WILLIAM BLAKE

 

THE strange and mysterious figure of William Blake seems continually to appear at the end of almost every vista of intellectual and æsthetic interest down which we move in these days.

      The man's genius must have been of a unique kind; for while writers like Wordsworth and Byron seem now to have stiffened into dignified statues of venerated and achieved pre-eminence, he - the contemporary of William Cowper - exercises now, half way through the second decade of the twentieth century, an influence as fresh, as living, as organic, as palpable, as that of authors who have only just fallen upon silence.

      His so-called "Prophetic Books" may be obscure and arbitrary in their fantastic mythology.  I shall leave the interpretation of these works to those who are more versed in the occult sciences than I am, or than I should greatly care to be; but a prophet in the most true sense of that distinguished word, Blake certainly was - and to prove it one need not touch these Apocalyptic oracles.

      Writing while Cowper was composing evangelical hymns under the influence of the Rev. Dr Newton, and while Burns was celebrating his Highland Mary, Blake anticipates many of the profoundest thoughts of Nietzsche, and opens the "charmed magic casements" upon these perilous fairy seas, voyaged over by Verlaine and Hauptmann and Maeterlinck and Mallarmé.

      When one considers the fact that he was actually writing poems and engraving pictures before the eighteenth century closed and before Edgar Allan Poe was born, it is nothing short of staggering to realise how, not only in literature but in art, his astounding genius dominates our modern taste.

      It might almost seem as if every single one of the poets and painters of our age - all these imagists and post-impressionists and symbolists and the rest - had done nothing during the sensitive years of their life but brood over the work of William Blake.  Even in music, even in dancing - certainly in the symbolic dancing of Isadora Duncan - even in the state decorations of our Little Theatres, one traces the mystical impulse he set in motion, and the austere lineaments, not exactly classical or mediæval, but partaking of the nature of both, of his elemental evocations.

      It were, of course, not really possible to suppose that all these people - all the more imaginative and interesting artists of our day - definitely subjected themselves to the influence of William Blake.  The more rational way of accounting for the extraordinary resemblance is to conceive that Blake, by some premonitory inspiration of the world-spirit "brooding upon things to come", anticipated in an age more emotionally alien to our own than that of Apuleius or of St Anselm, the very "body and pressure" of the dreams that were to dominate the earth.

      When one considers how between the age of Blake and the one in which we now live, extend no less than three great epochs of intellectual taste, the thing becomes almost as strange as one of his own imaginations.

      The age of Sir Walter Scott and Jane Austen, of Wordsworth and Byron, followed immediately upon his.  Then we have the age of Thackeray and Tennyson and the great Mid-Victorians.  Then finally at the end of the nineteenth century we have the epoch dominated in art by Aubrey Beardsley, and in literature by Swinburne and Oscar Wilde.

      Now in our own age - an age that feels as though Wilde himself were growing a little old-fashioned - we find ourselves returning to William Blake and discovering him to be more entirely in harmony with the instincts of our most secret souls than any single genius we could name actually working in our midst.  It is as though to find our completest expression, the passionate and mystical soul of our materialistic age were driven back to an author who lived a hundred years ago.  This phenomenon is by no means unknown in the history of the pilgrimage of the human spirit; but it has never presented itself in so emphatic a form as in the case of this extraordinary person.

      In the early age of the world, the result without doubt would be some weird deification of the clairvoyant prophet.  William Blake would become a myth, a legend, an avatar of the divine Being, a Buddha, a Zoroaster, a wandering Dionysus.  As it is, we are forced to confine ourselves to the fascinating pleasure of watching in individual cases, this or that modern soul, "touched to fine issues", meeting for the first time, as it may often happen, this century-buried incarnation of their own most evasive dreams.

      I myself, who now jot down these fragmentary notes upon him, had the privilege once of witnessing the illumination - I can tell it by no other name - produced upon the mind of the greatest novelist of America and the most incorrigibly realistic, by a chance encounter with the "Songs of Innocence".

      One of the most obvious characteristics of our age is its cult of children.  Here - in the passion of this cult - we separate ourselves altogether, both from our mediæval ancestors who confined their devotion to the divine child, and from the classical ages, who kept children altogether in the background.

      "When I became a man," says the apostle, "I put away childish things," and this "putting away of childish things" has always been a special note of the temper and attitude of orthodox Protestants for whom these other Biblical words, spoken by a greater than St Paul, about "becoming as little children", must seem a sort of pious rhetoric.

      When one considers how this thrice accursed weight of Protestant Puritanism, the most odious and inhuman of all the perverted superstitions that have darkened man's history, a superstition which, though slowly dying, is not yet, owing to its joyless use as a "business asset", altogether dead, has, ever since it was spawned in Scotland and Geneva, made cruel war upon every childish instinct in us and oppressed with unspeakable dreariness the lives of generations of children, it must be regarded as one of the happiest signs of the times that the double renaissance of Catholic Faith and Pagan Freedom now abroad among us, has brought the "Child in the House" into the clear sunlight of an almost religious appreciation.

      Let me not, however, be misunderstood.  It would be a grievous and ludicrous mistake to associate the child-cult which runs like a thread of filmy starlight through the work of William Blake with the somewhat strained and fantastic attitude of child-worship which inspires such poetry as Francis Thompson's "Love in Dian's Lap", and gives a ridiculous and affected air to so many of our little ones themselves.  The child of Blake's imagination is the immortal and undying child to be found in the heart of every man and every woman.  It is the child spoken of in some of the most beautiful passages, by Nietzsche himself - the child who will come at the last, when the days of the Camel and the days of the Lion are over, and inaugurate the beginning of the "Great Noon".

 

                                                                  "And there the lion's ruddy eyes

                                                                  Shall flow with tears of gold

                                                                  And pitying the tender cries

                                                                  And walking round the fold,

                                                                  Saying, 'Wrath by his weakness

                                                                  And by his health sickness

                                                                  Are driven away

                                                                  From our immortal day.'"

 

      Using boldly and freely, and with far more genuine worship than many orthodox believers, the figure and idea of Christ; it is not exactly the Christ we know in traditional Catholic piety, to whom in association with this image of the man-child, Blake's mind is constantly turning.

      With a noble blasphemy - dearer, one may hope, to God, than the slavishness of many evangelical pietists - he treats the Christian legend with the same sort of freedom that the old Greek poets used in dealing with the gods of Nature.

      The figure of Christ becomes under his hands, as we feel sometimes it does under the hands of the great painters of the Renaissance, a god among other gods; a power among other powers, but one possessed of a secret drawn from the hidden depths of the universe, which in the end is destined to prevail.  So far does Blake stray from the barriers of traditional reverence, that we find him boldly associating this Christ of his - this man-child who is to redeem the race - with a temper the very opposite of an ascetic one.

      What makes his philosophy so interesting and original is the fact that he entirely disentangles the phenomenal of sexual love from any notion or idea of sin or shame.  The man-child whose pitiful heart and whose tenderness toward the weak and unhappy are drawn from the Christ-Story, takes almost the form of a Pagan Eros - the full-grown, soft-limbed Eros of later Greek fancy - when the question of restraint or renunciation or ascetic chastity is brought forward.

      What Blake has really done, be it said with all reverence, and far from profane ears - is to steal the Christ-child out of his cradle in the church of his worshippers and carry him into the chambers of the East, the chambers of the Sun, into the "Green fields and happy groves" of primitive Arcadian innocence, where the feet of the dancers are light upon the dew of the morning, and where the children of passion and of pleasure sport and play, as they did in the Golden Age.

      In that wonderful picture of his representing the sons of God "shouting together" in the primal joy of creation, one has a vision of the large and noble harmony he strove after between an emancipated flesh and a free spirit.  William Blake, in his Adamic innocence of "sin", has something in him that suggests Walt Whitman, but unlike Whitman he prefers to use the figure of Christ rather than any vague "ensemble" of nature-forces to symbolise the triumphant nuptials of soul and body.

      Sometimes in his strange verses one has the impression that one is reading the fragmentary and broken utterances of some great ancient poet-philosopher - some Pythagoras or Empedocles - through whose gnomic oracles runs the rhythm of the winds and tides, and for whose ears the stars in their courses have a far-flung harmony.

      He often seems to make use of the Bible and Biblical usages, very much as the ancient poets made use of Hesiod or of Homer, treating such writings with reverence, but subordinating what is borrowed from them to new and original purpose.

 

                                                                  "Hear the voice of the Bard,

                                                                  Who present, past and future sees,

                                                                  Whose ears have heard

                                                                  The Holy Word

                                                     That walked among the ancient trees.

 

                                                                  "Calling the lapséd soul

                                                                  And weeping in the evening dew,

                                                                  That might control

                                                                  The starry pole

                                                                  And fallen, fallen light renew!

 

                                                                  "O Earth, O Earth, return!

                                                                  Arise from out the dewy grass!

                                                                            Night is worn

                                                                            And the Morn

                                                                  Rises from the slumbrous mass.

 

                                                                  "Turn away no more;

                                                                  Why wilt thou turn away?

                                                                            The starry floor

                                                                            The watery shore

                                                                  Is given thee till break of day."

 

      If I were asked to name a writer whose work conveys to one's mind, free of any admixture of rhetoric or of any alloy of cleverness, the very impact and shock of pure inspired genius, I would unhesitatingly name William Blake.  One is strangely conscious in reading him of the presence of some great unuttered power - some vast demiurgic secret - struggling like a buried Titan just below the surface of his mind, and never quite finding vocal expression.

      Dim shapes - vast inchoate shadows - like dreams of forgotten worlds and shadows of worlds as yet unborn, seem to pass backwards and forwards over the brooding waters of his spirit.  There is no poet perhaps who gives such an impression of primordial creative force - force hewing at the roots of the world and weeping and laughing from sheer pleasure at the touch of that dream stuff whereof life is made.  Above his head, as he laughs and weeps and sings, the branches of the trees of the forest of night stir and rustle under the immense spaces, and, floating above them, the planets and the stars flicker down upon him with friendly mysterious joy.

      No poet gives one the impression of greater strength than William Blake; and this is emphasised by the very simplicity and childishness of his style.  Only out of the strength of a lion could come such honeyed gentleness.  And if he is one of the strongest among poets he is also one of the happiest.

      Genuine happiness - happiness that is at the same time intellectual and spontaneous - is far rarer in poetry than one might suppose.  Such happiness has nothing necessarily to do with an optimistic philosophy or even with faith in God.  It has nothing at all to do with physical well-being or the mere animal sensations of eating and drinking and philandering.  It is a thing of more mysterious import and of deeper issues that these.  It may come lightly and go lightly, but the rhythm of eternity is in the beating of its wings, and deep calls to deep in the throbbing of its pulses.

      As Blake himself puts it -

 

                                                                  "He who bends to himself a joy

                                                                  Does the winged life destroy;

                                                                  But he who kisses the joy as it flies

                                                                  Lives in Eternity's sunrise."

 

      In the welling up, out of the world's depths, of happiness like this, there is a sense of calm, of serenity, of immortal repose and full-brimmed ecstasy.  It is the "energy without disturbance which Aristotle indicates as the secret of the life of the eternal Being himself.  It is beyond the ordinary pleasures of sex, as it is beyond the ordinary difference between good and evil.  It is human and yet inhuman.  It is the happiness of da Vinci, of Spinoza, of Goethe.  It is the happiness towards which Nietzsche all his life long struggled desperately, and struggled in vain.

      One touches the fringe of the very mystery of human symbols - of the uttermost secret of words in their power to express the soul of a writer - when one attempts to analyse the child-like simplicity of William Blake's style.  How is it that he manages with so small, so limited a vocabulary, to capture the very "music of the spheres"?  We all have the same words at our command; we all have the same rhymes; where then lies this strange power that can give the simplest syllables so original, so personal, a shape?

 

                                                                  "What the hammer?  What the chain?

                                                                  In what furnace was thy brain?

                                                                  What the anvil?  What dread grasp

                                                                  Dare its deadly terrors clasp?"

 

      Just because his materials are so simple and so few - and this applies to his plastic art as well as to his poetry - we are brought to pause more sharply and startlingly in his case than that of almost any other, before the primordial mystery of human expression and its malleableness under the impact of personality.  Probably no poet ever lived who expressed his meaning by the use of such a limited number of words, or of words so simple and childish.  It is as though William Blake had actually transformed himself into some living incarnation of his own Virgilian child-saviour, and were stammering his oracles to mankind through divine baby-lips.

      What matter?  It is the one and the same Urbs Beata, Calliopolis, Utopia, New Rome, New Atlantis, which these child-like syllables announce, trumpet heralded by the angels of the Revelation, chanted by the high-souled Mantuan, sung by David the King, or shouted "over the roofs of the world" by Walt Whitman.

      It is the same mystery, the same hope for the human race.

 

                                                                  "I will not cease from mental strife

                                                                  Nor shall my sword sink from my hand

                                                                  Till I have built Jerusalem

                                                                  In England's green and pleasant Land!"

 

      One of the most curious and interesting things in Blake's work is the value he places upon tears.  All his noble mythological figures, gathering in verse after verse, for the great battle against brutality and materialism, come "weeping" to the help of their outraged little ones.  Gods and beasts, lions and lambs, Christ and Lucifer, fairies and angels, all come "weeping" into the struggle with the forces of stupidity and tyranny.

      He seems to imply that to have lost the power of shedding tears is to have dehumanized oneself and put oneself outside the pale.  "A tear is an intellectual thing," and those who still have the power of "weeping" have not quite lost the key to the wisdom of the eternal gods.  It is not only the mysterious and foreordained congruity of rhyme that leads him to associate in poem after poem - until for the vulgar mind, the repetition becomes almost ludicrous - this symbolic "weeping" with the sweet sleep which it guards and which it brings.

      The poet of the veiled child at the heart of the world is naturally a poet of the mystery of tears and the mystery of sleep.  And William Blake becomes all this without the least tincture of sentimentality.  That is where his genius is most characteristic and admirable.  He can come chanting his strange gnomic tunes upon tears and upon sleep, upon the loveliness of children, upon life and death, upon the wonder of dews and clouds and rain and the soft petals of flowers which these nourish, without - even for one moment - falling into sentiment or pathos.

      All through his strange and turbulent life he was possessed of the power of splendid and terrible anger.  His invectives and vituperations bite and flay like steel whips.  The "buyers and sellers" in the temple of his Lord are made to skip and dance.  He was afraid of no man living - nor of any man's god.

      Working with his own hands, composing his poems, illustrating them, engraving them, printing them, and binding them in his own workshop, he was in a position to make Gargantuan sport of the "great" and the "little" vulgar.

      He went his own way and lived as he pleased; having something about him of that shrewd, humorous, imperturbable "insouciance" which served Walt Whitman so well, and which is so much wiser, kindlier and more human a shield for an artist's freedom, than the sarcasms of a Whistler or the insolence of a Wilde.

      Careless and nonchalant, he "travelled the open road", and gave all obscurantists and oppressors to ten-million cartloads of horned devils!

      It is my privilege to live, on the South Coast, not so many miles from that village of Felpham where he once saw in his child-like fantasies, a fairy's funeral.  That funeral must have been followed after Blake's death by many others; for there are no fairies in Felpham now.  But Blake's cottage is there still - to be seen by any who care to see it - and the sands by the sea's edge are the "yellow sands", flecked with white foam and bright-green seaweed of Ariel's song; and on the seabanks above grow tufts of Homeric Tamarisk.

      It is astonishing to think that while the laconic George Crabbe, "Nature's sternest painter", was writing his rough couplets in the metre of Alexander Pope, and while Doctor Johnson was still tapping the posts of his London streets, as he went his way to buy oysters for his cat, William Blake - in mind and imagination a contemporary of Nietzsche and Whitman - should have been asserting the artist's right (why should we not say the individual's right, artist or not artist?) to live as he pleases, according to the morals, manners, tastes, inclination and caprices, of his own absolute humour and fancy.

      This was more than one hundred years ago.  What would William Blake think of our new world, - would it seem to him to resemble his New Jerusalem of child-like happiness and liberty? - our world where young ladies are fined five dollars if they go into the sea without their stockings?  Well! at Felpham they do not tease them with stockings.

      What makes the genius of William Blake so salutary a revolutionary influence is the fact that while contending so savagely against puritanical stupidity, he himself preserves to the end, his guilelessness and purity of heart.

      There are admirable writers and philosophers, whose work on behalf of the liberation of humanity is rendered less disinterested by the fact that they are fighting for their personal inclinations rather than for the happiness of the world at large.  This could never be said of William Blake.  A more unselfish devotion to the spiritual interests of the race than that which inspired him from beginning to end could hardly be imagined.  But he held it as axiomatic that the spiritual interests of the race can only be genuinely served by means of the intellectual and moral freedom of the individual.  And certainly in his own work we have a beautiful and anarchical freedom.

      No writer or artist ever succeeded in expressing more completely the texture and colour of his thoughts.  Those strange flowing-haired old men who reappear so often in his engravings, like the "splendid and savage old men" of Walt Whitman's fancy, seem to incorporate the very swing and sweep of his elemental earth-wrestling; while those long-limbed youths and maidens, almost suggestive of El Greco in the way their bodies are made, yearn and leap upwards towards the clear air and the cloudless blue sky, in a passion of tumultuous escape, in an ecstasy of resurrection.

      It is extraordinary how Blake's peculiar use of very simple rhymes, with the same words repeated over and over again, enhances the power of his poetry - it does more than enhance it - it is the body of its soul.  One approaches here the very mystery of style, in the poetic medium, and some of its deepest secrets.  Just as that "metaphysics in sensuality" which is the dominant impulse of the genius of Remy de Gourmont expresses itself in constant echoes and reiterated liturgical repetitions - such as his famous "fleur hypocrite, fleur du silence" - until one feels that the "refrain" in poetry has become, in an especial sense, his predominant note, so these constantly recurring rhymes in the work of Blake, coming at the end of very short lines, convey, as nothing else could, the child-like quality of the spirit transfused through them.  They are child-like; and yet they could not have been written by anyone by a grown man, and a man of formidable strength and character.

      The psychology of the situation is doubtless the same as that which we remark in certain very modern artists - the ones whose work is most of all bewildering to those who, in their utter inability to becomes as "little children", are as completely shut our from the kingdom of art as they are from the kingdom of heaven.

      The curious spell which these simple and in some cases infantile rhymes cast over us, ought to compel the more fanatical adherents of "free verse" to rearrange their ideas.  Those who, without any prejudice one way or the other, are only anxious to enjoy to the full every subtle pleasure which the technique of art is able to give, cannot help finding in the unexpected thrill produced by these sweet, soft vibrations of verbal melody - like the sound of a golden bell rung far down under the humming waters - a direct revelation of the tender, strong soul behind them, for whose hidden passion they find a voice.

      After all, it is in the final impression produced upon our senses and intellect by a great artist, and not in any particular quality of a particular work of art, that - unless we are pedantic virtuosos - we weigh and judge what we have gained.  And what we have gained by William Blake cannot be overestimated.

      His poems seem to associate themselves with a thousand evanescent memories of days when we have been happy beyond the power of calamity of disappointment.  They associate themselves with those half-physical, half-spiritual trances - when, suddenly in the outskirts of a great city perhaps, or on the banks of some inland river, we have remembered the long line of breaking surf, and the murmurs and the scents of the sea.  They associate themselves with the dreamy indescribable moments when crossing the wet grass of secluded misty meadows, passing the drowsy cattle and the large cool early morning shadows thrown by the trees, we have suddenly come upon cuckoo flowers or marigolds, every petal of which seems burdened with a mystery almost intolerably sweet.

      Like the delicate pictures of early Italian art, the poems of Blake indicate and suggest rather than exhaust or satiate.  One is never oppressed by too heavy a weight of natural beauty.  A single tree against the sky - a single shadow upon the pathway - a single petal fallen on the grass; these are enough to transport us to those fields of light and "chambers of the sun" where the mystic dance of creation still goes on; these are enough to lead us to the hushed dew-drenched lawns where the Lord God walks in the garden "in the cool of the day."

      One associates the poetry of William Blake, not with the mountain peaks and gorgeous foliage and rushing torrents of a landscape that clamours to be admired and would fain overpower us with its picturesque appeal, but with the quietest, gentlest, softest, least assuming background to that "going forth" to our work, "and our labour until the evening," which is the normal destiny of man.

      The pleasant fields of Felpham with their hawthorn hedges, the little woods of Hertfordshire or Surrey with their patches of bluebells, were all that he needed to set him among the company of the eternal gods.

      For this is the prerogative of imagination, that it can reconcile us to life where life is simplest and least adorned; and this is the reluctance and timidity of imagination that it shrinks away into twilight and folds its wings, when the pressure of reality is too heavy, and the materials of beauty too oppressive and tyrannous.