Part 4

BUT when we have reached this point--that this ugly element in Blake was an intrusion of Blake’s mere theory of things--we have come, I think, very close to the true principle to be pursued in estimating his madness or his sanity. Blake the mere poet, would have been decent and respectable. It was Blake the logician who was forced to be almost blackguardly. In other words, Blake was not mad; for such part of him as was mad was not Blake. It was an alien influence, and in a sense even an accidental one; in an extreme sense it might even be called antagonist. Properly to appreciate what this influence was, we must see the man’s artistic character as a whole and notice what are its biggest forces and its biggest defects when taken in the bulk--in the whole mass of his poetry, his pictures, his criticism and his conversation. Blake’s position can be summed up as a sufficiently simple problem. Blake could do so many things. Why is it that he could do none of them quite right?

Blake was not a frail or fairy-like sort of person; he had not the light unity, the capering completeness of the entirely irresponsible man. He had not the independence, one might almost say the omnipotence, that comes from being hopelessly weak. There was nothing in him of Mr Skimpole; he was not a puff of silver thistledown. He was not a reed shaken in the wind in Jordan. He was rather an oak rooted in England, but an oak half killed by the ivy. The interesting question of spiritual botany is--What was the ivy that half killed him? Originally his intellect was not only strong but strongly rational--one might almost say strongly sceptical. There never was a man of whom it was less true to say (as has been said) that he was a light sensitive lyrist, a mere piper of pretty songs for children. His mind was like a ruined Roman arch; it has been broken by barbarians; but what there is of it is Roman. So it was with William Blake’s reason; it had been broken (or cracked) by something; but what there was of it was reasonable. In his art criticism he never said anything that was not strictly consistent with his first principles. In his controversies, in the many matters in which he argued angrily or venomously, he never lost the thread of the argument. Like every great mystic he was also a great rationalist. Read Blake’s attack upon Stothard’s picture of the _Canterbury Pilgrims_, and you will see that he could not only write a quite sensible piece of criticism, but even a quite slashing piece of journalism. By nature one almost feels that he might have done anything; have conducted campaigns like Napoleon or studied the stars like Newton. But something, when all is said and done, had eaten away whole parts of that powerful brain, leaving parts of it standing like great Greek pillars in a desert. What was this thing?

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MADNESS is not an anarchy. Madness is a bondage: a contraction. I will not call Blake mad because of anything he would say. But I will call him mad in so far as there was anything he _must_ say. Now, there are notes of this tyranny in Blake. It was not like the actual disease of the mind that makes a man believe he is a cat or a dog; it was more like the disease of the nerves, which makes a man say “dog” when he means “cat.” One mental jump or jerk of this nature may be especially remarked in Blake. He had in his poetry one very peculiar habit, a habit which cannot be considered quite sane. It was the habit of being haunted, one may say hag-ridden by a fixed phrase, which gets itself written in ten separate poems on quite different subjects, when it had no apparent connection with any of them. The amusing thing is that the omnipresent piece of poetry is generally the one piece that is quite incomprehensible. The verse that Blake’s readers can understand least seems always to be the verse that Blake likes best. I give an ordinary instance, if anything connected with Blake can be called ordinary.

The harmless Hayley, who was a fool, but a gentleman and a poet (a country gentleman and a very minor poet), provoked Blake’s indignation by giving him commissions for miniatures when he wanted to do something else, probably frescoes as big as the house. Blake wrote the epigram--

“If Hayley knows the thing you cannot do, That is the very thing he’ll set you to.”

And then, feeling that there was a lack of colour and warmth in the portrait, he lightly added, for no reason in particular, the lines--

“And when he could not act upon my wife, Hired a villain to bereave my life.”

There is, apparently, no trace here of any allusion to fact. Hayley never tried to bereave anybody’s life. He lacked even the adequate energy. Nevertheless I should not say for a moment that this startling fiction proved Blake to be mad. It proved him to be violent and recklessly suspicious; but there was never the least doubt that he was that. But now turn to another poem of Blake’s, a merely romantic and narrative poem called “Fair Eleanor,” which is all about somebody acting on somebody else’s wife. Here we find the same line repeated word for word in quite another connection--

“Hired a villain to bereave my life.”

It is not a musical line; it does not resemble English grammar to any great extent. Yet Blake is somehow forced to put it into a poem about a real person exactly as he had put it into an utterly different poem about a fictitious person. There seems no particular reason for writing it even once; but he has to write it again and again. This is what I do call a mad spot on the mind. I should not call Blake mad for hating Hayley or for boiling Hayley (though he had done him nothing but kindness), or for making up any statements however monstrous or mystical about Hayley. I should not in the least degree think that Blake was mad if he had said that he saw Hayley’s soul in hell, that it had green hair, one eye, and a serpent for a nose. A man may have a wild vision without being insane; a man may have a lying vision without being insane. But I should smell insanity if in turning over Blake’s books I found that this one pictorial image obsessed him apart from its spiritual meaning; if I found that the arms of the Black Prince in “King Edward III.” were a cyclops vert rampant, nosed serpentine; if I found that Flaxman was praised for his kindness to a one-eyed animal with green bristles and a snaky snout; if Albion or Ezekiel had appeared to Blake and commanded him to write a history of the men in the moon, who are one-eyed, green-haired, with long curling noses; if any flimsy sketch or fine decorative pattern that came from Blake’s pencil might reproduce ceaselessly and meaninglessly the writhing proboscis and the cyclopean eye. I should call _that_ morbidity or even madness; for it would be the triumph of the palpable image over its own intellectual meaning. And there is something of that madness in the dark obstinacy or weakness that makes Blake introduce again and again these senseless scraps of rhyme, as if they were spells to keep off the devil.

In four or five different poems, without any apparent connection with those poems, occur these two extraordinary lines--

“The caterpillar on the leaf Repeats to thee thy mother’s grief.”

In the abstract this might perhaps mean something, though it would, I think, take most people some time to see what it could mean. In the abstract it may perhaps involve some allusion to a universal law of sacrifice in nature. In the concrete--that is, in the context--it involves no allusion to anything in heaven or earth. Here is another couplet that constantly recurs--

“The red blood ran from the grey monk’s side, His hands and his feet were wounded wide.”

This is worse still; for this cannot be merely abstract. The ordinary rational reader will naturally exclaim at last, with a not unnatural explosion, “Who the devil is the grey monk? and why should he be always bleeding in places where he has no business?” Now to say that this sort of thing is not insanity of some kind is simply to play the fool with the words. A madman who writes this may be higher than ordinary humanity; so may any madman in Hanwell. But he is a madman in every sense that the word has among men. I have taken this case of actual and abrupt irrelevance as the strongest form of the thing; but it has other forms almost equally decisive. For instance, Blake had a strong sense of humour, but it was not under control; it could be eclipsed and could completely disappear. There was certainly a spouting fountain of fierce laughter in the man who could write in an epigram--

“A dirty sneaking knave I knew ... Oh, Mr. Cromek, how do you do?”

Yet the laughter was as fitful as it was fierce; and it can suddenly fail. Blake’s sense of humour can sometimes completely desert him. He writes a string of verses against cruelty to the smallest creature as a sort of mystical insult to the universe. It contains such really fine couplets as these--

“Each outcry of the hunted hare A fibre from the brain can tear.”

“A skylark wounded in the wing, A cherubim does cease to sing.”

Or again, in a more fanciful but genuinely weird way--

“He who torments the chafer’s sprite Weaves a bower in endless night.”

And then, after all this excellent and quite serious poetry, Blake can calmly write down the following two lines--

“He who the ox to wrath has moved Shall never be by woman loved.”

One could hardly find a more Gilbertian absurdity in the conjunction of ideas in the whole of the “Bab Ballads” than the idea that the success of some gentleman in the society of ladies depends upon whether he has previously at some time or other slightly irritated an ox. Such sudden inaccesibility to laughter must be called a morbid symptom. It must mean a blind spot on the brain. The whole thing, of course, would prove nothing if Blake were a common ranter incapable of writing well, or a common dunce incapable of seeing a joke. Such a man might easily be sane enough: he might be as sane as he was stupid. If Blake had always written badly he might be sane. But a man who could write so well and did write so badly must be mad.

What was it that was eating away a part of Blake’s brain? I venture to offer an answer which in the eyes of many people will have nothing to recommend it except the accident of its personal sincerity. I firmly believe that what did hurt Blake’s brain was the reality of his spiritual communications. In the case of all poets, and especially in the case of Blake, the phrase “an inspired poet” commonly means a good poet. About Blake it is specially instinctive. And about Blake, I am quite convinced, it is specially untrue. His inspired poems were not his good poems. His inspired poems were very often his particularly bad ones; they were bad by inspiration. If a ploughman says that he saw a ghost, it is not quite sufficient to answer merely that he is a madman. It may have been seeing the ghost that drove him mad. His lunacy may not prove the falsehood of his tale, but rather its terrible truth. So in the same way I differ from the common or sceptical critics of a man like Blake. Such critics say that his visions were false because he was mad. I say he was mad because his visions were true. It was exactly because he was unnaturally exposed to a hail of forces that were more than natural that some breaches were made in his mental continuity, some damage was done to his mind. He was, in a far more awful sense than Goldsmith, “an inspired idiot.” He was an idiot because he was inspired.

When he said of “Jerusalem” that its authors were in eternity, one can only say that nobody is likely to go there to get any more of their work. He did not say that the author of “The Tyger” was in eternity; the author of that glorious thing was in Carnaby Market. It will generally be found, I think, with some important exceptions, that whenever Blake talked most about inspiration he was actually least inspired. That is, he was least inspired by whatever spirit presides over good poetry and good thinking. He was abundantly inspired by whatever spirit presides over bad poetry or bad thinking. Whatever god specialises in unreadable and almost unpronounceable verse was certainly present when he invented the extraordinary history of “William Bond” or the maddening metre of the lines “To Mr Butts.” Whatever archangel rules over utter intellectual error had certainly spread his wings of darkness over Blake when he came to the conclusion that a man ought to be bad in order to be pardoned. But these unthinkable thoughts are mostly to be found in his most unliterary productions; notably in the Prophetic Books. To put my meaning broadly, the opinions which nobody can agree with are mostly in the books that nobody can read. I really believe that this was not from Blake, but from his spirits. It is all very well for great men, like Mr Rossetti and Mr Swinburne, to trust utterly to the seraphim of Blake. They may naturally trust angels--they do not believe in them. But I do believe in angels, and incidentally in fallen angels.

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THERE is no danger to health in being a mystic; but there may be some danger to health in being a spiritualist. It would be a very poor pun to say that a taste for spirits is bad for the health; nevertheless, oddly enough, though a poor pun it is a perfectly correct philosophical parallel. The difference between having a real religion and having a mere curiosity about psychic marvels is really very like the difference between drinking beer and drinking brandy, between drinking wine and drinking gin. Beer is a food as well as a stimulant; so a positive religion is a comfort as well as an adventure. A man drinks his wine because it is his favourite wine, the pleasure of his palate or the vintage of his valley. A man drinks alcohol merely because it is alcoholic. So a man calls upon his gods because they are good or at any rate good to him, because they are the idols that protect his tribe or the saints that have blessed his birthday. But spiritualists call upon spirits merely because they are spirits; they ask for ghosts merely because they are ghosts. I have often been haunted with a fancy that the creeds of men might be paralleled and represented in their beverages. Wine might stand for genuine Catholicism and ale for genuine Protestantism; for these at least are real religions with comfort and strength in them. Clean cold Agnosticism would be clean cold water, an excellent thing, if you can get it. Most modern ethical and idealistic movements might be well represented by soda-water--which is a fuss about nothing. Mr Bernard Shaw’s philosophy is exactly like black coffee--it awakens but it does not really inspire. Modern hygienic materialism is very like cocoa; it would be impossible to express one’s contempt for it in stronger terms than that. Sometimes, very rarely, one may come across something that may honestly be compared to milk, an ancient and heathen mildness, an earthly yet sustaining mercy--the milk of human kindness. You can find it in a few pagan poets and a few old fables; but it is everywhere dying out. Now if we adopt this analogy for the sake of argument, we shall really come back to the bad pun; we shall conclude that a taste for spiritualism is very like a taste for spirits. The man who drinks gin or methylated spirit does it only because it makes him super-normal; so the man who with tables or planchettes invokes supernatural beings invokes them only because they are supernatural. He does not know that they are good or wise or helpful. He knows that he desires the deity, but he does not even know that he likes him. He attempts to invoke the god without adoring him. He is interested in whatever he can find out touching supernatural existence; but he is not really filled with joy as by the face of a divine friend, any more than anyone actually likes the taste of methylated spirit. In such psychic investigations, in a word, there is excitement, but not affectional satisfaction; there is brandy, but no food.

Now Blake was in the most reckless, and sometimes even in the most vulgar, sense a spiritualist. He threw the doors of his mind open to what the late George Macdonald called in a fine phrase “the canaille of the other world.” I think it is impossible to look at some of the pictures which Blake drew, under what he considered direct spiritual dictation, without feeling that he was from time to time under influences that were not only evil but even foolishly evil. I give one case out of numberless cases. Blake drew, from his own vision a head which he called _The Man who built the Pyramids_. Anyone can appreciate the size and mystery of the idea; and most people would form some sort of fancy of how a great poetical painter, such as Michael Angelo or Watts, would have rendered the idea; they can conceive a face swarthy and secret, or ponderous and lowering, or staring and tropical, or Appolonian and pure. Whatever was the man who built the pyramids, one feels that he must (to put it mildly) have been a clever man. We look at Blake’s picture of the man, and with a start behold the face of an idiot. Nay, we behold even the face of an evil idiot, a leering, half-witted face with no chin and the protuberant nose of a pig. Blake declared that he drew this face from a real spirit, and I see no reason to doubt that he did. But if he did, it was not really the man who built the pyramids; it was not any spirit with whom a gentleman ought to wish to be on intimate terms. That vision of swinish silliness was really a bad vision to have, it left a smell of demoniac silliness behind it. I am very sure that it left Blake sillier than it found him.

In this way, rightly or wrongly, I explain the chaos and occasional weakness which perplexes Blake’s critics and often perplexed Blake himself. I think he suffered from the great modern loneliness and scepticism which is the root of the sorrows of the mere spiritualist. The tragedy of the spiritualist simply is that he has to know his gods before he loves them. But a man ought to love his gods before he is sure that there are any. The sublime words of St John’s Gospel permit of a sympathetic parody; if a man love not God whom he has not seen, how shall he love God whom he has seen? If we do not delight in Santa Claus even as a fancy, how can we expect to be happy even if we find that he is a fact? But a mystic like Blake simply puts up a placard for the whole universe, like an old woman letting lodgings. The mansion of his mind was indeed a magnificent one; but no one must be surprised if the first man that walked into it was “the man who built the pyramids,” the man with the face of a moon-calf. And whether or no he built the pyramids, he unbuilt the house.

But this conclusion touching Blake’s original sanity but incidental madness brings us abruptly in contact with the larger question of how far his soul and creed gained or suffered from his whole position; his heterodoxy, his orthodoxy, his attitude towards his age. Properly to do all this we must do now at the end of this book what ought (but the form of the book forbade) more strictly to have been done at the beginning; we must speak as shortly as possible about the actual age in which Blake lived. And we cannot do it without saying something, which we will say as briefly as possible, of that whole great western society and tradition to which he belonged and we belong equally; that Christendom or continent of Europe which is at once too big for us to measure and too close for us to understand.

What was the eighteenth century? Or rather (to speak less mechanically and with more intelligence), what was that mighty and unmistakable phase or mood through which western society was passing about the time that William Blake became its living child? What was that persistent trend or spirit which all through the eighteenth century lifted itself like a very slow and very smooth wave to the deafening breaker of the French Revolution? Of course it meant something slightly different to all its different children. Let us here ask ourselves what it meant to Blake, the poet, the painter, and the dreamer. Let us try to state the thing as nearly as possible in terms of his spirit and in relation to his unique work in this world.

Every man of us to-day is three men. There is in every modern European three powers so distinct as to be almost personal, the trinity of our earthly destiny. The three may be rudely summarised thus. First and nearest to us is the Christian, the man of the historic church, of the creed that must have coloured our minds incurably whether we regard it (as I do) as the crown and combination of the other two, or whether we regard it as an accidental superstition which has remained for two thousand years. First, then, comes the Christian; behind him comes the Roman, the citizen of that great cosmopolitan realm of reason and order in the level and equality of which Christianity arose. He is the stoic who is so much sterner than the anchorites. He is the republican who is so much prouder than kings. He it is that makes straight roads and clear laws, and for whom good sense is good enough. And the third man--he is harder to speak of. He has no name, and all true tales of him are blotted out; yet he walks behind us in every forest path and wakes within us when the wind wakes at night. He is the origins--he is the man in the forest. It is no part of our subject to elaborate the point; but it may be said in passing that the chief claim of Christianity is exactly this--that it revived the pre-Roman madness, yet brought into it the Roman order. The gods had really died long before Christ was born. What had taken their place was simply the god of government--Divus Cæsar. The pagans of the real Roman Empire were nothing if not respectable. It is said that when Christ was born the cry went through the world that Pan was dead. The truth is that when Christ was born Pan for the first time began to stir in his grave. The pagan gods had become pure fables when Christianity gave them a new lease of life as devils. I venture to wager that if you found one man in such a society who seriously believed in the personal existence of Apollo, he was probably a Christian. Christianity called to a kind of clamorous resurrection all the old supernatural instincts of the forests and the hill. But it put upon this occult chaos the Roman idea of balance and sanity. Thus, marriage was a sacrament, but mere sex was not a sacrament as it was in many of the frenzies of the forest. Thus wine was a sacrament with Christ; but drunkenness was not a sacrament as with Dionysus. In short, Christianity (merely historically seen) can best be understood as an attempt to combine the reason of the market-place with the mysticism of the forest. It was an attempt to accept all the superstitions that are necessary to man and to be philosophic at the end of them. Pagan Rome has sought to bring order or reason among men. Christian Rome sought to bring order and reason among gods.

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