definite when we really know it, and the severe lines and sensational
literalism of his other and more pictorial work will be easily
understood. Naturally his divinities are definite, because he thought
that the more they were definite, the more they were divine. Naturally
God was not to him a hazy light breaking through the tangle of the
evolutionary undergrowth, nor a blinding brilliancy in the highest
place of the heavens. God was to him the magnificent old man depicted
in his dark and extraordinary illustrations of “Job,” the old man
with the monstrous muscles, the mild stern eyebrows, the long smooth
silver hair and beard. In the dialogues between Jehovah and Job there
is little difference between the two ponderous and palpable old men,
except that the vision of Deity is a little more solid than the human
being. But then Blake held that Deity is more solid than humanity. He
held that what we call the ideal is not only more beautiful but more
actual than the real. The ordinary educated modern person staring
at these “Job” designs can only say that God is a mere elderly twin
brother of Job. Blake would have at once retorted that Job was an image
of God.
* * * * *
ON consideration I incline to think that the best way to
summarise the art of Blake from its most superficial to its most
subtle phase would be simply to take one quick characteristic picture
and discuss it fully; first its title and subject, then its look and
shape, then its main principles and implications. Let us take as a good
working example the weird picture which is reproduced on one of the
pages of Gilchrist’s “Life of Blake.”
Now the obvious, prompt, and popular view of Blake is very well
represented by the mere title of the picture. The first thing any
ordinary person will notice about it is that it is called “The Ghost
of a Flea”; and the ordinary person will be very justifiably amused.
This is the first fact about William Blake--that he is a joke; and it
is a fact by no means to be despised. Simply considered as a puzzle
or parlour game, Blake is extraordinarily entertaining. I have known
many cultivated families made happy on winter evenings by trying to
understand the poem called “The Mental Traveller,” or wondering what
can be the significance of the stanza that runs:
“Little Mary Bell had a fairy in a nut,
Long John Brown had the devil in his gut;
Long John Brown loved little Mary Bell,
And the fairy drew the devil into the nutshell.”
[Illustration: “ALBION! AROUSE THYSELF!” (1804)]
The first fact is that we are puzzled and also honestly amused. It is
as if we had a highly eccentric neighbour in the next garden. Long
before we like him we like gossiping about him. And the mere title,
“The Ghost of a Flea,” represents all that makes Blake a centre of
literary gossip.
And now, having enjoyed the oddity of the title, let us look at the
picture. Let us attempt to describe, so far as it can be done in words
instead of lines, what Blake thought that the ghost of a flea would
be like. The scene suggests a high and cheerless corridor, as in some
silent castle of giants. Through this a figure, naked and gigantic, is
walking with a high-shouldered and somewhat stealthy stride. In one
hand the creature has a peculiar curved knife of a cruel shape; in
the other he has a sort of stone basin. The most striking line in the
composition is the hard long curve of the spine, which goes up without
a single flicker to the back of the brutal head, as if the whole back
view were built like a tower of stone. The face is in no sense human.
It has something that is aquiline and also something that is swinish;
its eyes are alive with a moony glitter that is entirely akin to
madness. The thing seems to be passing a curtain and entering a room.
With this we may mark the second fact about Blake--that if his only
object is to make our flesh creep, he does it well. His bogeys are
good reliable bogeys. There is really something that appeals to the
imagination about this notion of the ghost of a flea being a tall
vampire stalking through tall corridors at night. We have found Blake
an amusing madman and now an interesting madman; let us go on with the
process.
The third thing to note about this picture is that for Blake the ghost
of a flea means the idea or principle of a flea. The principle of a
flea (so far as we can see it) is bloodthirstiness, the feeding on the
life of another, the fury of the parasite. Fleas may have other nobler
sentiments and meditations, but we know nothing about them. The vision
of a flea is a vision of blood; and that is what Blake has made of
it. This is the next point, then, to be remarked in his make-up as a
mystic; he is interested in the ideas for which such things stand. For
him the tiger means an awful elegance; for him the tree means a silent
strength.
If it be granted that Blake was interested, not in the flea, but
in the idea of the flea, we can proceed to the next step, which is
a particularly important one. Every great mystic goes about with a
magnifying glass. He sees every flea as a giant--perhaps rather as an
ogre. I have spoken of the tall castle in which these giants dwell;
but, indeed, that tall tower is the microscope. It will not be denied
that Blake shows the best part of a mystic’s attitude in seeing that
the soul of a flea is ten thousand times larger than a flea. But the
really interesting point is much more striking. It is the essential
point upon which all primary understanding of the art of Blake really
turns. The point is this: that the ghost of a flea is not only larger
than a flea, the ghost of a flea is actually more solid than a flea.
The flea himself is hazy and fantastic compared to the hard and
massive actuality of his ghost. When we have understood this, we have
understood the second of the great ideas in Blake--the idea of ideas.
To sum up Blake’s philosophy in any phrase sufficiently simple and
popular for our purpose is not at all easy. For Blake’s philosophy was
not simple. Those who imagine that because he was always talking about
lambs and daisies, about Jesus and little children, that therefore he
held a simple gospel of goodwill, entirely misunderstand the whole
nature of his mind. No man had harder dogmas; no one insisted more
that religion must have theology. The Everlasting Gospel was far from
being a simple gospel. Blake had succeeded in inventing in the course
of about ten years as tangled and interdependent a system of theology
as the Catholic Church has accumulated in two thousand. Much of it,
indeed, he inherited from ancient heretics who were much more doctrinal
than the orthodoxy which they opposed. Notable among these were the
Gnostics, and in some degree the mad Franciscans who followed Joachim
de Flor. Very few modern people would know an Akamoth or an Æon if they
saw him. Yet one would really have to be on rather intimate terms
with these old mystical gods and demons before one could move quite
easily in the Cosmos which was familiar to Blake.
[Illustration: THE CRUCIFIXION (1804)]
Let us, however, attempt to find a short and popular statement of the
position of Blake and all such mystics. The plainest way of putting
it, I think, is this: this school especially denied the authority
of Nature. Some went the extreme length of the mad Manichæans, and
declared the material universe evil in itself. Some, like Blake, and
most of the poets considered it as a shadow or illusion, a sort of
joke of the Almighty. But whatever else Nature was, Nature was not our
mother. Blake applies to her the strange words used by Christ to Mary,
and says to Mother-Earth in many poems: “What have I to do with thee?”
It is common to connect Blake and Wordsworth because of their ballads
about babies and sheep. They were utterly opposite. If Wordsworth
was the Poet of Nature, Blake was specially the Poet of Anti-Nature.
Against Nature he set a certain entity which he called Imagination; but
the word as commonly used conveys very little of what he meant by it.
He did not mean something shadowy or fantastic, but rather something
clear-cut, definite, and unalterable. By Imagination, that is, he meant
images; the eternal images of things. You might shoot all the lions on
the earth; but you could not destroy the Lion of Judah, the Lion of the
Imagination. You might kill all the lambs of the world and eat them;
but you could not kill the Lamb of the Imagination, which was the Lamb
of God, that taketh away the sins of the world. Blake’s philosophy, in
brief, was primarily the assertion that the ideal is more actual than
the real: just as in Euclid the good triangle in the mind is a more
actual (and more practical) than the bad triangle on the blackboard.
Many of Blake’s pictures become intelligible (or as intelligible as
they can become) if we keep this principle in mind. For instance, there
is a fine design representing a naked and heroic youth of great beauty
tracing something on the sand. The reader, when he looks at the title
of it, is interested to discover that this is a portrait of Sir Isaac
Newton. It was not so much of an affectation as it seems. Blake from
his own point of view really did think that the Eternal Isaac Newton as
God beheld him was more of an actuality than the terrestrial gentleman
who happened to be elderly or happened by some sublunary accident to
wear clothes. Therefore, when he calls it a “portrait” he is not, from
his own point of view, talking nonsense. It is the form and feature of
someone who exists and who is different from everyone else, just as if
it were the ordinary oil-painting of an alderman.
The most important conception can be found in one sentence which he let
fall as if by accident, “Nature has no outline, but imagination has.”
If a clear black line when looked at through a microscope was seen to
be a ragged and confused edge like a mop or a doormat, then Blake would
say, “So much the worse for the microscope.” If pure lines existed
only in the human mind, then Blake would say, “So much the better for
the human mind.” If the real earth grew damp and dubious when it met
and mixed itself with the sea, so much the worse for the real earth.
If the idea of clean-cut truth existed only in the intellect, that was
the most actual place in which anything could exist. In short, Blake
really insisted that man as the image of God had a right to impose form
upon nature. He would have laughed to scorn the notion of the modern
evolutionist--that Nature is to be permitted to impose formlessness
upon man. For him the lines in a landscape were boundaries which he
drew like frontiers, by his authority as the plenipotentiary ambassador
of heaven. When he drew his line round Leviathan he was drawing the
divine net around him; he tamed his bulls and lions even by creating
them. And when he made in some picture a line between sea and land that
does not exist in Nature, he was saying by supernatural right, “Thus
far shalt thou come, and no farther, and here shall thy proud waves be
stayed.”
* * * * *
I SELECT the symbol of the sea partly because Blake was
himself fond of such elemental images, and partly because it is an
image especially appropriate to Blake’s great conception of the outline
in the eternal imagination. Nearly all phrases about the sea are
specially and spiritually false. People talk of the sea as vast and
vague, drifting and indefinite; as if the magic of it lay in having
no lines or boundaries. But the spell of the sea upon the eye and the
soul is exactly this: that it is the one straight line in nature. They
talk of the infinite sea. Artistically it would be far truer to talk
of an infinite haystalk; for the haystalk does slightly fade into a
kind of fringe against the sky. But the horizon line is not only hard
but _tight_, like a fiddle-string. I have always a nervous fear that
the sea-line will snap suddenly. And it is exactly this mathematical
decision in the sea that makes it so romantic a background for fighting
and human figures. England was called in Catholic days the garden of
Mary. The garden is all the more beautiful because it is enclosed in
four hard angular walls of sapphire or emerald. Any mere tuft or twig
can curve with a curve that is incalculable. Any scrap of moss can
contain in itself an irregularity that is infinite. The sea is the one
thing that is really exciting because the sea is the one thing that is
flat.
[Illustration: THE JUDGMENT DAY (1806)]
Whether, however, these conclusions can be accepted by the reader as
true, they can at least be accepted as typifying the kind of thing
which William Blake believed to be true. He would have felt the sea not
as a waste but as a wall. Nature had no outline, but imagination had.
And it was imagination that was trustworthy.
This definition explains other things. Blake was enthusiastically in
favour of the French Revolution; yet he enthusiastically hated that
school of sceptics which, in the opinion of many, made the Revolution
possible. He did not mind Marat; but he detested Voltaire. The reason
is obvious in the light of his views on Nature and Imagination. The
Republican Idealists he liked because they were Idealists, because
their abstract doctrines about justice and human equality were abstract
doctrines. But the school of Voltaire was naturalistic; it loved to
remind man of his earthly origin and even of his earthly degradation.
The war, which Blake loved, was a war of the invisible against the
visible. Valmy and Arcola were part of such a war; it was a war between
the visible kings and the invisible Republic. But Voltaire’s war was
exactly the opposite; it was a discrediting of the invisible Church by
the indecent exhibition of the real Church, with its fat friars or its
foolish old women. Blake had no sympathy with this mere flinging of
facts at a great conception. In a really powerful and exact metaphor he
describes the powerlessness of this earthly and fragmentary sceptical
attack.
Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau,
Mock on, mock on, ’tis all in vain,
You throw the sand against the wind
And the wind blows it back again.
An excellent image for a mere attack by masses of detail.
There were some of Blake’s intellectual conceptions which I have not
professed either to admire or to defend. Some of his views were really
what the old mediæval world called heresies and what the modern world
(with an equally healthy instinct but with less scientific clarity)
calls fads. In either case the definition of the fad or heresy is not
so very difficult. A fad or heresy is the exaltation of something
which, even if true, is secondary or temporary in its nature against
those things which are essential and eternal, those things which always
prove themselves true in the long run. In short, it is the setting up
of the mood against the mind. For instance: it is a mood, a beautiful
and lawful mood, to wonder how oysters really feel. But it is a fad,
an ugly and unlawful fad, to starve human beings because you will
not let them eat oysters. It is a beautiful mood to feel impelled to
assassinate Mr Carnegie; but it is a fad to maintain seriously that
any private person has a right to do it. We all have emotional moments
in which we should like to be indecent in a drawing-room; but it is
faddist to turn all drawing-rooms into places in which one is indecent.
We all have at times an almost holy temptation suddenly to scream out
very loud; but it is heretical and pedantic really to go on screaming
for the remainder of your natural life. If you throw one bomb you are
only a murderer; but if you keep on persistently throwing bombs you are
in awful danger of at last becoming a prig. It has been this trouble
that has partly poisoned the people from which William Blake inherited,
if not his blood, at least his civilization. The real trouble with
Puritanism was not that it was a senseless prejudice nor yet altogether
(as would seem superficially obvious) that it was a mere form of
devil-worship. It was none of these things in its first and freshest
motive.
[Illustration: THE TOMB (1806)]
Puritanism was an honourable mood; it was a noble fad. In other words,
it was a highly creditable mistake. We have all felt the frame of mind
in which one wishes to smash golden croziers and mitres merely because
they are golden. We all know how natural it is at certain moments
to feel a profound thirst to kick clergymen simply because they are
clergymen. But if we seriously ask ourselves whether in the long run
humanity is not happier with gold in its religion rather than mere
drab, then we come to the conclusion that the gold on cross or cope
does give more pleasure to most men than it gives pain, for a moment,
to us. If we really ask ourselves if religions do not work better with
a definite priesthood to do the drudgery of religion, we come to the
conclusion that they do work better. Anti-clericalism is a generous and
ideal mood; clericalism is a permanent and practical necessity. To put
the matter in an easier and more everyday metaphor, it is natural for
any poor Londoner to feel at times an abstract aspiration to beat the
Lord Mayor of London. But it does not follow that it would really have
been a kindness to poor Londoners to abolish the Lord Mayor’s Show.
Now it is in this sense that we may truly say that Blake (upon one side
of his mind) was something worse than a maniac--he was a faddist. He
did permit aspirations or prejudices which are accidental or one-sided
to capture and control him at the expense of things really more human
and enduring: things which he shared with all the children of men. I
do not allude to his supernaturalism; for on that he is in no sense
alone, nor even specially eccentric. I do not refer to his love of the
gorgeous, the terrible or even the secretive of temples, initiations,
and hieroglyphic religion. For that sort of mystery is really quite
popular and even democratic. That sort of secrecy is a very open secret.
It is usual to hear a man say in modern England that he has too much
common sense to believe in ghosts. But common sense is in favour of
a belief in ghosts, the common sense of mankind. It is usual to hear
a man say that he likes common sense and does not like the mummeries
and flummeries of church ritual. But common sense is in favour of
mummery and ritualism, the common sense of mankind. The man who
attempts to do without symbols is a prophet so austere and isolated
as to be dangerously near to a madman. The man who does not believe
in ghosts is a solitary fanatic and lonely dreamer among the sons of
men. Therefore I do not in any sense count even his craziest visions
or wildest symbols among the real fads or eccentricities of Blake. But
he had mental attitudes which were really fads and eccentricities, in
this essential sense, that they were not exaggerations of a general
human feeling but definite denials of it. He did not lead humanity,
but attacked or even obstructed it. Many instances might be given
of the kind of thing I mean; there was something of it in Blake’s
persistent and even pedantic insistence that war as war is evil. There
was something of Tolstoy in Blake; and that means something that is
inhuman as well as something that is heroic. But his allusions to this
were occasional and perhaps even accidental, and better cases could
certainly be found. The essential of all the cases is, however, that
when he went wrong it was as an intellectual and not as a poet.
Take, for example, his notion of going naked. Here I think Blake is
merely a sort of hard theorist. Here, in spite of his imagination
and his laughter, there was even a touch of the prig about him. He
was obscene on principle. So to a great extent was Walt Whitman. A
dictionary is supposed to contain all words, so it has to contain
coarse words. “Leaves of Grass” was planned to praise all things, so
it had to praise gross things. There was something of this pedantic
perfection in Blake’s escapades. As the hygienist insists on wearing
Jäger clothes, he insisted on wearing no clothes. As the æsthete must
wear sandals, he must wear nothing. He is not really lawless at all; he
is bowing to the law of his own outlawed logic.
There is nothing at all poetical in this revolt. William Blake was a
great and real poet; but in this point he was simply unpoetical. Walt
Whitman was a great and real poet; but on this point he was prosaic and
priggish. Two extraordinary men are not poets because they tear away
the veil from sex. On the contrary it is because all men are poets
that they all hang a veil over sex. The ploughman does not plough by
night, because he does not feel specially romantic about ploughing. He
does love by night, because he does feel specially romantic about sex.
In this matter Blake was not only unpoetical, but far less poetical
than the mass of ordinary men. Decorum is not an over-civilised
convention. Decorum is not tame, decorum is wild, as wild as the wind
at night.
“Mysterious as the moons that rise
At midnight in the pines of Var.”
[Illustration: THE SELFHOOD OF DECEIT (1807)]
Modesty is too fierce and elemental a thing for the modern pedants to
understand; I had almost said too savage a thing. It has in it the joy
of escape and the ancient shyness of freedom. In this matter Blake and
Whitman are merely among the modern pedants. In not admiring sexual
reticence these two great poets simply did not understand one of the
greatest poems of humanity.
I have given as an instance his disregard of the idea of mystery and
modesty as involved in dress; it was an unpoetical thought that there
should be no curtains of gold or scarlet round the shrine of the Holy
Spirit. But there is stronger instances in his theology and philosophy.
Thus he imbibed the idea common among early Gnostics and not unknown to
Christian Science speculators of our day, that it was a confession of
weakness in Christ to be crucified at all. If he had really attained
divine life (so ran the argument) he ought to have attained immortal
life; he ought to have lived for ever upon the earth. With an excess
of what can only be called impudence, he even turned Gethsemane into a
sort of moral breakdown; the sudden weakness which accepted death. The
general claim that vices are poetical is largely unfounded; and this
is an excellent example of how unpoetical is the vice of profanity.
Blasphemy is not wild; blasphemy is in its nature prosaic. It consists
in regarding in a commonplace manner something which other and happier
people regard in a rapturous and imaginative manner. This is well
exemplified in poor Blake and his Gnostic heresy about Jesus. In
holding that Christ was weakened by being crucified he is certainly a
pedant, and certainly not a poet. If there is one point on which the
spirit of the poets and the poetic soul in all peoples is on the side
of Christianity, it is exactly this one point on which Blake is against
Christianity--“was crucified, dead and buried.” The spectacle of a God
dying is much more grandiose than the spectacle of a man living for
ever. The former suggests that awful changes have really entered the
alchemy of the universe; the latter is only vaguely reminiscent of
hygienic octogenarians and Eno’s Fruit Salts. Moreover, to the poet
as to the child, death must be dreadful even if it is desirable. To
talk (as some modern theosophists do) about death being nothing, the
mere walking into another room, to talk like this is not only prosaic
and profoundly un-Christian; it is decidedly vulgar. It is against the
whole trend of the secret emotions of humanity. It is indecent, like
persuading a decent peasant to go without clothes. There is more of
the song and music of mankind in a clerk putting on his Sunday clothes
than in a fanatic running naked down Cheapside. And there is more real
mysticism in nailing down a coffin lid than in pretending, in mere
rhetoric, to throw open the doors of death.
I have given two cases of the presence in Blake of these anti-human
creeds which I call fads--the case of clothes and the case of the
crucifixion. I could give a much larger number of them, but I think
their nature is here sufficiently indicated. They are all cases in
which Blake ceased to be a poet, through becoming entirely, instead
of only partially, separated from the people. And this, I think, is
certainly connected with that quality in him to which I referred in
analysing the eighteenth century; I mean the element of oligarchy and
fastidiousness in the mystics and masonries of that epoch. They were
all founded in an atmosphere of degrees and initiations. The chief
difference between Christianity and the thousand transcendental schools
of to-day is substantially the same as the difference nearly two
thousand years ago between Christianity and the thousand sacred rites
and secret societies of the Pagan Empire. The deepest difference is
this: that all the heathen mysteries are so far aristocratic, that they
are understood by some, and not understood by others. The Christian
mysteries are so far democratic that nobody understands them at all.
[Illustration: THE SHEPHERDS (1821)]