Blake’s philosophy, we can go on with greater ease and thoroughness
to state where the solid and genuine value of that philosophy lay. It
consisted in its placid and positive defiance of materialism, a work
upon which all the mystics, Pagan and Christian, have been employed
from the beginning. It is not unnatural that they should have fallen
into many errors, employed dangerous fallacies, and even ruined the
earth for the sake of the cloudland. But the war in which they were
engaged has been none the less the noblest and most important effort
of human history, and in their whole army there was no greater warrior
than Blake.
One of the strange and rooted contradictions of the eighteenth
century is a combination between profound revolution and superficial
conventionality. It might almost be said that the men of that time had
altered morals long before they thought of altering manners. The French
Revolution was especially French in this respect, that it was above
all things a respectable revolution. Violence was excused; madness
was excused; but eccentricity was inexcusable. These men had taken a
king’s head off his shoulders long before they had thought of taking
the powder off their own heads. Danton could understand the Massacres
of September, but he could not understand the worship of the Goddess
of Reason or all the antics of the German madman Clootz. Robespierre
grew tired of the Terror, but he never grew tired of shaving every
morning. It is impossible to avoid the impression that this is rather
a characteristic of the revolutions which really make a difference and
defy the world. The same is true of that fallacious but most powerful
and genuine English monument which was covered by the words Darwin and
Evolution. If there was one striking thing about the fine old English
agnostics, it was that they were entirely indifferent to alterations
in the externals of pose or fashion, that they seem to have supposed
that the huge intellectual overturn of agnosticism would leave the
obvious respectability of life exactly as it was. They thought that
one might entirely alter a man’s head without in the least altering
his hat. They thought that one might shatter the twin wings of an
archangel without throwing the least doubt upon the twin whiskers of
a mid-Victorian professor. And though there was undoubtedly a certain
solemn humour about such a position, yet, on the whole, I think the
mid-Victorian agnostics were employing the right kind of revolution.
It is broadly a characteristic of all valuable new-fashioned opinions
that they are brought in by old-fashioned men. For the sincerity of
such men is proved by both facts--the fact that they do care about
their new truth and the fact that they do not care about their old
clothes. Herbert Spencer’s philosophy is all the more serious because
his appearance (to judge by his photographs) was quite startlingly
absurd. And while the Tory caricatures were deriding Gladstone because
he introduced very new-fangled legislation, they were also deriding him
because he wore very antiquated collars.
But though this strange combination of convention in small things with
revolt in big ones is not uncommon in hearty and human reformers,
there is a quite special emphasis on this combination in the case of
the eighteenth century. The very men who did deeds which were more
dreadful and daring than we can dream to achieve, were the very men
who spoke and wrote with a mincing propriety and almost effeminate
fastidious distinction such as we should scarcely condescend to employ.
The eighteenth century man called the eighteenth century woman “an
elegant female”; but he was quite capable of saving her from a mad
bull. He described his ideal republic as a place containing all the
refined sensibilities of virtue with all the voluptuous seductions of
pleasure. But he would be hacked with an axe and blown out of a gun to
get it. He could pursue new notions with a certain solid and virile
constancy, as if they were old ones. And the explanation is partly
this: that however revolutionary, they were old ones--in this sense
at least, that they involved the pursuit of some primary human hope
to its original home. They powdered their hair because they really
thought that a civilized man should be civilized--or, if you will,
artificial. They spoke of “an elegant female” because they really
thought, with their whole souls, that a female ought to be elegant. The
old rebels preserved the old fashions--and among others the old fashion
of rebelling. The new rebels, the revolutionists of our time, are
intent upon introducing new fashions in boots, beds, food or furniture;
so they have no time to rebel. But if we have once grasped this
eighteenth century element of the insistence upon the elegant female
because she is elegant, we have got hold of a fundamental fact in the
relation of that century to Blake.
[Illustration: THE MORNING STARS (1821)]
It is instinctive to describe Blake as a fantastic artist; and yet
there is a very real sense in which Blake is conventional. If any
reader thinks the phrase paradoxical, he can easily discover that it
is true; he can discover it simply by comparing Blake even in his most
wild and arbitrary work with any merely modern artist who has the
name of being wild; with Aubrey Beardsley or even with Rossetti. All
Blake’s heroes are conventional heroes made unconventionally heroic.
All Blake’s heroines are elegant females without their clothes. But
in both cases they exaggerate and insist upon the traditional ideal
of the sexes--the broad shoulders of the god and the broad hips of
the goddess. Blake detested the sensuality of Rubens. But if he had
been obliged to choose between the women of Rubens and the women of
Rossetti, he would have flung himself on the neck of Rubens. For we
have a false conception of what constitutes exaggeration. The end of
the eighteenth century (being a dogmatic period) believed in certain
things and exaggerated them. The end of the nineteenth century simply
did not know what things to exaggerate; so it fell back upon merely
underrating them. Blake tried to make Wallace look even bolder
and fiercer than Wallace can possibly have looked. That was his
exaggeration of Wallace. But Burne-Jones’ exaggeration of Perseus is
not an exaggeration at all. It is an under-statement; for the whole
fascination of Burne-Jones’ Perseus is that he looks frightened.
Blake’s figure of a woman is aggressively and monstrously womanly. That
is its fascination, if it has any. But the fascination of a Beardsley
woman (if she has any) is exactly that she is not quite a woman. So
much of what we have meant by exaggeration is really diminution; so
much of what we have meant by fancy is simply falling short of fact.
The Burne-Jones’ man is interesting because he is not quite brave
enough to be a man. The Beardsley woman is interesting because she
is not quite pretty enough to be a woman. But Blake’s men are brave
beyond all decency: and Blake’s women are so swaggeringly bent on
being beautiful that they become quite ugly in the process. If anyone
wishes to know exactly what I mean, I recommend him to look at one of
those extraordinary designs of nymphs in which a woman (or, as Blake
loved to call it, the Female Form) is made to perform an impossible
feat of acrobatics. It is impossible, but it is quite female; perhaps
the words are not wholly inconsistent. A living serpent might perform
such a piece of athletics; but even then only a female living serpent.
But nobody would ask a Burne-Jones or Beardsley female to perform any
athletics at all.
Blake in pictorial art was not a mere master of the moonstruck or the
grotesque. On the contrary, he was, as artists go, exceptionally a
champion of the smooth and sensible. In so far as being “modern” means
being against the great conventions of mankind, indifferent to the
difference of the sexes, or inclined to despise doctrinal outline, then
there was never any man who was so little of a modern as Blake. He
may have been mad; but there are varieties even in madness. There are
madmen, like Blake, who go mad on health, and there are madmen who go
mad on sickness.
The distinction is a solid one. You may think the queerly and partially
clothed women of Aubrey Beardsley ugly. You may think the naked
women of William Blake ugly. But you must perceive this peculiar and
extraordinary effect about the women of William Blake, that they are
women. They are exaggerated in the direction of the female form; they
swing upon big hips; they let out and loosen long and luxuriant hair.
Now the queer females of Aubrey Beardsley are queerest of all in this,
that they are not even female. They are narrow where women have a curve
and cropped where women have a head of hair. Blake’s women are often
anatomically impossible. But they are so far women that they could
not possibly be anything else.
[Illustration: THE WHIRLWIND (1825)]
This comparison between Blake’s art and such art as Aubrey Beardsley’s
is not an invidious impertinence, it is really an important
distinction. Blake’s work may be fantastic; but it is a fantasia on
an old and recognisable air. It exaggerates characteristics. Blake’s
women are too womanish, his young men are too athletic, his old men
are too preposterously old. But Aubrey Beardsley does not really
exaggerate; he understates. His young men have less than the energy of
youth. His women fascinate by the weakness of sex rather than by its
strength. In short, if one is really to exaggerate the truth, one must
have some truth to exaggerate. The decadent mystic produces an effect
not by exaggerating but by distorting. True exaggeration is a thing
both subtle and austere. Caricature is a serious thing; it is almost
blasphemously serious. Caricature really means making a pig more like
a pig than even God has made him. But anyone can make him not like a
pig at all; anyone can create a weird impression by giving him the
beard of a goat. In Aubrey Beardsley the artistic thrill (and there is
an artistic thrill) consists in the fact that the women are not quite
women nor the men quite men. Blake had absolutely no trace of this
morbidity of deficiency. He never asks us to consider a tree magical
because it is a stunted tree; or a man a magician merely because he
has one eye. His form of fantasy would rather be to give a tree more
branches than it could carry and to give a man bigger eyes than he
could keep in his head. There is really a great deal of difference
between the fantastic and the exaggerative. One may be fantastic by
merely leaving something out. One might call it a fantasy if the
official portrait of Wellington represented him without a nose. But one
could hardly call it an exaggeration.
There is an everlasting battle in which Blake is on the side of the
angels, and what is much more difficult and dangerous, on the side of
all the sensible men. The question is so enormous and so important,
that it is difficult to state even by reason of its reality. For in
this world of ours we do not so much go on and discover small things;
rather we go on and discover big things. It is the details that we see
first; it is the design that we only see very slowly; and some men
die never having seen it at all. We all wake up on a battle-field.
We see certain squadrons in certain uniforms gallop past; we take an
arbitrary fancy to this or that colour, to this or that plume. But
it often takes us a long time to realise what the fight is about or
even who is fighting whom. One may say, to keep up the metaphor, that
many a man has joined the French army from love of the Horse Guards
Blue; many an old-fashioned eighteenth century sailor has gone over
to the Chinese merely because they wore pigtails. It is so easy to
turn against what is really yourself for the sake of some accidental
resemblance to yourself. You may envy the curled hair of Hercules; but
do not envy curly hair until you wish that you were a nigger. You may
regret that you have a short nose; but do not dream of its growing
longer and longer till it is like the trunk of an elephant. Wait until
you know what the battle is broadly about before you rush roaring after
any advancing regiment. For a battle is a complicated thing; each army
contains coats of different colour; each section of each army advances
at a different angle. You may fancy that the Greens are charging the
Blues exactly at the moment when both are combining to effect a fine
military manœuvre. You may conceive that two similar-looking columns
are supporting each other at the very instant when they are about to
blaze at each other with cannon, rifle, and revolver. So in the modern
intellectual world we can see flags of many colours, deeds of manifold
interest; the one thing we cannot see is the map. We cannot see the
simplified statement which tells us what is the origin of all the
trouble. How shall we manage to state in an obvious and alphabetical
manner the ultimate query, the primordial pivot on which the whole
modern problem turns? It cannot be done in long rationalistic words;
they convey by their very sound the suggestion of something subtle. One
must try to think of something in the way of a plain street metaphor or
an obvious analogy. For the thing is not too hard for human speech; it
is actually too obvious for human speech.
The fundamental fight in which, despite all this heat and headlong
misunderstanding, William Blake is on the right side, is one which
would require a book about the battle and not about William Blake.
By an accident at once convenient and deceptive, it can largely be
described as geographical as well as philosophical. It is crudely true
that there are two types of mysticism, that of Christendom and that
of Orientalism. Now this scheme of east and west is inadequate; but
it does happen to fit in with the working facts. For the odd thing is
this, not only are most of the merely modern movements of idealism
Oriental, but their Orientalism is all that they have in common. They
all come together, and yet their only apparent point of union is that
they all come from the East. Thus a modern vegetarian is generally
also a teetotaller, yet there is certainly no obvious intellectual
connection between consuming vegetables and not consuming fermented
vegetables. A drunkard, when lifted laboriously out of the gutter,
might well be heard huskily to plead that he had fallen there through
excessive devotion to a vegetable diet. On the other hand, a man
might well be a practised and polished cannibal and still be a strict
teetotaller. A subtle parallelism might doubtless be found; but the
only quite obvious parallelism is that vegetarianism is Buddhist and
teetotalism is Mahometan. In the same way, it is the cold truth that
there is no kind of logical connection between being an Agnostic and
being a Socialist. But it is the fact that the Chinese are as agnostic
as oxen; and it is the fact that the Japanese are as socialistic as
rats. These appalling ideas, that a man has no divine individual
destiny, that making a minute item in the tribe or hive, is his only
earthly destiny, these ideas do come all together out of the same
quarter; they do in practise blow upon us out of the East, as cold and
inhuman as the east wind.
[Illustration: THE JUST UPRIGHT MAN (1825)]
Nevertheless, I do not accept this dull definition by locality; I think
it is a spirit in Asia, and even a spirit that can be named. It is
approximately described as an insane simplicity. In all these cases we
find people attempting to perfect a thing solely by simplification;
by obliterating special features: this cosmos is full of wingless
birds, of hornless cattle, of hairless women, and colourless wine, all
fading into a formless background. There is a Christian simplicity,
of course, opposed to this pessimist simplicity. Both the western and
eastern mystic may be called children; but the eastern child treads
the sand-castle back into sand, and enjoys seeing the silver snow man
melt back into muddy water. This return to chaos and a comfortless
simplicity is the only intelligent meaning of the words reaction and
reactionary. In this sense much of modern science is reaction, and
most modern scientists are reactionaries. But where this reversion to
the void can be seen most clearly is in all the semi-oriental sects to
which I have referred. Teetotalism is a simplification; its objection
to beer is not really that beer makes a man like a beast. On the
contrary, its real objection is that beer most unmistakably separates
a man from a beast. Vegetarianism is a simplification; the herb-eating
Hindoo saint does not really dislike the carnivorous habit because
it destroys an animal. Rather, he dislikes it because it creates an
animal; renews the special aims and appetites of the separate animal,
man. Agnosticism, the ancient creed of Confucius, is a simplification;
it is a shutting out of all the shadowy splendours and terrors;
an Arcadian exclusiveness; _il faut cultiver son jardin_. Japanese
patriotism, the blind collectivism of the tribe, is a simplification;
it is an attempt to turn our turbulent and varied humanity into one
enormous animal, with twenty million legs, but only one head. There is
an utterly opposite kind of simplicity that springs from joy; but this
kind of simplicity certainly is rooted in despair.
Now, for practical purposes, there is an antagonistic order of
mysticism; that which celebrates personality, positive variety, and
special emphasis: just as in broad fact the mystery of dissolution
is emphasized and typified in the East, so in practice the mystery
of concentration and identity is manifest in the historic churches
of Christendom. Even the foes of Christianity would readily agree
that Christianity is “personal” in the sense that a vulgar joke is
“personal”: that is corporeal, vivid, perhaps ugly. This being so, it
has been broadly true that any mystic who broke with the Christian
tradition tended to drift towards the eastern and pessimist tradition.
In the Albigensian and other heresies the East crawled in with its
serpentine combination of glitter and abasement, of pessimism and
pleasure. Every dreamer who strayed outside the Christian order strayed
towards the Hindu order, and every such dreamer found his dream turning
to a nightmare. If a man wandered far from Christ he was drawn into
the orbit of Buddha, the other great magnet of mankind--the negative
magnet. The thing is true down to the latest and the most lovable
visionaries of our own time; if they do not climb up into Christendom,
they slide down into Thibet. The greatest poet now writing in the
English language (and it is surely unnecessary to say that I mean Mr
Yeats) has written a whole play round the statement, “Where there is
nothing there is God.” In this he sharply and purposely cuts himself
off from the real Christian position, that where there is anything
there is God.
[Illustration: FOR HIS EYES ARE UPON THE WAYS OF MAN (1825)]
But though, by an almost political accident, Oriental pessimism
has been the practical alternative to the Christian type of
transcendentalism, there is, and always has been, a third thing that
was neither Christian in an orthodox sense nor Buddhistic in any
sense. Before Christianity existed there was a European school of
optimist mystics; among whom the great name is Plato. And ever since
there have been movements and appearances in Europe of this healthier
heathen mysticism, which did not shrink from the shapes of things or
the emphatic colours of existence. Something of the sort was in the
Nature worship of Renaissance philosophers; something of the sort may
even have been behind the strange mixture of ecstacy and animality
in the isolated episode of Luther. This solid and joyful occultism
appears at its best in Swedenborg; but perhaps at its boldest and most
brilliant in William Blake.
The present writer will not, in so important a matter, pretend to the
absurd thing called impartiality; he is personally quite convinced
that if every human being lived a thousand years, every human being
would end up either in utter pessimistic scepticism or in the Catholic
creed. William Blake, in his rationalist and highly Protestant age,
was frequently reproached for his tenderness towards Catholicism; but
it would have surprised him very much to be told that he would join
it. But he would have joined it--if he had lived a thousand years, or
even perhaps a hundred. He was on the side of historic Christianity
on the fundamental question on which it confronts the East; the idea
that personality is the glory of the universe and not its shame; that
creation is higher than evolution, because it is more personal; that
pardon is higher than Nemesis, because it is more personal; that the
forgiveness of sins is essential to the communion of saints; and the
resurrection of the body to the life everlasting. It was a mark of the
old eastern initiations, it is still a mark of the grades and planes
of our theosophical thinkers, that as a man climbs higher and higher,
God becomes to him more and more formless, ethereal, and even thin. And
in many of these temples, both ancient and modern, the final reward of
serving the god through vigils and purifications, is that one is at
last worthy to be told that the god doesn’t exist.
Against all this emasculate mysticism Blake like a Titan rears his
colossal figure and his earthquake voice. Through all the cloud and
chaos of his stubborn symbolism and his perverse theories, through
the tempest of exaggeration and the full midnight of madness, he
reiterates with passionate precision that only that which is lovable
can be adorable, that deity is either a person or a puff of wind, that
the more we know of higher things the more palpable and incarnate we
shall find them; that the form filling the heavens is the likeness
of the appearance of a man. Much of what Blake thus wildly thundered
has been put quietly and quaintly by Coventry Patmore, especially in
that delicate and daring passage in which he speaks of the bonds, the
simpleness and even the narrowness of God. The wise man will follow a
star, low and large and fierce in the heavens; but the nearer he comes
to it the smaller and smaller it will grow, till he finds it the humble
lantern over some little inn or stable. Not till we know the high
things shall we know how lowly they are. Meanwhile, the modern superior
transcendentalist will find the facts of eternity incredible because
they are so solid; he will not recognise heaven because it is so like
the earth.
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