I shall not ask the commentators whether Blake used these two words in
union or in antithesis. They assuredly have an inseverable union in the
art of literature. The songs of Innocence and Experience are for each
poet the songs of his own separate heart and life; but to take the
cumulative experiences of other men, and to use these in place of the
virginal fruit of thought--whereas one would hardly consent to take them
for ordering even the most habitual of daily affairs--is to forgo
Innocence and Experience at once and together. Obviously, Experience can
be nothing except personal and separate; and Innocence of a singularly
solitary quality is his who does not dip his hands into other men's
histories, and does not give to his own word the common sanction of other
men's summaries and conclusions. Therefore I bind Innocence and
Experience in one, and take them as a sign of the necessary and noble
isolation of man from man--of his uniqueness. But if I had a mind to
forgo that manner of personal separateness, and to use the things of
others, I think I would rather appropriate their future than their past.
Let me put on their hopes, and the colours of their confidence, if I must
borrow. Not that I would burden my prophetic soul with unjustified
ambitions; but even this would be more tolerable than to load my memory
with an unjustifiable history.
And yet how differently do the writers of a certain kind of love-poetry
consider this matter. These are the love-poets who have no reluctance in
adopting the past of a multitude of people to whom they have not even
been introduced. Their verse is full of ready-made memories, various,
numerous, and cruel. No single life--supposing it to be a liberal life
concerned with something besides sex--could quite suffice for so much
experience, so much disillusion, so much _deception_. To achieve that
tone in its fullness it is necessary to take for one's own the
_praeterita_ (say) of Alfred de Musset and of the men who helped him--not
to live but--to have lived; it is necessary to have lived much more than
any man lives, and to make a common hoard of erotic remembrances with all
kinds of poets.
As the Franciscans wear each other's old habits, and one friar goes about
darned because of another's rending, so the poet of a certain order grows
cynical for the sake of many poets' old loves. Not otherwise will the
resultant verse succeed in implying so much--or rather so many, in the
feminine plural. The man of very sensitive individuality might hesitate
at the adoption. The Franciscan is understood to have a fastidiousness
and to overcome it. And yet, if choice were, one might wish rather to
make use of one's fellow men's old shoes than put their old secrets to
use, and dress one's art in a motley of past passions. Moreover, to
utilize the mental experience of many is inevitably to use their verse
and phrase. For the rest, all the traits of this love-poetry are
familiar enough. One of them is the absence of the word of promise and
pledge, the loss of the earliest and simplest of the impulses of love:
which is the vow. "Till death!" "For ever!" are cries too simple and
too natural to be commonplace, and in their denial there is the least
tolerable of banalities--that of other men's disillusions.
Perfect personal distinctness of Experience would be in literature a
delicate Innocence. Not a passage of cheapness, of greed, of assumption,
of sloth, or of any such sins in the work of him whose love-poetry were
thus true, and whose _pudeur_ of personality thus simple and inviolate.
This is the private man, in other words the gentleman, who will neither
love nor remember in common.