Part 6
This explanation is really essential to the understanding of Blake, because to the modern mind it is so easy to understand him in the opposite sense. In the ordinary modern meaning Blake’s symbols are not symbols at all. They are not allegories. An allegory nowadays means taking something that does not exist as a symbol of something that does exist. We believe, at least most of us do, that sin does exist. We believe (on highly insufficient grounds) that a dragon does not exist. So we make the unreal dragon an allegory of the real sin. But that is not what Blake meant when he made the lamb the symbol of innocence. He meant that there really is behind the universe an eternal image called the Lamb, of which all living lambs are merely the copies or the approximation. He held that eternal innocence to be an actual and even an awful thing. He would not have seen anything comic, any more than the Christian Evangelist saw anything comic, in talking about the Wrath of the Lamb. If there were a lamb in one of Æsop’s fables, Æsop would never be so silly as to represent him as angry. But Christianity is more daring than Æsop, and the wrath of the Lamb is its great paradox. If there is an immortal lamb, a being whose simplicity and freshness are for ever renewed, then it is truly and really a more creepy idea to horrify that being into hostility than to defy the flaming dragon or challenge darkness or the sea. No old wolf or world-worn lion is so awful as a creature that is always young--a creature that is always newly born. But the main point here is simpler. It is merely that Blake did not mean that meekness was true and the lamb only a pretty fable. If anything he meant that meekness was a mere shadow of the everlasting lamb. The distinction is essential to anyone at all concerned for this rooted spirituality which is the only enduring sanity of mankind. The personal is not a mere figure for the impersonal; rather the impersonal is a clumsy term for something more personal than common personality. God is not a symbol of goodness. Goodness is a symbol of God.
Some very odd passages in Blake become clear if we keep this in mind. I do not wish in this book to dwell unduly on the other side of Blake, the literary side. But there are queer facts worth remarking, and this is one of them. Blake was sincere; if he was insane he was insane with the very solidity and completeness of his sincerity. And the quaintest mark of his sincerity is this, that in his poetry he constantly writes things that look like mere mistakes. He writes one of his most colossal convictions and the average reader thinks it is a misprint. To give only one example not connected with the matter in hand, the fine though somewhat frantic poem called “The Everlasting Gospel” begins exactly as the modern humanitarian and essential Christian would like it to begin--
“The vision of Christ that thou dost see Is my vision’s greatest enemy.”
It goes on (to the modern Christian’s complete satisfaction) with denunciations of priests and praise of the pure Gospel Jesus; and then comes a couplet like this--
“Thine is the friend of all mankind, Mine speaks in parables to the blind.”
And the modern humanitarian Christian finds the orthodox Christ calmly rebuked because he is the friend of all mankind. The modern Christian simply blames the printer. He can only suppose that the words “Thine” and “Mine” have been put in each other’s places by accident. Blake, however, as it happens, meant exactly what he said. His private vision of Christ was the vision of a violent and mysterious being, often indignant and occasionally disdainful.
“He acts with honest disdainful pride, And that is the cause that Jesus died; Had he been Antichrist, creeping Jesus, He would have done anything to please us, Gone sneaking into their synagogues, And not use the elders and priests like dogs.”
When the reader has fully realised this idea of a fierce and mysterious Jesus, he may then see the sense in the statement that this Jesus speaks in parables to the blind while the lower and meaner Jesus pretends to be the friend of all men. But you have to know Blake’s doctrine before you can understand two lines of his poetry.
Now in the point which is here prominently before us there is a quotation (indeed there is more than one) which follows this same fantastic line. Let the ordinary modern man, who is, generally speaking, not a materialist and not a mystic, read first these two lines from the poem falsely called “The Auguries of Innocence”--
“God appears and God is light To those poor souls that dwell in night.”
He will not find anything objectionable in that, at any rate; probably he will bow his head slightly to a truism, as if he were in church. Then he will read the next two lines--
“But does a human form display To those that dwell in realms of day.”
And there the modern man will sit down suddenly on the sofa and come finally to the conclusion that William Blake was mad and nothing else.
But those last two lines express all that is best in Blake and all that is best in all the tradition of the mystics. Those two lines explain perfectly all that I have just pointed out concerning the palpable visions and the ponderous cherubim. This is the point about Blake that must be understood if nothing else is understood. God for him was not more and more vague and diaphanous as one came near to Him. God was more and more solid as one came near. When one was far off one might fancy Him to be impersonal. When one came into personal relation one knew that He was a person. The personal God was the fact. The impersonal God of the Pantheists was a kind of condescending symbol. According to Blake (and there is more in the mental attitude than most modern people will willingly admit) this vague cosmic view is a mere merciful preparation for the old practical and personal view. God is merely light to the merely unenlightened. God is a man to the enlightened. We are permitted to remain for a time evolutionary or pantheist until the time comes when we are worthy to be anthropomorphic.
Understand this Blake conception that the Divine is most bodily and 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.
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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.”
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.
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.”
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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.
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.
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.