was founded, could have made head or tail of this mere humanitarian
horror. He could not even have comprehended this idea--that war is
immoral when it is not unjust. You cannot find this sentiment in
the pagans of antiquity, but you can find it in the pagans of the
eighteenth century; you can find it in the speeches of Fox, the
soliloquies of Rousseau and even in the sniggering of Gibbon. Here
is an element of the eighteenth century which is derived darkly but
indubitably from Christianity, and in which Blake strongly shares.
Regulus has returned to be tortured and pagan Rome is saved; but
Christianity thinks a little of Regulus. A man must be pitied even when
he must be killed. That individual compassion provoked Blake to violent
and splendid lines--
“And the slaughtered soldier’s cry
Runs in blood down palace walls.”
The eighteenth century did not find that pity where it found its pagan
liberty and its pagan law. It took this out of the very churches
that it violated and from the desperate faith that it denied. This
irrational individual pity is the purely Christian element in the
eighteenth century. This irrational individual pity is the purely
Christian element in William Blake.
And second, there was another eighteenth century element that was
neither of Christian nor of pagan Rome. It was from the origins;
it had been in the world through the whole history of paganism and
Christianity; it had been in the world, but not of it. This element
appeared popularly in the eighteenth century in an extravagant
but unmistakable shape; the element can be summed up in one
word--Cagliostro. No other name is quite so adequate; but if anyone
desires a nobler name (a very noble one), we may say--Swedenborg.
There was in the eighteenth century, despite its obvious good sense,
this strain of a somewhat theatrical thaumaturgy. The history of
that element is, in the most literal sense of the word, horribly
interesting. For it all works back to the mere bogey feeling of the
beginnings. It is amusing to remark that in the eighteenth century for
the first time start up a number of societies which calmly announce
that they have existed almost from the beginning of the world. Of
these, of course, the best known instance is the Freemasons; according
to their own account they began with the Pyramids; but according to
everyone else’s account that can be effectively collected, they began
with the eighteenth century. Nevertheless the Freemasons are right in
the spirit even if they are wrong in the letter. There is a tradition
of things analogous to mystical masonry throughout all the historic
generations of Paganism and Christianity. There is a definite tradition
outside Christianity, not of rationalism, but of paganism, paganism in
the original and frightful forest sense--pagan magic. Christianity,
rightly or wrongly, always discouraged it on the ground that it was,
or tended to be, black magic. That is not here our concern. The point
is that this non-Christian supernaturalism, whether it was good or
bad, was continuous in spite of Christianity. Its signs and traces
can be seen in every age: it hung like a huge fume, in many monstrous
forms, over the dying Roman Empire: it was the energy in the Gnostics
who so nearly captured Christianity, and who were persecuted for their
pessimism; in the full sunlight of the living Church it dared to carve
its symbols upon the tombs of the Templars; and when the first sects
raised their heads at the Reformation, its ancient and awful voice was
heard.
[Illustration: PHILANDER’S DUST (1796)]
Now the eighteenth century was primarily the release (as its leaders
held) of reason and nature from the control of the Church. But when
the Church was once really weakened, it was the release of many
other things. It was not the release of reason only, but of a more
ancient unreason. It was not the release of the natural, but also
of the supernatural, and also, alas! of the unnatural. The heathen
mystics hidden for two thousand years came out of their caverns--and
Freemasonry was founded. It was entirely innocent in the manner of its
foundation; but so were all the other resurrections of this ancestral
occultism. I give but one obvious instance out of many. The idea of
enslaving another human soul, without lifting a finger or making a
gesture of force, of enslaving a soul simply by willing its slavery, is
an idea which all healthy human societies would regard and did regard
as hideous and detestable, if true. Throughout all the Christian ages
the witches and warlocks claimed this abominable power and boasted
of it. They were (somewhat excusably) killed for their boasting. The
eighteenth century rationalist movement came, intent, thank God, upon
much cleaner things, upon common justice and right reason in the state.
Nevertheless it did weaken Christianity, and in weakening Christianity
it uplifted and protected the wizard. Mesmer stepped forward, and
for the first time safely affirmed this infamous power to exist: for
the first time a warlock could threaten spiritual tyranny and not be
lynched. Nevertheless, if a mesmerist really had the powers which some
mesmerists have claimed, and which most novels give to him, there is (I
hope) no doubt at all that any decent mob would drown him like a witch.
The revolt of the eighteenth century, then, did not merely release
naturalism, but a certain kind of supernaturalism also. And of this
particular kind of supernaturalism, Blake is particularly the heir. Its
coarse embodiment is Cagliostro. Its noble embodiment is Swedenborg.
But in both cases it can be remarked that the mysticism marks an
effort to escape from or even to forget the historic Christian, and
especially the Catholic Church. Cagliostro, being a man of mean
spirituality, separated himself from Catholicism by rearing against it
a blazing pageant of mystical paganism, of triangles, secret seals,
Eleusinian initiation, and all the vulgar refinements of a secret
society. Swedenborg, being a man of large and noble spirituality,
marked his separation from Catholicism by inventing out of his own
innocence and genius nearly all the old Catholic doctrines, sincerely
believing them to be his own discoveries. It is startling to note how
near Swedenborg was to Catholicism--in his insistence on free will, for
instance, on the humanity of the incarnate God, and on the relative
and mystical view of the Old Testament. There was in Blake a great
deal of Swedenborg (as he would have been the first to admit), and
there was, occasionally, a little of Cagliostro. Blake did not belong
to a secret society: for, to tell the truth, he had some difficulty
in belonging to any society. But Blake did talk a secret language. He
had something of that haughty and oligarchic element in his mysticism
which marked the old pagan secret societies and which marks the
Theosophists and oriental initiates to this day. There was in him,
besides the beneficent wealth of Swedenborg, some touch of Cagliostro
and the Freemasons. These things Blake did inherit from that break up
of belief that can be called the eighteenth century: we will debit him
with these as an inheritance. And when we have said this we have said
everything that can be said of any debt he owed. His debts are cleared
here. His estate is cleared with this payment. All that follows is
himself.
If a man has some fierce or unfamiliar point of view, he must, even
when he is talking about his cat, begin with the origin of the cosmos;
for his cosmos is as private as his cat. Horace could tell his pupils
to plunge into the middle of the thing, because he and they were
agreed about the particular kind of thing; the author and his readers
substantially sympathised about the beauty of Helen or the duties of
Hector. But Blake really had to begin at the beginning, because it
was a different beginning. This explains the extraordinary air of
digression and irrelevancy which can be observed in some of the most
direct and sincere minds. It explains the bewildering allusiveness of
Dante; the galloping parentheses of Rabelais; the gigantic prefaces of
Mr Bernard Shaw. The brilliant man seems more lumbering and elaborate
than anyone else, because he has something to say about everything.
The very quickness of his mind makes the slowness of his narrative. For
he finds sermons in stones, in all the paving-stones of the street he
plods along. Every fact or phrase that occurs in the immediate question
carries back his mind to the ages and the initial power. Because he is
original he is always going back to the origins.
[Illustration: A GROUP (1804)]
Take, for instance, Blake’s verse rather than his pictorial art. When
the average sensible person reads Blake’s verse, he simply comes to
the conclusion that he cannot understand it. But in truth he has a
much better right to offer this objection to Blake than to most of the
slightly elusive or eccentric writers to whom he also offers it. Blake
is obscure in a much more positive and practical sense than Browning
is obscure--or, in another manner, Mr Henry James is obscure. Browning
is generally obscure through an almost brutal eagerness to get to big
truths, which leads him to smash a sentence and leave only bits of it.
Mr Henry James is obscure because he wishes to trace tiny truths by a
dissection for which human language (even in his exquisite hands) is
hardly equal. In short, Browning wishes almost unscrupulously to get to
the point. Mr James refuses to admit (on the mere authority of Euclid)
that the point is indivisible. But Blake’s obscurity is startlingly
different to both, it is at once more simple and more impenetrable. It
is not a different diction but a different language. It is not that we
cannot understand the sentences; it is that we often misunderstand the
words. The obscurity of Blake commonly consists in the fact that the
actual words used mean one thing in Blake and quite another thing in
the dictionary. Mr Henry James wants to split hairs; Browning wants to
tear them up by the roots. But in Blake the enigma is at once plainer
and more perplexing; it is simply this, that if Blake says “hairs” he
may not mean hairs, but something else--perhaps peacocks’ feathers.
To quote but one example out of a thousand; when Blake uses the word
“devils” he generally means some particularly exalted order of angels
such as preside over energy and imagination.
* * * * *
A VERBAL accident has confused the mystical with the
mysterious. Mysticism is generally felt vaguely to be itself vague--a
thing of clouds and curtains, of darkness or concealing vapours, of
bewildering conspiracies or impenetrable symbols. Some quacks have
indeed dealt in such things: but no true mystic ever loved darkness
rather than light. No pure mystic ever loved mere mystery. The mystic
does not bring doubts or riddles: the doubts and riddles exist
already. We all feel the riddle of the earth without anyone to point
it out. The mystery of life is the plainest part of it. The clouds and
curtains of darkness, the confounding vapours, these are the daily
weather of this world. Whatever else we have grown accustomed to, we
have grown accustomed to the unaccountable. Every stone or flower is
a hieroglyphic of which we have lost the key; with every step of our
lives we enter into the middle of some story which we are certain to
misunderstand. The mystic is not the man who makes mysteries but the
man who destroys them. The mystic is one who offers an explanation
which may be true or false, but which is _always_ comprehensible--by
which I mean, not that it is always comprehended, but that it always
can be comprehended, because there is always something to comprehend.
The man whose meaning remains mysterious fails, I think, as a mystic:
and Blake, as we shall see, did, for certain peculiar reasons of his
own, often fail in this way. But even when he was himself hard to
be understood, it was never through himself not understanding: it
was never because he was vague or mystified or groping, that he was
unintelligible. While his utterance was not only dim but dense, his
opinion was not only clear, but even cocksure. You and I may be a
little vague about the relations of Albion to Jerusalem, but Blake
is as certain about them as Mr Chamberlain about the relations of
Birmingham to the British Empire. And this can be said for his singular
literary style even at his worst, that we always feel that he is saying
something very plain and emphatic, even when we have not the wildest
notion of what it is.
There is one element always to be remarked in the true mystic, however
disputed his symbolism, and that is its brightness of colour
and clearness of shape. I mean that we may be doubtful about the
significance of a triangle or the precise lesson conveyed by a
crimson cow. But in the work of a real mystic the triangle is a hard
mathematical triangle not to be mistaken for a cone or a polygon. The
cow is in colour a rich incurable crimson, and in shape unquestionably
a cow, not to be mistaken for any of its evolutionary relatives,
such as the buffalo or the bison. This can be seen very clearly, for
instance, in the Christian art of illumination as practised at its best
in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The Christian decorators,
being true mystics, were chiefly concerned to maintain the reality
of objects. For the highest dogma of the spiritual is to affirm the
material. By plain outline and positive colour those pious artists
strove chiefly to assert that a cat was truly in the eyes of God a cat
and that a dog was preeminently doggish. This decision of tint and
outline belongs not only to Blake’s pictures, but even to his poetry.
Even in his descriptions there is no darkness, and practically, in
the modern sense, no distance. All his animals are as absolute as the
animals on a shield of heraldry. His lambs are of unsullied silver,
his lions are of flaming gold. His lion may lie down with his lamb, but
he will never really mix with him.
[Illustration: THE WATERS OF LIFE (1804)]
Really to make this point clear one would have to go back to the
twelfth century, or perhaps to Plato. Metaphysics must be avoided; they
are too exciting. But the root of the matter can be pretty well made
plain by one word. The whole difference is between the old meaning and
the new meaning of the word “Realist.” In modern fiction and science
a Realist means a man who begins at the outside of a thing: sometimes
merely at the end of a thing, knowing the monkey only by its tail or
the motor by its smell. In the twelfth century a Realist meant exactly
the opposite; it meant a man who began at the inside of a thing. The
mediæval philosopher would only have been interested in a motor because
it moved. He would have been interested (that is) only in the central
and original idea of a motor--in its ultimate motorishness. He would
have been concerned with a monkey only because of its monkeyhood;
not because it was like man but because it was unlike. If he saw an
elephant he would not say in the modern style, “I see before me a
combination of the tusks of a wild boar in unnatural development, of
the long nose of the tapir needlessly elongated, of the tail of the
cow unusually insufficient,” and so on. He would merely see an essence
of elephant. He would believe that this light and fugitive elephant
of an instant, as dancing and fleeting as the May-fly in May, was
nevertheless the shadow of an eternal elephant, conceived and created
by God. When you have quite realised this ancient sense in the reality
of an elephant, go back and read William Blake’s poems about animals,
as, for instance, about the lamb and about the tiger. You will see
quite clearly that he is talking of an eternal tiger, who rages and
rejoices for ever in the sight of God. You will see that he is talking
of an eternal and supernatural lamb, who can only feed happily in the
fields of Heaven.
It is exactly here that we find the full opposition to that modern
tendency that can fairly be called “Impressionism.” Impressionism is
scepticism. It means believing one’s immediate impressions at the
expense of one’s more permanent and positive generalisations. It puts
what one notices above what one knows. It means the monstrous heresy
that seeing is believing. A white cow at one particular instant of the
evening light may be gold on one side and violet on the other. The
whole point of Impressionism is to say that she really is a gold and
violet cow. The whole point of Impressionism is to say that there is
no white cow at all. What can we tell, it cries, beyond what we can
see? But the essence of Mysticism is to insist that there is a white
cow, however veiled with shadow or painted with sunset gold. Blessed
are they who have seen the violet cow and who yet believe in the white
one. To the mystic a white cow has a sort of solid whiteness, as if
the cow were made out of frozen milk. To him a white horse has a
solid whiteness as if he were cut out of the firm English chalk, like
the White Horse in the valley of King Alfred. The cow’s whiteness is
more important than anything except her cowishness. If Blake had ever
introduced a white cow into one of his pictures, there would at least
have been no doubt about either of those two elements. Similarly
there would have been no doubt about them in any old Christian
illumination. On this point he is at one with all the mystics and with
all the saints.
[Illustration: PLOUGHING THE EARTH (1804)]
This explanation is really essential to the understanding of Blake,
because to the modern mind it is so easy to understand him in the
opposite sense. In the ordinary modern meaning Blake’s symbols are
not symbols at all. They are not allegories. An allegory nowadays
means taking something that does not exist as a symbol of something
that does exist. We believe, at least most of us do, that sin does
exist. We believe (on highly insufficient grounds) that a dragon does
not exist. So we make the unreal dragon an allegory of the real sin.
But that is not what Blake meant when he made the lamb the symbol
of innocence. He meant that there really is behind the universe an
eternal image called the Lamb, of which all living lambs are merely
the copies or the approximation. He held that eternal innocence to be
an actual and even an awful thing. He would not have seen anything
comic, any more than the Christian Evangelist saw anything comic, in
talking about the Wrath of the Lamb. If there were a lamb in one of
Æsop’s fables, Æsop would never be so silly as to represent him as
angry. But Christianity is more daring than Æsop, and the wrath of the
Lamb is its great paradox. If there is an immortal lamb, a being whose
simplicity and freshness are for ever renewed, then it is truly and
really a more creepy idea to horrify that being into hostility than to
defy the flaming dragon or challenge darkness or the sea. No old wolf
or world-worn lion is so awful as a creature that is always young--a
creature that is always newly born. But the main point here is simpler.
It is merely that Blake did not mean that meekness was true and the
lamb only a pretty fable. If anything he meant that meekness was a
mere shadow of the everlasting lamb. The distinction is essential to
anyone at all concerned for this rooted spirituality which is the only
enduring sanity of mankind. The personal is not a mere figure for the
impersonal; rather the impersonal is a clumsy term for something more
personal than common personality. God is not a symbol of goodness.
Goodness is a symbol of God.
Some very odd passages in Blake become clear if we keep this in mind.
I do not wish in this book to dwell unduly on the other side of Blake,
the literary side. But there are queer facts worth remarking, and this
is one of them. Blake was sincere; if he was insane he was insane with
the very solidity and completeness of his sincerity. And the quaintest
mark of his sincerity is this, that in his poetry he constantly writes
things that look like mere mistakes. He writes one of his most colossal
convictions and the average reader thinks it is a misprint. To give
only one example not connected with the matter in hand, the fine though
somewhat frantic poem called “The Everlasting Gospel” begins exactly as
the modern humanitarian and essential Christian would like it to begin--
“The vision of Christ that thou dost see
Is my vision’s greatest enemy.”
It goes on (to the modern Christian’s complete satisfaction) with
denunciations of priests and praise of the pure Gospel Jesus; and then
comes a couplet like this--
“Thine is the friend of all mankind,
Mine speaks in parables to the blind.”
And the modern humanitarian Christian finds the orthodox Christ calmly
rebuked because he is the friend of all mankind. The modern Christian
simply blames the printer. He can only suppose that the words “Thine”
and “Mine” have been put in each other’s places by accident. Blake,
however, as it happens, meant exactly what he said. His private vision
of Christ was the vision of a violent and mysterious being, often
indignant and occasionally disdainful.
“He acts with honest disdainful pride,
And that is the cause that Jesus died;
Had he been Antichrist, creeping Jesus,
He would have done anything to please us,
Gone sneaking into their synagogues,
And not use the elders and priests like dogs.”
When the reader has fully realised this idea of a fierce and mysterious
Jesus, he may then see the sense in the statement that this Jesus
speaks in parables to the blind while the lower and meaner Jesus
pretends to be the friend of all men. But you have to know Blake’s
doctrine before you can understand two lines of his poetry.
Now in the point which is here prominently before us there is a
quotation (indeed there is more than one) which follows this same
fantastic line. Let the ordinary modern man, who is, generally
speaking, not a materialist and not a mystic, read first these two
lines from the poem falsely called “The Auguries of Innocence”--
“God appears and God is light
To those poor souls that dwell in night.”
[Illustration: THE EAGLE (1804)]
He will not find anything objectionable in that, at any rate; probably
he will bow his head slightly to a truism, as if he were in church.
Then he will read the next two lines--
“But does a human form display
To those that dwell in realms of day.”
And there the modern man will sit down suddenly on the sofa and come
finally to the conclusion that William Blake was mad and nothing else.
But those last two lines express all that is best in Blake and all
that is best in all the tradition of the mystics. Those two lines
explain perfectly all that I have just pointed out concerning the
palpable visions and the ponderous cherubim. This is the point about
Blake that must be understood if nothing else is understood. God for
him was not more and more vague and diaphanous as one came near to
Him. God was more and more solid as one came near. When one was far
off one might fancy Him to be impersonal. When one came into personal
relation one knew that He was a person. The personal God was the fact.
The impersonal God of the Pantheists was a kind of condescending
symbol. According to Blake (and there is more in the mental attitude
than most modern people will willingly admit) this vague cosmic view is
a mere merciful preparation for the old practical and personal view.
God is merely light to the merely unenlightened. God is a man to the
enlightened. We are permitted to remain for a time evolutionary or
pantheist until the time comes when we are worthy to be anthropomorphic.