Some Books on Blake
By Mona Wilson. (Nonesuch
The Centenary Edition of Blake's Poetry and Prose. Edited by Geoffrey Keynes. (Nonesuch Press. 12s. 6d. net.) A LITTLE boy of eight, gazing at a tree in Peckham Rye, and telling an astonished and displeased parent that it is full of angels. A small, yellow-haired apprentice of sixteen, working among the tombs in Westminster Abbey, drawing accurately and with ecstatic delight the monuments of the Plantagenet Queens, and sometimes seeing in vision processions of monks, priests and thurifers and hearing the chant of Latin psalms. A queer but promising young poet and artist, enduring with difficulty the kindly patronage of a cultured circle which included those patterns of intellectual respectability Mrs. Chapone, Mrs. Barbauld and Mrs. Hannah More. A tempestuous and heterodox thinker, full of revolutionary sympathies ; consorting with such advanced spirits as Mary Wollstonecraft and Tom Paine, feeding his soul on Boehme and Swedenborg, denouncing churches, laws, and conventional morals, and wearing a cap of liberty on his aureole of golden hair. An ecstatic poet, rising night after night under the fury of his inspiration to express in poems and sketches the overwhelming intuitions by which he was possessed. An industrious crafts- man obediently executing a patron's design for Cowper's Tomb : A device of the Bible upright supporting The Task' with a laurel wreath and Palms . . . neatly copied by our kind Blake." An " eccentric little artist," strangely encountered in 1820 at one of Lady Caroline Lamb's dinner parties ; whose shabby and undistinguished appearance caused the lip of the magnificent Sir Thomas Lawrence to " curl with a sneer," but who seemed to his partner " full of beautiful imaginations and genius," though careworn and subdued. An old man dying in a poverty-stricken room in Fountain Court, and "singing of the things he saw in heaven."
These are moments in the outward life of William Blake. Place beside them his literary achievement : the youthful Poetical Sketches ; then the exquisite Songs of Innocence. and Experience, and the revolutionary Marriage of Heaven and• Hell, produced in his thirties ; then the strange, dark power of the Prophetic Books. Beside all this, the multi- tude of paintings and designs in which he struggled to express other aspects of his vision—the sublime Creation of Adam, the dreadful Lazar House, the deep and tender feeling of the series inspired by the life of Christ, the mature wisdom of the Illustrations to Job. Finally, consider those rare sayings which disclose his inner history and hint at the secret adven- tures of his soul :— " I am not ashamed, afraid, or averse to tell you what Ought to be Told : That I am under the direction of Messengers from Heaven, Daily and Nightly ; but the nature of such things is not as some suppose without trouble or care. Temptations are on the right hand and left ; behind, the sea of time and space roars and follows swiftly ; he who keeps not right onward is lost, and if our footsteps slide in clay, how can we do otherwise than fear and tremble ? . . . I too well remember the threats I heard! If you, who are organized.by Divine Providence for spiritual com- munion, Refuse and bury your Talent in the Earth, even tho' you should want Natural Bread, Sorrow and Desperation pursues you through life, and after death shame and confusion to eternity."'
Such a passage is decisive for any comprehension of Blake's career, and explains much that seems perverse and obscure in his doctrine and work. It shows that he conceived himself, _under Divine inspiration, to be committed to the task of translating spiritual realities into artistic form. Such trans- lation, such a revealing of the eternal World of Imagination' in sensible terms, he believed to be the true business alike of religion and of art, which were in essence identical. " Jesus and his apostles were all artists," he said with that discon- certing simplicity which shocked the pious so much. To understand his complex genius we have to remember that in him profound and daring thought and great aesthetic sensi- bility were subdued to the demands of an overwhelming spiritual vocation. He suffered for years the secret conflicts
of intellect and intuition peculiar to mystics of his type, and
the disappointinents of a prophet struggling to communicate his " four-fold vision " to an indifferent world. From the
welter of impressions offered to him by the universe, he chose as most significant those which most men do not even per- ceive ; and drew from them inferences which none of his con- temporaries could understand.
Only now, indeed, are we beginning to collect and arrange the material which will make such understanding possible. Here, Blake students owe an immense debt to the labours of Mr. Geoffrey Keynes ; and no memorial of the poet's cen- tenary could be more welcome than the beautiful one-volume reprint of his standard edition of the prose and poetry, issued by the Nonesuch Press. It gives us, well printed on India paper, everything which Blake ever wrote. A re-examination of this and of such of his more significant designs as the illu- minated Marriage of Heaven and Hell (beautifully re- produced by Messrs. Dent) or the better-known Illustrations to Job, suggests how far we still are from guessing the real nature of his experience and the meaning of his works. Miss Wilson's Life, however, which fills up the gaps in previous biographies with material that has lately come to light, and allows Blake to reveal himself in his letters, acts, and creative works, marks a substantial advance towards knowledge of the real man. She has been particularly successful in suggesting his social and intellectual background ; less, perhaps, in the attempt to rationalize his visionary experience, or fit the various phases of his development into the traditional divisions of the " mystic way." One of the most individual of all the mystics, and perhaps one of the greatest interpreters of Christianity the world has seen, he was hostile to all Christian convention ; and his use of its tradition is his own. He trod a lonely path, " compelled by my Genius or Angel to follow where he led " ; and those who wish to learn his secrets must be content to follow in their turn.
EVELYN UNDERIIILL.
Previous page
