The Portable Blake

by William Blake

  These are some of the poem’s details, but they are not the poem. For the poem is to be grasped only by the moral imagination, as a shuddering vision of the mind. The title is a city, as the city is the present human world on the threshold of the industrial revolution. We are to read from the title to the last word, from London to its inner death, in one movement of human sympathy and arousal. This, in its simplest sense, is the key to Blake’s meaning of vision. Vision is his master-word, not mysticism or soul. For vision represents the total imagination of man made tangible and direct in works of art. And as the metric structure of the poem encloses, in each line-frame of sharply enclosed syllables, the sight of man entering fully into the city with all his being—hearing “the mind-forg’d manacles,” the harlot’s disease blasting “the new born infant’s tear,” so the whole poem carries us along, in a single page, while the border designs meanwhile extend the vision by another art.

  Blake was artist and poet; he designed his poems to form a single picture. Trained to engraving as a boy, he invented for himself a method of etching a hand-printed poem and an accompanying design on the same page. Only two of his works were ever printed—his first book, Poetical Sketches, most of which he wrote between the ages of twelve and twenty-one, and a long and declamatory celebration of the new world after ’89 called The French Revolution. Neither of these works was ever published. Poetical Sketches was run off for him, with a patronizing and apologetic preface by a Reverend Mathew, who with his wife formed a provincial intellectual society that Blake burlesqued in An Island In The Moon. The French Revolution was printed by a bookseller, Joseph Johnson, who was the center of a radical circle in London that included Blake, William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Thomas Paine. After England became embroiled with France and a reactionary witch-hunt set after radical intellectuals and sympathizers with the French Republic, Johnson became panicky and left the book in proof. Some of Blake’s greatest poems—“The Everlasting Gospel,” “Auguries of Innocence,” the lyrics that follow Songs of Innocence and of Experience—were found in “The Rossetti Manuscript,” which was bought by Dante Gabriel Rossetti for ten shillings from an attendant at the British Museum. Blake’s most famous works, Songs of Innocence and of Experience and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, along with his Prophetic Books—The Book of Thel, Visions of the Daughters of Albion, America, Europe, The Book of Urizen, Milton, Jerusalem, etc.—were done entirely by his method of “illuminated printing.” Blake said he got the inspiration for this technique from the spirit of his dead brother Robert, the only member of his family with whom he had common sympathies. This may be true, but it is a pity that Blake had to say so, for it has given people the idea ever since that Blake’s visions were of the kind limited to a séance.

  Blake’s general technique is now clear. He etched his poems and designs in relief, with acid on copper. He corroded with acid the unused portions of the plate—characteristically, this became a symbol in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell of the corrosion of dead matter by the visionary human imagination. Each print-page as it was taken off the press was colored by hand. Each copy of a work was planned in a different color scheme. There are probably no handmade books in the world more beautiful. The only models for Blake were, of course, the illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages. But Blake worked in an entirely different spirit. The medieval manuscripts, impressive as they are, remain . pictorial and remote; they were created by copyists, ornamentalists and pious scribes who worked in a liturgical spirit. Blake’s designs are the accessories of a single creative idea. His conception of the beautiful book, as Laurence Binyon said, was one of a complete unity, “in which the lettering, the decoration, the illustrations, the proportions of the page, the choice of paper, surpassed even the conceptions of the medieval scribes and miniaturists.” Yet Blake was not aiming at a “beautiful book” for its own sake, or at the kind of isolated luxury product which we usually associate with book illustration by a master artist. To him all the arts were simultaneously necessary, in their highest creative use and inner proportion, to give us the ground essence of his vision and a stimulus to our own. What was most important to him was that he should get all his vision down, through all the arts open to him, in work done entirely in his own person.

  Blake’s search for unity began in his own hands, with his sense of craft. The symbolic synthesis to be created by his imagination was an image of man pressing, with the full power of his aroused creativity, against the walls of natural appearances. Each page of “illuminated printing” for him was a little world, in which the structure of the poem, the designs on the border, the accompanying figures on the page, the tints of the color, the rhythm of the lettering, were joined together into the supreme metaphor.

  The attempt to model some ideal unity in a single work is not unique in itself—it is the symbolic function of traditional religious art, and is to be found in the outer and inner architecture of the cathedrals, the structure of The Divine Comedy, and crucifonnly printed poems of George Herbert. What is different in Blake is that he is not modeling after any symbols but his own. The symbols always have an inner relatedness that leads us from the outer world to the inner man. The symbols live in the ordered existence of his vision; the vision itself is entirely personal, in theme and in the logic, that sustains it. What is before us, in one of his pages, has been created entirely by him in every sense, and the unimpeachable quality of his genius is shown in an order that is as great as his independence, and shows us how real both were. The characteristic of his genius is to lift his unexpected symbols for the inner world of the imagination into a world in which they stand apart from the natural world and defy it. When he designs illustrations to Gray’s poems, the magnitude of his vision throws the lines he is illustrating off the page. But what impresses us in their magnitude is not their physical size, but the uncanny spiritual coherence which joins them together and gives them an effect of absolute force. Blake could never “illustrate” another man’s work, even though it was pretty much the only way by which he could earn a living. Even if he respected the other man’s work, as he did Milton and Dante, he created new conceptions of their subject in his own designs. When he did his twenty-one engravings to the Book of Job, he reversed the pious maxims of the Bible story to show a man destroyed by his own materialism and self-righteousness. Fortunately, he did not set his Job designs against a page reproduced from the Bible; he selected passages, and wrote new ones, and put both into the scroll-work of his border designs. His vision of Job is entirely his own work, as the Job is indeed the greatest of his “Prophetic Books.” Where the words were created by him, as in his poems, the love of the word to the design is only one revelation of man’s will to wed the contraries—like the marriage of Heaven and Hell. Blake’s conception of union and of the infiniteness of union has no physical status. For him infinity is in man’s passions and his will to know; it is a state of being.

  Yet what has been designed is bound, much as Blake disliked all limits. So he carried the force and delicacy of his longing for the infinite into the subtle inwardness of everything he drew. In Songs of Innocence and of Experience, he designed his poems in such a way that the words on the line seem to grow like flowerheads out of a thicket. Each hand-printed letter of script, each vine trailing a border between the lines, each moving figure above, beside, and below the page mounts and unites to form some visible representation of the inner life of man—seen in phases of the outward nature. Yet Blake was not seeking to represent nature; he used it as a book of symbols. When he put down something “natural” and visible on his page—a bramble, a tree, a leaf, a figure moving mysteriously in its symbolic space—the effort seemed to dissolve his need to believe in its separate existence. The acid of the designer’s imagination burned away the materials on which it worked. What he represented, for purposes of spiritual vision and imagery, dissolved its own exterior naturalness for him. The natural forms—from the arch of the sky to the stolid heroic figures he liked to draw�
��became a mold that would contain his symbolic ideas of them. This is what makes his gift so beautiful on one level, and often so unreachable on another. He brought a representation of the world into every conception; but he never drew an object for its own sake. He wrote and drew, as he lived, from a fathomless inner window, in an effort to make what was deepest and most invisible capturable by the mind of man. Then he used the thing created—the poem, the picture, joined in their double vision—as a window in itself, through which to look to what was still beyond. “I look through the eye,” he said, “not with it.”

  In short, Blake was not looking for God. He shared in the mystic’s quest, but he was not going the same way. But we can see at the same time that he was not interested in natural phenomena, in the indestructible actuality of what is not in ourselves but equally real. Spinoza once said that the greatest good is the knowledge of the union which the mind has with the whole nature. That is an exalted statement, but we can recognize its meaning through the work of naturalists of genius like Darwin, Marx, and Freud. The creative function of naturalism has been to establish, with some exactness, a measure of objective knowledge—whether in the description of matter and energy, man’s own life as a biological organism, his economic society, or the life urges which civilization has pushed into a world below consciousness. Naturalism is a great and tragic way of looking at life, for with every advance in man’s consciousness and in his ability to ascertain, to predict, and to control, he loses that view of his supreme importance which is at the center of religious myth. Naturalism helps to postpone death, but never denies it; it cannot distort objective truth for the sake of personal assurance; it finds assurance in man’s ability to know something of what lies outside him. There flows from its positive insights an advance in man’s consciousness of his own power that is more fertile and resourceful than any anthropocentric myth can inspire. Naturalism declares limits, and discovers new worlds of actuality between them. It is tragic, for by showing that man’s experience is limited it gives him a sense of his permanent and unremitting struggle in a world he did not make. But the struggle is the image of his true life in the world, and one he deepens by art, knowledge, and love. The quality of tragedy is not sadness but grave exhilaration; it defines the possible.

  Blake is not a naturalist; he believes in apprehension, not in being; in certainty at the price of reality. He does not believe that anything is finally real except the imagination of man. He grasped one horn of the classic dilemma—“ how do I know that anything is real, since I know of reality only through my own mind?”—and pronounced that the problem was settled. He refused to believe the evidence of his senses that the human mind —however it may qualify or misread reality—is bombarded by something outside itself. We are eternally subjective; but there are objects. Indeed, it would seem to follow from our very ability to correct ourselves that we do measure our knowledge by some source. Our backs in Plato’s cave are to the fire; but we know that the shadows on the wall before us are shadows, and not the fire itself. Blake assumed that what is partial is in error, and that what is limited is non-existent. But the truth is that he was not trying to prove anything philosophically at all; his greatness depends not on his conception of the world but on what he created through it. In defense of his own personality, and in defiance of his age, he imagined a world equal to his heart’s desire. He refused to admit objective reality only because he was afraid man would have to share the creation.

  It is here that Blake has perplexed his readers even more than he has delighted them. The reason lies in his refusal to concede a distance between what is real and what is ideal; in his desperate need to claim them as one. Blake is difficult not because he invented symbols of his own; he created his symbols to show that the existence of any natural object and the value man’s mind places on it were one and the same. He was fighting the acceptance of reality in the light of science as much as he was fighting the suppression of human nature by ethical dogmas. He fought on two fronts, and shifted his arms from one to the other without letting us know—more exactly, he did not let himself know. He created for himself a personality, in life and in art, that was the image of the thing he sought.

  Like all the great enlighteners of the eighteenth century, Blake is against the ancien régime, in all its manifestations—autocracy, feudalism, superstition. Though he loathed the destructive reason of the Deists, he sometimes praised it in the fight against “holy mystery.” He was fighting for free thought. Yet he is not only a confederate of Diderot and Voltaire, Jefferson and Tom Paine; he is a herald of the “heroic vitalism” of Nietzsche and D. H. Lawrence, of Dostoevsky’s scorn for nineteenth-century utilitarianism and self-contentment. Where the Encyclopedists were concerned with the investigation, on “natural principles,” of man’s place in society and his order in the universe, Blake— who hated the Church as much as Voltaire and was as republican as Jefferson—was concerned with the freedom of man from all restrictions—whether imposed by the morality of the Church or the narrowness of positivism. Like Nietzsche, he considered himself an enemy of Socrates and of the Platonic dualism that became a permanent basis of Christian thought. What Blake said in so many of his early poems Nietzsche was to say in his autobiography: “All history is the experimental refutation of the theory of the so-called moral order of the world.” Zarathustra, dancing mysteriously to the bacchanal of Nietzsche’s imagined self-fulfillment, is prefigured in Blake’s Los, the crusading imagination with the hammer in his hand. And like Nietzsche, Blake writes in his masterpiece, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, with the playful daemonism of those, who league themselves with the “Devil” because his opposite number restricts human rights:The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it.

  With it there is the stress on heroic energy, on the rights of the superior that cannot be claimed under what Nietzsche called the “slave-morality”:The eagle never lost so much time as when he submitted to learn of the crow.

  Damn braces. Bless relaxes.

  Improvement makes strait roads; but the crooked roads without Improvement are the roads of genius.

  Destroy, Blake says, all that binds man to decayed institutions. But destroy as well man’s obedience to moral precepts that hinder the full power of his creative will to assert, to love and to build. Desire is never vicious in itself; it is only turned to vicious ends when driven out of its real channel. Restraint in the name of the moral code is alone evil, for it distorts man’s real nature. It is a device of the rulers of this world to keep us chained. For life is holy. Energy is eternal delight. Jesus is dear to us not because he was divine, but because he was a rebel against false Law, and the friend of man’s desire. He defied the Kings and Priests. He was against punishment. He was the herald of man’s joy, not of his imaginary redemption. Joy is the only redemption and all suppression is a little death. Humility is an imposture born of cunning. Better wrath than pity. “The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.”

  If he had been Antichrist, Creeping Jesus,

  He’d have done anything to please us:

  Gone sneaking into the Synagogues

  And not used the Elders & Priests like Dogs,

  But humble as a Lamb or an Ass,

  Obey himself to Caiaphas.

  God wants not man to humble himself.

  For he acts with honest, triumphant Pride,

  And this is the cause that Jesus died.

  In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Blake writes: “Opposition is true friendship.” His drive is always toward creative self-assertion, toward man as a free creator. In A Song of Liberty, his vision of the old world burning in the fires of the French Revolution leads him to cry: “Empire is No More!”

  Let the Priests of the Raven of dawn no longer, in deadly black, 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 letchery call that virginity that wishes but acts not!

  So far Blake is a libertarian, an eighteenth-century radical more vehement, daring and imaginative in his conception of freedom than others, but sharing in a revolutionary tradition. Where he becomes truly prophetic and difficult is in his rejection of materialism. He denounces the Priest, in his “deadly black”; but he warns us not to “lay the bound or build the roof” with our anti-clerical freedom. He sets his thought absolutely against rationalism, scepticism, and experimentalism. He is with the Deists so long as they attack supernaturalism—detestable to Blake not because it is disprovable by reason, but because it implies obedience. He is against the Deists so long as they seek to submit the imagination to reason. Rationalism is dangerous because it leaves man in doubt. When the time-serving Bishop Watson wrote, at the request of the English Tory government, an attack on Tom Paine’s The Age of Reason, Blake scrawled vehement attacks on the Bishop all over the margin of his Apology for the Bible.

  It appears to me Now that Tom Paine is a better Christian than ,the Bishop.

  I have read this Book with attention & find that the Bishop has only hurt Paine’s heel while Paine has broken his head. The Bishop has not answer’d one of Paine’s grand objections.

  But in one of his most famous poems, he denounced Voltaire and Rousseau as the arch-Deists seeking to destroy man’s capacity for visionary wonder:Mock on, mock on, Voltaire! Rousseaul

  Mock on, mock on: ’tis all in vain !

  You throw the sand against the wind,