No More Learning

May, 1901.




WILLIAM BLAKE AND THE IMAGINATION.


THERE have been men who loved the future like a mistress, and the
future mixed her breath into their breath and shook her hair about
them, and hid them from the understanding of their times. William Blake
was one of these men, and if he spoke confusedly and obscurely it was
because he spoke of things for whose speaking he could find no models
in the world about him. He announced the religion of art, of which no
man dreamed in the world about him; and he understood it more perfectly
than the thousands of subtle spirits who have received its baptism in
the world about us, because, in the beginning of important things--in
the beginning of love, in the beginning of the day, in the beginning of
any work, there is a moment when we understand more perfectly than we
understand again until all is finished. In his time educated people
believed that they amused themselves with books of imagination, but
that they 'made their souls' by listening to sermons and by doing or
by not doing certain things. When they had to explain why serious
people like themselves honoured the great poets greatly they were hard
put to it for lack of good reasons. In our time we are agreed that we
'make our souls' out of some one of the great poets of ancient times,
or out of Shelley or Wordsworth, or Goethe or Balzac, or Flaubert, or
Count Tolstoy, in the books he wrote before he became a prophet and
fell into a lesser order, or out of Mr. Whistler's pictures, while we
amuse ourselves, or, at best, make a poorer sort of soul, by listening
to sermons or by doing or by not doing certain things. We write of
great writers, even of writers whose beauty would once have seemed an
unholy beauty, with rapt sentences like those our fathers kept for the
beatitudes and mysteries of the Church; and no matter what we believe
with our lips, we believe with our hearts that beautiful things, as
Browning said in his one prose essay that was not in verse, have 'lain
burningly on the Divine hand,' and that when time has begun to wither,
the Divine hand will fall heavily on bad taste and vulgarity. When no
man believed these things William Blake believed them, and began that
preaching against the Philistine, which is as the preaching of the
Middle Ages against the Saracen.

He had learned from Jacob Boehme and from old alchemist writers that
imagination was the first emanation of divinity, 'the body of God,'
'the Divine members,' and he drew the deduction, which they did not
draw, that the imaginative arts were therefore the greatest of Divine
revelations, and that the sympathy with all living things, sinful and
righteous alike, which the imaginative arts awaken, is that forgiveness
of sins commanded by Christ. The reason, and by the reason he meant
deductions from the observations of the senses, binds us to mortality
because it binds us to the senses, and divides us from each other by
showing us our clashing interests; but imagination divides us from
mortality by the immortality of beauty, and binds us to each other
by opening the secret doors of all hearts. He cried again and again
that every thing that lives is holy, and that nothing is unholy except
things that do not live--lethargies, and cruelties, and timidities, and
that denial of imagination which is the root they grew from in old
times. Passions, because most living, are most holy--and this was a
scandalous paradox in his time--and man shall enter eternity borne upon
their wings.
And he understood this so literally that certain drawings to _Vala_,
had he carried them beyond the first faint pencillings, the first
faint washes of colour, would have been a pretty scandal to his time
and to our time. The sensations of this 'foolish body,' this 'phantom
of the earth and water,' were in themselves but half-living things,
'vegetative' things, but passion that 'eternal glory' made them a part
of the body of God.

This philosophy kept him more simply a poet than any poet of his time,
for it made him content to express every beautiful feeling that came
into his head without troubling about its utility or chaining it to
any utility. Sometimes one feels, even when one is reading poets of a
better time--Tennyson or Wordsworth, let us say--that they have troubled
the energy and simplicity of their imaginative passions by asking
whether they were for the helping or for the hindrance of the world,
instead of believing that all beautiful things have 'lain burningly on
the Divine hand. ' But when one reads Blake, it is as though the spray
of an inexhaustible fountain of beauty was blown into our faces, and
not merely when one reads the _Songs of Innocence_, or the lyrics he
wished to call 'The Ideas of Good and Evil,' but when one reads those
'Prophetic Works' in which he spoke confusedly and obscurely because
he spoke of things for whose speaking he could find no models in the
world about him. He was a symbolist who had to invent his symbols;
and his counties of England, with their correspondence to tribes of
Israel, and his mountains and rivers, with their correspondence to
parts of a man's body, are arbitrary as some of the symbolism in the
_Axel_ of the symbolist Villiers De L'Isle Adam is arbitrary, while
they mix incongruous things as _Axel_ does not. He was a man crying
out for a mythology, and trying to make one because he could not find
one to his hand. Had he been a Catholic of Dante's time he would have
been well content with Mary and the angels; or had he been a scholar of
our time he would have taken his symbols where Wagner took his, from
Norse mythology; or have followed, with the help of Professor Rhys,
that pathway into Welsh mythology which he found in 'Jerusalem'; or
have gone to Ireland--and he was probably an Irishman--and chosen for
his symbols the sacred mountains, along whose sides the peasant still
sees enchanted fires, and the divinities which have not faded from the
belief, if they have faded from the prayers of simple hearts; and have
spoken without mixing incongruous things because he spoke of things
that had been long steeped in emotion; and have been less obscure
because a traditional mythology stood on the threshold of his meaning
and on the margin of his sacred darkness. If 'Enitharmon' had been
named Freia, or Gwydeon, or Danu, and made live in Ancient Norway, or
Ancient Wales, or Ancient Ireland, we would have forgotten that her
maker was a mystic; and the hymn of her harping, that is in _Vala_,
would but have reminded us of many ancient hymns.

'The joy of woman in the death of her most beloved,
Who dies for love of her,
In torments of fierce jealousy and pangs of adoration.
The lover's night bears on my song,
And the nine spheres rejoice beneath my powerful control.

They sing unwearied to the notes of my immortal hand.
The solemn, silent moon
Reverberates the long harmony sounding upon my limbs.
The birds and beasts rejoice and play,
And every one seeks for his mate to prove his inmost joy.

Furious and terrible they sport and rend the nether deep.
The deep lifts up his rugged head,
And lost in infinite hovering wings vanishes with a cry.