never tried to bereave anybody’s life. He lacked even the adequate
energy. Nevertheless I should not say for a moment that this startling
fiction proved Blake to be mad. It proved him to be violent and
recklessly suspicious; but there was never the least doubt that he
was that. But now turn to another poem of Blake’s, a merely romantic
and narrative poem called “Fair Eleanor,” which is all about somebody
acting on somebody else’s wife. Here we find the same line repeated
word for word in quite another connection--
“Hired a villain to bereave my life.”
It is not a musical line; it does not resemble English grammar to
any great extent. Yet Blake is somehow forced to put it into a poem
about a real person exactly as he had put it into an utterly different
poem about a fictitious person. There seems no particular reason for
writing it even once; but he has to write it again and again. This is
what I do call a mad spot on the mind. I should not call Blake mad for
hating Hayley or for boiling Hayley (though he had done him nothing
but kindness), or for making up any statements however monstrous or
mystical about Hayley. I should not in the least degree think that
Blake was mad if he had said that he saw Hayley’s soul in hell, that
it had green hair, one eye, and a serpent for a nose. A man may have a
wild vision without being insane; a man may have a lying vision without
being insane. But I should smell insanity if in turning over Blake’s
books I found that this one pictorial image obsessed him apart from
its spiritual meaning; if I found that the arms of the Black Prince
in “King Edward III.” were a cyclops vert rampant, nosed serpentine;
if I found that Flaxman was praised for his kindness to a one-eyed
animal with green bristles and a snaky snout; if Albion or Ezekiel had
appeared to Blake and commanded him to write a history of the men in
the moon, who are one-eyed, green-haired, with long curling noses; if
any flimsy sketch or fine decorative pattern that came from Blake’s
pencil might reproduce ceaselessly and meaninglessly the writhing
proboscis and the cyclopean eye. I should call _that_ morbidity or even
madness; for it would be the triumph of the palpable image over its own
intellectual meaning. And there is something of that madness in the
dark obstinacy or weakness that makes Blake introduce again and again
these senseless scraps of rhyme, as if they were spells to keep off the
devil.
In four or five different poems, without any apparent connection with
those poems, occur these two extraordinary lines--
“The caterpillar on the leaf
Repeats to thee thy mother’s grief.”
In the abstract this might perhaps mean something, though it would,
I think, take most people some time to see what it could mean. In
the abstract it may perhaps involve some allusion to a universal law
of sacrifice in nature. In the concrete--that is, in the context--it
involves no allusion to anything in heaven or earth. Here is another
couplet that constantly recurs--
“The red blood ran from the grey monk’s side,
His hands and his feet were wounded wide.”
This is worse still; for this cannot be merely abstract. The ordinary
rational reader will naturally exclaim at last, with a not unnatural
explosion, “Who the devil is the grey monk? and why should he be always
bleeding in places where he has no business?” Now to say that this sort
of thing is not insanity of some kind is simply to play the fool
with the words. A madman who writes this may be higher than ordinary
humanity; so may any madman in Hanwell. But he is a madman in every
sense that the word has among men. I have taken this case of actual and
abrupt irrelevance as the strongest form of the thing; but it has other
forms almost equally decisive. For instance, Blake had a strong sense
of humour, but it was not under control; it could be eclipsed and could
completely disappear. There was certainly a spouting fountain of fierce
laughter in the man who could write in an epigram--
“A dirty sneaking knave I knew ...
Oh, Mr. Cromek, how do you do?”
[Illustration: THE TYGER (1794)]
Yet the laughter was as fitful as it was fierce; and it can suddenly
fail. Blake’s sense of humour can sometimes completely desert him. He
writes a string of verses against cruelty to the smallest creature as a
sort of mystical insult to the universe. It contains such really fine
couplets as these--
“Each outcry of the hunted hare
A fibre from the brain can tear.”
“A skylark wounded in the wing,
A cherubim does cease to sing.”
Or again, in a more fanciful but genuinely weird way--
“He who torments the chafer’s sprite
Weaves a bower in endless night.”
And then, after all this excellent and quite serious poetry, Blake can
calmly write down the following two lines--
“He who the ox to wrath has moved
Shall never be by woman loved.”
One could hardly find a more Gilbertian absurdity in the conjunction of
ideas in the whole of the “Bab Ballads” than the idea that the success
of some gentleman in the society of ladies depends upon whether he has
previously at some time or other slightly irritated an ox. Such sudden
inaccesibility to laughter must be called a morbid symptom. It must
mean a blind spot on the brain. The whole thing, of course, would prove
nothing if Blake were a common ranter incapable of writing well, or a
common dunce incapable of seeing a joke. Such a man might easily be
sane enough: he might be as sane as he was stupid. If Blake had always
written badly he might be sane. But a man who could write so well and
did write so badly must be mad.
What was it that was eating away a part of Blake’s brain? I venture
to offer an answer which in the eyes of many people will have nothing
to recommend it except the accident of its personal sincerity. I
firmly believe that what did hurt Blake’s brain was the reality of his
spiritual communications. In the case of all poets, and especially in
the case of Blake, the phrase “an inspired poet” commonly means a good
poet. About Blake it is specially instinctive. And about Blake, I am
quite convinced, it is specially untrue. His inspired poems were not
his good poems. His inspired poems were very often his particularly bad
ones; they were bad by inspiration. If a ploughman says that he saw a
ghost, it is not quite sufficient to answer merely that he is a madman.
It may have been seeing the ghost that drove him mad. His lunacy may
not prove the falsehood of his tale, but rather its terrible truth. So
in the same way I differ from the common or sceptical critics of a man
like Blake. Such critics say that his visions were false because he was
mad. I say he was mad because his visions were true. It was exactly
because he was unnaturally exposed to a hail of forces that were more
than natural that some breaches were made in his mental continuity,
some damage was done to his mind. He was, in a far more awful sense
than Goldsmith, “an inspired idiot.” He was an idiot because he was
inspired.
When he said of “Jerusalem” that its authors were in eternity, one can
only say that nobody is likely to go there to get any more of their
work. He did not say that the author of “The Tyger” was in eternity;
the author of that glorious thing was in Carnaby Market. It will
generally be found, I think, with some important exceptions, that
whenever Blake talked most about inspiration he was actually least
inspired. That is, he was least inspired by whatever spirit presides
over good poetry and good thinking. He was abundantly inspired by
whatever spirit presides over bad poetry or bad thinking. Whatever
god specialises in unreadable and almost unpronounceable verse
was certainly present when he invented the extraordinary history of
“William Bond” or the maddening metre of the lines “To Mr Butts.”
Whatever archangel rules over utter intellectual error had certainly
spread his wings of darkness over Blake when he came to the conclusion
that a man ought to be bad in order to be pardoned. But these
unthinkable thoughts are mostly to be found in his most unliterary
productions; notably in the Prophetic Books. To put my meaning broadly,
the opinions which nobody can agree with are mostly in the books that
nobody can read. I really believe that this was not from Blake, but
from his spirits. It is all very well for great men, like Mr Rossetti
and Mr Swinburne, to trust utterly to the seraphim of Blake. They may
naturally trust angels--they do not believe in them. But I do believe
in angels, and incidentally in fallen angels.
[Illustration: HOLY THURSDAY (1794)]
* * * * *
THERE is no danger to health in being a mystic; but there
may be some danger to health in being a spiritualist. It would be a
very poor pun to say that a taste for spirits is bad for the health;
nevertheless, oddly enough, though a poor pun it is a perfectly
correct philosophical parallel. The difference between having a
real religion and having a mere curiosity about psychic marvels is
really very like the difference between drinking beer and drinking
brandy, between drinking wine and drinking gin. Beer is a food as
well as a stimulant; so a positive religion is a comfort as well as
an adventure. A man drinks his wine because it is his favourite wine,
the pleasure of his palate or the vintage of his valley. A man drinks
alcohol merely because it is alcoholic. So a man calls upon his gods
because they are good or at any rate good to him, because they are
the idols that protect his tribe or the saints that have blessed his
birthday. But spiritualists call upon spirits merely because they
are spirits; they ask for ghosts merely because they are ghosts. I
have often been haunted with a fancy that the creeds of men might be
paralleled and represented in their beverages. Wine might stand for
genuine Catholicism and ale for genuine Protestantism; for these at
least are real religions with comfort and strength in them. Clean
cold Agnosticism would be clean cold water, an excellent thing, if
you can get it. Most modern ethical and idealistic movements might
be well represented by soda-water--which is a fuss about nothing. Mr
Bernard Shaw’s philosophy is exactly like black coffee--it awakens
but it does not really inspire. Modern hygienic materialism is very
like cocoa; it would be impossible to express one’s contempt for it in
stronger terms than that. Sometimes, very rarely, one may come across
something that may honestly be compared to milk, an ancient and heathen
mildness, an earthly yet sustaining mercy--the milk of human kindness.
You can find it in a few pagan poets and a few old fables; but it is
everywhere dying out. Now if we adopt this analogy for the sake of
argument, we shall really come back to the bad pun; we shall conclude
that a taste for spiritualism is very like a taste for spirits. The
man who drinks gin or methylated spirit does it only because it makes
him super-normal; so the man who with tables or planchettes invokes
supernatural beings invokes them only because they are supernatural.
He does not know that they are good or wise or helpful. He knows that
he desires the deity, but he does not even know that he likes him. He
attempts to invoke the god without adoring him. He is interested in
whatever he can find out touching supernatural existence; but he is not
really filled with joy as by the face of a divine friend, any more than
anyone actually likes the taste of methylated spirit. In such psychic
investigations, in a word, there is excitement, but not affectional
satisfaction; there is brandy, but no food.
Now Blake was in the most reckless, and sometimes even in the most
vulgar, sense a spiritualist. He threw the doors of his mind open to
what the late George Macdonald called in a fine phrase “the canaille
of the other world.” I think it is impossible to look at some of the
pictures which Blake drew, under what he considered direct spiritual
dictation, without feeling that he was from time to time under
influences that were not only evil but even foolishly evil. I give
one case out of numberless cases. Blake drew, from his own vision a
head which he called _The Man who built the Pyramids_. Anyone can
appreciate the size and mystery of the idea; and most people would form
some sort of fancy of how a great poetical painter, such as Michael
Angelo or Watts, would have rendered the idea; they can conceive a face
swarthy and secret, or ponderous and lowering, or staring and tropical,
or Appolonian and pure. Whatever was the man who built the pyramids,
one feels that he must (to put it mildly) have been a clever man. We
look at Blake’s picture of the man, and with a start behold the face
of an idiot. Nay, we behold even the face of an evil idiot, a leering,
half-witted face with no chin and the protuberant nose of a pig. Blake
declared that he drew this face from a real spirit, and I see no reason
to doubt that he did. But if he did, it was not really the man who
built the pyramids; it was not any spirit with whom a gentleman ought
to wish to be on intimate terms. That vision of swinish silliness was
really a bad vision to have, it left a smell of demoniac silliness
behind it. I am very sure that it left Blake sillier than it found him.
In this way, rightly or wrongly, I explain the chaos and occasional
weakness which perplexes Blake’s critics and often perplexed Blake
himself. I think he suffered from the great modern loneliness and
scepticism which is the root of the sorrows of the mere spiritualist.
The tragedy of the spiritualist simply is that he has to know his gods
before he loves them. But a man ought to love his gods before he is
sure that there are any. The sublime words of St John’s Gospel permit
of a sympathetic parody; if a man love not God whom he has not seen,
how shall he love God whom he has seen? If we do not delight in Santa
Claus even as a fancy, how can we expect to be happy even if we find
that he is a fact? But a mystic like Blake simply puts up a placard for
the whole universe, like an old woman letting lodgings. The mansion of
his mind was indeed a magnificent one; but no one must be surprised if
the first man that walked into it was “the man who built the pyramids,”
the man with the face of a moon-calf. And whether or no he built the
pyramids, he unbuilt the house.
But this conclusion touching Blake’s original sanity but incidental
madness brings us abruptly in contact with the larger question of
how far his soul and creed gained or suffered from his whole position;
his heterodoxy, his orthodoxy, his attitude towards his age. Properly
to do all this we must do now at the end of this book what ought (but
the form of the book forbade) more strictly to have been done at the
beginning; we must speak as shortly as possible about the actual age
in which Blake lived. And we cannot do it without saying something,
which we will say as briefly as possible, of that whole great western
society and tradition to which he belonged and we belong equally; that
Christendom or continent of Europe which is at once too big for us to
measure and too close for us to understand.
[Illustration: ARIEL]
What was the eighteenth century? Or rather (to speak less mechanically
and with more intelligence), what was that mighty and unmistakable
phase or mood through which western society was passing about the time
that William Blake became its living child? What was that persistent
trend or spirit which all through the eighteenth century lifted itself
like a very slow and very smooth wave to the deafening breaker of the
French Revolution? Of course it meant something slightly different to
all its different children. Let us here ask ourselves what it meant to
Blake, the poet, the painter, and the dreamer. Let us try to state the
thing as nearly as possible in terms of his spirit and in relation to
his unique work in this world.
Every man of us to-day is three men. There is in every modern European
three powers so distinct as to be almost personal, the trinity of our
earthly destiny. The three may be rudely summarised thus. First and
nearest to us is the Christian, the man of the historic church, of the
creed that must have coloured our minds incurably whether we regard it
(as I do) as the crown and combination of the other two, or whether
we regard it as an accidental superstition which has remained for two
thousand years. First, then, comes the Christian; behind him comes
the Roman, the citizen of that great cosmopolitan realm of reason and
order in the level and equality of which Christianity arose. He is the
stoic who is so much sterner than the anchorites. He is the republican
who is so much prouder than kings. He it is that makes straight roads
and clear laws, and for whom good sense is good enough. And the third
man--he is harder to speak of. He has no name, and all true tales of
him are blotted out; yet he walks behind us in every forest path and
wakes within us when the wind wakes at night. He is the origins--he
is the man in the forest. It is no part of our subject to elaborate
the point; but it may be said in passing that the chief claim of
Christianity is exactly this--that it revived the pre-Roman madness,
yet brought into it the Roman order. The gods had really died long
before Christ was born. What had taken their place was simply the god
of government--Divus Cæsar. The pagans of the real Roman Empire were
nothing if not respectable. It is said that when Christ was born the
cry went through the world that Pan was dead. The truth is that when
Christ was born Pan for the first time began to stir in his grave. The
pagan gods had become pure fables when Christianity gave them a new
lease of life as devils. I venture to wager that if you found one man
in such a society who seriously believed in the personal existence of
Apollo, he was probably a Christian. Christianity called to a kind
of clamorous resurrection all the old supernatural instincts of the
forests and the hill. But it put upon this occult chaos the Roman idea
of balance and sanity. Thus, marriage was a sacrament, but mere sex
was not a sacrament as it was in many of the frenzies of the forest.
Thus wine was a sacrament with Christ; but drunkenness was not a
sacrament as with Dionysus. In short, Christianity (merely historically
seen) can best be understood as an attempt to combine the reason of
the market-place with the mysticism of the forest. It was an attempt
to accept all the superstitions that are necessary to man and to be
philosophic at the end of them. Pagan Rome has sought to bring order or
reason among men. Christian Rome sought to bring order and reason among
gods.
* * * * *
GIVEN these three principles, the epoch we discuss can be
defined. The eighteenth century was primarily the return of reason--and
of Rome. It was the coming to the top of the stoic and civic element in
that triple mixture. It was full, like the Roman world, of a respect
for law. Note that the priest still wears, in the main, the popular
garb of the Middle Ages: but the lawyer still wears the head-dress of
the eighteenth century. Yet while the Roman world was full of rule it
was also full of revolution. But indeed the two things necessarily
go together. The English used to boast that they had achieved a
constitutional revolution; but every revolution must necessarily be a
constitutional revolution, in so far that it must have reference to
some antecedent theory of justice. A man must have rights before he
can have wrongs. So it may be constantly remarked that the countries
which have done most to spread legal generalisations and judicial
decisions are those most filled with political fury and potential
rebellion--Rome, for instance, and France. Rome planted in every tribe
and village the root of the Roman law at the very time when her own
town was torn with faction and bloody with partisan butcheries. France
forced intellectually on nearly all Europe an excellent code of law,
and she did it when her own streets were hardly cleared of corpses,
when she was in a panting pause between two pulverising civil wars.
And, on the other hand, you may remark that the countries where there
is no revolution are the countries where there is no law; where mental
chaos has clouded every intelligible legal principle--such countries as
Morocco and modern England.
[Illustration: PRELUDIUM TO URIZEN (1794)]
The eighteenth century, then, ended in revolution because it began in
law. It was the age of reason, and therefore the age of revolt. It is
needless to say how systematically it revived all the marks and motives
of that ancient pagan society in which Christianity first arose. Its
greatest art was oratory, its favourite affectation was severity. Its
pet virtue was public spirit, its pet sin political assassination. It
endured the pompous, but hated the fantastic; it had pure contempt for
anything that could be called obscure. To a virile mind of that epoch,
such as Dr Johnson or Fox, a poem or picture that did not at once
explain itself was simply like a gun that did not go off or a clock
that stopped suddenly: it was simply a failure, fit for indifference or
for a fleeting satire. In spite of their solid convictions (for which
they died) the men of that time always used the word “enthusiast”
as a term of scorn. All that we call mysticism they called madness.
Such was the eighteenth century civilisation; such was the strict and
undecorated frame from which look at us the blazing eyes of William
Blake.
So far Blake and his century are a mere contrast. But here we must
remember that the three elements of Europe are not the strata of a
rock, but the strands of a rope; since all three have existed not
one of them has ever appeared entirely unmixed. You may call the
Renascence pagan, but Michael Angelo cannot be imagined as anything
but a Christian. You may call Thomas Aquinas Christian, but you cannot
say exactly what he would have been without Aristotle the pagan. You
may, even in calling Virgil the poet of Roman dignity and good sense,
still ask whether he did not remember something older than Rome when
he spoke of the good luck of him who knew the field gods and the old
man of the forest. In the same way there was even in the eighteenth
century an element of the purely Christian and an element of the
purely primitive. And, as it happens, both these non-rational (or
non-Roman) strains in the eighteenth century are particularly important
in considering the mental make-up of William Blake. For the first alien
strain in this century practically represents all that is effective
and fine in this great genius, the second strain represents without
question all that is doubtful, all that is irritating, and all that is
ineffective in him.
* * * * *
IN the eighteenth century there were two elements not taken
from the Roman stoic or the Roman citizen. The first was what our
century calls humanitarianism--what that century called “the tear of
sensibility.” The old pagan commonwealths were democratic, but they
were not in the least humanitarian. They had no tears to spare for a
man at the mercy of the community; they reserved all their anger and
sympathy for the community at the mercy of a man. That individual
compassion for an individual case was a pure product of Christianity;
and when Voltaire flung himself with fury into the special case of
Calas, he was drawing all his energies from the religion that he
denied. A Roman would have rebelled for Rome, but not for Calas.
This personal humanitarianism is the relic of Christianity--perhaps
(if I may say so) the dregs of Christianity. Of this humanitarianism
or sentimentalism, or whatever it can best be called, Blake was the
enthusiastic inheritor. Being the great man that he was, he naturally
anticipated lesser men than himself; and among the men less than
himself I should count Shelley, for instance, and Tolstoy. He carried
his instinct of personal kindness to the point of denouncing war as
such--
“Naught can deform the human race
Like the Armourer’s iron brace.”
Or, again--
“The strongest poison ever known
Came from Cæsar’s iron crown.”
[Illustration: HAR AND HEVA (1795)]