Notes on Novalis and Blake
No poet has mused with more intensity about magic and its relation to art than Novalis. That he regarded the science of his day and its astonishing discoveries in the domain of electricity and saw the philosophers—Kant, and his idea of synthetic a priori judgments, Fichte, and his theory of the act by which the I is posited and posits the world—to be “truly magical”; that, above all, he observed himself and that delicate organization through which he perceived things simultaneously in their detail and infinity: all this led him to the conception of a universal thaumaturgy. And this constituted his magic idealism by which he surpassed Fichte in Fichteanism and Romanticism in Romanticism. It is the idea of an ennobling and a deepening of things solely by our manner of seeing them in their grandeur and profundity; it is the idea of an art of a priori discovery, modifying the world and our organs, healing our bodies, shaping our perceptions, fashioning our ideas, creating God by our prayer and our faith.
Magic is the art of using the world for our purposes. What are we? Personified and all-powerful points of reality. The individual is a magic principle. He possesses the art of becoming omnipotent, of causing miracles and at the same time of seeing everything as a miracle.
This art is a fruit of belief. Mysticism is magic. Here vision, will, and intelligence are united. All our faculties are smelted into one another in the act of intellectual intuition, which Kant negated, but the affirmation of which is the essence of the thought of his successors. Intellectual intuition, says Novalis, is the key to life.
This intuition is irreducible to and incommensurable with reason. The more something is independent of reason, the more it can become the starting point for determination. This is the foundation of magic.
But in this art of transcendental well-being, the poet enjoys a privileged place. He is truly the transcendental doctor.
He operates through words, by conjuring up objects, and these words and objects are a charm, an enchantment.
He operates through words. Every word employed by the poet is an incantation. It does not serve as a sign, but as a tone. He enjoys a magical intuition of objects. He is an enchanter because he is intensely impassioned, and every passion is itself a charm.
He creates a poetic world. Thought is speech and speech is action. In the beginning of the world is the word—or thought—or action. Knowledge and act are identical. All this is one. And all this is identical to love. Love acts magically.
Art is therefore not observation: the beautiful is not given, but created. The vision of the artist moves from the inside out, and not the outside in. The poet is he who puzzles out a priori symphonies and thereby transforms nature.
Heinrich von Ofterdingen brims with these ideas. All of a sudden Henry hears a word that he does not understand, but which nevertheless resonates deeply throughout his entire being. All around him are raised songs that make the world appear at once more familiar and more mysterious, and which open up infinite depths to him. He turns his attention more and more to antiquity when all was poetry, and toward the future when the master of the domain of sounds will perhaps become master of the world. Through contact with the poet nature is allowed to pass into happier, more divine fantasies; nature dances, glides, climbs to heaven. With the poet, nature has a marvellous time.
Poetry is magical thought. There are prophets, magic men, true poets—they romanticize the world. Be always in a state of poetry!
It is appropriate to note that all of these affirmations for Novalis are not the consequences of a priori conceptions. They come from experience. Experience shows us in itself the presence of the a priori, of the magical, of the voluntary. All experience is magical and is only explicable magically.
It should also be noted, following the dialectic of Novalis’s thought, that, limiting itself, sometimes negating itself, it is not necessary to concede too much to magic (if grossly conceived), to poetry, or to action. Do not concede too much to pure magic for it is through laziness that man demands pure magic, as if it were sheer mechanics. Do not cede too much to poetry. For among the arts, poetry plays the role that prose plays in relation to poetry: it is the most prosaic of arts. Whether we compare it to painting, to music, to this world, and to silence.
Do not cede too much to pure action. The same Novalis who writes in a delightfully clumsy French, “Il est beaucoup plus commode d’être fait que de se faire lui-même” (It is much more fitting to be created than to create oneself), and who wants to see man en état de créateur absolu (in a state of absolute creativity), is also the one who says: “La jouissance et le laisser-faire ont beaucoup plus de prix qu’on ne le croit d’ordinaire. La passivité est souvent bien plus haute que l’activité. Toute activité cesse quand arrive le vrai savoir, le grand savoir” (Ecstatic pleasure and leaving things be have a much higher value than is ordinarily believed. Passivity is often much higher than activity. Every activity ceases on the arrival of true knowledge, the great knowledge). And once again in French: “On ne fait pas, mais on fait qu’il se puisse faire” (One does not create, but does what one can). This is a striking formulation that shows us the poet summoning the self and gathering unknown forces above the self. He is the place of confluence [rencontre] among these forces; the place of magical encounter [rencontre]. Magic is the extreme of activity that is overturned and becomes the extreme of passivity.
A meditation on magic is not found in Blake as it is in Novalis. And yet their thinking is very close. Blake’s theory of imagination is, though distinctly accented, the very theory of Novalis. The “first principle” of Blake is that the “Poetic Genius is the true Man, and that the body or outward form of Man is derived from the Poetic Genius.”1 In 1820 he repeats what he wrote in 1788: “The eternal body of man is The IMAGINATION, that is God himself, the Divine Body … JESUS. We are his Members. It manifests itself in his Works of Art. (In Eternity All is Vision.)”2 And again: “Art is the Tree of Life. Science is the Tree of Death. GOD is Jesus. The world of Imagination is the World of Eternity it is the Divine bosom into which we shall go after the death of the Vegetated body.”3
It is the same thinking that explains this passage from Milton:
And of the sports of wisdom in the human imagination
Which is the Divine Body of the Lord Jesus, blessed for ever.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
According to the inspiration of the Poetic Genius
Who is the eternal all-protecting Divine Humanity,
To whom be Glory and Power and Dominion Evermore. Amen.4
All things exist within the human imagination, Blake writes in Jerusalem.
And he embodies the “Four Faces of Humanity … [that] conversed together in Visionary Forms dramatic, which bright redounded from their Tongues in thunderous majesty, in Visions, in new Expanses, creating exemplars of Memory and of Intellect: Creating Space, Creating Time according to the wonders Divine of Human Imagination.”5 The poet is the man of imagination as well as the man of desire. And he becomes Albion (the universal man) whose paths are ideas of the imagination.
As the breath of the Almighty, such are words of man to man
In the great Wars of Eternity, in fury of Poetic Inspiration
To build the Universe stupendous: Mental forms Creating
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The Human Imagination which is the Divine Vision and Fruition.6
This imagination is not a state but human existence itself.
The enemies of the imagination are Blake’s enemies. And these enemies are the moral law.
O human imagination, O divine body that I have crucified
I turned my back on you, concerning myself with the deserts of the moral law.
And it is reasoning, abstract philosophy, that wages war against the imagination.
And it is the imitation of nature.
If one turns away from morality, from reason, and from the enslaved observation of the real, everything from that moment on reveals its infinity. The gates of each instant and at each point turn on their hinges.
… within that Center Eternity expands
Its ever during doors …7
One must open “the Eternal Worlds … the immortal Eyes of Man inwards into the Worlds of Thought.”8 And, in fact,
The nature of infinity is this! That every thing has its
Own Vortex, and when once a traveller thro Eternity
Has passed that Vortex, he perceives it roll backward behind
His path, into a globe itself infolding: like a sun:
Or, is developing in a globe like a sun
Or like a moon, or like a universe of starry majesty.9
The briefest moment is equivalent to the greatest length of time.
Every Time less than a pulsation of the artery
Is equal in its period & value to Six Thousand Years
For in this Period the Poet’s Work is Done: and all the Great
Events of Time start forth & are conceived in such a Period
Within a Moment: a Pulsation of the Artery.10
Blake never tires of diving into this infinity.
What is above is Within, for everything in Eternity is translucent:
The Circumference is Within: Without is formed the Selfish Center
And the Circumference still expands going forward to Eternity.
And the Center has Eternal States!11
Here is seen the importance of what Blake calls the minute particulars, opposed to the generalities of reason.
Every particular thing is a soul; each is a person.
If our imagination opens up its wings, it will teach us to see the lark as a powerful angel, and every particle of matter as a person.
Each grain of Sand
Every Stone on the Land
Each rock & each hill
Each fountain & rill
Each herb & each tree
Mountain hill Earth & Sea
Cloud Meteor & Star
Are Men Seen Afar12
. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
My Eyes more & more
Like a Sea without shore
Continue Expanding
The Heavens commanding
Till the Jewels of Light
Heavenly Men beaming bright
Appeard as One Man
Who Complacent began
My limbs to infold
In his beams of bright gold13
Ultimately these minute particulars ought to be reunited in the universal man.
In Great Eternity, every particular Form gives forth or Emanates
Its own peculiar Light & the Form is the Divine Vision
And the Light is his Garment This is Jerusalem in every Man14
And again:
But General Forms have their vitality in Particulars: & every
Particular is a Man; a Divine Member of the Divine Jesus.15
And now we reach the conclusion of Jerusalem:
All human forms identified even Tree Metal Earth & Stone. all
Human Forms identified. Living …16
The great magical work of transmutation of metals into gold, the ambition of the philosopher to unite the particulars and the universal, in what Hegel will call the idea, we find again in Blake and Novalis, and Coleridge, when each tells us in turn of the imagination and the creative logos, human and divine.
Could one trace the subterranean currents of thought that run from the exemplarism of the Middle Ages, and even perhaps from the Platonic demiurge, to these thinkers? How the idea of creation, passing from man as creator in order then to climb up to his idea of God, comes to redescend to man, giving birth to the Romantic conception—this is a question I leave to others with a desire to examine it. I am convinced that emerging in many passages from Albert the Great there can be found already the ideas that will form the essence of Romanticism.
At the end of the eighteenth century, Swedenborg, and later Saint-Martin, are the direct inheritors of certain currents that stretch back through the Renaissance to the Middle Ages, alternately coloring the fiery alcohol stills and the flame of divine love.
And in the last half of the nineteenth century, Baudelaire, and sometimes Mallarmé, more clearly (but also sometimes oratorically) Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, and finally Rimbaud, take their place in this tradition of magic poetry, a tradition of active and transmutative thinking, a tradition both antimaterialist17 and revolutionary.
1. [All Religions are One, The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 1–2.]
2. [Laocoön, The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, 272–73.]
3. [Ibid., 274. (Wahl inverts the order of the first two sentences.) A Vision of the Last Judgment, Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, 555. (Wahl quotes these two passages as if from the same text.)]
4. [Milton a Poem, ed. Robert Essick and Joseph Viscomi, in The Illuminated Books of William Blake, vol. 5 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), plate 2(b): 3–4 (114), plate 12: 1–3 (137).]
5. [William Blake, Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion, ed. Morton Paley, in The Illuminated Books of William Blake, vol. 1 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), plate 98: 26–32 (294). I follow Wahl in ignoring the poetic line breaks here and elsewhere below when quoting the text in line.]
6. [Blake, Milton a Poem, plate 30: 18–20 (181–82), plate 32: 19–20 (185). Wahl gives no ellipsis between the third and fourth line, although the fourth appears later in the poem. Wahl’s French rendering of this line is: “L’imagination humaine est la vision et la jouissance divine.”]
7. [Milton a Poem, plate 31(34): 48–49 (184).]
8. [Jerusalem, plate 5: 18–19 (136).]
9. [Milton a Poem, plate 1: 21–27 (133).]
10. [Ibid., plates 27–28: 62–63; 1–3 (177–78).] Cf. [Auguries of Innocence, ll. 1–4]:
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.
[The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, 490.]
11. [Jerusalem, plate 71: 6–9 (247).]
12. [Letter 15: 25–32, in The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, 712.] Or as he will say in Jerusalem [plate 71: 15–19 (247)]:
For all are Men in Eternity. Rivers Mountains Cities Villages.
All are Human & when you enter into their Bosoms you walk
In Heavens & Earths; as in your own Bosom you bear your Heaven
And Earth, & all you behold, tho it appears Without it is Within
In your Imagination …
13. [Letter 15: 45–54, in The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, 713.]
14. [Jerusalem, plate 54: 1–3 (216).]
15. [Ibid., plate 91: 29–30 (285).]
16. [Ibid., plate 99: 1–2 (296).]
17. If, that is, we give the word matter its ordinary sense. We would have to make an exception here in the case of Rimbaud, or for certain moments of his thought. And, moreover, do the words materialist and antimaterialist conserve any meaning at all, if we become aware of the impossibility of defining matter, either as opposed to the spirit, or as identical with it?