MR. SWINBURNE'S ESSAY ON BLAKE.*

Mn. SWINBURNE has made a profound study of Blake, and there is no one whom it takes more effort to make a pro- found study of than Blake, in spite of his unquestionable genius and splendid faculty as a painter. Moreover, Mr.

• William mesa A Critical Bony by Algernon Charles Swinburne. With Illus. trations from Bingo's Design In Iso-simile, coloured and plain. Second Edition. Vendee I Jchn Camden Bonen. 1865.

Swinburne, though entirely devoid of that simplicity of nature which constitutes one of the greatest charms of Blake's poetry, has a deep sense of the mystical side of natural beauty, in very

close affinity with that which Blake's pictures show in such won- derful measure, so that he has, at least, one great qualification for interpreting Blake to the outer world. We are bound to say that he has not shirked the toil of an interpreter of this human jungle

of forms and symbols. He has found or forced his way honestly through those dreary wildernesses of what Blake and his friends call 'prophecy,' but we cannot say that he has brought away spoils rich enough to encourage many others to follow in his footsteps.

Mr. Swinburne's own book is, so soon as he gets into Blake's symbolism, very hard reading, and though we do not in the least doubt that Blake was a man of wonderful imaginative power and extraordinary gifts as a mystical painter, the attempt to set him up as a great poetical artist is simply absurd, and proved to be so by the very language in which his apologist speaks of his poems. It is true that he has written a few little poems that will last as long as English literature, that through all his poems there are distri- buted,—at rare intervals,—lines of wonderful beauty and mar- vellous power, but it is also true that nine out of every ten of his poetical compositions are fuller of deformity than of beauty, over- loaded with chaotic rubbish, smoky with confused and labouring thought, disfigured by windy and grandiloquent nonsense, choked with unmeaning names, with an insane mythology, and an anarchic philosophy. You may say, if you please, that the man's mind was sane and healthy at bottom. Possibly it was, and undoubtedly it was one of strange force, child-like simplicity, and the profoundest moral sincerity. But it was child-like also in the utter and grotesque disorder of its imaginative impulses, in its absolute inability to remember that words had better not be used at all unless they mean something to other people than than the writer, and in the fatal confusion between thoughts and things. Blake was, says Mr. Swinburne, with a sort of hectoring wrath in his tone, thoroughly sane as to his own artistic ends. But what shall we say of Blake's adaptation of means to ends, when the warmest of his admirers has to speak of it in language such as this :—

" It must be enough to reply here that be was by no means mad, in any sense that would authorize us in rejecting his own judgment of his own aims and powers on a plea which would be held insufficient in another man's case. Let all readers and all critics get rid of that notion for good—clear the minds of it utterly and with all haste ; let them know and remember, having once been told it, that in these strangest of all written books there is purpose as well as power, meaning as well as mystery. Doubtless, nothing quite like them was ever pitched out headlong into the world as they wore. The confusion, the clamour, the jar of words that half suffice and thoughts that half exist—all these and other more absolutely offensive qualities—audacity, monotony, bombast, obscure play of licence and tortuous growth of fancy—cannot quench or oven wholly conceal the living purport and the imperishable beauty which are here latent."

Can you say anything worse of a work of poetic art than what Mr.

Swinburne himself says, except, indeed, to deny that there was• any meaning in the artist's own mind ? Granting him his mean-

ing, could there be more final testimony as to his artistic inability to give it due expression than this ? And this is not an incidental admission of Mr. Swinburne's. It is one he repeats

almost as often as he enters on the discussion of any of Blake's works. Thus, he tells us, a page or two further on :—

" Blake was not incapable of mixing the Hellenic, the Miltonic, and the Celtic mythologies into one drugged and adulterated compound. He had read much and blindly; he had no leaning to verbal accuracy, and never acquired any faculty of comparison. Any sound that in the dim- mest way suggested to him a notion of hell or heaven, of passion or power, was significant enough to adopt and register. Commentary was impossible to him ; if his work could not be apprehended or enjoyed by an instinct of inspiration like his own, it was lost labour to dissect or expound; and here, if ever, translation would have been treason. He took the visions as they came ; he let the words lie as they fell. These barbarous and blundering names are not always without a certain kind of melody and an uncertain sort of meaning."

Again :—" Blake was often taken off his feet by the strong cur- rents of fancy, and indulged, like a child during its first humour of invention, in wild byplay and erratic excesses of simple sound ; often lost his way in a maze of wind-music, and transcribed as it were with eyes closed and open ears the notes caught by chance as they drifted across the dream of his subdued senses. Alternating between lyrical invention and gigantic allegory, it is hard to catch and hold him down to any form or plan,"—and so on, more or less apologetically, almost in every page. Say of such a poet as Ws that he is fundamentally sane, if you please. He is not superficially, not at least poetically, sane, if he cannot find better modes of expressing his ideas than these. It may, no doubt, be worth while for those who profoundly love his occasional beauties and flashes of power, to wade through the .tangled bruahwOod of his tropioal

hieroglyphics for the sake of one clear passage here and there. That is a matter of personal taste and judgment. But no poet can be called great whose verse is 90 per cent. smoke, for 10 per cent.

clear flame and light, — and not the most cordial of Blake's admirers will lay claim to a larger proportion than this of pure poetry. When Mr. Swinburne quotes the following from one of Blake's few perfect lyrics,—the lines to the Evening Star,—we feel that, were there much of the same kind, Blake's would not be the forgotten name it is :—

" Smile on our loves ; and while thou drawest round The sky's blue curtains, scatter silver dew On every flower that closes its sweet eyes In timely sleep. Let thy west wind sleep on The lake: speak silence with thy glimmering eyes, And wash the dusk with silver."

And there are a few pieces, perhaps, of still greater beauty than this, like that quoted by Mr. Swinburne. (p. 273-4.) But for the most part Blake's poetry is lovely in exact proportion to the sim-

plicity of its aim. Directly he becomes prophetic, both his wisdom and his art fail together ; his wisdom, because a child even of high wise impulses—like Blake's—makes but a foolish man ; and his poetry, because he habitually uses things which, as real things, have necessarily a dozen different attributes and accidents, in the place of some one of those attributes or accidents, and that one

often so arbitrarily chosen, and so frequently varied, that even his profoundest admirers, like Mr. Swinburne, are generally compelled to confess that it is pure haphazard to guess at the exact purport of Blake's wild myths and dim allegories. When Mr. Swin- burne expects us to see grandeur in rubbish like the follow- ing, we entirely decline to be browbeaten because we find it utterly worthless, and even excusable in a man of real genius like Blake only on the ground that poor education, the inordinate self-confidence of his genius, his hot fancy, and his restless unquiet mind, rendered him utterly unable to discern for himself when he was talking grotesque and empty bombast, and when he was reproducing by his words some of the most exquisite effects of nature, or more than this, making nature interpret for us the most mysterious secrets of the soul. We extract Mr. Swinburne's preliminary warning, as well as the magniloquent rubbish to which it is prefixed :—

" The date of 1790 must here be kept in mind, that all may remember what appearances of change were abroad, what manner of light and tempest was visible upon earth, when the hopes of such men as Blake made their stormy way into speech or song :— ", A SONG OF LIBERTY.

" '1. The Eternal Female groan'd! it was heard over all the Earth.

2. Albion's coast is sick silent ; the American meadows faint !

3. Shadows of Prophecy shiver along by the lakes and the rivers, and mutter across the ocean. France, rend down thy dungeon; 4. Golden Spain, burst the barriers of old Borne; I. Cast thy keys, 0 Rome! into the deep down falling, even to eternity down falling; 6. And weep. 7. In her trembling hands she took the new-born terror howling; 8. On those infinite mountains of light now barred out by the Atlantic sea, the new-born fire stood before the starry King ! 9. Flag'd with grey-browed snows and thunderous visages, the jealous wings waved over the deep.

10. The speary hand burned aloft, unbuckled was the shield, forth went the hand of jealousy among the flaming hair, and hurled the new-born wonder thro' the starry night.

11. The fire, the fire is falling !

12. Look up ! look up ! 0 citizen of London, enlarge thy countenance! 0 Jew, leave counting gold! return to thy oil and wine ! 0 African! black African;! (go, winged thought, widen his forehead).

18. The fiery limbs, the flaming hair, shot like the sinking sun into the western sea.

14. Waked from his eternal sleep, the hoary element roaring fled away.

13. Down rushed, beating his wings in vain, the jealous King; his grey-browed councillors, thunderous warriors, curled veterans, among helms and shields, and chariots, horses, elephants ; banners, castles, slings and rocks; 16. Falling, rushing. ruining! buried in the rains, on Urthona's dens; 17. All night beneath the ruins, then their sullen flames faded emerge round the gloomy King.

18. With thunder and fire, leading his starry hosts thro' the waste wilderness, he promulgates his ten commands, glancing his beauty eyelids over the deep in dark dismay.

19. Where the son of fire in his eastern cloud, while the morning plumes her golden breast.

20. Spurning the clouds written with curses, stamps the stony law to dust, loosing the eternal horses from the dens of night, crying, Empire is no more ! and now the Hon and the wolf shall cease.

"CHORUS.

"Let the Priest of the Haven of dawn no longer in deadlyblack with hoarse note curse the sons of joy; Nor his accepted brethren, whom, tyrant, he calls free, lay the bound or build the roof; Nor pale religious letehery call that virginity that wishes but acts not;

"'For everything that lives is Holy.'

And so [adds Mr. Swinburne], as with fire and thunder= thunder of thought, and flames of fierce desire' is this Marriage of Heaven and Hell at length happily consummated ; the prophet, as a fervent paranymph, standing by to invoke upon the wedded pair his most unclerical benediction."

If any one can believe that this childish bombast has value, he may find almost any quantity of it in Blake's prophetic books, and a great deal more than we should have supposed possible extracted by Mr. Swinburne himself, with special commendation in this critical essay. We suppose some allowance must be made for a man who has plunged and dived in this sort of stuff for mere love of its incidental oases of poetic beauty, and of the wonderfui splendour of the mystical designs with which it is throughout illuminated and illustrated. But while yielding to none in our admiration of a few of Blake's lyrics and of his genius as a mystical painter, we entirely decline to believe in either the poetic beauty or moral wisdom of the weltering chaos of rhodomontade through the interpretation of a few main outlines of which we have painfully followed Mr. Swinburne.

For the truth is, that such philosophy as there really was in Blake, a philosophy which mainly consisted in the justification of impulse, sensuous and imaginative, and the vehement denunciation of under- standing, reason, conscience,—in a word, of the whole worldof reflec- tion lying between the impulses of the senses on the one hand, and the impulse3of religious emotion on the other,—is not a philosophy worth considering for a moment after it is understood. The ex- cuse for Blake is, that even if he were fundamentally sane, which is perhaps true, since he was in any case fundamentally noble, his curious hatred of all rational and moral restraints, of all intellectual laws and moral obligations, may be fairly ascribed to his having found a substitute, and something in many respects much higher than a substitute, for moral principles, in the ardours of his own spiritual life. A man who could truly live, as Blake truly told Mr. Butts in one of his letters, that he did live, may be excused a defective philosophy. "That I cannot live," he wrote to Mr. Butts, "without doing my duty to lay up treasure in heaven is certain and determined, and to this I have long made up my mind. And why should this be made an objection to me, while drunkenness, lewdness, gluttony, and even idleness itself do not hurt other men, let Satan himself explain. The thing I have most at heart, more than life, or all that seems to make life comfortable without, is the interest of true religion and science. And whenever anything appears to affect that interest. (especially if I myself omit any duty to my station as a soldier of Christ) it gives me the greatest of torments." A man who could live in strict accordance with what he thus wrote may be excused a fundamentally false philosophy. Blake had no genius for philosophy. He was a man in whom noble but impatient and. imperious impulses took the place of thought and meditation, and what we usually call conscience. And his vehement vindication of all sorts of impulse, both sensual and spiritual, was, as Mr. Swinburne says, only one way of expressing his profound. conviction of the identity of spirit and body, his deep faith that the senses feed the spirit, and that the spirit lives in the senses of man, a faith without which the bodily life of man would have seemed to him impure, and the spiritual life of man would have seemed to him unreal. Still, say what you will for Blake himself, his violent hatred of all the rational and reflective faculties of the mind was bad philosophy ; and to any one but himself would have been worse morality. His great doc- trine, "Damn braces, bless relaxes," was harmless in him, but, both foolish and mischievous as an evangel to the world at large, and not dangerous only because Blake's whole prophetic mind was too grotesquely childish to win disciples. Even in Mr. Swin- burne's expositions, Blake's innocent antinomianism becomes revolting, because Mr. Swinburne, whenever he gets hold of an impropriety, makes as much clutter over it, flapping his wings with as much excitement, as a hen over a new-laid egg. For example, in the note on Blake's quotation from Aphra Behn, Mr. Swinburne fixes our attention on Blake's innocent, because un- conscious, worship of sensual impulse, till lie transmutes what is a mere vehement wilfulness of belief into a shamelessness of soul. Blake's grotesque hatred of ordinary morality never becomes shock- ing till it is rendered by Mr. Swinburne.

Mr. Swinburne's great power of description,—which is some- times, however, spoilt by a want of self-restraint, till the brilliant adjectives cloy like an excess of sugar,—has given a great deal of power and beauty to various pages of this book. At times he is affected, indeed ; at times he annoys us with that horrible strut of his style which marks when he is congratulating himself on his glorious words,—and at times, which is more foolish, but far less disagreeable, he indulges in what he calls "the subtle humour of scandalizing," i.e., writes passages entirely destitute of any drift, and wholly foreign even to his own opinions, solely for the sake of giving offence to the world at large,—as, for example, the silly panegyric on the coarse murderer Wainwright. But, on the whole, for a writer who scarcely knows what simplicity of nature means, and who has unfortunately to criticize one of the most simple of the sons of men, he loses himself more in his subject than we could have expected, and his own great genius in pictorial language adds almost as much brilliance of effect to the book as the exceedingly beautiful coloured designs of Blake's with which the volume is enriched. As an instance of power and beauty of style, —with, perhaps, a tinge too much of over-colour,—but still power and beauty such as few men except Mr. Swinburne can command in prose, take the following :— "There is in all these straying songs the freshness of clear wind and purity of blowing rain : here a perfume as of dew or grass against the sun, there a keener smell of sprinkled shingle and brine-bleached sand ; some growth or breath everywhere of blade or herb leaping into life under the green wet light of spring; some colour of shapely cloud or mound of moulded wave. The verse pauses and musters and falls always as a wave does, with the same patience of gathering form, and rounded glory of springing curve, and sharp sweet flash of dishevelled and flickering foam as it curls over, showing the sun through its soft heaving side in veins of gold that inscribe and jewels of green that inlay the quivering and sundering skirt or veil of thinner water, throwing upon the tremulous space of narrowing sea in front, like a reflection of lifted and vibrating hair, the windy shadow of its shaken spray. The actual page seems to take life, to assume sound and colour, under the hands that turn it and the lips that read ; we feel the falling of dew and have sight of the rising of stars. For the very sound of Blake's verse is no leas remote from the sound of common things and days on earth than is the sense or the sentiment of it.

0 what land Is the land of dreams ?

What are its Mountains and what are its streams ?

—0 father, I Raw my mother there, Among the lilies by waters fair.

"—Dear child, I also by pleasant streams Have wandered all night in the land of dreams ; But though calm and warm the waters wide I could not get to the other side.'

We may say of Blake that he never got back from that other side—only came and stood sometimes, as Chapman said of Marlowe in his groat plain fashion of verse, 'up to the chin in that Pierian flood,' and so sang halfway across the water."

On the whole, this volume is a real addition to the knowledge of Blake's great genius as an artist. Some of the illustrations,—

particularly the tender and sweet fancy taken from the book of Thel, of the marriage of the dewdrop and the raindrop, and the strange frontispiece in which the crescent moon, like the mystic eye of God, looks down upon Blake's three great enemies, the representatives of inductive reason (Bacon, Newton, and Locke), with a weird expression of intellectual scorn and penetrating insight,—will fascinate even those who prefer a more intelligible style of art. Mr. Swinburne,—though, with something of the feeling of a discoverer, he attaches far more importance than it deserves to Blake's prophetic rhodomontade,—has profoundly

istudied his subject. Impertinent and shallow though he often is, —though he too often manages to cast a sense of impurity on Blake which Blake would never produce for himself,—he yet interprets Blake subtly on the whole, and with more of sincere

disinterestedness of admiration, than he has hitherto bestowed in print on any other poet.