There have been men who loved the future like a mistress, and the future
mixed her breath into their breath and shook her hair about them, and hid
them from the understanding of their times. William Blake was one of these
men, and if he spoke confusedly and obscurely it was because he spoke
things for whose speaking he could find no models in the world about him.
He announced the religion of art, of which no man dreamed in the world
about him; and he understood it more perfectly than the thousands of
subtle spirits who have received its baptism in the world about us,
because, in the beginning of important things--in the beginning of love,
in the beginning of the day, in the beginning of any work, there is a
moment when we understand more perfectly than we understand again until
all is finished. In his time educated people believed that they amused
themselves with books of imagination but that they 'made their souls' by
listening to sermons and by doing or by not doing certain things. When
they had to explain why serious people like themselves honoured the great
poets greatly they were hard put to it for lack of good reasons. In our
time we are agreed that we 'make our souls' out of some one of the great
poets of ancient times, or out of Shelley or Wordsworth, or Goethe or
Balzac, or Flaubert, or Count Tolstoy, in the books he wrote before he
became a prophet and fell into a lesser order, or out of Mr. Whistler's
pictures, while we amuse ourselves, or, at best, make a poorer sort of
soul, by listening to sermons or by doing or by not doing certain things.
We write of great writers, even of writers whose beauty would once have
seemed an unholy beauty, with rapt sentences like those our fathers kept
for the beatitudes and mysteries of the Church; and no matter what we
believe with our lips, we believe with our hearts that beautiful things,
as Browning said in his one prose essay that was not in verse, have 'lain
burningly on the Divine hand,' and that when time has begun to wither, the
Divine hand will fall heavily on bad taste and vulgarity. When no man
believed these things William Blake believed them, and began that
preaching against the Philistine, which is as the preaching of the Middle
Ages against the Saracen.
He had learned from Jacob Boehme and from old alchemist writers that
imagination was the first emanation of divinity, 'the body of God,' 'the
Divine members,' and he drew the deduction, which they did not draw, that
the imaginative arts were therefore the greatest of Divine revelations,
and that the sympathy with all living things, sinful and righteous alike,
which the imaginative arts awaken, is that forgiveness of sins commanded
by Christ. The reason, and by the reason he meant deductions from the
observations of the senses, binds us to mortality because it binds us to
the senses, and divides us from each other by showing us our clashing
interests; but imagination divides us from mortality by the immortality of
beauty, and binds us to each other by opening the secret doors of all
hearts. He cried again and again that every thing that lives is holy, and
that nothing is unholy except things that do not live--lethargies, and
cruelties, and timidities, and that denial of imagination which is the
root they grew from in old times. Passions, because most living, are most
holy--and this was a scandalous paradox in his time--and man shall enter
eternity borne upon their wings.
And he understood this so literally that certain drawings to _Vala_, had
he carried them beyond the first faint pencillings, the first faint washes
of colour, would have been a pretty scandal to his time and to our time.
The sensations of this 'foolish body,' this 'phantom of the earth and
water,' were in themselves but half-living things, 'vegetative' things,
but passion that 'eternal glory' made them a part of the body of God.
This philosophy kept him more simply a poet than any poet of his time, for
it made him content to express every beautiful feeling that came into his
head without troubling about its utility or chaining it to any utility.
Sometimes one feels, even when one is reading poets of a better
time--Tennyson or Wordsworth, let us say--that they have troubled the
energy and simplicity of their imaginative passions by asking whether they
were for the helping or for the hindrance of the world, instead of
believing that all beautiful things have 'lain burningly on the Divine
hand.' But when one reads Blake, it is as though the spray of an
inexhaustible fountain of beauty was blown into our faces, and not merely
when one reads the _Songs of Innocence_, or the lyrics he wished to call
'The Ideas of Good and Evil,' but when one reads those 'Prophetic Works'
in which he spoke confusedly and obscurely because he spoke of things for
whose speaking he could find no models in the world about him. He was a
symbolist who had to invent his symbols; and his counties of England, with
their correspondence to tribes of Israel, and his mountains and rivers,
with their correspondence to parts of a man's body, are arbitrary as some
of the symbolism in the _Axël_ of the symbolist Villiers De L'Isle Adam is
arbitrary, while they mix incongruous things as _Axël_ does not. He was a
man crying out for a mythology, and trying to make one because he could
not find one to his hand. Had he been a Catholic of Dante's time he would
have been well content with Mary and the angels; or had he been a scholar
of our time he would have taken his symbols where Wagner took his, from
Norse mythology; or have followed, with the help of Prof. Rhys, that
pathway into Welsh mythology which he found in 'Jerusalem'; or have gone
to Ireland--and he was probably an Irishman--and chosen for his symbols
the sacred mountains, along whose sides the peasant still sees enchanted
fires, and the divinities which have not faded from the belief, if they
have faded from the prayers of simple hearts; and have spoken without
mixing incongruous things because he spoke of things that had been long
steeped in emotion; and have been less obscure because a traditional
mythology stood on the threshold of his meaning and on the margin of his
sacred darkness. If 'Enitharmon' had been named Freia, or Gwydeon, or
Danu, and made live in Ancient Norway, or Ancient Wales, or Ancient
Ireland, we would have forgotten that her maker was a mystic; and the hymn
of her harping, that is in _Vala_, would but have reminded us of many
ancient hymns.
'The joy of woman is the death of her beloved,
Who dies for love of her,
In torments of fierce jealousy and pangs of adoration.
The lover's night bears on my song,
And the nine spheres rejoice beneath my powerful control.
They sing unwearied to the notes of my immortal hand.
The solemn, silent moon
Reverberates the long harmony sounding upon my limbs.
The birds and beasts rejoice and play,
And every one seeks for his mate to prove his inmost joy.
Furious and terrible they rend the nether deep,
The deep lifts up his rugged head,
And lost in infinite hovering wings vanishes with a cry.
The fading cry is ever dying,
The living voice is ever living in its inmost joy.'
1897.