamental
religious and intellectual conceptions which made him the man he was, and
gave him so strange and subjective a point of view. Blake is no ordinary
painter, whose art-work is the only key to his inner life or to his
perceptions of beauty in the natural world.
He is an artist and a poet of the highest spiritual order, but he is also
a mystic. Messrs. Ellis and Yeats tell us that his rank as a mystic
entitles him to far more admiration and patient study than any claims he
may have as a mere painter and poet! Be that as it may (and some of us
cannot but hold the artist as the most glorious manifestation of the
divine on this earth!), it is certainly necessary to apprehend Blake the
mystic before we can enter into the spirit of Blake the artist.
His was a strange religious creed. It is evident that in early life he
obtained somehow or other many of the works of the great mystics and
studied them with passionate attention. Among them Swedenborg (whom,
however, he frequently criticised harshly) and Jacob Boehmen, the
wonderful shoemaker of the sixteenth century, seem to have exerted the
most lasting influence on his mind.
Swedenborg's doctrine of correspondences--the theory that natural
phenomena actually represent, or rather shadow, unseen spiritual
conditions and existence--attracted Blake at first reading, and became so
much a part of his mental fibre that one feels certain he would have
eventually fought his intellectual way out into this channel of thought
had Swedenborg never written. Nature seemed to Blake but the confused and
vague copy of something definite and perfect in "Imagination" or "Spirit."
"All things exist in the human imagination," and "in every bosom a
universe expands," he wrote, and in the human imagination and its reverend
preservation and cultivation lay man's only source of divine illumination,
he believed.
"If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man
as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up till he sees all things
through narrow chinks in his cavern," are illuminating words of his.
Blake's whole effort in life seemed to be the cleansing and spiritualizing
of the portals of the senses that he might see and hear and receive as
much of the infinite spirit as his humanity could hold.
The mission which he put clearly before him always, he expressed in these
words in his prophetic poem of "Jerusalem":
I rest not from my great task
To open the Eternal Worlds, to open the Immortal Eyes
Of Man inwards; into the Worlds of Thought, into Eternity
Ever expanding in the bosom of God, the Human Imagination.
No man ever sought more gallantly to batter down the walls of materialism
which were closing round the souls of men, to let in the sweet breath of
Spirit, and to unveil the Vision of the Universal Life. The immemorial
struggle between the body and the soul of man was never lost sight of by
him, though he sometimes seems to deny it, and his letters to Butts from
Felpham show something of his acute consciousness of the difficulty of
subduing his spectre or "selfhood." "Nature and religion," he announces
passionately, "are the fetters of Life." The orthodox narrow unspiritual
religion of his time and all times was repugnant to Blake, and aroused all
his fiery combative qualities. It seemed to him to be as actually a fetter
to the spirit as the carnal nature of man. Religion was to him a matter of
intuition, and not a question of creed or dogma at all. He gives a picture
of ordinary religious conceptions in the poem called the "Everlasting
Gospel":
The vision of Christ that thou dost see
Is my vision's greatest enemy.
Thine is the friend of all mankind;
Mine speaks in parables to the blind.
Thine loves the same world that mine hates,
Thy heaven-doors are my hell-gates.
Socrates taught what Miletus
Loathed as a nation's bitterest curse;
And Caiaphas was, in his own mind,
A benefactor to mankind.
Both read the Bible day and night;
But thou read'st black where I read white.
The last line is very significant of Blake. The world which made so decent
and respectable a thing out of Christianity, which called success and
opportunism the favour of God, and hailed the Prince of this world by the
name of Christ, excited Blake's utmost antagonism. He announced definite
counter doctrines on his part, and advocated in his vehemence, almost as
partial a view of things, as in their own way, did the materialists of his
time. "La verite est dans une nuance," Renan has declared, but the swing
of the pendulum of opinion must alternate from one extreme to the other
before the precise "nuance" can be determined. Blake's noble but often
impractical views have yet a practical utility, for only through a
knowledge of the extreme, can the mean be discriminated. Of his own
personal religion it might be said that certain fantastic and strange
tenets he _chose_ to believe because they pleased him, as we may choose to
believe in this or that section of the Catholic Church; but the most
quintessential, intimate, and spiritual of his views were not beliefs at
all, but simply and purely knowledge. He _knew_, by an intuition beyond
reason, things outside the ken of ordinary men.
The deep melodies of the super-sensible universe reverberated through his
soul, and he could never therefore think much of the hum and clamour of
this material world. From this intuitive and rapt knowledge of the mystic
there is no appeal, for it transcends human experience, and when Blake had
it, he was prophet (teller of hidden things) indeed. But when he chose to
believe and assert complex and sometimes contradictory doctrines, the
affair is different, and we may give or withhold our intellectual sympathy
as we will. In any case the spiritual and unorthodox creed which was the
lamp of truth to this beautiful soul is worthy of deep reverence, but I
cannot altogether agree with Messrs. Ellis and Yeats that a _consistent_
basis of mysticism underlies Blake's writings. Even a system of mystic
philosophy requires to be stated comprehensibly and in a recognizable
literary form, and the prophetic books (in which the greater part of
Blake's views are expressed) have no form nor sequence, and are as chaotic
and dim as dreams. Messrs. Ellis and Yeats, it is true, have constructed
an elaborate, imaginative and very coherent thought-structure out of
Blake's prophetic writings, but owing to the looseness, confusion and
unintelligible character of the greater part of the symbolic books
themselves, the deftly woven web of mysticism which they present to us as
Blake's does not carry conviction with it. It is suggestive, deeply
sympathetic with Blake--sometimes radiantly illuminating--but seems an
independent treatise rather than an exposition. Deeply as all students of
Blake must feel themselves indebted to Messrs. Ellis and Yeats for their
learned work, and the real help it has afforded to a clearer view of his
unique personality, I cannot but think that every man will--nay
_must_--interpret Blake for himself. He was too erratic, too emotional,
too much the artist, the apostle of discernment and the enemy of reason
and science, to have constructed the closely-reasoned,
carefully-articulated system of thought which they describe so
graphically. Blake was an intuitive mystic, not a systematic or learned
one. However, if Messrs. Ellis and Yeats have appreciated Blake's
mysticism, in all its strange convolutions and cloudy gyrations, they have
done so not by following his expressed thoughts but by stating from a
sympathetic insight denied to others, what he himself left unexpressed.
This does not materially concern the student of Blake's art and poetry,
but it _does_ deeply concern them that they should ascertain the _main_
opinions which we know he held and the nature of the spiritual insight
that obviously moulded his intellect, and hence his art.
He had a startlingly naive and original mental perspective, and he
focussed profound and virgin thought on Life, Spirit and Art. Virgin
thought it was indeed, for tradition had little hold on him, and the
social, political and intellectual movements of his time passed by him,
washing round the rock on which he sat isolated, but leaving him almost
untouched by their influence and atmosphere. He was never swept into the
current of contemporary life, but was as removed from the London of his
time as if his rooms had been an Alpine tower of silence, instead of being
in the very heart and turmoil of the city.
He belonged to no particular age. We could never think of him, for
instance, like Rossetti or William Morris, as an exile from the middle
ages who had fallen upon an uncongenial nineteenth century. He lived apart
in a world of spirit, and concerned himself with the great elementary
problems of all ages, bringing none of the bias or characteristic mental
hamper of his generation to bear upon these considerations. His art
necessarily ranges in the same primeval world, not yet thoroughly removed
from chaos.
Mr. Swinburne, in his eloquent critical essay on Blake, finds him largely
pantheistic in his views. There is something in Blake of the rapt
indifference to externals, found in the Buddhist.
Here is a characteristic assertion of his:
"God is in the lowest effects as well as in the highest causes. He is
become a worm that he may nourish the weak. For let it be remembered that
creation is God descending according to the weakness of man: our Lord is
the Word of God, and everything on earth is the Word of God, and in its
essence is _God_." Here certainly speaks the pantheist.
From the study of Blake's writings the following points--and they are
important to our future understanding of his art-work--stand out clearly
defined. He believed in a great permeating unconditioned spirit--God--of
whose nature men also partake, but subjected to the conditions and moral
nature which result from sexual and generative humanity. And beside the
unnameable supreme God there is another God, the creator Urizen, who is a
sort of divine demon. He it is who has divided humanity into sexes, and
inclosed the universal soul in separate bodies, and set up a code of
morals which bears no relation to the supreme God, Who being altogether
removed from, and above, the generative nature of man, does not Himself
conform to "laws of restriction and forbidding."
Urizen, who imprisons and torments conditioned humanity, is somehow
subduable by this same humanity of his own invention, and Christ, the
perfect man filled as full as may be with the Divine Spirit (for "a cup
may not contain more than its capaciousness"), rises in the hearts of
humanity, and effects its freedom, by aspiring past the Creator, to the
Altogether Divine, and uniting with it.
Jehovah addressing Christ, as the highest type and flower of humanity,
says to him, in the poem called the "Everlasting Gospel":
If thou humblest thyself thou humblest me.
Thou art a man: God is no more:
Thine own humanity learn to adore,
For that is my spirit of life.
This makes us think of Blake's follower, Walt Whitman, who in the same
sort of turgid and chaotic poetry in which Blake wrote the prophetic
books, but with no mystic clouds to shroud the meaning, has consistently
developed this thought: "One's self I sing, a simple separate person," and
"none has begun to think how divine he himself is," etc.
In Blake's conversations with Crabb Robinson, this mystic view of Christ
is very apparent. "On my asking," writes Mr. Robinson, "in what light he
viewed the great questions of the duty of Jesus," he said, "He is the only
God. But then," he added, "and so am I, and so are you."
Keeping this point in view,--Blake's belief in the identity of the Spirit
of God behind all phenomena, the homogeneous character of the great
creative Energy or Imagination expressing Itself through various forms and
organisms,--another extract from Crabb Robinson's diary will help us still
nearer home to Blake's point of view. He writes: "In the same tone, he
said repeatedly, 'The Spirit told me.' I took occasion to say, 'You
express yourself as Socrates used to do. What resemblance do you suppose
there is between your spirit and his?' 'The same as between our
countenances.' He paused and added, 'I was Socrates,' and then, as if
correcting himself, 'a sort of brother. I must have had conversations with
him. So I had with Jesus Christ. I have an obscure recollection of having
been with both of them.' I suggested on philosophic grounds the
impossibility of supposing an immortal being created an _a parte post_
without an _a parte ante_. His eye brightened at this, and he fully
concurred with me. 'To be sure, it is impossible. We are all co-existent
with God, members of the Divine Body. We are all partakers of the Divine
Nature.'"
The latter words seem as ordinary and orthodox as on first reading his
assertion that he was Socrates seems wild and mad. But all Blake really
meant (and I think Crabb Robinson only half took his meaning) was, that
the vegetative universe being a mere shadow, so are the accidents of
personality, the age one is born into, the organic form which incloses the
spirit. So his personality and that of Socrates, their imprisonment in the
"vegetative" life were differences of no account, being transitory. But he
and Socrates were one (or at least related) at the point where their
spirits (the eternal verity) touched, and melted each into the other.
He understood the Bible in its spiritual sense. As to the natural sense,
"Voltaire was commissioned by God to expose that. I have had much
intercourse with Voltaire, and he said to me, 'I blasphemed the Son of
Man, and it shall be forgiven me, but they (the enemies of Voltaire)
blasphemed the Holy Ghost in me, and it shall not be forgiven them.'" This
affords an instance of the manner in which Blake intuitively probed
beneath the appearance, and divined the spirit beneath, discarding the
fact or body with which it clothed itself. Another characteristic opinion
of Blake's, and one that moulded much of his work, is the following:
"Without contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason
and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to human existence. From these
contraries spring what the religious call Good and Evil. Good is the
passive that obeys Reason. Evil is the active, springing from Energy. Good
is Heaven, Evil is Hell."
"All Bibles or sacred codes have been the causes of the following errors:
"1. That man has two existing principles, viz., a Body and a Soul.
"2. That energy, called evil, is alone from the body, and that Heaven,
called Good, is alone from the soul.
"3. That God will torment man in Eternity for following his energies. But
the following contraries are true:
"1. Man has no Body distinct from Soul, for that called Body is a portion
of Soul discerned by the five senses, the chief inlets of soul in this
age.
"2. Energy is the only life, and is from the body, and reason is the bound
or outward circumference of energy.
"3. Energy is eternal delight."
These postulates form links in a chain of thought, another progression of
which is developed in "Jerusalem." Blake writes: "There is a limit of
opaqueness and a limit of contraction in every individual man, and the
limit of opaqueness is called Satan, and the limit of contraction is
called Adam. But there is no limit of expansion, there is no limit of
translucence in the bosom of man for ever from eternity to eternity."
Certainly there was no limit in his own bosom, and in vision he expanded
away from his own "ego" and merged in the universal life, the
all-pervading Spirit. Opaqueness and contraction were the only forms of
evil he recognized, and these are negative rather than active qualities.
Indeed, Blake often seems to deny the existence of sin at all. Again
referring to the invaluable record that Crabb Robinson has left of
Blake--I quote always from Messrs. Ellis and Yeats' complete reprint of
the part of the diary referring to him--"He allowed, indeed, that there
are errors, mistakes, etc., and if these be evil, then there is evil. But
these are only negations. He denied that the natural world is anything. It
is all nothing, and Satan's empire is the empire of nothing."
In another place he writes: "Negations are not contraries. Contraries
exist. But negations exist not; nor shall they ever be organized for ever
and ever." Contraries, 'the marriage of Heaven and Hell,' seemed necessary
and right to him, and the urge and recoil natural correlatives.
The great strife with Blake was always that between reason and
imagination, experience and spiritual discernment.
The greater part of humanity seemed to him to see _with_ the natural eye
natural phenomena only. This was accordingly opaque to them, and did not
let through the light of the Universal Spirit or Imagination, seen with
which alone it was beautiful, as being then the symbol of something
immeasureably greater than itself. Locke and Newton, the men of "single
vision" as he called them, were the types of this part of humanity. He
would fain have had men look _through_ the eye at the infinite imagination
which is the cause of phenomena.
[Illustration: DEATH'S DOOR: FROM BLAIR'S "GRAVE"
Engraved by L. Schiavonetti after Blake's drawing. Published 1808]
As he states in a glorious passage in his prose essay of the Last
Judgement: "Mental things are alone real: what is called corporeal nobody
knows of; its dwelling-place is a fallacy, and its existence an imposture.
Where is the existence out of mind, or thought? where is it but in the
mind of a fool? Some people flatter themselves that there will be no
Last Judgement, and that bad art will be adopted, and mixed with good
art--that error or experiment will make a part of truth--and they boast
that it is its foundation. These people flatter themselves; I will not
flatter them. Error is created, truth is eternal. Error or creation will
be burnt up, and then, and not till then, truth or eternity will appear.
It is burned up the moment men cease to behold it." (This is a mystical
utterance, a spiritual discernment which will repay thoughtful
consideration. It gives the Last Judgement--hitherto conceived of by the
orthodox as a terribly material and mundane affair--an imaginative and
esoteric significance very grateful and welcome to the spiritually
sensitive.) "I assert for myself, that I do not behold the outward
creation, and that to me it is hindrance and not action. 'What!' it will
be questioned, 'when the sun rises, do you not see a round disc of fire,
somewhat like a guinea?' Oh! no! no! I see an innumerable company of the
heavenly host, crying: 'Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty.' I
question not my corporeal eye, any more than I would question a window
concerning a sight. I look through it, and not with it."
One of Blake's most beautiful conceptions of God is as the universal
"Poetic Genius," and he was very fond of asserting that Art is Religion,
which indeed it is when, like his own, it represents the forms of this
world as the transparent media through which pulses the light of the
universal Poetic Genius. Another belief of Blake's must be quoted before I
leave this part of our subject: "Men are admitted into heaven, not because
they have curbed and governed their passions, or have no passions, but
because they have cultivated their understandings. The treasures of heaven
are not negations of passion, but realities of intellect, from which all
the passions emanate, uncurbed in their eternal glory.
"The fool shall not enter into heaven, let him be ever so holy; holiness
is not the price of entrance into heaven. Those who are cast out are all
those who, having no passions of their own, because no intellect, have
spent their lives in curbing and governing other people's by the various
arts of poverty, and cruelty of all kinds. The modern Church crucifies
Christ with the head downwards." And again, "Many persons, such as Paine
and Voltaire, with some of the ancient Greeks, say: "We will not converse
concerning good and evil, we will live in Paradise and Liberty! You may do
so in spirit, but not in the mortal body, as you pretend, till after the
Last Judgment. For in Paradise they have no corporeal and mortal body:
_that_ originated with the Fall and was called Death, and cannot be
removed but by a Last Judgment. While we are in the world of mortality, we
must suffer--the whole Creation groans to be delivered....
"Forgiveness of sin is only at the judgment-seat of Jesus the Saviour,
where the accuser is cast out, not because he sins, but because he
torments the just, and makes them do what he condemns as sin, and what he
knows is opposite to their own identity."
And now I must gather together all the frayed ends of this diffuse but
necessary chapter, and put the vital points, around which the seeming
incongruities and strangenesses of Blake's assertions arrange themselves,
into a symmetrical if not an organic whole. The oneness of the Eternal
Imagination, "Universal Poetic Genius," or God the Spirit, was the golden
background to Blake's vision of life. And on this unity he saw contrasted
the endless diversity of the spirit's expression in phenomena. All error
(not sin, which he did not believe to exist) came from the fall of the
spirit (through Urizen the creator) into division and the sexual and
generative life of man. This tended to a closing up of man into separate
selfhoods, and each selfhood, in its effort to preserve its corporeal
existence and separate character, was guilty of error, and gradually the
inlets through which communication with the Universal Spirit was
maintained became closed up, and were senses only available, in most men,
for the uses of the natural world. This condition leads to spiritual
negation, but is merely temporary, for when the body is destroyed at
death, which is the Last Judgement, Urizen's power is broken, and the
soul, however attenuated (as long as not altogether atrophied), returns to
its pristine union with the Universal Spirit, and, though completely
merged in it, yet in some wonderful way it preserves its own identity, or
essential quality, while the body, which is error, is "burnt up." But even
in the prison of the bodily life Humanity may be delivered from the
cramping and negative effect of the selfhood, through Jesus Christ, who
exists as the Human Divine in every heart, and who at the voice of the
Universal Spirit rises from the grave of selfhood, and draws the Christian
up into the life of that spirit where is no error nor negation.
It naturally follows that to Blake the one important point was to keep the
senses, "the chief inlet of soul," perpetually cleansed and open, that he
might descry the Great Reality of which Nature and all her phenomena are
but a symbol or shadow.
In fact, Blake's hope for man lay in the contrary of Herbert Spencer's
philosophy. The continuous evolution into new divisions and organisms,
separate selfhoods and particles, was to him the falling of Urizen, head
downwards, and bound with the snake of materiality, deeper and deeper into
the abyss. By union, not division, by aspiring into the universal life, by
conquering the selfhood and cleaving to the divine element (Jesus Christ)
which exists in every human heart, Blake conceived that man might, if he
would, find salvation, true vision, and everlasting life. His own vision
was always double or symbolic, and he prayed to be delivered from "single
vision" and "Newton's sleep." For the preoccupation with Nature as an end
in itself and an object worthy of study was to him the great error, a sign
of the horror of great darkness that clouded the human intelligence.
In moments of a special inrush of spiritual apprehension his vision was
"threefold," and sometimes "fourfold," which suggests that vista behind
vista unrolled itself, revealing untellable truth and beauty to his keen
etherealized sight.
These things, not being matters of common experience, must be received and
understood intuitively, and not Blake himself can always make them
comprehensible to us. His language and visions recall the language and
visions of the Prophet Ezekiel, whose writings were read and re-read by
him till they created a frenzy of excitement in his sensitive brain.
His opinion of women, far from being in accordance with our modern
emancipated views, was somewhat oriental, though among his poems we may
find many instances of sweet and spiritual femininity.
When Urizen created Man and walled him up in his separate organism with
five senses, like five small chinks in a cavern to let in the outside
light, he gave him a dual nature, male and female, so that he was at first
a hermaphrodite. "The female portion of man trying to get the ascendency
of the male portion caused inward strife," so a further subdivision
occurred, and Man cast out his female portion, which became woman, and was
a mere "emanation" of man. "There is no such thing in eternity as a female
will," writes Blake oracularly, his happy experience being based doubtless
on the beautiful subjection of Catherine Blake to his own overmastering
personality. Yet he is bound to exclaim in "Jerusalem," "What may man be?
Who can tell? But what may woman be, to have power over man from cradle to
corruptible grave." We may fairly say that the inferior shadowy nature
which he imputes to woman was one of those opinions which he chose to
adopt, though his real and unconscious belief regarding her was possibly
very different. Be that as it may, he often makes her serve as a symbol
for material existence, obviously an infelicitous parallel.
Having very briefly indicated the nature of Blake's religious and mystical
opinions, it remains for us to say a word about his mythology.
In a letter written to Mr. Butts while Blake was at Felpham, these lines
occur among some verses, and will I think help us:
For a double vision is always with me.
With my inward eye, 'tis an old man gray;
With my outward, a thistle across the way.
The personification and nomenclature of these double visions of his seem
to suggest the genesis of this mythology. He has peopled a twilight mental
world with a dim shadowy population of personified states and conditions.
They bear strange mouth-filling names, such as Orc, Fuzon, Rintrah,
Palamabron, Enitharmon, Oothoon and Ololon. What each symbolizes must be
determined by the reader for himself. No explanation of their separate
functions will be attempted in this book. Messrs. Ellis and Yeats have
carried explanation and analytic criticism as far as it can be carried,
and the reader who is interested in the literary matter of the prophetic
books should consult their learned work as well as Mr. Swinburne's
highly-suggestive critical essay.