The Portable Blake by William Blake
Yet Blake is very much like Beethoven in his artistic independence and universality. Like Beethoven, he is a pioneer Romantic of that heroic first generation which thought that the flames of the French Revolution would burn down all fetters. Like Beethoven, he asserts the creative freedom of the imagination within his work and makes a new world of thought out of it. There sounds all through Blake’s poetry, from the boyish and smiling defiance of neo-classic formalism in Poetical Sketches, The languid strings do scarcely move!
The sound is forc’d, the notes are few!
to the vision of man the divine in Jerusalem that lyric despair mingled with quickness to exaltation, that sense of a primal intelligence fighting the mind’s limitations, that brings Beethoven’s last quartets so close to absolute meditation and the Ninth Symphony to a succession of triumphal mashes. What is nearest and first in both men is so strong a sense of their own identity that they are always reaching beyond man’s conception of his powers. In both there is a positive assertion against suffering, an impatience with forms and means. As Beethoven said of the violinist who complained of the difficulty of one of the Rasumofsky quartets—“Does he really suppose I think of his puling little fiddle when the spirit speaks to me and I compose something?”—so to Blake the forms he uses in his last Prophetic Books, even to their very narrative coherence, are nothing before the absoluteness of his vision. In both life becomes synonymous with the will.
There, however, the resemblance ends. For Beethoven does not block our way by asking us to read him in symbols of his own invention. He is subtle, moving, reflective, in a language which we share because he has made it possible for us to share in it. Out of a limited number of musical tones and devices, he has organized his thought and impressed his conception in such a way that his difference is all in his art. When we have grasped his meaning something has enriched our lives without dislodging them. Beethoven is as luminously human as he is creatively independent; he can be gay; he parodies; he introduces a little Russian tune to compliment a patron; he is fond of bearish jokes. He is often difficult, but never impossible. He does not challenge man’s submission to the natural order; he finds his place in it, and often in such deep wells of serenity, of happiness in his own struggle, that the song that rises from him almost at the very end, in his last quartet, is for a dance. “Must it be?” he wrote on the manuscript. “It must be. It must be.” He may have been thinking of something less than man’s ultimate relation to life. But the idea that something must be is what is most hateful to Blake’s mind.
For Blake accepts nothing—not the God who is sup- . posed to have proposed it this way, or the man who is constrained to dispose it in any way he can., Blake begins with a longing so deep, for all that is invisible and infinite to man under the dominion of God, matter, and reason, that he tears away the shell of earth, the prison of man in his own senses, to assert that there is nothing but man and that man is nothing but the highest flights of his own imagination. With his little tradesman’s look, his fanatical industriousness, his somber qualities of the English dissenter and petty-bourgeois, he begins with so absolute a challenge to the religion that was dying in his age, and to the scientific materialism that arose in it, that he transcends them both—into a world that is exalted and often beautiful, but of which he alone saw the full detail.
To understand this is to pass up the usual tags. Blake is seeking something which is analogous to mysticism, but he is not in any ordinary sense a mystic. He is very much in the stream of thought which led to naturalism, but he is not a naturalist. It is more important, however, to show what he shares with us rather than with the mystics. Only those who want to make a Blake easy to explain and apologize for, convenient for the textbooks, can see him as a queer and harmless “mystic.” As D. H. Lawrence said of his work, “They’ll say as they said of Blake: It’s mysticism, but they shan’t get away with it, not this time: Blake’s wasn’t mysticism, neither is this.” Even at the end, when Blake celebrated Jesus as his great friend and deliverer, we have in “The Everlasting Gospel:”The Vision of Christ that thou dost see
Is my Vision’s Greatest Enemy:
Thine is the friend of all Mankind,
Mine speaks in parables to the Blind:
Thine loves the same world that mine hates,
Thy Heaven doors are my Hell gates.
Christian mysticism is founded on dualism. It is rooted in the belief that man is a battleground between the spirit and the flesh, between the temptations of earth and God as the highest Good. The mystic way is the logical and extreme manifestation of the spiritual will, obedient to a faith in supernatural authority, to throw off the body and find an ultimate release in the God-head. Christian mysticism is based upon a mortification of the body so absolute that it attains a condition of ecstasy. To the mystic, God is the nucleus of the Creation, and man in his earthly life is a dislodged atom that must find its way back. The mystic begins with submission to a divine order, which he accepts with such conviction that earthly life becomes nothing to him. He lives only for the journey of the soul that will take him away, upward to God. What would be physical pain to others, to him is purgation; what would be doubt to others, to him is hell; what would be death for others, to him is the final consummation—and one he tries to reach in the living body.
Blake has the mystic’s tormented sense of the doubleness of life between reality and the ideal. But he tries to resolve it on earth, in the living person of man. Up to 1800 he also thought that it could be resolved in society, under the inspiration of the American and French Revolutions. Blake is against everything that submits, mortifies, constricts and denies. Mystics are absent-minded reactionaries; they accept indifferently everything in the world except the barriers that physical existence presents to the soul’s inner quest. Blake is a revolutionary. He ceased to be a revolutionary in the political sense after England went to war with France and tried to destroy the revolution in Europe. That was less out of prudent cowardice—though like every other radical and free-thinker of the time he lived under a Tory reign of terror—than because he had lost faith in political action as a means to human happiness. Even in politics, however, his libertarian thought became a challenge to all the foundations of society in his time. Blake is not only unmystical in the prime sense of being against the mystic’s immediate concerns and loyalties; he is against all accepted Christianity. He is against the churches,Remove away that black’ning church:
Remove away that marriage hearse:
Remove away that place of blood:
You’ll quite remove the ancient curse.
Against priesthood:And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars my joys & desires.
Against the “moral law.” He denies that man is born with any innate sense of morality—all moral codes are born of education—and thinks education a training in conformity. He is against all belief in sin; to him the tree in Eden is the gallows on which freedom-seeking man is hanged by dead-souled priests. He savagely parodied a Dr. Thornton’s new version of the Lord’s Prayer:
Our Father Augustus Caesar, who art in these thy Substantial Astronomical Telescopic Heavens, Holiness to Thy Name or Title, & reverence to thy Shadow.... Give us day by day our Real Taxed Substantial Money bought bread, deliver from the Holy Ghost whatever cannot be taxed...
He is against every conception of God as an omnipotent person, as a body, as a Lord who sets in train any lordship over man:Thou art a Man, God is no more,
Thine own humanity learn to adore.
He believes that all restraint in obedience to a moral code is against the spirit of life:Abstinence sows sand all over
The ruddy limbs & flaming hair,
But Desire Gratified
Plants fruits & beauty there.
Blake is against all theological casuistry that excuses pain and admits evil; against sanctimonious apologies for injustice and the attempt to buy bliss in another world with self-deprivatio
The lineaments of Gratified Desire.
What is it women in men do require?
The lineaments of Gratified Desire.
Restraint, in fact, follows from the organized injustice and domination in society: The harvest shall flourish in wintry weather
When two virginities meet together:
The King & the Priest must be tied in a tether
Before two virgins can meet together.
He is against all forms of human exploitation, and all rationalizations of it in human prejudice:And all must love the human form,
In heathen, turk, or jew;
Where Mercy, Love, & Pity dwell
There God is dwelling too.
Against war, especially holy ones; against armies, and in pity for soldiers; against the factory system, the labor of children, the evaluation of anything by money.
In “London,” one of his simplest and greatest poems, Blake paints the modem city under the sign of man’s slavery, the agony of children, the suffering Soldier and the Whore:I wander thro’ each charter’d street,
Near where the charter’d Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
In every cry of every Man,
In every Infant’s cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forg’d manacles I hear.
How the Chimney-sweeper’s cry
Every black’ning Church appalls;
And the hapless Soldier’s sigh
Runs in blood down Palace walls.
But most thro’ midnight streets I hear
How the youthful Harlot’s curse
Blasts the new born Infant’s tear,
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.
“Charter’d” means “bound.” In his first draft of this poem, Blake wrote “dirty Thames,” but characteristically saw that he could realize more of the city’s human slavery in describing the river as bound between its London shores. His own place in the poem is that of the walker in the modem inhuman city, one isolated man in the net which men have created. “I wander thro’ each charter’d street For him man is always the wanderer in the oppressive and sterile world of materialism which only his imagination and love can render human. In a more difficult poem, characteristic of his deeper symbolism, he speaks of the world of matteras A Fathomless & boundless deep,
There we wander, there we weep;
In “London,” however, the wandering is not a symbolic expression. In the modern city man has lost his real being, as he has already lost his gift of vision in the “fathomless and boundless” deep of his material nature. Blake here describes one man, himself, in a city that is only too real, the only city he ever knew—yet the largest in the world, the center of empire. The city stands revealed in the cry of every Man, in every Infant’s cry of fear. The wanderer in the chartered streets is concerned with a social picture and, in the face of so much suffering, with the social evil that some create and all permit. The extraordinary terseness of the poem stems from Blake’s integral vision of the suffering of man and his alienation from institutions as one. His indignation gives him the power of movement; it also leads him into the repetitions which dominate the tonal order of the poem —the every cry of every Man, the Infant’s cry of fear, till his tender vehemence swells into the generality of in every voice, in every ban.
Every is magic to Blake. Poetically he cannot go wrong on it, for it carries such a kernel of glory to his mind, it points so immediately to his burning human solidarity, that in using it he knows himself carried along by what is deepest to him. The mind-forg’d manacles, as central to his thought as any phrase he ever used, follows with a triumphant sweep right after it, and for an obvious reason. For he is one with every voice, every ban, and can now make his judgment. On this fresh creative impulse he leaps ahead to what is so complex, but for him so natural, a yoking of images:How the Chimney-sweeper’s cry
Every black’ning Church appalls;
The young Chimney-sweeper is always dear to Blake, especially when he is condemned to get the soot out of the churches—an impossible task. He is the symbol of the child who is lost. He works among the waste-dirt of the Church, itself black with dogma and punitive zeal, and his own suffering makes it even blacker. Black’ ning is a verb of endless duration in present time for Blake. In his drawing to this poem, the Chimney-sweeper is shown in one comer struggling before a black flame. At the top of the page he stands in defiance before the blind and tottering old man, the fossilized Church, who seems to be pouring out fresh soot. The walls are the stone blocks of a prison. The whole page is marked, like the turn of the hand on a vehement signature, by a fierce black border. Pictorially and verbally we thus rise to a climax at the word appalls. The Church is not appalled by the Chimney-sweeper’s cry; the cry of the child, out of the midst of the Church, makes the Church appalling. Blake’s thrust is so swift and deep that he characteristically puts the whole burden of his protest, with its inner music, into four words. Every black and blackening Church is appalling, and in every way. The tone of palls to his ear, carrying the image of death, the grief and shame that will not rest, clangs with reverberations.
The unhappiness of the Soldier is not that of a man bleeding before a palace of which he is the sentry. Blake means that the Soldier’s desperation runs, like his own blood, in accusation down the walls of the ruling Palace. Blake’s own mind ran in so many channels at once, his vision of human existence was so total, that it probably never occurred to him that blood would mean anything less to others than it did to him. “Runs in blood down palace walls” is what Blake sees instantaneously in his mind when he thinks of the passivity and suffering of the Soldier. Blake is too much abreast of the reality he sees to use similes; he cannot deliberate to compare something to another. And he is equally incapable of using a metaphor with self-conscious daring. He saw the blood running down the ruler’s walls before thinking of blood as a “powerful” image. There is no careful audacity in him, the preparation for the humor of T. S. Eliot’sI am aware of the damp souls of housemaids
Sprouting despondently at area gates.
Blake’s poetic urge, it is clear, was not to startle, to tease the. mind into fresh combinations, but to make tangible, out of the wealth of relationships he carried in his mind, some portion of it equal to his vision of the life of man. How swiftly and emphatically he turns, at the first line of the fourth stanza, toBut most thro’ midnight streets I hear
But most stands for: what I have described thus far is not the full horror of London, my city; not anything like what I have to tell you! And he then gives back, in eighteen words, the city in which young girls are forced into prostitution; in which their exile from respectable society, like the unhappiness of the Soldier, expresses itself in a physical threat to another. The Soldier accuses the Palace with his blood; the prostitute curses with infection the young husband who has been with her; the “plague” finally kills the new-born child. The carriage that went to the church for a marriage ends at the grave as a hearse. Nothing can equal the bite of “blights with plagues,” the almost visible thrust of the infection. And thanks to Blake’s happy feeling for capitals, which he used with a painter’s eye to distinguish the height of his concepts, Marriage stands above the rest in the last sentence of the poem, and swiftly falls into a hearse.