CHAPTER V. HIS RELIGIOUS VIEWS

It seems to me that it would be quite vain and useless to go on to a review of Blake’s art, and, incidentally, his poetry, without a preliminary examination — as concise as may be — of the fundamental religious and intellectual conceptions which made him the man he was, and gave him so strange and subjective a point of view. Blake is no ordinary painter, whose art-work is the only key to his inner life or to his perceptions of beauty in the natural world.

He is an artist and a poet of the highest spiritual order, but he is also a mystic. Messrs. Ellis and Yeats tell us that his rank as a mystic entitles him to far more admiration and patient study than any claims he may have as a mere painter and poet! Be that as it may (and some of us cannot but hold the artist as the most glorious manifestation of the divine on this earth!), it is certainly necessary to apprehend Blake the mystic before we can enter into the spirit of Blake the artist.

His was a strange religious creed. It is evident that in early life he obtained somehow or other many of the works of the great mystics and studied them with passionate attention. Among them Swedenborg (whom, however, he frequently criticised harshly) and Jacob Boehmen, the wonderful shoemaker of the sixteenth century, seem to have exerted the most lasting influence on his mind.

Swedenborg’s doctrine of correspondences — the theory that natural phenomena actually represent, or rather shadow, unseen spiritual conditions and existence — attracted Blake at first reading, and became so much a part of his mental fibre that one feels certain he would have eventually fought his intellectual way out into this channel of thought had Swedenborg never written. Nature seemed to Blake but the confused and vague copy of something definite and perfect in “Imagination” or “Spirit.” “All things exist in the human imagination,” and “in every bosom a universe expands,” he wrote, and in the human imagination and its reverend preservation and cultivation lay man’s only source of divine illumination, he believed.

“If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up till he sees all things through narrow chinks in his cavern,” are illuminating words of his. Blake’s whole effort in life seemed to be the cleansing and spiritualizing of the portals of the senses that he might see and hear and receive as much of the infinite spirit as his humanity could hold.

The mission which he put clearly before him always, he expressed in these words in his prophetic poem of “Jerusalem”:

I rest not from my great task
To open the Eternal Worlds, to open the Immortal Eyes
Of Man inwards; into the Worlds of Thought, into Eternity
Ever expanding in the bosom of God, the Human Imagination.

No man ever sought more gallantly to batter down the walls of materialism which were closing round the souls of men, to let in the sweet breath of Spirit, and to unveil the Vision of the Universal Life. The immemorial struggle between the body and the soul of man was never lost sight of by him, though he sometimes seems to deny it, and his letters to Butts from Felpham show something of his acute consciousness of the difficulty of subduing his spectre or “selfhood.” “Nature and religion,” he announces passionately, “are the fetters of Life.” The orthodox narrow unspiritual religion of his time and all times was repugnant to Blake, and aroused all his fiery combative qualities. It seemed to him to be as actually a fetter to the spirit as the carnal nature of man. Religion was to him a matter of intuition, and not a question of creed or dogma at all. He gives a picture of ordinary religious conceptions in the poem called 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.
Socrates taught what Miletus
Loathed as a nation’s bitterest curse;
And Caiaphas was, in his own mind,
A benefactor to mankind.
Both read the Bible day and night;
But thou read’st black where I read white.

The last line is very significant of Blake. The world which made so decent and respectable a thing out of Christianity, which called success and opportunism the favour of God, and hailed the Prince of this world by the name of Christ, excited Blake’s utmost antagonism. He announced definite counter doctrines on his part, and advocated in his vehemence, almost as partial a view of things, as in their own way, did the materialists of his time. “La vérité est dans une nuance,” Renan has declared, but the swing of the pendulum of opinion must alternate from one extreme to the other before the precise “nuance” can be determined. Blake’s noble but often impractical views have yet a practical utility, for only through a knowledge of the extreme, can the mean be discriminated. Of his own personal religion it might be said that certain fantastic and strange tenets he chose to believe because they pleased him, as we may choose to believe in this or that section of the Catholic Church; but the most quintessential, intimate, and spiritual of his views were not beliefs at all, but simply and purely knowledge. He knew, by an intuition beyond reason, things outside the ken of ordinary men.

The deep melodies of the super-sensible universe reverberated through his soul, and he could never therefore think much of the hum and clamour of this material world. From this intuitive and rapt knowledge of the mystic there is no appeal, for it transcends human experience, and when Blake had it, he was prophet (teller of hidden things) indeed. But when he chose to believe and assert complex and sometimes contradictory doctrines, the affair is different, and we may give or withhold our intellectual sympathy as we will. In any case the spiritual and unorthodox creed which was the lamp of truth to this beautiful soul is worthy of deep reverence, but I cannot altogether agree with Messrs. Ellis and Yeats that a consistent basis of mysticism underlies Blake’s writings. Even a system of mystic philosophy requires to be stated comprehensibly and in a recognizable literary form, and the prophetic books (in which the greater part of Blake’s views are expressed) have no form nor sequence, and are as chaotic and dim as dreams. Messrs. Ellis and Yeats, it is true, have constructed an elaborate, imaginative and very coherent thought-structure out of Blake’s prophetic writings, but owing to the looseness, confusion and unintelligible character of the greater part of the symbolic books themselves, the deftly woven web of mysticism which they present to us as Blake’s does not carry conviction with it. It is suggestive, deeply sympathetic with Blake — sometimes radiantly illuminating — but seems an independent treatise rather than an exposition. Deeply as all students of Blake must feel themselves indebted to Messrs. Ellis and Yeats for their learned work, and the real help it has afforded to a clearer view of his unique personality, I cannot but think that every man will — nay must — interpret Blake for himself. He was too erratic, too emotional, too much the artist, the apostle of discernment and the enemy of reason and science, to have constructed the closely-reasoned, carefully-articulated system of thought which they describe so graphically. Blake was an intuitive mystic, not a systematic or learned one. However, if Messrs. Ellis and Yeats have appreciated Blake’s mysticism, in all its strange convolutions and cloudy gyrations, they have done so not by following his expressed thoughts but by stating from a sympathetic insight denied to others, what he himself left unexpressed. This does not materially concern the student of Blake’s art and poetry, but it does deeply concern them that they should ascertain the main opinions which we know he held and the nature of the spiritual insight that obviously moulded his intellect, and hence his art.

He had a startlingly naïve and original mental perspective, and he focussed profound and virgin thought on Life, Spirit and Art. Virgin thought it was indeed, for tradition had little hold on him, and the social, political and intellectual movements of his time passed by him, washing round the rock on which he sat isolated, but leaving him almost untouched by their influence and atmosphere. He was never swept into the current of contemporary life, but was as removed from the London of his time as if his rooms had been an Alpine tower of silence, instead of being in the very heart and turmoil of the city.

He belonged to no particular age. We could never think of him, for instance, like Rossetti or William Morris, as an exile from the middle ages who had fallen upon an uncongenial nineteenth century. He lived apart in a world of spirit, and concerned himself with the great elementary problems of all ages, bringing none of the bias or characteristic mental hamper of his generation to bear upon these considerations. His art necessarily ranges in the same primeval world, not yet thoroughly removed from chaos.

Mr. Swinburne, in his eloquent critical essay on Blake, finds him largely pantheistic in his views. There is something in Blake of the rapt indifference to externals, found in the Buddhist.

Here is a characteristic assertion of his:

“God is in the lowest effects as well as in the highest causes. He is become a worm that he may nourish the weak. For let it be remembered that creation is God descending according to the weakness of man: our Lord is the Word of God, and everything on earth is the Word of God, and in its essence is God.” Here certainly speaks the pantheist.

From the study of Blake’s writings the following points — and they are important to our future understanding of his art-work — stand out clearly defined. He believed in a great permeating unconditioned spirit — God — of whose nature men also partake, but subjected to the conditions and moral nature which result from sexual and generative humanity. And beside the unnameable supreme God there is another God, the creator Urizen, who is a sort of divine demon. He it is who has divided humanity into sexes, and inclosed the universal soul in separate bodies, and set up a code of morals which bears no relation to the supreme God, Who being altogether removed from, and above, the generative nature of man, does not Himself conform to “laws of restriction and forbidding.”

Urizen, who imprisons and torments conditioned humanity, is somehow subduable by this same humanity of his own invention, and Christ, the perfect man filled as full as may be with the Divine Spirit (for “a cup may not contain more than its capaciousness”), rises in the hearts of humanity, and effects its freedom, by aspiring past the Creator, to the Altogether Divine, and uniting with it.

Jehovah addressing Christ, as the highest type and flower of humanity, says to him, in the poem called the “Everlasting Gospel”:

If thou humblest thyself thou humblest me.
Thou art a man: God is no more:
Thine own humanity learn to adore,
For that is my spirit of life.

This makes us think of Blake’s follower, Walt Whitman, who in the same sort of turgid and chaotic poetry in which Blake wrote the prophetic books, but with no mystic clouds to shroud the meaning, has consistently developed this thought: “One’s self I sing, a simple separate person,” and “none has begun to think how divine he himself is,” etc.

In Blake’s conversations with Crabb Robinson, this mystic view of Christ is very apparent. “On my asking,” writes Mr. Robinson, “in what light he viewed the great questions of the duty of Jesus,” he said, “He is the only God. But then,” he added, “and so am I, and so are you.”

Keeping this point in view, — Blake’s belief in the identity of the Spirit of God behind all phenomena, the homogeneous character of the great creative Energy or Imagination expressing Itself through various forms and organisms, — another extract from Crabb Robinson’s diary will help us still nearer home to Blake’s point of view. He writes: “In the same tone, he said repeatedly, ‘The Spirit told me.’ I took occasion to say, ‘You express yourself as Socrates used to do. What resemblance do you suppose there is between your spirit and his?’ ‘The same as between our countenances.’ He paused and added, ‘I was Socrates,’ and then, as if correcting himself, ‘a sort of brother. I must have had conversations with him. So I had with Jesus Christ. I have an obscure recollection of having been with both of them.’ I suggested on philosophic grounds the impossibility of supposing an immortal being created an a parte post without an a parte ante. His eye brightened at this, and he fully concurred with me. ‘To be sure, it is impossible. We are all co-existent with God, members of the Divine Body. We are all partakers of the Divine Nature.’”

The latter words seem as ordinary and orthodox as on first reading his assertion that he was Socrates seems wild and mad. But all Blake really meant (and I think Crabb Robinson only half took his meaning) was, that the vegetative universe being a mere shadow, so are the accidents of personality, the age one is born into, the organic form which incloses the spirit. So his personality and that of Socrates, their imprisonment in the “vegetative” life were differences of no account, being transitory. But he and Socrates were one (or at least related) at the point where their spirits (the eternal verity) touched, and melted each into the other.

He understood the Bible in its spiritual sense. As to the natural sense, “Voltaire was commissioned by God to expose that. I have had much intercourse with Voltaire, and he said to me, ‘I blasphemed the Son of Man, and it shall be forgiven me, but they (the enemies of Voltaire) blasphemed the Holy Ghost in me, and it shall not be forgiven them.’” This affords an instance of the manner in which Blake intuitively probed beneath the appearance, and divined the spirit beneath, discarding the fact or body with which it clothed itself. Another characteristic opinion of Blake’s, and one that moulded much of his work, is the following:

“Without contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to human existence. From these contraries spring what the religious call Good and Evil. Good is the passive that obeys Reason. Evil is the active, springing from Energy. Good is Heaven, Evil is Hell.”

“All Bibles or sacred codes have been the causes of the following errors:

“1. That man has two existing principles, viz., a Body and a Soul.

“2. That energy, called evil, is alone from the body, and that Heaven, called Good, is alone from the soul.

“3. That God will torment man in Eternity for following his energies. But the following contraries are true:

“1. Man has no Body distinct from Soul, for that called Body is a portion of Soul discerned by the five senses, the chief inlets of soul in this age.

“2. Energy is the only life, and is from the body, and reason is the bound or outward circumference of energy.

“3. Energy is eternal delight.”

These postulates form links in a chain of thought, another progression of which is developed in “Jerusalem.” Blake writes: “There is a limit of opaqueness and a limit of contraction in every individual man, and the limit of opaqueness is called Satan, and the limit of contraction is called Adam. But there is no limit of expansion, there is no limit of translucence in the bosom of man for ever from eternity to eternity.” Certainly there was no limit in his own bosom, and in vision he expanded away from his own “ego” and merged in the universal life, the all-pervading Spirit. Opaqueness and contraction were the only forms of evil he recognized, and these are negative rather than active qualities.

Indeed, Blake often seems to deny the existence of sin at all. Again referring to the invaluable record that Crabb Robinson has left of Blake — I quote always from Messrs. Ellis and Yeats’ complete reprint of the part of the diary referring to him — ”He allowed, indeed, that there are errors, mistakes, etc., and if these be evil, then there is evil. But these are only negations. He denied that the natural world is anything. It is all nothing, and Satan’s empire is the empire of nothing.”

In another place he writes: “Negations are not contraries. Contraries exist. But negations exist not; nor shall they ever be organized for ever and ever.” Contraries, ‘the marriage of Heaven and Hell,’ seemed necessary and right to him, and the urge and recoil natural correlatives.

The great strife with Blake was always that between reason and imagination, experience and spiritual discernment.

The greater part of humanity seemed to him to see with the natural eye natural phenomena only. This was accordingly opaque to them, and did not let through the light of the Universal Spirit or Imagination, seen with which alone it was beautiful, as being then the symbol of something immeasureably greater than itself. Locke and Newton, the men of “single vision” as he called them, were the types of this part of humanity. He would fain have had men look through the eye at the infinite imagination which is the cause of phenomena.

 

 

DEATH’S DOOR: FROM BLAIR’S “GRAVE”

Engraved by L. Schiavonetti after Blake’s drawing.
Published    1808

 

As he states in a glorious passage in his prose essay of the Last Judgement: “Mental things are alone real: what is called corporeal nobody knows of; its dwelling-place is a fallacy, and its existence an imposture. Where is the existence out of mind, or thought? where is it but in the mind of a fool? Some people flatter themselves that there will be no Last Judgement, and that bad art will be adopted, and mixed with good art — that error or experiment will make a part of truth — and they boast that it is its foundation. These people flatter themselves; I will not flatter them. Error is created, truth is eternal. Error or creation will be burnt up, and then, and not till then, truth or eternity will appear. It is burned up the moment men cease to behold it.” (This is a mystical utterance, a spiritual discernment which will repay thoughtful consideration. It gives the Last Judgement — hitherto conceived of by the orthodox as a terribly material and mundane affair — an imaginative and esoteric significance very grateful and welcome to the spiritually sensitive.) “I assert for myself, that I do not behold the outward creation, and that to me it is hindrance and not action. ‘What!’ it will be questioned, ‘when the sun rises, do you not see a round disc of fire, somewhat like a guinea?’ Oh! no! no! I see an innumerable company of the heavenly host, crying: ‘Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty.’ I question not my corporeal eye, any more than I would question a window concerning a sight. I look through it, and not with it.”

One of Blake’s most beautiful conceptions of God is as the universal “Poetic Genius,” and he was very fond of asserting that Art is Religion, which indeed it is when, like his own, it represents the forms of this world as the transparent media through which pulses the light of the universal Poetic Genius. Another belief of Blake’s must be quoted before I leave this part of our subject: “Men are admitted into heaven, not because they have curbed and governed their passions, or have no passions, but because they have cultivated their understandings. The treasures of heaven are not negations of passion, but realities of intellect, from which all the passions emanate, uncurbed in their eternal glory.

“The fool shall not enter into heaven, let him be ever so holy; holiness is not the price of entrance into heaven. Those who are cast out are all those who, having no passions of their own, because no intellect, have spent their lives in curbing and governing other people’s by the various arts of poverty, and cruelty of all kinds. The modern Church crucifies Christ with the head downwards.” And again, “Many persons, such as Paine and Voltaire, with some of the ancient Greeks, say: “We will not converse concerning good and evil, we will live in Paradise and Liberty! You may do so in spirit, but not in the mortal body, as you pretend, till after the Last Judgment. For in Paradise they have no corporeal and mortal body: that originated with the Fall and was called Death, and cannot be removed but by a Last Judgment. While we are in the world of mortality, we must suffer — the whole Creation groans to be delivered....

“Forgiveness of sin is only at the judgment-seat of Jesus the Saviour, where the accuser is cast out, not because he sins, but because he torments the just, and makes them do what he condemns as sin, and what he knows is opposite to their own identity.”

And now I must gather together all the frayed ends of this diffuse but necessary chapter, and put the vital points, around which the seeming incongruities and strangenesses of Blake’s assertions arrange themselves, into a symmetrical if not an organic whole. The oneness of the Eternal Imagination, “Universal Poetic Genius,” or God the Spirit, was the golden background to Blake’s vision of life. And on this unity he saw contrasted the endless diversity of the spirit’s expression in phenomena. All error (not sin, which he did not believe to exist) came from the fall of the spirit (through Urizen the creator) into division and the sexual and generative life of man. This tended to a closing up of man into separate selfhoods, and each selfhood, in its effort to preserve its corporeal existence and separate character, was guilty of error, and gradually the inlets through which communication with the Universal Spirit was maintained became closed up, and were senses only available, in most men, for the uses of the natural world. This condition leads to spiritual negation, but is merely temporary, for when the body is destroyed at death, which is the Last Judgement, Urizen’s power is broken, and the soul, however attenuated (as long as not altogether atrophied), returns to its pristine union with the Universal Spirit, and, though completely merged in it, yet in some wonderful way it preserves its own identity, or essential quality, while the body, which is error, is “burnt up.” But even in the prison of the bodily life Humanity may be delivered from the cramping and negative effect of the selfhood, through Jesus Christ, who exists as the Human Divine in every heart, and who at the voice of the Universal Spirit rises from the grave of selfhood, and draws the Christian up into the life of that spirit where is no error nor negation.

It naturally follows that to Blake the one important point was to keep the senses, “the chief inlet of soul,” perpetually cleansed and open, that he might descry the Great Reality of which Nature and all her phenomena are but a symbol or shadow.

In fact, Blake’s hope for man lay in the contrary of Herbert Spencer’s philosophy. The continuous evolution into new divisions and organisms, separate selfhoods and particles, was to him the falling of Urizen, head downwards, and bound with the snake of materiality, deeper and deeper into the abyss. By union, not division, by aspiring into the universal life, by conquering the selfhood and cleaving to the divine element (Jesus Christ) which exists in every human heart, Blake conceived that man might, if he would, find salvation, true vision, and everlasting life. His own vision was always double or symbolic, and he prayed to be delivered from “single vision” and “Newton’s sleep.” For the preoccupation with Nature as an end in itself and an object worthy of study was to him the great error, a sign of the horror of great darkness that clouded the human intelligence.

In moments of a special inrush of spiritual apprehension his vision was “threefold,” and sometimes “fourfold,” which suggests that vista behind vista unrolled itself, revealing untellable truth and beauty to his keen etherealized sight.

These things, not being matters of common experience, must be received and understood intuitively, and not Blake himself can always make them comprehensible to us. His language and visions recall the language and visions of the Prophet Ezekiel, whose writings were read and re-read by him till they created a frenzy of excitement in his sensitive brain.

His opinion of women, far from being in accordance with our modern emancipated views, was somewhat oriental, though among his poems we may find many instances of sweet and spiritual femininity.

When Urizen created Man and walled him up in his separate organism with five senses, like five small chinks in a cavern to let in the outside light, he gave him a dual nature, male and female, so that he was at first a hermaphrodite. “The female portion of man trying to get the ascendency of the male portion caused inward strife,” so a further subdivision occurred, and Man cast out his female portion, which became woman, and was a mere “emanation” of man. “There is no such thing in eternity as a female will,” writes Blake oracularly, his happy experience being based doubtless on the beautiful subjection of Catherine Blake to his own overmastering personality. Yet he is bound to exclaim in “Jerusalem,” “What may man be? Who can tell? But what may woman be, to have power over man from cradle to corruptible grave.” We may fairly say that the inferior shadowy nature which he imputes to woman was one of those opinions which he chose to adopt, though his real and unconscious belief regarding her was possibly very different. Be that as it may, he often makes her serve as a symbol for material existence, obviously an infelicitous parallel.

Having very briefly indicated the nature of Blake’s religious and mystical opinions, it remains for us to say a word about his mythology.

In a letter written to Mr. Butts while Blake was at Felpham, these lines occur among some verses, and will I think help us:

For a double vision is always with me.
With my inward eye, ‘tis an old man gray;
With my outward, a thistle across the way.

The personification and nomenclature of these double visions of his seem to suggest the genesis of this mythology. He has peopled a twilight mental world with a dim shadowy population of personified states and conditions. They bear strange mouth-filling names, such as Orc, Fuzon, Rintrah, Palamabron, Enitharmon, Oothoon and Ololon. What each symbolizes must be determined by the reader for himself. No explanation of their separate functions will be attempted in this book. Messrs. Ellis and Yeats have carried explanation and analytic criticism as far as it can be carried, and the reader who is interested in the literary matter of the prophetic books should consult their learned work as well as Mr. Swinburne’s highly-suggestive critical essay.