OTHER BOOKS

Kidnapping Blake

By W. W. ROI3SON

THE bicentenary of William Blake's birth finds him not yet established as an academic classic; the 'English' student, obliged to make at least a show of wrestling with the 'thought' of Paradise Lost, is not at present requested to per- form the same feat with Jerusalem or The Four Zoos. But the process of canonisation is well under way, as the dust-jacket of Professor Pinto's volume* reminds us: `Each of these essays is an important contribution to Blake scholarship.' Blake scholarship is industrious; and those who love Blake have therefore a duty to look into the results of this industry, and to ask whether it is being applied in a spirit likely to promote the understanding and valuing of the Blake who matters.

Professor Pinto's volume, I am afraid, does little but confirm one's misgivings. It is edited `for the Blake Bicentenary Committee,' which has a reassuring sound (though we are not told who the committee are or who appointed them). And its contributors include some distinguished names. But it is emphatically not a book to recommend to the reader who has been struck by the short poems of Blake he has come across and wants some guidance through Blake's work as a whole. It has the appearance of a paste-up of scholarly oddments. True, it contains some respectable essays, for example Professor Pinto's own contribution, and Mr. H. M. Margoliouth's study of Blake's drawings for the Night Thoughts. But both of these are merely expansions of ar- ticles that have appeared elsewhere. More typical of the collection are the essays on Milton and Jerusalem: exegetic commentaries which con- stantly assumes the identity between what Blake may be thought to have attempted and what he actually did.

The dreariness of the book as a whole is a disappointment. But the longest contribution and the one that is given pride of place is not only disappointing but alarming—the more so since it represents a trend in the study of Blake which is becoming influential. I refer to Miss Kathleen Raine's substantial essay on `The Little Girl Lost and Found' and 'The Lapsed Soul.' Miss Raine's avowed aim is to show that Blake was essentially an esoteric, hierophantic, Gnostic poet; his poetry is proved to be as literary, as abstruse, as occultist as some of Yeats's or Mallarmes. It is this notion of poetry which inspires his (alleged) dealings in Plotinus, Porphyry and such. Above all, his preoccupations are other-worldly. And she finds support for her view of Blake not only, or mainly, in the eccentric poetry of the Prophetic Books, but in earlier short poems which for most of us are the least equivocal demon- stration of his genius as a poet. Her aim in itself I think regrettable. It does not strengthen the claim for Blake to find in deliberate esotericism the reason for his obscurity; for his pathetic failures in communication; and, finally, for the lurid, tragic disasters of the Prophetic Books. Surely it •is not so hard to explain, in a more natural way, the so obvious carelessness, the im- patience, the ellipses, the solemn rigmaroles of Blake's later poetry. They are there because poor Blake was isolated, because he knew he had a wisdom to offer, but knew also and bitterly that there was no one to listen to it : What is the price of Experience? Do men buy it for a song?

Or wisdom for a dance in the street? No, it is bought with the price Of all that a man hath, his house, his wife, his children.

Wisdom is sold in the desolate market where none come to buy,

And in the wither'd field where the farmer plows for bread in vain.

Miss Raine's efforts to show that Blake was not `an isolated crank' with a home-made philosophy can only succeed in making him seem more of a crank than ever, one with an esoteric, derivative, literary philosophy instead. This seems to me an undesirable enterprise. So I am relieved to discover that she had done nothing, in the essay published here, to justify her importation of bizarre meanings into fartioiliar poems of Blake. This is not merely a matter of one 013'n' o against another. Nor is it merely a case of °hie t. ing, on both intellectual and emotional growl's, to the Jungian assumptions which lie behind her treatment of these poems. For Miss Raine 0.0ts not only a way of reading them, but factual evl dente that hers is the right way. That evidence' then, must be carefully scrutinised. Etlake's two poems 'The Little Girl Lose and `The Little Girl Found' are on the face of poems for children. They were originally included in the Songs of Innocence. They appear to bc lovely, imaginative, but none the less lucid an

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simple renderings of the prophet's vision of sinless world, where the wolf lies down with the lamb and all is gentleness, peace and goodne(' If 'parallels' are required, they might be fours, in poems like Hogg's Kilmeny; or if `sources. one would point to some famous and beaut'; passages from the Book of Isaiah. However, Ile this is not all that need be said about thein is suggested by Blake's later transference of them from the Songs of Innocence to the Songs °I Experience. And we know that such apparendf simple poems may turn out to have unsuspeelej depths of meaning. But have they the meaning which Miss Ra lic reads into them? She explains them, with Ie, tailed and learned commentary, as an elaborajt neo-Platonic interpretation of the myth °f Demeter and Persephone (pp. 40-41). 'The seed of the two poems takes up the theme 0,r tbGreater Mysteries, in which were celebrated the Great Mother's search for her lost daughter. • The wanderings of Lyca's parents is [sic] bu paraphrase of the myth.' The literal-minded nliEbt object that Blake mentions two parents. Nil° Raine replies : 'It is strikingly evident that onli the mother counts. In the first of the pOems father is not even mentioned, and he plays on a passive role in the second.' (And anY93' `Demeter did not travel alone; she was accent' panied by Dionysus.') This is typical of 1.145 Raine's ingenious method. Then, she ma Is proofs of the influence of the myth out of sue observations • as these: `The mother's grief , is stressed in "The Little Girl Found." ' Sur any description of a sad mother seeking for • daughter will have some resemblance to traditional account of Demeter. It is pre( reminiscences that are wanted, and these are la ing in the stanzas quoted by Miss Raine• the. resemblances she finds are of that gene kind. They prove nothing.

Miss Raine makes much of the little girl's nal Lyca. She derives it from the Greek ?'E'' `white,' and discourses on the symbolism, fot in Plato and elsewhere, of the soul (Lyca, in interpretation) as the 'light' of the body. I there is no reason to think that Blake bet learning Greek before he went to Felpham. anyway `Lyca' is not a correct anglicisation Xandi.

Where Blake got the name Lyca I do not knI Miss Raine, searching through Porphyry Virgil, does not stop to note that it occurs another poem of Blake's, the 'Song 2nd b) Young Shepherd,' apparently an early draft the famous 'Laughing Song.' (Incidentally, Geoffrey Keynes seems to have made a mist;

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* The DIVINE VISION. STUDIES IN THE POETRY ART OF WILLIAM BLAKE. Edited by Vivian de S Pinto. (Gollancz, 25s.)

t THE COMPLETE WRITINGS OF WILLIAM BL With all the variant readings. Edited by Geofl Keynes. (Nonesuch Press. 63s.) SYMBOL AND IMAGE IN WILLIAM BLAKE. By GO Wingfield Digby. (Oxford, 35s.) 1' nit

gf, (el such Press of Blake's complete writings.t He gives is (211 P. 63—as in the old Nonesuch edition, P. 65—with the superscription 'Composed about 1/87.' But according to his own statement in Notes and Queries, II.S.II, September 24, 1910, it is found in a copy of Poetical Sketches inscribed 'from Mrs. Flaxman May 15 1784.') Miss Raine, striving to establish her interpre- tation, has again and again to make heavy Weather of the most straightforward lines in these Pet,,. Ins. Consider her extensive commentary (FP. 31 ff.) on Lyca's simple words :

How can Lyca sleep If her mother weep?

If my mother sleep, Lyca shall not weep.

`Peorrthyry at length describes the intense desire o the "moist" souls to descend, as Lyca wishes to descend, into generation. . . . If the story 0, ere simply that of a lost little girl being sought Y her parents [Lyca's words] would be non- sensical; no mother would refuse sleep to her for child; and no child would give as a reason lor her inability to sleep her mother's vigilance. [Therefore] Blake's story is myth pure and 11.1Ple.' There follows a long interpretation of LYea's desire to descend into the dream-world of bodily existence.'

But Lyca's statement, taken straightforwardly, Is not at all 'nonsensical.' She is worried about her Mother's anxiety; if her mother has not dis- covered she is missing It • Lyca shall not weep.

IS 'Pure and simple' without bringing in 'myth' at all.

The most amazing example of misplaced in-

genuity occtirs on p. 43, where Lyca's age (seven) and the seven days and nights during which her parents sought her are said to show that Blake was thinking of the episode (in Ovid's Metamor- phoses) of Persephone's eating the seven seeds

of a pomegranate!

A puzzling point, which Miss Raine makes much of to support her case, is the discrepancy between the poem of 'The Little Girl Lost' and Blake's first illustration. In the poem Lyca is a child of seven, but the illustration shows a man embracing a young woman. (Miss Raine is con- fused on p. 30 about the two illustrations; it is

the second illustration which shows Lyca half- reclining under a tree.) Here Professor Foster Damon's conjecture is attractive : that the first illustration was really meant to go with another and very different poem, 'A [not 'The'] Little Girl Lost.' Usually Blake illustrates the literal meaning of the songs. It would seem that, unless Damon is right, the illustration is merely decora-

tive.

Miss Raine is so insistent that Blake ought to have meant what she wants him to mean that she even says (p. 47) that the poem 'fails' because he has not 'completely integrated' his neo-Platonic material! And, finally, why does Miss Raine ignore 'The Little Boy Lost' and 'The Little Boy Found' poems which seem obviously comple- mentary? Is it because she could not give them a nco-Platonic meaning?

Miss Raine may be right to claim, in her dis- cussion of 'Hear the voice of the Bard,' that

Blake was influenced by Thomas Taylor's trans- lation of The Five Books of Plotinus. But when does that influence appear in his poetry? Miss Raine (p. 51) says it appears as early as the Songs of Experience, and thinks that the phrase 'the lapsed soul' used by Blake in the introductory poem 'Hear the voice of the Bard' was derived from Taylor's 'lapse of the soul,' a phrase used in his translation of Plotinus. But Taylor's Five Books of Plotinus appeared in 1794; and 'Hear thc voice of the Bard' had been engraved by October, 1793 (i.e. it was written before then). All the Plotinus parallels given by Miss Raine on pp. 52 ff. are, therefore, irrelevant.

Miss Raine's analysis of this poem is contra- dictory. On p. 52 she misconstrues the second stanza : what is 'Calling' is not the 'Bard'

(imagination) but the 'Holy Word' (God); there has to be something, grammatically, for the Bard's 'ears' to 'have heard.' But on p. 56 she implies (rightly) that it is the Holy Word That walk'd among the ancient trees who is Calling the lapsed Soul And weeping in the evening dew.

What matters most, however, is that it is going against the spirit of Blake to say, as Miss Raine does (p. 58), that the 'Holy Word' of this poem is not 'Starry Jealousy'—the jealous, hypocriti- cal Jehovah of the Old Testament; that they are contrasted. With the 'Holy Word' compare the 'holy book' in 'A Litle Girl Lost' : But his [the father's] loving look Like the holy book, All her tender limbs with terror shook.

I conclude, then, that Miss Raine has not made out her case about these poems. What troubles me is is not her factual inaccuracies (though her essay contains a good many), but her critical approach, her attitude towards Blake. She seems oddly out of sympathy with his emotional and

moral purposes; at least, with those of the Blake of Songs of Experience.

Mr. Wingfield Digby's learned study of Blake's pictorial arts is worth having for its excellent

plates alone; but it is inevitably rather specialised. My advice to the interested non-specialist is to read the admirable and thoroughly sensible intro- duction and commentary written by Mr. F. W. Bateson for his Selected Poems of William Blake (Heinemann, 9s. 6d.). Here better reasons than Miss Raine's are set forth for not dismissing Blake as 'an isolated crank.' Mr. Bateson is not, however, it must be admitted, a member of the Blake Bicentenary Committee.