ACM

English Blake

By JOHN HOLLOWAY

`ONE.1-NNE I have finished,' Blake wrote of the coloured copy of Jerusalem; 'it con- tains 100 Plates, but it is not likely I shall get a customer for it.' Nor did he. Nothing suc- ceeds, it seems, like failure, or fails like success. Wordsworth, to his successors, was the great poet of—of all things—the Excursion: the authentic text of the Prelude had to wait until 1926. The first printed edition of Blake's major lyrics appeared in 1840. In 1847 Rossetti could buy his Notebook for ten shillings. It was a treasure- house of new poems. Some were published in 1863, with Gilchrist's Life, the first book on Blake. But . . . 'my rather unceremonious shak- ing up of Blake's rhymes,' was Rossetti's com- ment: he improved Blake vigorously. Swinburne, in 1868, shook him up some more.

The first reputable text even of the lyrics appeared ninety years late; of the longer poems, a hundred. Blake the graphic artist has lain buried deeper still. A handful of the incom- parable Dante illustrations were exhibited in the 1890s. The complete set were first reproduced in 1922. The woodcuts for Virgil were first printed without travesty in 1937. The illuminated books themselves became properly knowable only with the facsimile reprints of the William Blake Trust in the last decade or so. A painting as important and beautiful as The Sea of Time and Space lay forgotten in a cupboard until 1949. In fact, we are still discovering Blake. He is the great unknown of our poetry, perhaps the only one left.

A first-rate editor has the satisfaction that his work, humanly speaking, is 'all truth and no error. No critic can say the same; and it is arguable that in this century, literary studies owe as much to Geoffrey Keynes, the surgeon, as they do to anyone. He was Blake's first bibliographer (1921), author of the 'Census' of illuminated books in 1953, editor of the Letters in 1956 and many of Blake's works of illustration, and editor, above all, of the first great text of Blake, the three-volume Nonesuch edition of 1925, which has been the basis of all later study and later texts. The volume* now published is a corrected and somewhat amplified version of the Nonesuch 1957 edition, which marked the fact that (130 years after his death) Blake seemed to have arrived for the general reader of poetry. With someone else, this might be the beginning of the end, the moment when ossification sets in; but it will take more than notes, variants and line-numbering to ossify Blake, and with a text as hard as his, there are still golden rewards to be had. Blake wrote: Who will exchange his own fire side For the stone of another's door?

—not 'steps.' Is that dull textualism?

But the decisive fact is this: our affairs have been put in order. A fully adequate text of Blake, generally available, is a significant stage in our cultural history, because Blake was him- self among its most astonishing events. Largely,

* BLAKE'S COMPLETE WRITINGS. Edited by Geoffrey Keynes. (0.U.P., 30s.)

this is because of his work as a graphic artist. But had he never drawn a line, the very first words of his first published poem would still have been electric: 0 thou with dewy locks, who lookest down Thro' the clear windows of the morning, turn Thine angel eyes upon our western isle . . .

It is possible that Blake's four season-poems (of which this is the first) may have had some kind of link with Thomson's Seasons, or other respect- able manifestations of the traditions of the eighteenth century. But at a stroke, Blake awoke in these pieces a power for lyric verse which had slept for nearly 150 years: almost, one could say, from Waller's `Goe lovely Rose' (published in 1645) to his own '0 Rose, thou art sick.' And as a lyric poet, Blake is with no one but Shakespeare.

If there was anything that deserved the name `Romantic Movement' in English, it did not begin with Wordsworth, still less with Gray or Collins. It began with Blake, and with him it sprang alive fully armed, aad as good as ran its whole course. 'The language really used by men,' Wordsworth laid down as his criterion of diction; but it was Blake, not Wordsworth, who put the idea to most effective use, and it was Blake, more than anyone else of the time, who drew together a variety of strands from the less orthodox parts of eighteenth-century culture—the grandiose, cloudy imagery of Ossian, the dissenting sects with their store of Biblical language, and the rich intricacies of Swedenborgism (Blake and his wife belonged to a Swedenborg church in London)— and created, out of them all, a new flashpoint for poetry.

If Blake had sympathy for much that was un- orthodox in his time, that was because there was an orthodoxy against which he revolted; and it was less the orthodoxy of Bacon and Locke than that of church and state, landowning and commerce, militarism and war. That he was writing at a time when inwardness and originality were gaining status in the arts must be seen against a wider fact: that in the Western European area (it included America) emancipation and self- determination were in the first place striving to take over the whole public life of the nations. Blake, the greatest of our political poets—and almost the last—was on the side of this great en- deavour, and his engagement with the events of his time was fiercely whole-hearted and pas- sionately open. It is easy enough to think of Robert Adam, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Fanny Burney and Cowper's Iliad, and forget that England at the close of the eighteenth century

could seem a land of horror. But: . the present King of Great Britain . . . is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages. . . .' That is from the American Declaration of Independence.

It fell chiefly to an American scholar, Pro- fessor Erdman, to point out how Blake's writings glow on every page with his sense of this. It extended beyond the political dimension to the economic, and it shows in Blake's graphic art as clearly as in his verse. He drew on Gillray's savage cartoons, and he drew (for Ore bound to the rock in America. and elsewhere, too) on the terrible drawings, which he had himself engraved for the official account, depicting the suppression of the slave-insurrection in Surinam. Visions of the Daughters of Albion is an allegory of Negro enslavement, and the 'fat fed hireling. in it who 'buys whole cornfields into wastes' is the recruit- ing sergeant of English militarism, with his accursed King's Shilling. Again and again, the details are there; and the sedition is there, too.

One asks why Blake could be thus closely and ferociously to the point, without his poetry turn- ing into topical verse and no more. The answer is that he saw public affairs from a vantage-point infinitely beyond them. Partly, he had the apocalyptic vision of the seventeenth-century Ranters (with whom, it has been argued, he had a real link); and in the earlier prophetic books, from The French Revolution through Europe to The First Book of Urizen, one may trace the exact stages by which 'heroic' history is turned into historical myth. But beyond this, Blake drew to himself another side of the culture of his time: its recovery of Plato—though for him this seems to have been mainly second-hand, through Thomas Taylor. Blake had the same paradoxical duality of consciousness as Plato himself. Both commanded an enrapturing vision of innocence and beauty; both grasped, with savage immediacy, what life could be in fact. Blake's recurrent night- mare of the degeneration of the `Zoas,' or the emergence of Urizen and his counterpart Ore, matches the portrait in the Republic of descent from the ideal city to total evil. The great beatific myths of Plato are themselves matched by the last 'Night' of The Four Zoos. Blake lived in a historicising time, and he historicised his vision, that is the great difference.

It is easy todogmatise like this over Blake's main outlines; but turn to the texts and all is dark and shifting multiplicity. The reason is this. Blake did not hang. His searing indictment was in a hard code. But if the price of his neck was obscurity, the price of that was isolation; and this, too, in its turn, perhaps led to a repetitive and tangled elaboration which did Blake's work substantial harm. The excess is mirrored, in little, by those slight, squiggling arabesques that sometimes run their distractions all round his letterpress, and stand in sad contrast to the lovely graphic work itself. Blake had the time on his hands to doodle across his unwanted masterpieces.

Blake's Complete Writings has almost nothing in it of Blake the artist. It is understandable, but a major loss. At his best, there is no mechanical, page-by-page correspondence, but a marvellous flow and interaction between the text and the illumination. Moreover, the twin poles of Blake's sensibility are brought into focus by his visual art : there is the, Goya-like Our End is Come, or the hell-scenes from the Dante, on the one hand; and the unearthly beauty of some of the Paradise Lost illustrations, on the other. To see such contrasts is to know what to look for in his cryptic texts. But more than this again, as the years passed, the ideal vision a little died away in Blake the poet. 'I behold Babylon in the streets of London,' he wrote in Jerusalem; and his works somewhat (to quote him again) 'became what they beheld.' By contrast with the early books, a harsher, more cramped letterpress, and a savage, almost frenzied art take over. The breath-taking vision of the lark, early in Part 2 of Milton, seems to be Blake's last Song of Innocence. Jerusalem is dense and elaborate, but it lacks that note, and in its apocalypse there is a kind of barbaric 'splendour and hurried in- sistence. The continuing innocence of Blake's vision came out now in the rich pastoral lento of his woodcuts for a version of Virgil's first Eclogue. Away from the world of Castlereagh and the Peterloo massacre, Blake here, in a medium wholly new for him, could create what inspired Samuel Palmer: . a mystic and dreamy glimmer . . . unlike the gaudy daylight of this world.' It was close in time to Keats's `Ode to a Nightingale'; but Keats seems not to have met Blake or known his work.

The Arts, and all things in Common,' was Blake's recipe for man's life. His isolation and his century-long neglect point to major facts in our history: in short, that when the emancipa- tion, the released energy, the creativity he stood for, at last came our way, we did not use them for the ends he advocated, but for material opulence and what Arnold called 'doing as one likes.' No society, in fact, has ever quite chosen Blake's way. 'Everything that lives is Holy,' he remarked; but the idea has not caught on. All the same, even if we stand by our choice, we had better keep in mind that we made it. Blake's verse, now that it is established on our shelves, will stop our forgetting all right.