HIS MYSTICAL NATURE
To the world of his own time Blake appeared a mad visionary, whose sweet
impulsive early poems attracted a few of the rarer souls of the age, but
whose pictures and designs were practically unknown. His genius,
atmosphere, and modes of thought were antipathetic to his age, and his
aims and achievement proved so difficult to understand from the point of
view of that day, that he was summarily and uncomprehendingly set down as
mad.
This was an offhand and unintelligent method of accounting for so rare a
spirit. The spectacle of a man who might, had he chosen, have enjoyed
riches, honour, admiration and glory, but who instead, like his great
Master, cared not at all for lordship in this world, but much for the
preservation of the kingdom of the spirit that is not of this world, did a
great deal to earn for Blake the name of madman. The world has always
regarded the voluntarily poor with suspicion and misapprehension.
Then, again, Blake was one of those who lived very near the veil which
shrouds the great unexplored spiritual forces. Death, as we know, seemed
to him but the "passing from one room to another."
To raise the veil, to look forth on the cause of phenomena, on the visions
of eternal imagination, to strain to the uttermost that he might hear the
reverberations of the unmeasured mighty stream of Divine power, to bathe
within that stream, and let it bear him onward as it would--these were to
him the real purposes of life, and being so, formed other reasons why the
world, all engrossed as it is with wealth and position, and "here" and
"now," looked at him askance.
To-day, however, there is an undercurrent of popular opinion--a small
stream, but strong--that recognizes him for what he is, and his name is
sacred as that of the great High Priest of Spiritual Art, to those who
compose it.
It is noticeable that none of those who were personally acquainted with
him, save perhaps Crabb Robinson, ever gave credence to the prevailing
notion that he was mad: strongly do they condemn such a verdict. He was
eccentric, abnormally developed on the spiritual side, and undisciplined
in thought and speech. The mystic in him finally all but destroyed the
poet, though it never arrested the magnificent development of his artistic
genius. Again, much that is strange and difficult of apprehension in Blake
may be traced to the fact that his mind lacked the firm basis, the just
and right power of thinking, that comes from a sound education. As a
matter of fact, capriciously self-educated as he was, his ignorance of
ordinary rudimentary knowledge was as extraordinary as his acquaintance
with much that is caviar to the ordinary intellect.
"Celui qui a l'imagination sans erudition a des ailes et n'a pas de
pieds." And so it was with Blake. But it does not detract one iota from
the illuminating quality of the thoughts which flash as it were from a
heaven in his brain in times of creative inspiration. Blake on the wing
has a strange beauty, a swift, direct and strenuous flight that thrills
and awes the imaginative spectator. It is only when this wild wonderful
creature is caught and entangled in theories and systems and human
reasoning, that we may not give him our intellectual adherence.
Other causes which appear to give colour to the theory that he was mad are
the following: Blake had no curious regard or nice care for words, but
used them at random in speech, just as they came to hand, and as he
cherished numerous violent prejudices it naturally followed that he often
expressed them in very emphatic and often unreasonable language.
Passionate partisan as he was of the world of imagination as against the
world of fact, he assumed an attitude of defiance to natural science and
its oldest established facts which seemed to those who had not the key to
Blake's mind simply insane or at the best puerile.
So accustomed was he to misunderstanding, that when strangers tried to
draw him out he seems purposely to have indulged in exaggeration and
symbolic language to baffle and mystify them. In ordinary intercourse, as
in his art and poetry, he seems to have had no care to put his mind and
his listeners or spectators _en rapport_ with his own. That magical
sympathy which some men know so well how to establish like a living
current between their own and other minds before "speaking the truth that
is in them," was not one of Blake's gifts. The sympathetic standpoint for
observance or understanding he expected from those who would be at the
pains to find out his meaning. "Let them that have ears, hear--if they
can, and if they be not too tightly shut into their selfhoods, and their
senses not clogged beyond cleansing with the dust and litter of
materialism," he would seem to say.
Examining into the vexed question of Blake's visions, whether they were
the apparitions of an unsound mind, the automatic picture-making of a
vivid imagination, or the visual apprehension of supernatural appearances,
we shall see that madness is not the key to them, though we shall have to
admit a certain want of balance and proportion in his intellectual life.
Sometimes one is tempted to think that he had eyes that saw the visible
loveliness and manifest images in which Plato supposes that Ideas exist in
the spiritual universe. Which being so, it is not wonderful that he was
called mad, for the Greek philosopher himself said that "this is the most
excellent of all forms of enthusiasm (or possession), and that the lover
who has a share of this madness is called a lover of the beautiful." Our
artist was a seer such as Plato meant, but his is a figurative rather than
an actual description of the mental operations which suspend such visions
before the prophet's eye.
All the writers on Blake--Allan Cunningham, Alexander Gilchrist, James
Smetham, Mr. Swinburne, Mr. W. M. Rossetti, Messrs. Ellis and Yeats, Sir
Richard Garnett--have discussed the subject, but I find the most
illuminating passage in an article by James Smetham included in the second
volume of Gilchrist's "Life," which I shall take leave to quote, for its
matter could never be better stated: "Thought with Blake leaned largely to
the side of imagery rather than to the side of organized philosophy, and
we shall have to be on our guard, while reading the record of his views
and opinions, against the dogmatism which was more frequently based on
exalted fancies than on the rock of abiding reason and truth. The
conceptive faculty working with a perception of facts singularly narrow
and imperfect, projected every idea boldly into the sphere of the actual.
What he _thought_, he _saw_, to all intents and purposes, and it was this
sudden and sharp crystallization of inward notions into outward and
visible signs which produced the impression on many beholders that reason
was unseated.... We cannot but on the whole lean to the opinion that
somewhere in the wonderful compound of flesh and spirit, somewhere in
those recesses where the one runs into the other, he was 'slightly
touched,' and by so doing we shall save ourselves the necessity of
attempting to defend certain phases of his work" (such as much of the
literary part of the prophetic books) "while maintaining an unqualified
admiration for the mass and manner of his thoughts." This seems a just
opinion. The colloquialism "slightly touched" (just that and nothing but
that) is the very phrase to express this elusive, almost indefinable
condition of mind. In all mankind living in conditions of time and space,
a certain adjustment of themselves to these conditions, and to each other,
is a necessary function of existence. The failure to comply with such an
adjustment was Blake's strength and weakness--the defect of his quality.
As I have said before, he firmly believed in his own inspiration, and with
reason. For a mood of trance-like absorption would come upon him, his soul
would be rapt in an ecstasy, he was disturbed by no impressions of earthly
persons or surroundings, but was for the time being alone with his
quickening vision. At such moments his mind's eye was but the retina on
which God Himself projected the image. And he would permit no criticism,
no questioning of work which seemed to him not his own, but produced
through divine agency.
All creative genius must work in much the same way. The vision is granted,
who shall say just how and whence, and its translation into any form of
art must be accomplished by a power as it were outside, above, the artist.
Vogl said of Schubert, that he composed in a state of clairvoyance. (That
is the reason why the Unfinished Symphony was, and always will be,
unfinished. Schubert transcribed the tormenting melody, the awful picture
of Fate suddenly reaching a long arm from out the smiling heaven to
arrest the blithe jigging mortal so gaily tripping along a flowery path.
The overwhelming terror and pity of it all shake the soul. But the vision
was withdrawn, the clairvoyant condition left Schubert, and so he wrote no
more.)
Blake's conceptions were projected in form instantaneously and with
extraordinary vividness, and the vision seen with his mind's eye seldom
varied or faded till he had transferred its likeness to paper. In this he
was indeed unlike those artists who, having but a vague mental conception,
build up their designs from without, laboriously selecting and copying,
not that which will merely help to perfect the realization of the inward
conception, but those things which they conjecture will arrange themselves
most successfully in the making of an eye-pleasing picture. Such artists
are but little concerned with the innate and obligatory form with which an
idea must necessarily clothe itself. Blake writes in the Descriptive
Catalogue, "A spirit and a vision are not, as the modern philosophy
supposes, a cloudy vapour or a nothing: they are organized and minutely
articulated beyond all that the mortal and perishing nature can produce.
He who does not imagine in stronger and better lineaments, and in stronger
and better light than his perishing and mortal eye can see, does not
imagine at all."
At the same time in justice we must admit that Blake sometimes failed to
make his vivid and living conceptions as clear to the world as he might
have done, for the reason that he neglected to refer to Nature for the
technique which after all is the language of Art. His art in this respect
is somewhat like that of the Italian Trecenti, who uttered burning
messages in a tongue which sometimes stammered. His impetuous soul never
wholly achieved the mastery of material which only a prolonged and patient
drudgery can give, but the images which hurtled from his imagination were
so forceful and superabundant that mere fiery creation, the unburdening of
the overloaded heart and brain, was the crying obligation which forced him
ever onward, seeking relief often in the mere act of projection.
It is always a wonder that he makes so few mistakes, his technique being
manifestly deficient. When his drawing is right it is heroically,
magnificently so, and even when incorrect, it is always of amazing power
and almost convincing strength.
"Execution," says Blake, in his notes on Reynolds' "Discourses," "is the
chariot of Genius," and when he mounts into the chariot and takes the
reins into his strong nervous hands, then, indeed, nothing can withstand
the flashing glory of his course.
At such times the affinity between our artist and Michael Angelo is very
apparent. Both had the grand simple manner in their treatment of the human
form, both worked as it would seem "in a state of clairvoyance" and
according to the direction of a divine daemon, both felt the body to be at
best but the prison of the straining fluttering soul; but Blake's
conceptions glow with a whiter flame of spiritual intensity than do those
of the Florentine, greater as the latter was at all other points. I think
it is the presence of this mystic fire which forms one of the great
difficulties in the way of a facile understanding of his art-work. We feel
ourselves in the presence of an incommunicable overburdening spiritual
intensity. It has seldom happened that a mystic should be also an artist
translating those things which transcend human experience into the terms
of an art which by its very nature is only concerned with the sensible
creation.
It is this incongruity between the thought and the language in which it is
conveyed--Blake's thoughts often lying beyond the proper range of a
graphic embodiment--which creates one of the great difficulties in the
way of our right apprehension of him.
A few of his works, as we shall presently see, are perfect and flawless as
Art can make them, such as the "Songs of Innocence" and the majestic
series of designs to Job. In both of these, the thoughts, and their
incarnation in form, are harmoniously complementary each to the other. But
often the thought will not, cannot be inclosed: it outstrips the reach of
his art. Hence many designs are tumultuous with leaping ideas, dimly
apprehended suggestions, not one of which is caught and contained in its
essence, but seems rather, as it were, to flutter, tantalizingly enough,
just beyond the grasp.
Blake "hitched his waggon to the stars," to use Emerson's expressive
phrase, and to the spiritually "elect" in art--those to whom ideas are the
really precious things--he speaks winged words and with authority. The
pity is that his art speaks thus clearly to the "initiated" only. The
sense of freedom of the spirit, of the absence of all contractile elements
in Blake's work must however be obvious to all. It is his special charm,
to be expansive, sublime, large. The great ethereal spaces of the sky have
breathed their inspiration upon him, and he has reflected the colour and
the mystery and the depth of the sea. To those who are spiritually
homesick he comes as an emissary from beyond the Great Darkness, from
where Life is found at its Source.