Chapter 3

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

“A petty sneaking knave I knew ...

Oh, Mr. Cromek, how do you do?”

Blake’s irritation broke out, as was common with him, not over the clearest but over the most confused case of Cromek’s misconduct. The publisher had seen a design by Blake of Chaucer’s “Canterbury Pilgrims,” and commissionedBlake to complete it. A few days afterwards Cromek found himself in the studio of the popular painter Stothard, and suggested the subject to him. Stothard finished his picture first and it appeared before Blake’s. Blake went into one of his worst rages and wrote one of his best pieces of prose.

A brotherartist said of Blake, with beautiful simplicity, “He is a good man to steal from.” The remark is as philosophical as it is practical. Blake had the great mark of real intellectual wealth; anything that fell from him might be worth picking up. What he dropped in the street might as easily be half-a-sovereign as a halfpenny. Moreover, he invited theft in this further sense, that his mental wealth existed, so to speak, in the most concentrated form. It is easier to steal half-a-sovereign in gold than in halfpence. He was literally packed with ideas—with ideas which required unpacking. In him and his works they were too compressed to be intelligible; they were too brief to be even witty. And as a thief might steal a diamond and turn it into twenty farms, so theplagiarist of Blake might steal a sentence and turn it into twenty volumes. It was profitable to steal an epigram from Blake for three reasons—first, that the original phrase was small and would not leave a large gap; second, that it was cosmic and synthetic and could be applied to things in general; third, that it was unintelligible and no one would know it again. I could give innumerable instances of what I mean; I will let one instance stand for the rest. In the middle of that long poem which is so disconnected that it may reasonably be doubted whether it is a long poem at all (I mean that commonly bearing the title “The Auguries of Innocence”), he introduces these two lines:

“When gold and gems adorn the ploughTo peaceful arts shall envy bow.”

“When gold and gems adorn the plough

To peaceful arts shall envy bow.”

A careless and honest man would read these lines and make nothing of them. A careful thief might make out of them a whole entertaining and symbolic romance, like “Gulliver’s Travels” or “Erewhon.” The idea obviously is this;—that we still for some reason admit the tools of destruction to be nobler than the toolsof production, because decorative art is expended on the one and not on the other. The sword has a golden hilt; but no plough has golden handles. There is such a thing as a sword of state; there is no such thing as a scythe of state. Men come to court wearing imitation swords; few men come to court wearing imitation flails. It is fascinating to reflect how fantastic a story might be written upon this hint by Blake. But Blake does not write the story; he only gives the hint, and that so hurriedly that even as a hint it may hardly be understood.

OOTHOON (1793)

Most of Blake’s quarrels were trivial, and some were little short of discreditable. But in his quarrel with Cromek and Stothard he does really stand as the champion of all that is heroic and ideal, as against all that is worldly and insincere. The celebrated Stothard was at this time in the height of his earlier success; he occupied somewhat the same relation to art and society that has been occupied within our own time by Frederic Leighton. He was, like Leighton, an accomplished draughtsman, a man of slight but genuine poetic feeling, an artist who thoroughlyrealised that the aim of art was to please. Ruskin said of him very truly (I forget the exact words) that there were no thorns to his roses. At the same time, his smoothness was a smoothness of innocence rather than a smoothness of self-indulgence; his work has a girlish timidity rather than any real conventional cowardice; he was a true artist in a somewhat effeminate style of art. Nor is there any reason to doubt that his personal character was as clean and good-natured as his pictures. It may be that he began hisCanterbury Pilgrimswithout any commission from Cromek, or it may be that he took the commission from Cromek without the least idea that the conception had been borrowed from Blake. That Cromek treated Blake badly is beyond dispute; that Stothard treated him badly is unproved; but Blake was not much in the habit of waiting for proof in such cases. Stothard, I say, may not have been morally in the wrong at all. But he was intellectually and critically very much in the wrong; and Blake pointed this out in a pamphlet which, though defaced here and there with his fantastic malice, is a solid and powerfulcontribution to artistic and literary criticism.

Stothard, the elegant gentleman, the man of sensibility, the eighteenth century æsthete, cast his condescending eye upon the Middle Ages. He was of that age and school that only saw the Middle Ages by moonlight. Chaucer’s Pilgrims were to him a quaint masquerade of hypocrisy or superstition, now only interesting from its comic or antiquated costume. The monk was amusing because he was fat, the wife of Bath because she was gay, the Squire because he was dandified, and so on. Blake knew as little about the Middle Ages as Stothard did; but Blake knew about eternity and about man; he saw the image of God under all garments. And in a rage which may really be called noble he tore in pieces Stothard’s antiquarian frivolity, and asked him to look with a more decent reverence at the great creations of a great poet. Stothard called the young Squire of Chaucer “a fop.” Blake points out forcibly and with fine critical truth that the daintiness of the Squire’s dress is the mere last touch to his youth, gaiety, and completeness; but that he was no fop at all, buta serious, chivalrous, and many-sided gentleman who enjoyed books, understood music, and was hardy and prompt in battle. Moreover, he is definitely described as humble, reverent, and full of filial respect. That such a man should be called a fop because of a frill or a feather Blake rightly regarded as a sign of the mean superficiality of his rival’s ideas. Stothard spoke of “the fair young wife of Bath”; Blake placidly points out that she had had four husbands, and was, as in Blake’s picture, a loud, lewd, brazen woman of quite advanced age, but of enormous vitality and humour. Stothard makes the monk the mere comic monk of commonplace pictures, shaped like a wine barrel and as full of wine. Blake points out that Chaucer’s monk was a man, and an influential man; not without sensual faults, but also not without dignity and authority. Everywhere, in fact, he reminds his opponent that in entering the world of Chaucer he is not entering a fancy-dress ball, but a temple carved with colossal and eternal images of the gods of good and evil. Stothard was only interested in Chaucer’s types because they were dead; Blake was interested in thembecause they cannot die. In many of Blake’s pictures may be found one figure quite monotonously recurrent—the figure of a monstrously muscular old man, with hair and beard like a snowstorm, but with limbs like young trees. That is Blake’s root conception; the Ancient of Days; the thing which is old with all the awfulness of its past, but young with all the energies of its future.

SPELLS OF LAW (1793)

I make no excuse for dwelling at length on this in a life of Blake; it is the most important event. It is worth while to describe this quarrel between Blake and Stothard, because it is really a symbolic quarrel, interesting to the whole world of artists and important to the whole destiny of art. It is the quarrel between the artist who is a poet and the artist who is only a painter. In many of his merely technical designs Blake was a better and bolder artist than Stothard; still, I should admit, and most people who saw the two pictures would be ready to admit, that Stothard’sCanterbury Pilgrimsas a mere piece of drawing and painting is better than Blake’s. But this if anything only makes the whole argument more certain. It is the duel between the artist whowishes only to be an artist and the artist who has the higher and harder ambition to be a man—that is, an archangel. Or, again, it might be put thus: whether an artist ought to be a universalist or whether he is better as a specialist. Now against the specialist, against the man who studies only art or electricity, or the violin, or the thumbscrew or what not, there is only one really important argument, and that, for some reason or other, is never offered. People say that specialists are inhuman; but that is unjust. People say an expert is not a man; but that is unkind and untrue. The real difficulty about the specialist or expert is much more singular and fascinating. The trouble with the expert is never that he is not a man; it is always that wherever he is not an expert he is too much of an ordinary man. Wherever he is not exceptionally learned he is quite casually ignorant. This is the great fallacy in the case of what is called the impartiality of men of science. If scientific men had no idea beyond their scientific work it might be all very well—that is to say, all very well for everybody except them. But the truth is that, beyond their scientific ideas, theyhave not the absence of ideas but the presence of the most vulgar and sentimental ideas that happen to be common to their social clique. If a biologist had no views on art and morals it might be all very well. The truth is that a biologist has all the wrong views of art and morals that happen to be going about in the smart set in his time. If Professor Tyndall had held no views about politics, he could have done no harm with his views about evolution. Unfortunately, however, he held a very low order of political ideas from his sectarian and Orange ancestry; and those ideas have poisoned evolution to this day. In short, the danger of the mere technical artist or expert is that of becoming a snob or average silly man in all things not affecting his peculiar topic of study; wherever he is not an extraordinary man he is a particularly stupid ordinary man. The very fact that he has studied machine guns to fight the French proves that he has not studied the French. Therefore he will probably say that they eat frogs. The very fact that he has learnt to paint the light on medieval armour proves that he has not studied the medieval philosophy. Therefore he willprobably suppose that medieval barons did nothing but order vassals into the dungeons beneath the castle moat. Now all through the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries art, that is, the art of painting, suffered terribly from this conventional and uncultured quality in the working artist. People talk about something pedantic in the knowledge of the expert; but what ruins mankind is the ignorance of the expert. In the period of which we speak the experts in painting were bursting with this ignorance. The early essays of Thackeray are full of the complaint, that the whole trouble with painters was that they only knew how to paint. If they had painted unimportant or contemptible subjects, all would have been well; if they had painted the nearest donkey or lamp-post no one would have complained. But exactly because they were experts they fell into the mere snobbish sentimentalism of their times; they insisted on painting all the things they had read about in the cheapest history books and the most maudlin novels. As Thackeray has immortally described in the case of Mr Gandish, they painted Boadishia and declared that they had discovered “intheir researches into ’istry” the story of King Alfred and the Cakes. In other words, the expert does not escape his age; he only lays himself open to the meanest and most obvious of the influences of his age. The specialist does not avoid having prejudices; he only succeeds in specialising in the most passing and illiterate prejudices.

Of all this type of technical ignorance Stothard is absolutely typical. He was an admirable instance of the highly cultivated and utterly ignorant man. He had spent his life in making lines swerve smoothly and shadows creep exactly into their right place; he had never had any time to understand the things that he was drawing except by their basest and most conventional connotation. Somebody suggested that he should draw some medieval pilgrims—that is, some vigorous types in the heyday of European civilisation in the act of accepting the European religion. But he who alone could draw them right was especially likely to see them wrong. He had learnt, like a modern, the truth from newspapers, because he had no time to read even encyclopedias. He had learnt how to paintarmour and armorial bearings; it was too much to expect him to understand them. He had learnt to draw a horse; it was too late to ask him to ride one. His whole business was somehow or other to make pictures; and therefore when he looked at Chaucer, he could see nothing but the picturesque.

Against this sort of sound technical artist, another type of artist has been eternally offered; this was the type of Blake. It was also the type of Michael Angelo; it was the type of Leonardo da Vinci; it was the type of several French mystics, and in our own country and recent period, of Rossetti. Blake, as a painter among other things, belongs to that small group of painters who did something else besides paint. But this is indeed a very inadequate way of stating the matter. The fuller and fairer way is this: that Blake was one of those few painters who understood his subject as well as his picture. I have already said that I think Stothard’s picture of theCanterbury Pilgrimsin a purely technical sense better than his. Indeed, there is nothing to be said against Stothard’s picture of theCanterbury Pilgrims, except that it is not a pictureof theCanterbury Pilgrims. Blake (to summarise the whole matter as simply as it can be summarised) was in the tradition of the best and most educated ideas about Chaucer; Stothard was the inheritor of the most fashionable ideas and the worst. The whole incident cannot be without its moral and effect for all discussions about the morality or unmorality of art. If art could be unmoral it might be all very well. But the truth is that unless art is moral, art is not only immoral, but immoral in the most commonplace, slangy, and prosaic way. In the future, the fastidious artists who refuse to be anything but artists will go down to history as the embodiment of all the vulgarities and banalities of their time. People will point to a picture by Mr Sargent or Mr Shannon and say, “See, that man had caught all the most middle class cant of the early twentieth century.”

FRONTISPIECE TO “AMERICA”

We can now recur, however, to the general relations of Blake with his later patron. In a phrase of singular unconscious humour Mr Cromek accused Blake of “a want of common politeness.” Common politeness certainly can hardly be said to have been Blake’s strongpoint. But Cromek’s politeness was certainly an uncommon sort of politeness. One is tempted to be thankful that it is not a common sort. Cromek’s notion of common politeness was to give the artist a guinea a drawing on the understanding that he should get some more for engraving them, and then give the engraving to somebody else who cost him next to nothing. Blake, as we have said, resented this startling simplicity of swindling. Blake was in such matters a singular mixture of madness and shrewdness in the judgment of such things. He was the kind of man whom a publisher found at one moment more vague and viewless than any poet, and at the next moment more prompt and rapacious than any literary agent. He was sometimes above his commercial enemy, sometimes below him; but he never was on his level; one never knew where he was. Cromek’s letter is a human document of extraordinary sincerity and interest. The Yorkshire publisher positively breaks for once in his life into a kind of poetry. He describes Blake as being “a combination of the serpent and the dove.” He did not quite realise, perhaps, that according to the NewTestament he was paying Blake a compliment. But the truth is, I fancy, that the painter and poet had been one too many for the publisher. I think that on any occasion Cromek would have willingly forgiven Blake for showing the harmlessness of the dove. I fancy that on one occasion Blake must have shown the wisdom of the serpent.

From the mere slavery of this sweater Blake was probably delivered by the help of the last and most human of his patrons, a young man named John Linnell, a landscape painter and a friend of the great Mulready. It is extraordinary to think that he was young enough to die in 1882; and that a man who had read in the Prophetic Books the last crusades of Blake may have lived to read in the newspapers some of the last crusades of Gladstone. This man Linnell covers the last years of Blake as with an ambulance tent in the wilderness. Blake never had any ugly relations with Linnell, just as he had never had any with Butts. His quarrels had wearied many friends; but by this time I think he was too weary even to quarrel. On Linnell’s commission he begana system of illustrations to Dante; but I think that no one expected him to live to finish it.

Hislast sickness fell upon him very slowly, and he does not seem to have taken much notice of it. He continued perpetually his pictorial designs; and as long as they were growing stronger he seems to have cared very little for the fact that he was growing weaker himself. One of the last designs he made was one of the strongest he ever made—the tremendous image of the Almighty bending forward, foreshortened in a colossal perspective, to trace out the heavens with a compass. Nowhere else has he so well expressed his primary theistic ideas—that God, though infinitely gigantic, should be as solid as a giant. He had often drawn men from the life; not unfrequently he had drawn his dead men from the life. Here, according to his own conceptions, he may be said to have drawn God from the life. When he had finished the portrait (which he made sitting up in his sick-bed) he called out cheerfully,“What shall I draw after that?” Doubtlesshe racked his brain for some superlative spirit or archangel which would not be a mere bathos after the other. His rolling eyes (those round lustrous eyes which one can always see roll in his painted portraits) fell on the old frail and somewhat ugly woman who had been his companion so long, and he called out, “Catherine, you have been an angel to me; I will draw you next.” Throwing aside the sketch of God measuring the universe, he began industriously to draw a portrait of his wife, a portrait which is unfortunately lost, but which must have substantially resembled the remarkable sketch which a friend drew some months afterwards; the portrait of a woman at once plain and distinguished, with a face that is supremely humorous and at once harsh and kind. Long before that portrait was drawn, long before those months had elapsed, William Blake was dead.

PRELUDIUM (1793)

Whatever be the explanation, it is quite certain that Blake had more positive joy on his death-bed than any other of the sons of Adam. One has heard of men singing hymns on their death-beds, in low plaintive voices. Blake was not at all like that on his death-bed:the room shook with his singing. All his songs were in praise of God, and apparently new: all his songs were songs of innocence. Every now and then he would stop and cry out to his wife, “Not mine! Not mine!” in a sort of ecstatic explanation. He truly seemed to wait for the opening of the door of death as a child waits for the opening of the cupboard on his birthday. He genuinely and solemnly seemed to hear the hoofs of the horses of death as a baby hears on Christmas eve the reindeer-hooves of Santa Claus. He was in his last moments in that wonderful world of whiteness in which white is still a colour. He would have clapped his hands at a white snowflake and sung as at the white wings of an angel at the moment when he himself turned suddenly white with death.

Andnow, after a due pause, someone will ask and we must answer a popular question which, like many popular questions, is really a somewhat deep and subtle one. To put the matter quite simply, as the popular instinct would put it, “Was William Blake mad?” It is easyenough to say, of course, in the non-committal modern manner that it all depends on how you define madness. If you mean it in its practical or legal sense (which is perhaps the most really useful sense of all), if you mean was William Blake unfit to look after himself, unable to exercise civic functions or to administer property, then certainly the answer is “No.” Blake was a citizen, and capable of being a very good citizen. Blake, so far from being incapable of managing property, was capable (in so far as he chose) of collecting a great deal of it. His conduct was generally business-like; and when it was unbusiness-like it was not through any subhuman imbecility or superhuman abstraction, but generally through an unmixed exhibition of very human bad temper. Again, if when we say “Was Blake mad?” we mean was he fundamentally morbid, was his soul cut off from the universe and merely feeding on itself, then again the answer is emphatically “No.” There was nothing defective about Blake; he was in contact with all the songs and smells of the universe, and he was entirely guiltless of that one evil element which is almost universal in the character of the morbidlyinsane—I mean secrecy. Yet again, if we mean by madness anything inconsistent or unreasonable, then Blake was not mad. Blake was one of the most consistent men that ever lived, both in theory and practice. Blake may have been quite wrong, but he was not in the least unreasonable. He was quite as calm and scientific as Herbert Spencer on the basis of his own theory of things. He was vain to the last degree; but it was the gay and gusty vanity of a child, not the imprisoned pride of a maniac. In all these aspects we can say with confidence that the man was not at least obviously mad or completely mad. But if we ask whether there was not some madness about him, whether his naturally just mind was not subject to some kind of disturbing influence which was not essential to itself, then we ask a very different question, and require, unless I am mistaken, a very different answer.

When all Philistine mistakes are set aside, when all mystical ideas are appreciated, there is a real sense in which Blake was mad. It is a practical and certain sense, exactly like the sense in which he was not mad. In fact, in almost every case of his character and extraordinarycareer we can safely offer this proposition, that if there was something wrong with it, it was wrong even from his own best standpoint. People talk of appealing from Philip drunk to Philip sober; it is easy to appeal from Blake mad to Blake sane.

When Blake lived at Felpham angels appear to have been as native to the Sussex trees as birds. Hebrew patriarchs walked on the Sussex Downs as easily as if they were in the desert. Some people will be quite satisfied with saying that the mere solemn attestation of such miracles marks a man as a madman or a liar. But that is a short cut of sceptical dogmatism which is not far removed from impudence. Surely we cannot take an open question like the supernatural and shut it with a bang, turning the key of the mad-house on all the mystics of history. To call a man mad because he has seen ghosts is in a literal sense religious persecution. It is denying him his full dignity as a citizen because he cannot be fitted into your theory of the cosmos. It is disfranchising him because of his religion. It is just as intolerant to tell an old woman that she cannot be a witch as to tell her that she must be awitch. In both cases you are setting your own theory of things inexorably against the sincerity or sanity of human testimony. Such dogmatism at least must be quite as impossible to anyone calling himself an agnostic as to anyone calling himself a spiritualist. You cannot take the region called the unknown and calmly say that though you know nothing about it, you know that all its gates are locked. You cannot say, “This island is not discovered yet; but I am sure that it has a wall of cliffs all round it and no harbour.” That was the whole fallacy of Herbert Spencer and Huxley when they talked about the unknowable instead of about the unknown. An agnostic like Huxley must concede the possibility of a gnostic like Blake. We do not know enough about the unknown to know that it is unknowable.

If, then, people call Blake mad merely for seeing ghosts and angels, we shall venture to dismiss them as highly respectable but very bigoted people. But then, again, there is another line along which the same swift assumption can be made. While he was at Felpham Blake’s eccentricity broke out on another side. A quality that can frankly becalled indecency appeared in his pictures, his opinions, and to some extent in his conduct. But it was an idealistic indecency. Blake’s mistake was not so much that he aimed at sin as that he aimed at an impossible and inhuman sinlessness. It is said that he proposed to his wife that they should live naked in their back garden like Adam and Eve. If the husband ever really proposed this, the wife succeeded in averting it. But in his verse and prose, particularly in some of the Prophetic Books, he began to talk very wildly. However far he really meant to go against common morality, he certainly meant (like Walt Whitman) to go the whole way against common decency. He professed to regard the veiling of the most central of human relations as the unnatural cloaking of a natural work. He was never at a loss for an effective phrase; and in one of his poems on this topic he says finely if fallaciously—

“Does the sower sow by nightOr the ploughman in darkness plough?”

“Does the sower sow by night

Or the ploughman in darkness plough?”

A PROPHECY (1793)

But his speculations went past decorum and at least touched the idea of primary law. Insome parts of the Prophetic Books (written in the period which may fairly be called a paroxysm) he really seems to be preaching the idea that sin is sometimes a good thing because it leads to forgiveness. I cannot think this idea does much credit to Blake’s power of logic, which was generally good. The very fact of forgiveness implies that what led up to it was evil. But though the position is hardly rational, it is quite unfair to say that it is insane. It is no sillier or more untenable than a hundred sophistries that one may hear at every tea-table or read in every magazine. A little while ago the family of a young lady attempted to shut her up in an asylum because she believed in Free Love. This atrocious injustice was stopped; but many people wrote to the papers to say that marriage was a very fine thing—as indeed it is. Of course the answer was simple: that if everyone with silly opinions were locked up in an asylum, the asylums of the twentieth century would have to be somewhat unduly enlarged. The same common-sense applies to the case of Blake. That he did maintain some monstrous propositions proves that he was not always right,that he had even a fine faculty for being exceedingly wrong. But it does not prove that he was a madman or anything remotely resembling one. Nor is there any reason to suppose that he was carried into any practice inconsistent with his strong domestic affections. Indeed, I think that much of Blake’s anarchy is connected with his innocence. I have noticed the combination more than once, especially in men of Irish blood like Blake. Heavy, full-blooded men feel the need of bonds and are glad to bind themselves. But the chaste are often lawless. They are theoretically reckless, because they are practically pure. Thus Ireland, while it is the island of rebels is also the island of saints, and might be called the island of virgins.

Butwhen 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 logicianwho 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 interestingquestion 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 theCanterbury 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 orstudied 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?

A FEMALE DREAM (1793)

Madnessis 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 hemustsay. 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 amusingthing 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.”

“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.”

“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 adequateenergy. 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 wasmad 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 callthatmorbidity 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 againand 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 leafRepeats to thee thy mother’s grief.”

“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.”

“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 kindis 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?”

“A dirty sneaking knave I knew ...

Oh, Mr. Cromek, how do you do?”

THE TYGER (1794)

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 hareA fibre from the brain can tear.”“A skylark wounded in the wing,A cherubim does cease to sing.”

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

“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.”

“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 spriteWeaves a bower in endless night.”

“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 movedShall never be by woman loved.”

“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 besane 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 differfrom 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 unpronounceableverse 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.

HOLY THURSDAY (1794)

Thereis 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 poorpun 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 inthem. 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 theyare 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 calledThe Man who built the Pyramids. Anyone canappreciate 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 perplexesBlake’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 questionof 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.

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