But perhaps the soundest testimony to the effectiveness of the Anatomy is the praise of that great melancholic Samuel Johnson, the only man to improve on Burton (“What is a ship but a prison?” Anatomy, 2.3.4; “No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned,” Boswell’s Life, 16 March 1759).
Burton ends his stupendous work with the excellent advice: “Be not solitary; be not idle.” This is a great direction, says Johnson, but he would modify it thus: “If you are idle, be not solitary; if you are solitary, be not idle.” There are many sufferers from melancholy who swear by the truth of that, and innumerable readers throughout nearly four centuries who agree with Johnson that “there is a great spirit and great power in what Burton says.”
Nor would we wish the book a sentence shorter, or be without one of the thousands of anecdotes and quotations. This is one of the indispensable books; for my money, it is the best of all.
THE ESSAY WAS FIRST PUBLISHED AS THE INTRODUCTION TO THE FOLIO SOCIETY EDITION OF ROBERT BURTON’S THE ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY (2005).
I find Post-it notes indispensable. They really came into their own when I was preparing to write about this book. The pages of my paperback copy bristle with so many little yellow stickers that its thickness is almost doubled, and it wasn’t a slender book to start with.
Soft Beulah’s Night
WILLIAM BLAKE AND VISION
On the influence and power of a poet who has inspired and intoxicated me for fifty years
Sometimes we find a poet, or a painter, or a musician who functions like a key that unlocks a part of ourselves we never knew was there. The experience is not like learning to appreciate something that we once found difficult or rebarbative, as we might conscientiously try to appreciate the worth of The Faerie Queene and decide that yes, on balance, it is full of interesting and admirable things. It’s a more visceral, physical sensation than that, and it comes most powerfully when we’re young. Something awakes that was asleep, doors open that were closed, lights come on in all the windows of a palace inside us, the existence of which we never suspected.
So it was with me in the early 1960s, at the age of sixteen, with William Blake. I came to Blake through Allen Ginsberg, whose Howl I read half aghast, half intoxicated. I knew who Blake was; I even had an early poem of his by heart (“How Sweet I Roam’d from Field to Field”); I must have come across “The Tyger” in some school anthology. But if Blake could inspire the sort of hellish rapture celebrated and howled about by Ginsberg, then he was the sort of poet I needed to read. Hellish rapture was exactly what I most wanted.
Accordingly, I searched for Blake in the nearest bookshop, which was W. H. Smith in Barmouth, in what used to be called Merionethshire. There was no Blake there. The local library didn’t help, either. It wasn’t until I went to London on a rare holiday visit that I found a Selected Blake in a small American paperback, edited by Ruthven Todd and published by Dell in their Laurel poetry series. If I’d bought it in the United States it would have cost 35 cents; I can’t remember what I paid for it in Foyles, but it must have been well under a pound.
It’s on the table next to me now, battered, the cover coming apart, the cheap paper flimsy and yellowing. It’s the most precious book I have. A couple of years later I acquired, as a school prize, Geoffrey Keynes’s Nonesuch Press Complete Prose and Poetry of William Blake, a handsome hardback now almost as battered, almost as yellowed, almost as precious. But I could put the Dell Blake in my pocket, and for years I did.
Thanks to those books, and thanks to my encounter with Ginsberg, and thanks further back to the enlightened local education authority that sent a library van around to the secondary schools in Merionethshire so that I could choose from their shelves the anthology (Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry 1945–1960: still in print, still irreplaceable) that contained Howl—thanks to those things, I discovered what I believed in. My mind and my body reacted to certain lines from the Songs of Innocence and of Experience, from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, from “Auguries of Innocence,” from Europe, from America with joyful immediacy. What these things meant I didn’t quite know then, and I’m not sure I fully know now. There was no sober period of reflection, consideration, comparison, analysis: I didn’t have to work anything out. I knew they were true in the way I knew that I was alive. I had stumbled into a country in which I was not a stranger, whose language I spoke by instinct, whose habits and customs fitted me like my own skin.
That was fifty years ago. My opinions about many things have come and gone, changed and changed about, since then; I have believed in God, and then disbelieved; I have thought that certain writers and poets were incomparably great, and gradually found them less and less interesting, and finally commonplace; and the reverse has happened too—I have found wonderful things, unexpected depths of treasure, in books and poems I had no patience to read properly before.
But those first impulses of certainty about William Blake have never forsaken me, though I may have been untrue to them from time to time. Indeed, they have been joined by others, and I expect to go on reading Blake, and learning more, for as long as I live.
One such impulse of certainty concerns the nature of the world. Is it twofold, consisting of matter and spirit, or is it all one thing? Is dualism wrong, and if so, how do we account for consciousness? In the opening passage to Europe: A Prophecy, Blake recounts how he says to a fairy, “Tell me, what is the material world, and is it dead?” In response the fairy promises to “shew you all alive / The world, where every particle of dust breathes forth its joy.” This is close to the philosophical position known as panpsychism, or the belief that everything is conscious, which has been argued back and forth for thousands of years. Unless we deny that consciousness exists at all, it seems that we have to believe either in a thing called “spirit” that does the consciousness, or that consciousness somehow emerges when matter reaches the sort of complexity we find in the human brain. Another possibility, which is what Blake’s fairy is describing here, is that matter is conscious itself.
But why shouldn’t it be? Why shouldn’t consciousness be a normal property of matter, like mass? Let every particle of dust breathe forth its joy. I don’t argue this; I perceive it.
Things that are living, whose bodies however small pulse with that same energy, are capable of even more joy than the particle of dust:
How do you know but ev’ry Bird that cuts the airy way,
Is an immense world of delight, clos’d by your senses five?
(THE MARRIAGE OF HEAVEN AND HELL)
That perception carries a moral charge, which is most clearly expressed in “Auguries of Innocence,” a poem not published during Blake’s lifetime. I think it is one of the greatest political poems in the language, for the way it insists on the right to life and freedom without qualification, uniting large things and small, and showing the moral connections between them:
A Robin Redbreast in a Cage
Puts all Heaven in a Rage.
A dove house fill’d with doves and pigeons
Shudders Hell thro’ all its regions.
A dog starv’d at his Master’s Gate
Predicts the ruin of the State.
Each outcry of the hunted Hare
A fibre from the Brain does tear.
The wanton Boy that kills the Fly
Shall feel the Spider’s enmity.
Each couplet is a hammer blow in the cause of a justice that includes all creatures, and tells the truth about power:
Nought can deform the Human Race
Like to the Armour’s iron brace.
This is not a matter of arguing so much as of perceiving. It’s a matter of vision. And when it comes to vision, we need to be able to see contrary things and believe them both true: “Without Contrar
ies is no progression” (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell), despite the scorn of rationalists whose single vision rejects anything that is not logically coherent.
Blake was hard on single vision:
Now I a fourfold vision see
And a fourfold vision is given to me;
Tis fourfold in my supreme delight
And threefold in soft Beulah’s night
And twofold Always. May God us keep
From Single vision and Newton’s sleep!
(“LETTER TO THOMAS BUTTS”)
Fourfold vision is a state of ecstatic or mystical bliss.
Threefold vision arises naturally from Beulah, which, in Blake’s mythology, is the place of poetic inspiration and dreams, “where Contrarieties are equally True” (Blake, Milton).
Twofold vision is seeing not only with the eye, but through it, seeing contexts, associations, emotional meanings, connections.
Single vision is the literal, rational, dissociated, uninflected view of the world, characteristic—apparently—of the left hemisphere of the brain when the contextualising, empathetic, imaginative, emotionally involved right brain is disengaged or ignored. (I owe this observation to Roderick Tweedy’s remarkable The God of the Left Hemisphere (2012), and through that to Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary (2009), a profound examination of the differences between the left hemisphere of the brain and the right.)
I believe this too. Single vision is deadly. Those who exalt reason over every other faculty, or who maintain that other ways of seeing (the imaginative, the poetic, etc.) are fine in their place but the scientific is the only true one, find this position ridiculous. But no symphony, no painting, no poem, no art at all was ever reasoned into existence, and I knew from my youth that art of some kind was going to be the preoccupation of my life. Single vision would not do. “I will not Reason & Compare: my business is to Create” (Blake, “Jerusalem”).
If I didn’t know that from experience when I was young, I know it now. We find the truth of it most forcibly when twofold or threefold vision fails, and we fall into the state described by that great Blakeian W. B. Yeats as “the will trying to do the work of the imagination.” It’s a condition, I dare say, in which most writers and artists have found themselves marooned from time to time. To get lost in that bleak state when inspiration fails is to find yourself only a step away from an even darker labyrinth, which goes by the entirely inadequate name of depression.
A savage deadly heaviness, a desolation of the spirits, an evil gnawing at the very roots of our life: if we’re unlucky enough to feel that, we will know from experience that the opposite of that abominable condition is not happiness, but energy. “Energy is the only life, and is from the Body; and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy. Energy is Eternal Delight” (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell).
Blake’s equation (Energy = Eternal Delight) is as profound and important as Einstein’s E = MC2. In the absence of energy, goodness, intellect, beauty—and reason too—are listless, useless phantoms pining for the blood of life. When I had the misfortune to fall under the oppression of melancholia (another inadequate word), one of the things to which I owed my escape was an edition of the letters of Bernard Shaw, where I found energy abounding. I have loved him ever since.
With twofold vision it’s possible to see how contrary things could be believed. With threefold vision, with the inspiration that comes from the unconscious, from Beulah, it’s possible to believe them. I have found over many years that my way of writing a story, from what used to be called the position of the omniscient narrator, allows me a freedom that writing in the first person doesn’t permit. It means the telling voice can inhabit a multitude of different imaginative states. The voice that tells my stories is not that of a person like myself, but that of a being who is credulous and sceptical simultaneously, who is both male and female, sentimental and cynical, old and young, hopeful and fearful. It knows what has happened and what will happen, and it remains in pure ignorance of both. With all the passion in its heart it believes contrary things: it is equally overawed by science and by magic. To this being, logic and reason are pretty toys to play with, and invaluable tools to improve the construction of the castles and grottoes it creates in the air. It scoffs at ghosts, and fears them dreadfully, and loves to call them up at midnight, and then laughs at them. It knows that everything it does is folly, and loves it all the same.
And thanks to the genius of William Blake, it knows that “All deities reside in the human breast,” and that “Eternity is in love with the productions of time” (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell). And it thinks that those things are worth knowing.
THIS ESSAY FIRST APPEARED IN THE GUARDIAN, 26 JANUARY 2015, TO COINCIDE WITH THE EXHIBITION WILLIAM BLAKE: APPRENTICE & MASTER, AT THE ASHMOLEAN MUSEUM, OXFORD (4 DECEMBER 2014 TO 1 MARCH 2015).
One test of poetry—not the only one by any means, but a good one all the same—is memorability. Blake’s lyrics, especially those in Songs of Innocence and of Experience, pass that test triumphantly. Has anything so simple and so profound been said so unforgettably as “The Sick Rose”?
Oh Rose, thou art sick!
The invisible worm
That flies in the night
In the howling storm,
Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy,
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.
I once had a student who translated that into Dutch. It seemed to go perfectly, almost word for word.
Writing Fantasy Realistically
FANTASY, REALISM AND FAITH
The view that fantasy is a load of old cobblers—unless it serves the purposes of realism
Thank you for inviting me here, and thank you for demonstrating my favourite virtue. The most important virtue is Charity, of course; but the one whose company I most enjoy is Hope. Clearly, in asking me to speak to a conference about religion, you’re hoping that I shall have something relevant to say. Well, I hope so too, of course, but in my case the hope is tempered by experience, whereas yours is still fresh, vigorous, undamaged. I shall try not to damage it too much.
The title of this conference—“Faith and Fantasy”—refers to the third great Christian virtue. Well, here comes the first disappointment: I have to tell you that although I know something about fantasy, and a little about charity and hope, I know almost nothing about faith. I can tell you neither how to get it, nor what it feels like, once got. So I’ve been looking for something to say which (a) doesn’t repeat too much of what I’ve said before; and (b) has at least something to do with your subject; and (c) won’t tread too heavily on what I’ve got in mind to write next. If I talk about the things I’m supposed to be writing about, they disappear. Talking about things I’ve already written about is much safer.
And while I was thinking about what I could say in this talk, it was very helpful to read what Don Cupitt—the noted scholar of Christian theology and philosopher of religion—has had to say about stories and the part they play in helping us to understand the otherwise formless flow of life. Even when he’s chiding me for clinging to the apparatus of supernaturalism, what he has to say is worth attending to.
But it’s not just any sort of story that features in the title of your conference: it’s fantasy. And the thing that bothers me is that I don’t much care for fantasy. I’ve got into trouble for saying this; apparently, since what I write is labelled fantasy, I should be a champion of it. But I didn’t begin to write fantasy because I was a great reader of it, a lifelong fan of orcs and elves and made-up languages. In fact, if you’re a devotee of the works of J. R. R. Tolkien, I should warn you that I have some stern things to say about The Lord of the Rings later on. In my own case, I began writing His Dark Materials hesitantly, doubtfully, and it was a surprise, not altogether a flattering one, to f
ind that my imagination was liberated when it found itself in a world where people have personal dæmons, and polar bears make armour, and spies three inches tall ride on dragonflies.
But liberated was exactly what it was. In fact (and it embarrasses me to admit it), I even felt that in some odd way I had come home. This was where I was connected with all the things that gave me strength; where the air I breathed was full of the scents I recognised and relished, where my feet were on soil where the bones of my ancestors were laid, and where the language I heard around me was the language I thought and spoke and dreamed in, and where manners and customs were familiar—you know everything I mean when I say the word home; well, this world was home, in a way that no other world that I’ve written about has ever been—not even late-nineteenth-century London, which I know pretty well. It was more than home, actually. This caused me a great deal of surprise, as I say, and I felt taken aback. Embarrassed.
Embarrassment is often a sign that something important is happening: some revelation is taking place. For those of us with white skins, the revelation of a blush is signalled with red, the most alarming of colours. Darwin was fascinated by that: “Blushing,” he said, “is the most peculiar and the most human of all expressions.” He believed that it has a social function, that it signals to other people that the individual who blushes is not to be trusted, because he or she has violated the mores of the group, or has even committed some crime.
Now I was embarrassed to discover that I felt so much at home writing fantasy, because I’d previously thought that fantasy was a low kind of thing, a genre of limited interest and small potential. I had thought (and I do still think) that the most powerful, the most profound, the greatest novels I’d read were examples of realism, not of fantasy.
Take a supreme example of literary realism: George Eliot’s Middlemarch, a great novel in which nothing in the slightest degree fantastical even flickers into existence. Everything that happens in Middlemarch could happen in real life, and what gives it a great deal of its power is the recognition of the similarities between the situations the author describes and the experiences we ourselves have lived through. I used to teach a course on Victorian fiction to student teachers, and the younger ones found Middlemarch pretty hard going; but the mature students, often women in their thirties and forties whose children were now at school, and who were able to come back into education themselves for the first time for twenty years or more, revelled in the book for what it showed them about the things that, by now, they’d had time to learn about: marriage, and incompatibility, and disappointment, and compromise, and just getting on with things, and thwarted ambition, and passionate hope, and tenderness, and so on. They enjoyed the book because of what they recognised: it was realistic, it was like reality. The writers we call the greatest of all—Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Proust, George Eliot herself—are those who have created the most lifelike simulacra of real human beings in real human situations. In fact, the more profound and powerful the imagination, the closer to reality are the forms it dreams up. Not the most unlike real things, but the most like.
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