William Blake Part 5

It is true that Blake came nearer to pantheism than Swedenborg did. He had come, through his teacher, to regard the universe as an emanation from G.o.d, and in working from this doctrine to its logical outcome in pantheism he was more consistent than Swedenborg, who tried to evade the consequences of his own theory.

That Blake found a home in an ancient and consummated Church is true only if Swedenborg's New Church is really the New Jerusalem predicted by St John! For the rest, we hail with joy the element of "h.e.l.l" in Blake.

Blake himself makes some short incisive remarks on Swedenborg, which will carry us a little farther to an understanding. "Swedenborg has not written one new truth." "He has written all the old falsehoods." Blake had ardently welcomed Swedenborg as a new teacher with a new message. In these sentences he betrays disappointment, anger, and resentment. "Any man of mechanical talents may, from the writings of Paracelsus or Jacob Behmen, produce ten thousand volumes of equal value with Swedenborg's, and from those of Dante or Shakespeare an infinite number." If Blake had had a wider culture, he would have known this when a boy, and blown off his fumes at the proper season. We shall encounter again and again his lack of grace when dealing with his successful contemporaries.

We see, so far, that Blake reckoned that Swedenborg had failed him, and that anything of value he found in him, he could find in the old masters.

But there was something he could find in them--a spirit of beauty and a beauty of form--that was wholly lacking in Swedenborg, and an energy and exuberance that appeared only in Swedenborg's h.e.l.l. That this should be the net result of Blake's expectations and Swedenborg's pretensions was too much for Blake's patience; hence the violence of his reaction.

Blake must have felt vaguely all along the lack of the aesthetic faculty in Swedenborg. It was Swedenborg who helped him finally to understand the exact value of his visions and thus to place him.

We have seen that Swedenborg, by abstraction from s.p.a.ce and time, arrived at a doctrine of state which takes their place in heaven and h.e.l.l. From this it follows that man's vision is wholly dependent on his state, and also that a man's visions cannot be trusted unless he has a perfect organ of vision resting on a sound state. It is always fatuous for a religious teacher to appeal to his visions to enforce his doctrines, since they depend on the man himself, and we must form our judgment of him apart from his visions. To appeal to a vision for the truth of a doctrine, and to the doctrine for the truth of a vision, is merely to whirl oneself round in a vicious circle; and therefore Swedenborg's whole make-up--will and understanding--must be laid bare and measured by some standard with which we may try the spirits and the prophets before we can begin to approach his visions and gauge their value.

Swedenborg's state was a state of reason, whether he viewed this world or the other. His early scientific studies, unbalanced by any real appreciation of art, moulded his mind into a rigid state which was impervious to any outside stimulus. When he turned to religion, he made the barren attempt to trim the mysteries of the Faith until they came wholly within the grasp of the understanding. This is a rationalizing process. Swedenborgians may object to hear their master called a rationalist. It is true that that term is usually applied to those who have no supersensual vision, and even deny its existence. Swedenborg is, of course, sharply distinguished from all such, but he has with them the same fundamental trust of reason, which in their case is used to gauge the things of this world, in his the things of the other. Hence when he has raised our expectations to a dizzy height, as he is about to report on things seen and heard in heaven and h.e.l.l, there is a ludicrous anticlimax when we find that the angels are simply religious and talk theology everlastingly, that heaven is like a well arranged Dutch tulip field, and excepting one or two phases of h.e.l.l the whole is just as exciting as a problem in Euclid and as dull as a sanitary report. h.e.l.l alone stirred some interest because its inmates had energy and blood. And therefore one sympathizes with those spirits who, allowed to peep into heaven, immediately chose to plunge themselves head-first into h.e.l.l.

Now Blake, being a visionary, knew that vision depended on will, and he learnt further from Swedenborg that it depended also on state, and so, as a man's state changed, his vision changed also. Blake's state was the imagination of the poetic genius (Los), Swedenborg's the dry logical faculty of the una.s.sisted reason (Urizen), and as Blake looked at Swedenborg's heaven and h.e.l.l, he saw them approaching one to the other and finally with an impetuous rush locked in a marital embrace.

This is the most significant vision of modern times, after which it is easy to judge Swedenborg. He had given for life, theology; for beauty, ashes; and instead of emanc.i.p.ating the modern world he condemned it to the appalling tedium of an everlasting Sunday School. The doctrine of the New Jerusalem was not half so beautiful as that of the Old Jerusalem. Christ come again in Glory was stripped of that beauty that men had perceived in His first lowly coming. Blake's indictment of Swedenborg was severe. It was also an indictment of the whole of protestant theology. The magnificent fruit of Swedenborg's action and reaction, attraction and repulsion for Blake was _The Marriage of Heaven and h.e.l.l_. Blake was fresh from reading Swedenborg's _Heaven and h.e.l.l_, and this and not the ecclesiastical was continually in his thought as he wrote. At the same time it is necessary to remember that Blake was not merely criticizing Swedenborg. Swedenborg gave a rationalized version of the Lutheran doctrine, and therefore to reject him involved a rejection of much of Luther's teaching and of the protestantism that has flowed from him.

Heaven, then, consists of the pa.s.sive obeyers of reason, the religious, the good; h.e.l.l of the active obeyers of Energy, the irreligious, the evil.

Here let it be well marked and remembered that by the religious Blake always meant those who repress their energies or pa.s.sions until they become pa.s.sive enough for them to obey reason.

h.e.l.l's prime quality is pa.s.sion or energy or desire. This in itself is neither good nor evil in the abstract sense in which these words are generally understood, but considered absolutely it is good, for it is the native energy of the man made in G.o.d's image and likeness. Energy works according to the object of desire. If a man's object is the flesh, he becomes an adulterer; if things of beauty and delight, an artist; if G.o.d, a saint. Religious people, frightened and mistrustful of their desires, restrain them until they are pa.s.sive, and in doing so they are destroying the motive power of their lives. They are wholly successful when they become dead souls, and it is then, strictly speaking, that they are fit, not for heaven, but for h.e.l.l. The stronger the desire, the greater the man. Once direct the energy by fixing its desire on G.o.d, it will drive the man to greatness. Thus the typical restrainer or devil is the priest, the typical man of pa.s.sion or energy is the artist. Those who restrain their energies in the name of Christ have identified Him with the reason, and they have never caught so much as a glimpse of Him as He is. Swedenborg and Milton worshipped a rational Christ, and therefore in Blake's eyes, as also in the catholic's, they were heretics. The Book of Job and Shakespeare see inspiration and imagination working with energy as the highest good. The restrainer in the Book of Job is called Satan. Blake alone in his time saw Christ as the supreme symbol of the pa.s.sionate-imaginative life.

Those who have followed Blake thus far will at once understand the Proverbs of h.e.l.l, and perceive in them the glorification of energy and all things belonging to it. Excess, pride, l.u.s.t and wrath are evidences of great energy. Therefore "the road of _excess_ leads to the palace of wisdom," "the _pride_ of the peac.o.c.k is the glory of G.o.d," "the _l.u.s.t_ of the goat is the bounty of G.o.d" "the _wrath_ of the lion is the wisdom of G.o.d." Generosity, prodigality, open-handedness, impulse, show a rich full nature. Prudence, number, measure, weight, betray poverty and are fit "in a year of death." The animals of abounding energy are the n.o.blest, like the lion, tiger, eagle. The animals lacking great energy take refuge in cunning, like the fox and the crow. (Blake no longer questions who made the tiger.) Blake extols fountains, not cisterns or standing water, courage not cunning, exuberance not reason-broken pa.s.sion. Even an energetic "d.a.m.n" braces, while a pious blessing induces a flabby relaxation.

Man's most valuable gift of G.o.d is pa.s.sion. What a man makes of his life will depend on how he regards his pa.s.sion, and into what channels he directs its course.

Thus Blake unites contraries. But just as all is going merry as a marriage bell, he suddenly declares that there are some contraries that can never be married. The modern immanentist world is trying to unite good and evil, beauty and ugliness, with baneful results. We are told that there is nothing ugly to the discerning eye, and one wonders why one should take pains to improve ones crude daubs. Blake says that religious people are always trying to make these false matches. He gives as a typical example the prolific and devourer--the active and pa.s.sive. Each is necessary to the other's existence. Union destroys both. It is easy to multiply examples. Black and white produce grey, beautiful in art, but depressing in life. Dark and light, twilight, beautiful, but sad and lowering. Cold and heat, lukewarmness, which is hateful. Hard and soft, slush, which abounds in modern thought. Hate and love, unctuousness or slime, which is particularly obnoxious in some religious people.

Blake hated these mashes. He had no faith in the love that could not hate.

Just as he seemed on the brink of sweeping away h.e.l.l like an amiable modern, he discovered that though he had made quick work of the Swedenborgian and protestant h.e.l.l, yet h.e.l.l as Christ thought of it remained and must remain. "Note.--Jesus Christ did not wish to unite, but to separate them, as in the Parable of sheep and goats. And He says, 'I come not to send Peace, but a Sword.'" Thus Blake kept his perception clear and sharp. In following his own mental energy he was able to shake off all pantheistic distortions of good and evil, and to see that though with the majority these are mere abstractions, yet there is ultimately an eternal distinction between them, and therefore heaven and earth may pa.s.s away, but Jesus Christ's word concerning heaven and h.e.l.l will abide for ever.

Christians have thought of heaven and h.e.l.l too much as of future places.

Blake thought of them primarily as present states. Here a man's state is obscured by its intermingling with conditions of s.p.a.ce and time. Hereafter the state creates the environment. The man in a state of h.e.l.l, and therefore in h.e.l.l, is the one whose energy or vital fire is dead. The man in a state of Heaven is the one who lives the more abundant life in which his religion, art, and philosophy have become one. The real h.e.l.l and the real heaven can never be married, for any attempt to marry them results in moral loss. But a man can pa.s.s from a state of h.e.l.l into a state of heaven, and the way to do it is the old way of repentance and faith--repentance which changes heart and mind by giving them a new object, and faith that takes and receives the glad tidings of the Kingdom of G.o.d.

Blake gave a curious ill.u.s.tration of his doctrine of state. A Swedenborgian angel came to him, and condoled with him because of the hot, burning dungeon that he was preparing for himself to all eternity.

The angel at his request undertook to show him his place in h.e.l.l. Truly it was horrible, and Blake describes the ideal Swedenborgian h.e.l.l with a power and vividness to which Swedenborg could never attain. The angel, not enjoying the sight, decamped; but no sooner was Blake alone than the horrible vision vanished, and he found himself "on a pleasant bank beside a river, by moonlight, hearing a harper, who sung to the harp." The angel had drawn him into his state, and he saw what the angel saw. When he regained his real state, the vision was pleasant enough. Afterwards he rejoined the angel and undertook to show him his lot. An angel is necessarily above the modes of s.p.a.ce and time. This one being religious, and therefore repressed to pa.s.sivity, was shown a timeless, s.p.a.celess void, which was an eternal nightmare more unutterably fearful than anything in Swedenborg's filthy sewer.

Finally Blake overheard a marvellously rich and splendid bit of conversation between a devil in a flame of fire and an angel seated on a cloud.

The devil pointed out how Jesus Christ was obedient to impulse, and how His obedience to His pa.s.sionate energies--to the Voice of G.o.d within Him--made Him the Great Rebel and Law Breaker, mocking the sabbath and the sabbath's G.o.d, guilty of the blood of His martyrs, exonerating the woman taken in adultery, living on the labour and sweat of wage-slaves, acquiescing in a false witness by His silence, coveting the best gifts for His disciples. It was a Pharisee who said, "All these laws have I kept from my youth," and he became a dead soul. Jesus on the cross looked back on a pathway strewn with the corpses of the religious people He had killed in His fiery impetuous course, and instead of a death-repentance, He uttered the audacious word, "Father, into Thy Hands I commend My Spirit."

The angel was converted. Embracing the flame of fire he was consumed, and rose again as Elijah--the prophet of spirit and fire.

And thus Blake took his leave of Swedenborg. He had expected too much of him and was disappointed. It was more than enough to hear his name on the lips of his pious, commonplace brother. He was indignant that he had not fulfilled his high-sounding pretensions, and "the voice of honest indignation," he wrote, "is the voice of G.o.d." But we who calmly look on can detect the voice of resentment too, which robs his departure of grace.

But for Swedenborg _The Marriage of Heaven and h.e.l.l_ had never been written. Swedenborg was the Goliath, strong in reason, logic, system, science, intellect, slain by the stone from David's sling. Blake and not Swedenborg was "the true Samson shorn by the Churches."

CHAPTER VI

THE REBELS

Blake was thirty-three when in 1790 he wrote _The Marriage of Heaven and h.e.l.l_.

It marked a crisis in his life. Hitherto, with all the generous exuberance of youth, he was striving to leave the past behind, and reach forth to something new that by sheer glory and beauty should sweep up in its course the youth of the ages to come.

For a time he believed that Swedenborg could supply him with the fire to fashion and direct his own genius; but after poring long over his pages, he began reluctantly to discover that the fire of his imagination had either never been kindled or it was long since extinct. Whatever else remained in Swedenborg--and there were undeniably many good things--was impotent for the supreme task of supplying the creative spark.

Blake was disappointed and disillusioned. Never again did he make an impetuous rush to embrace any man, however dazzling his gifts. But not yet had he learnt the vital value of the past. If no new prophet arrived, there was still himself, and if he trusted himself with pa.s.sionate faith, he might yet accomplish the desired thing.

In 1791 the outer events of his life ran a new course. Some time previously, Fuseli had introduced him to a bookseller and publisher named Johnson, living at 72 St Paul's Churchyard.

This Johnson was a remarkable man. His sympathies were with rebels, whom he detected, welcomed, and encouraged. But he had none of the hard narrowness of advanced liberals, and his eye and heart were quick also to discover and cheer such a shy, diffident, conservative genius as Cowper.

He was a friend to the authors whose works he published; and in a little upper chamber he gave weekly dinner parties, to which were bidden William G.o.dwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, Tom Paine, Dr Price and Dr Priestley, and now Blake himself. In the 'eighties Blake had moved among elegant Blue-stockings who were above all things anxious to show themselves true daughters of Sarah: now in the 'nineties he was one of a party of rebels who despised the past, and were hailing the French Revolution, believing that after a few more of such upheavals a millennium would surely come in which man would be perfected.

Foremost among the rebels was William G.o.dwin. Ten years younger, Blake might have been captivated by G.o.dwin, as later on Sh.e.l.ley, Coleridge, and Bulwer Lytton were to be. There was always something clean and fresh about G.o.dwin, and his hopes and aspirations for mankind were generous. Brought up in the narrowest sect of Calvinism, and believing while still a boy that he was a.s.suredly one of the elect, he rebounded in later life to a liberal humanism, and retained little of his Calvinism except an unshaken belief in his own election. The first edition of his _Enquiry concerning Political Justice_ appeared in 1793, which he stated all his first principles. These can be summarized briefly:

The characters of men originate in their external circ.u.mstances, and therefore man has no innate ideas or principles, and no instincts of right action apart from reasoning. Heredity counts for almost nothing. It is impression makes the man. The voluntary actions of men originate in their opinions.

Man is perfectible.

Man has negative rights but no positive rights.

Nothing further is requisite, but the improvement of his reasoning faculty, to make him virtuous and happy. Freedom of will is a curse. It is not free or independent of understanding, and therefore it follows understanding, and fortunately is not free to resist it. Man becomes free as he obeys it. It follows that our disapprobation of vice will be of the same nature as our disapprobation of an infectious distemper.

A scheme of self-love is incompatible with virtue.

The only means by which truth enters is through the inlet of the senses.

Intellect is the creature of sensation, we have no other inlet of knowledge.

Government is in all cases an evil, and it ought to be introduced as sparingly as possible.

Give a state but liberty enough, and it is impossible that vice should exist in it.

Thus G.o.dwin was rationalist, altruist, anarchist, and non-resister. It is not probable that Blake ever read _Political Justice_, his patience not being equal to the task. While ardently desiring political justice and liberty, it was soon plain to him from his personal knowledge of G.o.dwin that all his first principles were false. It was not true that man's character originates in his external circ.u.mstances, although these do act on him. The differences between men are traceable to a fundamental inequality. One man turns everything he touches into dross, another into gold. Why? Blake had no need to argue. Being a mystic, he knew that man's innate principles, ideas, and instincts differed, that heredity could not be ignored, that beyond the five inlets of the senses which reason alone recognizes, there are a thousand inlets for the man whose spiritual understanding is awakened.

He shivered at the thought of what the world would become if the rationalist had his way; for though he would sweep away superst.i.tions, injustices, cruelties, yet from his invariable lack of discrimination he would crush with these the flowers and fruits of imagination, intuition, and inspiration. Besides, whether State or no State, what sort of life would man's be when his fundamental instincts and pa.s.sions were allowed no expression? Blake had not the statesman's power of looking at men in the ma.s.s, but he knew that the individual was of extreme importance in any community, and also that the individual's value lay in his power of pa.s.sion, and therefore G.o.dwin's calm, reasoned, _doctrinaire_ scheme for bringing the Millennium made no appeal to him whatever, and the two men went their separate courses.

It is interesting to note later that Sh.e.l.ley attained to liberty and song just so far as he shook off G.o.dwin. When he talked with exaggerated nonsense about kings and priests, he was but repeating what he imbibed from G.o.dwin in his early undiscriminating youth.

Mary Wollstonecraft was something quite new in the feminine way. Suffering in youth all the torments of a repressed and restricted woman-child, and possessing a full, pa.s.sionate nature, she rebelled. Everywhere she turned she saw woman set in an utterly false position, and, as a consequence, silly, affected, degraded. Even those who made a bid for some solid knowledge simpered, and too often, like Mrs Piozzi, repeated by rote, and in Johnsonian periods, what they did not understand. Mary never doubted for a moment that woman enfranchised economically would rise to great things. Unerringly, she detected the true cause of woman's failure. "It is vain to expect virtue from women till they are in some degree independent of men." "Women must have a civil existence in the State." Poor Mary was terribly alone, and had to work out her new faith in woman without any human a.s.sistance. Fearlessly she exposed the delicate immorality of Dr Gregory's _Legacy to his Daughters_, the "most sentimental rant" of Dr George Fordyce, the oriental despotism of Rousseau; and not content with such small game, she entered the lists against the arch-conservator Edmund Burke, for which Walpole named her "a hyena in petticoats," and Burke himself reckoned her with the viragoes and _poissardes_. Mary's wide sympathies were not only for women. Her knowledge of children had convinced her that they too had rights, and she had an irresistible faith that with tyranny put down and political liberty won, the oppressed peoples of the world would prove themselves capable of the highest things.

And therefore she flung herself into the cause of the French Revolution, and made that her bone of contention with Burke.

There is no finer contrast than f.a.n.n.y Burney for bringing into relief the special characteristics of Mary Wollstonecraft as a type of new woman.

f.a.n.n.y welcomed with breathless interest the French emigrants as they arrived one by one at Juniper Hall, and listened with horror as Talleyrand, M. d'Arblay, M. de Narbonne recounted the atrocities of the people. Mary took a room in Paris and watched their progress through her window. f.a.n.n.y was completely overcome at the news of Louis XVI's martyrdom. Mary watched him go to his death, and would not allow a momentary pity to make her forget the down-trodden poor.