CHAPTER VI

HIS MYSTICAL NATURE

To the world of his own time Blake appeared a mad visionary, whose sweet impulsive early poems attracted a few of the rarer souls of the age, but whose pictures and designs were practically unknown. His genius, atmosphere, and modes of thought were antipathetic to his age, and his aims and achievement proved so difficult to understand from the point of view of that day, that he was summarily and uncomprehendingly set down as mad.

This was an offhand and unintelligent method of accounting for so rare a spirit. The spectacle of a man who might, had he chosen, have enjoyed riches, honour, admiration and glory, but who instead, like his great Master, cared not at all for lordship in this world, but much for the preservation of the kingdom of the spirit that is not of this world, did a great deal to earn for Blake the name of madman. The world has always regarded the voluntarily poor with suspicion and misapprehension.

Then, again, Blake was one of those who lived very near the veil which shrouds the great unexplored spiritual forces. Death, as we know, seemed to him but the "passing from one room to another."

To raise the veil, to look forth on the cause of phenomena, on the visions of eternal imagination, to strain to the uttermost that he might hear the reverberations of the unmeasured mighty stream of Divine power, to bathe within that stream, and let it bear him onward as it would--these were to him the real purposes of life, and being so, formed other reasons why the world, all engrossed as it is with wealth and position, and "here" and "now," looked at him askance.

To-day, however, there is an undercurrent of popular opinion--a small stream, but strong--that recognizes him for what he is, and his name is sacred as that of the great High Priest of Spiritual Art, to those who compose it.

It is noticeable that none of those who were personally acquainted with him, save perhaps Crabb Robinson, ever gave credence to the prevailing notion that he was mad: strongly do they condemn such a verdict. He was eccentric, abnormally developed on the spiritual side, and undisciplined in thought and speech. The mystic in him finally all but destroyed the poet, though it never arrested the magnificent development of his artistic genius. Again, much that is strange and difficult of apprehension in Blake may be traced to the fact that his mind lacked the firm basis, the just and right power of thinking, that comes from a sound education. As a matter of fact, capriciously self-educated as he was, his ignorance of ordinary rudimentary knowledge was as extraordinary as his acquaintance with much that is caviar to the ordinary intellect.

"Celui qui a l'imagination sans érudition a des ailes et n'a pas de pieds." And so it was with Blake. But it does not detract one iota from the illuminating quality of the thoughts which flash as it were from a heaven in his brain in times of creative inspiration. Blake on the wing has a strange beauty, a swift, direct and strenuous flight that thrills and awes the imaginative spectator. It is only when this wild wonderful creature is caught and entangled in theories and systems and human reasoning, that we may not give him our intellectual adherence.

Other causes which appear to give colour to the theory that he was mad are the following: Blake had no curious regard or nice care for words, but used them at random in speech, just as they came to hand, and as he cherished numerous violent prejudices it naturally followed that he often expressed them in very emphatic and often unreasonable language. Passionate partisan as he was of the world of imagination as against the world of fact, he assumed an attitude of defiance to natural science and its oldest established facts which seemed to those who had not the key to Blake's mind simply insane or at the best puerile.

So accustomed was he to misunderstanding, that when strangers tried to draw him out he seems purposely to have indulged in exaggeration and symbolic language to baffle and mystify them. In ordinary intercourse, as in his art and poetry, he seems to have had no care to put his mind and his listeners or spectators _en rapport_ with his own. That magical sympathy which some men know so well how to establish like a living current between their own and other minds before "speaking the truth that is in them," was not one of Blake's gifts. The sympathetic standpoint for observance or understanding he expected from those who would be at the pains to find out his meaning. "Let them that have ears, hear--if they can, and if they be not too tightly shut into their selfhoods, and their senses not clogged beyond cleansing with the dust and litter of materialism," he would seem to say.

Examining into the vexed question of Blake's visions, whether they were the apparitions of an unsound mind, the automatic picture-making of a vivid imagination, or the visual apprehension of supernatural appearances, we shall see that madness is not the key to them, though we shall have to admit a certain want of balance and proportion in his intellectual life.

Sometimes one is tempted to think that he had eyes that saw the visible loveliness and manifest images in which Plato supposes that Ideas exist in the spiritual universe. Which being so, it is not wonderful that he was called mad, for the Greek philosopher himself said that "this is the most excellent of all forms of enthusiasm (or possession), and that the lover who has a share of this madness is called a lover of the beautiful." Our artist was a seer such as Plato meant, but his is a figurative rather than an actual description of the mental operations which suspend such visions before the prophet's eye.

All the writers on Blake--Allan Cunningham, Alexander Gilchrist, James Smetham, Mr. Swinburne, Mr. W. M. Rossetti, Messrs. Ellis and Yeats, Sir Richard Garnett--have discussed the subject, but I find the most illuminating passage in an article by James Smetham included in the second volume of Gilchrist's "Life," which I shall take leave to quote, for its matter could never be better stated: "Thought with Blake leaned largely to the side of imagery rather than to the side of organized philosophy, and we shall have to be on our guard, while reading the record of his views and opinions, against the dogmatism which was more frequently based on exalted fancies than on the rock of abiding reason and truth. The conceptive faculty working with a perception of facts singularly narrow and imperfect, projected every idea boldly into the sphere of the actual. What he _thought_, he _saw_, to all intents and purposes, and it was this sudden and sharp crystallization of inward notions into outward and visible signs which produced the impression on many beholders that reason was unseated.... We cannot but on the whole lean to the opinion that somewhere in the wonderful compound of flesh and spirit, somewhere in those recesses where the one runs into the other, he was 'slightly touched,' and by so doing we shall save ourselves the necessity of attempting to defend certain phases of his work" (such as much of the literary part of the prophetic books) "while maintaining an unqualified admiration for the mass and manner of his thoughts." This seems a just opinion. The colloquialism "slightly touched" (just that and nothing but that) is the very phrase to express this elusive, almost indefinable condition of mind. In all mankind living in conditions of time and space, a certain adjustment of themselves to these conditions, and to each other, is a necessary function of existence. The failure to comply with such an adjustment was Blake's strength and weakness--the defect of his quality.

As I have said before, he firmly believed in his own inspiration, and with reason. For a mood of trance-like absorption would come upon him, his soul would be rapt in an ecstasy, he was disturbed by no impressions of earthly persons or surroundings, but was for the time being alone with his quickening vision. At such moments his mind's eye was but the retina on which God Himself projected the image. And he would permit no criticism, no questioning of work which seemed to him not his own, but produced through divine agency.

All creative genius must work in much the same way. The vision is granted, who shall say just how and whence, and its translation into any form of art must be accomplished by a power as it were outside, above, the artist. Vogl said of Schubert, that he composed in a state of clairvoyance. (That is the reason why the Unfinished Symphony was, and always will be, unfinished. Schubert transcribed the tormenting melody, the awful picture of Fate suddenly reaching a long arm from out the smiling heaven to arrest the blithe jigging mortal so gaily tripping along a flowery path. The overwhelming terror and pity of it all shake the soul. But the vision was withdrawn, the clairvoyant condition left Schubert, and so he wrote no more.)

Blake's conceptions were projected in form instantaneously and with extraordinary vividness, and the vision seen with his mind's eye seldom varied or faded till he had transferred its likeness to paper. In this he was indeed unlike those artists who, having but a vague mental conception, build up their designs from without, laboriously selecting and copying, not that which will merely help to perfect the realization of the inward conception, but those things which they conjecture will arrange themselves most successfully in the making of an eye-pleasing picture. Such artists are but little concerned with the innate and obligatory form with which an idea must necessarily clothe itself. Blake writes in the Descriptive Catalogue, "A spirit and a vision are not, as the modern philosophy supposes, a cloudy vapour or a nothing: they are organized and minutely articulated beyond all that the mortal and perishing nature can produce. He who does not imagine in stronger and better lineaments, and in stronger and better light than his perishing and mortal eye can see, does not imagine at all."

At the same time in justice we must admit that Blake sometimes failed to make his vivid and living conceptions as clear to the world as he might have done, for the reason that he neglected to refer to Nature for the technique which after all is the language of Art. His art in this respect is somewhat like that of the Italian Trecenti, who uttered burning messages in a tongue which sometimes stammered. His impetuous soul never wholly achieved the mastery of material which only a prolonged and patient drudgery can give, but the images which hurtled from his imagination were so forceful and superabundant that mere fiery creation, the unburdening of the overloaded heart and brain, was the crying obligation which forced him ever onward, seeking relief often in the mere act of projection.

It is always a wonder that he makes so few mistakes, his technique being manifestly deficient. When his drawing is right it is heroically, magnificently so, and even when incorrect, it is always of amazing power and almost convincing strength.

"Execution," says Blake, in his notes on Reynolds' "Discourses," "is the chariot of Genius," and when he mounts into the chariot and takes the reins into his strong nervous hands, then, indeed, nothing can withstand the flashing glory of his course.

At such times the affinity between our artist and Michael Angelo is very apparent. Both had the grand simple manner in their treatment of the human form, both worked as it would seem "in a state of clairvoyance" and according to the direction of a divine daemon, both felt the body to be at best but the prison of the straining fluttering soul; but Blake's conceptions glow with a whiter flame of spiritual intensity than do those of the Florentine, greater as the latter was at all other points. I think it is the presence of this mystic fire which forms one of the great difficulties in the way of a facile understanding of his art-work. We feel ourselves in the presence of an incommunicable overburdening spiritual intensity. It has seldom happened that a mystic should be also an artist translating those things which transcend human experience into the terms of an art which by its very nature is only concerned with the sensible creation.

It is this incongruity between the thought and the language in which it is conveyed--Blake's thoughts often lying beyond the proper range of a graphic embodiment--which creates one of the great difficulties in the way of our right apprehension of him.

A few of his works, as we shall presently see, are perfect and flawless as Art can make them, such as the "Songs of Innocence" and the majestic series of designs to Job. In both of these, the thoughts, and their incarnation in form, are harmoniously complementary each to the other. But often the thought will not, cannot be inclosed: it outstrips the reach of his art. Hence many designs are tumultuous with leaping ideas, dimly apprehended suggestions, not one of which is caught and contained in its essence, but seems rather, as it were, to flutter, tantalizingly enough, just beyond the grasp.

Blake "hitched his waggon to the stars," to use Emerson's expressive phrase, and to the spiritually "elect" in art--those to whom ideas are the really precious things--he speaks winged words and with authority. The pity is that his art speaks thus clearly to the "initiated" only. The sense of freedom of the spirit, of the absence of all contractile elements in Blake's work must however be obvious to all. It is his special charm, to be expansive, sublime, large. The great ethereal spaces of the sky have breathed their inspiration upon him, and he has reflected the colour and the mystery and the depth of the sea. To those who are spiritually homesick he comes as an emissary from beyond the Great Darkness, from where Life is found at its Source.