William Blake Part 10

In appraising the value of Blake's defamation of the Greeks' inspiration, one must remember that he was not a profound Grecian. His studies with Hayley cannot have carried him into the heart of the Greek genius. When he limits its inspiration to Memory, there is no scholar, I imagine, that would agree with him. The Greeks did make an invaluable contribution to the world's memory; and while one source of their inspiration came from the past, we must further admit that it was the past wedded to the present which actually produced something new, that is, of the creative order.

Blake's own inspiration when it came from his spiritual guides is not of such a high order as the Greek's at his highest. The so-called guides, if we may trust St Paul, are inside of the cosmos, like the great Memory, and their source of wisdom is from this world, which is the arena of the Church in her militant course. It is only by watching her that they are able to get glimpses of the manifold wisdom of G.o.d. Hence to place oneself under their guidance is a hindrance to receiving that highest inspiration that comes direct from the Spirit of G.o.d.

Blake was wrong, too, in his efforts to shut off Memory. Of course he could not succeed. Every page of _Jerusalem_ shows that Memory was at work though shackled. Memory alone could have made it coherent and a luminous whole, as it had made _Paradise Lost_; but it was not free enough to keep its different scenes, often very beautiful, from flying far apart, and the imagination grows weary in trying to capture the complete picture.

The one thing in these poems that we can positively affirm to be new is their symbolism, and that cannot be defended. Symbolism is beautiful only as it is universal, or can become so. It should be one language against many tongues. But Blake's is not even the tongue of a nation or a tribe.

It is his own private invention, and, incidentally, uncouth, forbidding, unintelligible, and in actual fact a little insane. It is true that we can learn his symbolism after much labour; but a beautiful and catholic symbolism is the one thing that we have a right to understand, without learning, through the imagination, which Blake always affirmed to be divine.

Blake could not afford to indulge these idiosyncrasies. Like all mystics, he found it difficult to adjust the inner things that were real to him to the outer that were but a shadow. Since most people find the outer things are the substantial reality, they are not only moving in a different world from that of the mystic, but they are puzzled to know when the letter of his statements is to be taken.

Ezekiel says that he ate his meat baked with cow's dung; Blake, that Hayley, when he could not act upon his wife, hired a villain to bereave his life. We know sufficient of Blake's relation to Hayley to understand that Hayley's murderous purpose was towards Blake's spiritual life, not his corporeal, and that he tried to prevail on Blake through his wife. We may hope also that Ezekiel did not really eat "abominable flesh," or lie for a preposterously long time on his left side. We mention the mystic's hazy treatment of external actions, to explain Blake; but we hope the mystic of the future will be more considerate of what his words are likely to convey to others, and then clear them of all ambiguity.

Blake should have guarded himself perpetually here, but was too proud or wilful to do so. Hence with his merging of inward and outward things, and using the same language for both, added to his private symbolism, what should have been his greatest poems have become submerged continents in which you may discover endless treasures only if you dare to dive, and can hold your breath under water.

Let us dive for the sake of understanding the growth of Blake's mind.

I will take _Milton_ separately, and _The Four Zoas_ and _Jerusalem_ together.

Blake's feelings towards Milton had always been divided. He saw in him the highest order of poetic genius, but also, ominously present, the spirit of reason (Urizen) enthroned in the wrong place, and a servile love of the cla.s.sics that placed him under the heel of the Daughters of Memory. To change the metaphor, Milton's Pegasus was ridden by Urizen.

Blake's final criticism of Swedenborg was that he drew the line in the wrong place between heaven and h.e.l.l; and his amendment was to take his two contraries and marry them. From that time forward his first question in trying a man's religion was, Where do you draw the line? Popular religion always draws it in the wrong place. Good things are reckoned evil and evil things good. But as Blake continued to put his question to the world's great spirits, he counted twenty-seven different answers that had produced twenty-seven different churches, each church having its own particular heaven and corresponding h.e.l.l. He had hoped to unite all these contraries as successfully as he had Swedenborg's; but when he came to Christ's division, finding that nothing would unite His sheep and goats, and His wheat and tares, he henceforth took Christ's dividing line as absolute, and the line of any other as right only when it coincided with Christ's.

Applying this test to Milton, Blake saw that he wrongly divided heaven and h.e.l.l, and that this fatal mistake necessarily affected the characters of his Messiah and Satan. Messiah, who should have stood for the supreme poetic genius, was the embodiment of restrictive reason, and Satan, who by immemorial tradition is absolute evil, was endowed with a marvellous imagination that inevitably brought with it certain virtues. When Blake inquired for the root cause of this perversion in Milton, he traced it to the fact that Reason had largely usurped the place of Imagination. He then took one more customary step. He set Milton in his imagination in the light of the eternal order. Seen in this perspective, the prime fact about him appeared that he had fallen in his encounter with Urizen and come under his dominion, and the last was that his redemption would be effected only by going down into self-annihilation and death with Christ, and then rising again with the life of pure imagination. Once imagination (Los) is supreme, then reason (Urizen) falls into his proper place, and the return into the eternal order is accomplished.

During Blake's stay at Felpham, Milton was continually present in the minds of both himself and Hayley. Hence he was for Blake an actual person in the Felpham drama, Mr and Mrs Blake and Hayley being with him the chief characters, and Skofield and his confederates the rabble. Then pa.s.sing, as in _The French Revolution_, from actual persons and events to the unseen things of which they were the temporal manifestation, Blake saw each person in his eternal state, and as a symbol of that state, and he lost sight of the earthly puppets, as they were merged into their monstrous and eternal counterparts. The transition made, the poem is no longer intelligible to the corporeal understanding, and Hayley might read it a hundred times without suspecting that he was the villain of the piece.

The characters are Los, Urizen, Palamabron and Rintrah, sons of Los, Satan, and Skofield, who keeps his own name. Satan for a time is Hayley, Palamabron by turns Blake and Wesley, Rintrah, Whitefield. This is a seemingly harsh judgment of poor Hayley, akin to Michael Angelo's treatment of Biagio da Cesena; but the harshness is humorously softened when Satan is discovered decked with half the graces. He is kind, meek, humble, and complains gently when his kindness fails to call forth grat.i.tude. He is the personification of Hayley's virtues, which together make up (hypocritic) holiness.

Blake had made the startling discovery, which Nietzsche has popularized in our time, that the graces in wrong places are vices. Nietzsche went on to make the absurd a.s.sertions that humility and pity are the virtues of the herd and are never right in any place. Blake believed that the graces coupled with insight and understanding took on a new quality which made them divine.

To give examples: Blake, while submissive to Hayley, was humble, but at the risk of his birthright.

Hayley, exerting himself to find rich neighbours to sit for Blake to paint in miniature, was kind, but he was suffocating his genius.

To the scribes and Pharisees, Christ meek would have been Christ weak.

Modesty in one who does not know that all things that live are holy is prudery.

To pity oneself or another for the troubles that come through slackness is effeminacy. The true virtue here is to d.a.m.n. Hence the right place for a man clothed from head to foot in hypocritic graces is h.e.l.l, his right name is Satan.

But when a man has stripped himself of his virtues, and annihilating himself goes down with Christ into death, then he rises again into newness of life and vision, and the graces of the new life, still called by their old names, but now in their right places, are flaming, beautiful, irresistible.

Once Blake saw his man in his setting in eternity, he escaped from his initial resentment, and he could write calmly to Hayley and subscribe himself, "Your devoted Will Blake."

I may remark that Blake did not think he had invented new values, like Nietzsche, in his indictment of the virtues. His language was his own, but his conclusions were precisely the same as those of Wesley, Whitefield, Bunyan, St Paul, when they, in effect, speak of man's righteousness as filthy rags, and of his need to be clothed with the _living_ righteousness of Christ before his garment can be reckoned beautiful and clean.

A few quotations from _Milton_ may be given as Blake's final word on Hayley. I will write Hayley for Satan, and Blake for Palamabron.

"Blake, reddening like the Moon in an eclipse, Spoke, saying, You know Hayley's mildness and his self-imposition; Seeming a brother, being a tyrant, even thinking himself a brother While he is murdering the just."

"How should Hayley know the duties of another?"

"Hayley wept, And mildly cursing Blake, him accused of crimes himself had wrought."

"So Los said: Henceforth, Blake, let each his own station Keep; nor in pity false, nor in officious brotherhood, where None needs be active."

"But Hayley, returning to his Mills (for Blake had served The Mills of Hayley as the easier task), found all confusion, And back returned to Los, not filled with vengeance, but with tears.

Himself convinced of Blake's turpitude."

"Blake prayed: O G.o.d protect me from my friends."

"For Hayley, flaming with Rintrah's fury hidden beneath his own mildness, Accused Blake before the a.s.sembly of ingrat.i.tude and malice."

"When Hayley, making to himself Laws from his own ident.i.ty, Compelled others to serve him in moral grat.i.tude and submission."

"Leutha said: 'Entering the doors of Hayley's brain night after night, Like sweet perfumes, I stupefied the masculine perceptions, And kept only the feminine awake; hence rose his soft Delusory love to Blake.'"

"The Gnomes cursed Hayley bitterly, To do unkind thinks in kindness, with power armed; to say The most irritating things in the midst of tears and love-- These are the stings of the Serpent!"

These are enough to show Blake's method, and his remorseless understanding of Hayley. There is present an irresistible touch of humour which preserves them from being too bitter.

For the rest, the poem narrates Milton's encounter with Urizen; his going down into self-annihilation and death; his judgment, and final redemption as he ascends to the heaven of the imagination. Milton's heaven is then the heaven of Jesus, and his h.e.l.l remains its irreconcilable contrary.

In this poem Blake's full-grown mythology appears. The mythical persons, places, states are ominously present; but since they appear with much more particularity in _The Four Zoas_ and _Jerusalem_, I may pa.s.s to them to extract what is necessary for understanding the mature Blake.

_Jerusalem_ and _The Four Zoas_ should be studied together. The latter was begun about 1795, and rewritten at Felpham. The early prophetic books--_Urizen_, _Los_--stand as preliminary sketches to this large poem.

They are woven into it with scarcely a change of word.

Blake's great scheme is mainly in line with historical Christianity, which of course is catholicism. He starts with the eternal order and unity.

Without attempting to explain the origin of evil, he narrates the fall out of unity and order into diversity and disorder, and how as a consequence of the fall creation appears. He is obliged to use the word "creation,"

but there is no real creation in his cosmogony. There are only three possible theories of creation. Creation from within G.o.d, which is pantheism, and makes the universe an emanation; creation from something outside of G.o.d, which is dualism, and not likely to be accepted in the West; and creation out of nothing, which is catholicism. Blake learnt from Swedenborg the emanative theory. Swedenborg tried to avoid the pantheistic conclusion of his foundation principle, and believed that he had succeeded. His doctrine of the human G.o.d was certainly fine, and nearly catholic. Blake sways between the two. His doctrine of creation is pantheistic, but his affirmation that "G.o.d doth a human form display to those that dwell in realms of day" is splendidly catholic, and so, on the whole, is his doctrine of the fall. Since Blake's day the problem has become enormously complicated, because we have to take account of the vestiges in man's body of an animal ancestry, and the still more infallible signs in his soul of a divine origin. Perhaps we shall eventually all come to believe in both evolution and a special creation to account for man's unique place in the universe. At any rate a denial of the fall involves a definite departure from historical Christianity, and it is important to see that it was an integral part of Blake's scheme and without it that scheme falls to pieces. Not that he pressed the letter of the Adam and Eve story. It stood for him as a divinely simple witness of an ancient simplicity and unity from which man has departed by disobedience and the a.s.sertion of a life and a self independent of G.o.d.

His way back into unity is by the cross of Jesus Christ, where the self-hood dies, and the day of judgment, which finally separates in him the gold from the dross, and presents him in his divine humanity perfect before the human-divine G.o.d.

Between these two stupendous facts--the fall and the redemption--Blake finds a place to say all that he wishes about the manifold things of heaven and earth and h.e.l.l.

The unity from which man departs is made up of four mighty ones--the Four Zoas--who are the four beasts of the Apocalypse, taken from the four beasts of Ezekiel, who probably appropriated four of the many monstrous symbolical beasts of a.s.syria.

Blake invented names for them. Of these--Urizen, Urthona-Los, Luvah, and Tharmas--Urizen and Los are by far the clearest conceived figures. Perfect unity is maintained so long as Los is supreme. Reason is important in its right place. It becomes an evil when it usurps the place of imagination and thinks it can see as far. The essence of the fall is disorder.

Redemption restores order, which is unity. Science alone breaks down because it is built up on observation and induction. Its observation is insufficient, for it is the observation of a shrunk universe. It gathers its materials through the five senses. But there are other avenues in regenerated man. If science were built up on the observation or vision of the whole instead of a very small part, it would become divine science and coincident with religion.

Religion breaks down whether built on nature or experience. If on nature, it is nature only as seen through limited vision; if on experience, it is the experience of fallen man, and therefore it is of vital force only when it transcends nature and becomes super-natural, and rests on a revelation not from man's experience, however deep, but from G.o.d.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ALBION.

_From Jerusalem._]