BOOKS OF THE DAY
William Blake
Fearful Symmetry : A Study of William Blake. By Northrop Frye. (Princeton University Press, Oxford University Press. 25s.) William Blake : Selected Poems. With an Introduction by Denis Saurat. (John Westhouse. 12s. 6d.)
MR. NORTHROP FRYE'S book is of such importance that it is im- possible even to begin to do it justice in the space at my disposal. To say it is a magnificent, extraordinary book is to praise it as it should be praised, but in doing so one gives little idea of the huge scope of the book and of its fiery understanding. Several great poets have written of Blake, but this book, I believe, is the first to show the full magnitude of Blake's mind, its vast creative thought. The mysterious beings of the Prophetic Works unveil their faces, the intellectual patterns of these vast works fall into place and are understood. Opening the book at random, our eyes fall on this sentence: "In eternity Urizen, the Prince• of Light' or the true sun is the golden head of Man ; in the fallen world the sun is part of ;he dying and reviving Vision of Generation '" (page 285). Or on: "This imprisoned Titanic power in man, which spasmodically causes revolutions, Blake calls Orc. Orc is regarded as an evil being by conventional morality. But in Blake the coming of Jesus is one of his reappearances" (page 129). I can only attempt to do justice to this book by making use of the most copious quotations.
Mr. Frye shows us the difference between this fallen world and the unfallen world of Blake's heart. "In Eden," he says, "the fundamental processes of the imagination are war and hunting ; that is, struggle and search, perverted here into two different kinds of murder. In the unfallen world, the creative joy of the artist expands into that of the Creator God twisting the sinews of the tiger's heart, that of the exploring scientist into the vision of the Titan Orc piercing into the Ephemeral Planets and the orbs of eccentric fire '•"
This book is of extraordinary importance, not only for the light it throws on Blake, but also philosophically and religiously. Every page is crammed with such sentences as this: "The crucified Christ is the visible form of Man's dream state, and as whatever is com- pletely visible is transparent, that means that the crucified Christ is a prism or lens of reality, that is, an eye, which Man is slowly trying to open. Satan,' Blake says, is a Reactor ; he never acts, he only reacts ; he never sees, he always has to be shown." (Both these sentences occur on page 40x.) Mr. Frye takes a well-known passage and holds it up to the light in such a way that we see the full truth of it for the first time—see the full magnitude for the first time. He takes the sentence "God is only an Allegory of Kings and Nothing Else. . . . God is the Ghost of the Priest and King, who Exist, whereas God exists not except from their Effluvia," and we see this sentence as the brother and equal of Hamlet's thought about the "outstretched heroes." He holds to the light the phrase, "I do not consider either the Just or the Wicked to be in a Supreme State, but to be every one of them States of the Sleep which the Soul may fall into in its deadly dream of Good & Evil when it leaves Paradise following the Serpent "—and we see this as the brother and equal of other thoughts of Hamlet's.
It is a book of great wisdom, and every page opens fresh doors on to the universe of reality and that universe of the trans- fusion of reality which is called art. Speaking of Blake's doctrine that "Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy," Mr. Frye points out that "we are back again to Blake's doctrine
that energy and form, existence and perception, is a time-space complex, not time plus space but time times space, so to speak, in which time and space as we know them disappear as hydrogen and oxygen disappear when they become water." This is what the words " eternal " and " infinite " mean in Blake. "Eternity is not endless time, nor infinity endless space: they are the entirely different mental categories through which we perceive the unfalleti world." The chapter, The Rising God and the chapter The City of God, with its inspired vision of Jesus, seem to me to be of great importance to our time. "In each day, Blake says, there is a moment that Satan cannot find, a moment of eternal life which no death-principle can touch, a moment of absolute imagina- tion. In that moment the mystery of the Incarnation, the uniting of God and man, the attaining of eternity in time, the work of Los, the Word becoming flesh, is recreated, and thereby ceases to be a mystery." This extraordinary book helps us to find that moment. Professor Saurat's introduction to his selection from Blake's poems is full of admirable sense. The following sentence should be engraved as a text and hung over the bed of every poet : " A man can be a visionary and a bad poet. In fact, a visionary is almost always a bad poet." The reader must respect both Professor Saurat's learning and his love for Blake. But there is much in this introduction with which the present reviewer disagrees profoundly. Does Professor Saurat, for instance, really think the heavenly pity and tenderness of the Little Chimney Sweep, "romantic nonsense ' ? Perhaps I have misunderstood him, but he has given me the impression that he sees it thus. I do not think The Crystal Cabinet an "astonishing masterpiece," a "peak in literature." On the con- trary, I think it is rather a bad poem.
I would not say that Blake "had a sense of humour" or that he was "having a dart at himself" in that "Memorable Fancy" when "The prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel dined with me."
I cannot understand Professor Saurat's statement that "Blake is perfectly aware that, in a way, he is telling us lies." I would have said that Blake was absolutely assured of the truth of everything he said. Since that first strange moment when the sight of God looking at him through the window set the four-year-old Master Blake a-screaming, he walked with beings of an infinite wonder, unseen by the common eye. And he saw no reason why he should not say so.
I wish that Professor Saurat's love for Blake did not cause him to apply to him such phrases as "naughty child" and "mischievous English workman." One should no more slap Blake on the back than one should speak of Shakespeare as "Will." Yet how apt, how admirable, is much of the criticism. "Read ` Je eapporte l'infant d'une nuit d'Idumee ' and then read Blake's Mental Traveller . . . . The English poem is a typhoon in the tropics, whereas the French is only a tempest in the North Atlantic." Professor Saurat is at his best when writing of what he admires most. Especially is he admirable and illuminating when writing of the Christian side of Blake's poetry. Here as in much else, he indis- putably reveals to us Blake's grandeurs. The selection itself contains many of the lesser-known splendours from the Prophetic Books.
EDITH SITWELL.
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