by Unknown
A full study of Blake’s personality should logically be divided into three phases — the pathological, the theosophical, and the artistic. The first, I believe, we can dismiss without many qualms. Saying that a great genius is mad, while at the same time recognizing his artistic worth, is like saying that he had rheumatism or suffered from diabetes. Madness, in fact, is a medical term that can claim no more notice from the objective critic than he grants the charge of heresy raised by the theologian, or the charge of immorality raised by the police. If we must accuse of madness every great genius who does not believe in the hurried materialism now in vogue with the happy fatuousness of a recent college graduate in the exact sciences, little remains for art and universal philosophy. Such a slaughter of the innocents would take in a large part of the peripatetic system, all of medieval metaphysics, a whole branch of the immense symmetrical edifice constructed by the Angelic Doctor, St. Thomas Aquinas, Berkeley’s idealism, and (what a combination) the scepticism that ends with Hume. With regard to art, then, those very useful figures, the photographer and court stenographer, would get by all the more easily. The presentation of such an art and such a philosophy, flowering in the more or less distant future in the union of the two social forces felt more strongly in the market-place every day — women and the proletariat — will reconcile, if nothing else, every artist and philosopher to the shortness of life on earth.
To determine what position Blake must be assigned in the hierarchy of occidental mystics goes beyond the scope of this lecture. It seems to me that Blake is not a great mystic. The orient is the paternal home of mysticism, and now that linguistic studies have put us in the position to understand oriental thought (if that ideational energy that created the vast cycles of spiritual activity and passivity of which the Upanishads speak can be called thought) the mystical books of the occident shine, if at all, with a reflected light. Blake is probably less inspired by Indian mysticism than Paracelsus, Jacob Behmen, or Swedenborg; at any rate, he is less objectionable. In him, the visionary faculty is directly connected with the artistic faculty. One must be, in the first place, well-disposed to mysticism, and in the second place, endowed with the patience of a saint in order to get an idea of what Paracelsus and Behmen mean by their cosmic exposition of the involution and evolution of mercury, salt, sulphur, body, soul and spirit. Blake naturally belongs to another category, that of the artists, and in this category he occupies, in my opinion, a unique position, because he unites keenness of intellect with mystical feeling. This first quality is almost completely lacking in mystical art. St. John of the Cross, for example, one of the few idealist artists worthy to stand with Blake, never reveals either an innate sense of form or a coordinating force of the intellect in his book The Dark Night of the Soul, that cries and faints with such an ecstatic passion.
The explanation lies in the fact that Blake had two spiritual masters, very different from each other, yet alike in their formal precision — Michelangelo Buonarotti and Emanuel Swedenborg. The first of Blake’s mystical drawings that we have, Joseph of Arimathea among the Rocks of Albion, has in one corner the words: Michelangelopinxit. It is modelled after a sketch made by Michelangelo for his Last Judgment, and symbolizes the poetic imagination in the power of the sensual philosophy. Beneath the drawing Blake has written: This is one of the Gothic Artists who built the cathedrals in what we call the Dark Ages, wandering about in sheepskins and goatskins, of whom the world was not worthy.’ Michelangelo’s influence is felt in all of Blake’s work, and especially in some passages of prose collected in the fragments, in which he always insists on the importance of the pure, clean line that evokes and creates the figure on the background of the uncreated void.
The influence of Swedenborg, who died in exile in London when Blake was beginning to write and draw, is seen in the glorified humanity with which all of Blake’s work is stamped. Swedenborg, who frequented all of the invisible worlds for several years, sees in the image of man heaven itself and Michael, Raphael, and Gabriel, who, according to him, are not three angels, but three angelic choirs. Eternity, which had appeared to the beloved disciple and to St. Augustine as a heavenly city, and to Alighieri as a heavenly rose, appeared to the Swedish mystic in the likeness of a heavenly man, animated in all his limbs by a fluid angelic life that forever leaves and re-enters, systole and diastole of love and wisdom. From this vision he developed that immense system of what he called correspondences which runs through his masterpiece Arcana Coelestia, the new Gospel which, according to him, will be the apparition in the heavens of the Son of Man foretold by St. Matthew.
Armed with this two-edged sword, the art of Michelangelo and the revelations of Swedenborg, Blake killed the dragon of experience and natural wisdom, and, by minimizing space and time and denying the existence of memory and the senses, he tried to paint his works on the void of the divine bosom. To him, each moment shorter than a pulse-beat was equivalent in its duration to six thousand years, because in such an infinitely short instant the work of the poet is conceived and born. To him, all space larger than a red globule of human blood was visionary, created by the hammer of Los, while in a space smaller than a globule of blood we approach eternity, of which our vegetable world is but a shadow. Not with the eye, then, but beyond the eye, the soul and the supreme love must look, because the eye, which was born in the night while the soul was sleeping in rays of light, will also die in the night. Dionysius the pseudo-Areopagite, in his book De Divinis Nominibus, arrives at the throne of God by denying and overcoming every moral and metaphysical attribute, and falling into ecstasy and prostrating himself before the divine obscurity, before that unutterable immensity which precedes and encompasses the supreme knowledge in the eternal order. The mental process by which Blake arrives at the threshold of the infinite is a similar process. Flying from the infinitely small to the infinitely large, from a drop of blood to the universe of stars, his soul is consumed by the rapidity of flight, and finds itself renewed and winged and immortal on the edge of the dark ocean of God. And although he based his art on such idealist premises, convinced that eternity was in love with the products of time, the sons of God with the sons of [The manuscript ends here.]
The Shade of Parnell
1912
By passing the bill for parliamentary autonomy on its second reading, the House of Commons has resolved the Irish question, which, like the hen of Mugello, looks newborn, though it is a hundred years old. The century which began with the transaction of buying and selling the Dublin parliament is now closing with a triangular pact between England, Ireland, and the United States. It was graced with six Irish revolutionary movements which, by the use of dynamite, rhetoric, the boycott, obstructionism, armed revolt, and political assassination, have succeeded in keeping awake the slow and senile conscience of English Liberalism.
The present law was conceived, in the full maturity of time, under the double pressure of the Nationalist party at Westminster which has been jumbling up the workings of the British legislative body for half a century, and the Irish party across the Atlantic, which is blocking the greatly desired Anglo-American alliance. Conceived and moulded with masterful cunning and art, the law forms a worthy capstone to the tradition handed down to posterity by that pluterperfect Liberal statesman, William Gladstone. It suffices to say that, while it reduces the strong phalanx of 103 Irish members actually represented at Westminster to a band of 40 representatives, it pushes these into the arms of the little Labour party; and from this incestuous embrace there will probably be born a coalition which will operate from the left, that is to say from the Liberal party’s point of operations in its campaign against Conservatism to the extreme left.
Into its tangle of financial qualifications, there is no chance of penetrating. At any rate, the Irish government about to be born will have to cover a deficit ably created by the British treasury, either by manipulation of local and imperial taxes, or by a reduction of its administrative expenses, or by an increase in direct taxes, in
any case provoking the disillusioned hostility of the middle and lower classes. The Irish separatist party would like to reject this Greek gift, which makes the Chancellor of the Exchequer in Dublin a titular minister fully responsible to the taxpayers and at the same time dependent on the British cabinet, one who has the power to tax without being able to control the collections of his department — a transmitter which cannot work unless the dynamo at London sends a current of the necessary voltage.
It doesn’t matter — there is an appearance of autonomy. At the recent national assembly held at Dublin, the recriminations and protests of the Nationalists who belong to the bitterly sceptical school of John Mitchel did not disturb the popular rejoicing very much. The representatives, grown old in the constitutional struggle and weakened by so many years of deluded hopes, hailed in their speeches the end of a long era of misunderstanding. A young orator, Gladstone’s nephew, invoked the name of his uncle amid the frenzied acclamation of the crowd, and hailed the prosperity of the new nation. Within two years at the most, with or without the consent of the House of Lords, the doors of the old Irish parliament will be reopened; and Ireland, released from its century-old prison, will walk forth toward the palace like a new bride, escorted by musicians and ritual bridal torches. A grand- nephew of Gladstone, if there is one, will scatter flowers beneath the feet of the sovereign; but there will be a ghost at the banquet — the shade of Charles Parnell.
* * * *
His most recent critic has tried to minimize the greatness of this strange spirit by pointing out the different sources of his agile parliamentary tactics. But even if we grant the historical critic that obstructionism was invented by Biggar and Ronayne, that the doctrine of the independence of the Irish party was launched by Gavan Duffy, that the Agrarian League was the creation of Michael Davitt, these concessions only make more conspicuous the extraordinary personality of a leader who, without forensic gifts or any original political talent, forced the greatest English politicians to carry out his orders; and, like another Moses, led a turbulent and unstable people from the house of shame to the verge of the Promised Land.
The influence exerted on the Irish people by Parnell defies critical analysis. He had a speech defect and a delicate physique; he was ignorant of the history of his native land; his short and fragmentary speeches lacked eloquence, poetry, and humour; his cold and formal bearing separated him from his own colleagues; he was a Protestant, a descendant of an aristocratic family, and, as a crowning disgrace, he spoke with a distinct English accent. He would often come to meetings an hour or an hour and a half late without apologizing. He would neglect his correspondence for weeks on end. The applause and anger of the crowd, the abuse and praise of the press, the denunciations and defence of the British ministers never disturbed the melancholy serenity of his character. It is even said that he did not know by sight many of those who sat with him on the Irish benches. When the Irish people presented him with a national gratuity of 40,000 pounds sterling in 1887, he put the cheque into his billfold, and in the speech which he delivered to the immense gathering made not the slightest reference to the gift which he had received.
When he was shown the copy of The Times containing the famous autograph letter which would have proved his implication in the barbarous assassination in Phoenix Park, he put his finger on one letter in the handwriting and said simply, ‘I have not made an V that way since S.’ Later, when the inquiries of the Royal Commission revealed the conspiracy which had been formed against him and the perjurer and forger Pigott blew out his brains in a Madrid hotel, the House of Commons, without regard to party, greeted Parnell’s entrance with an ovation that remains without precedent in the annals of the British Parliament. Is it necessary to say that Parnell made no response to the ovation with a smile or a bow or a gesture, but merely passed to his place beyond the aisle and sat down? Gladstone was probably thinking of this incident when he called the Irish leader an intellectual phenomenon.
Nothing more unusual can be imagined than the appearance of this intellectual phenomenon in the midst of the moral suffocation of Westminster. Now, looking back at the scene of the drama and hearing again the speeches that shook the minds of his listeners, it is useless to deny that all the eloquence and all those triumphs of strategy begin to smell stale. But time is kinder to the ‘uncrowned king’ than to the jester and the phrase-maker. The light of his sovereign bearing, mild and proud, silent and disconsolate, makes Disraeli look like a diplomatic opportunist who dines when he can at rich men’s houses, and Gladstone like an imposing major domo who has gone to night school. How lightly Disraeli’s wit and Gladstone’s culture weigh in the balance today. Today how flimsy seem the studied gibes, the greasy locks, and the stupid novels of Disraeli; and the high-sounding periods, the Homeric studies, the speeches on Artemis and on marmalade of Gladstone.
Although Parnell’s strategy was to make use of any English party, Liberal or Conservative, at his pleasure, a nexus of circumstances involved him in the Liberal movement. Gladstonian liberalism was an inconstant algebraic symbol whose coefficient was the movement’s political pressure and whose index was his personal profit. While he temporized in internal politics, contradicting and justifying himself in turn, he always maintained (as much as he was capable of it) a sincere admiration for liberty in the house of others. It is necessary to keep in mind this elastic quality of Gladstone’s liberalism in order to understand the nature and magnitude of Parnell’s task.
To put it in few words, Gladstone was a self-seeking politician. He raged at the restless iniquity of O’Connell in 1835, but he was the English legislator who proclaimed the moral and economic necessity for Irish autonomy. He thundered against the admission of Jews to public office, but he was the minister who, for the first time in English history, raised a Jew to the peerage. He spoke fiercely against the Boers who rebelled in 1881, but after the defeat of Majuba he concluded a treaty with Transvaal which the English themselves called a cowardly surrender. In his first parliamentary speech he warmly defended against Earl Grey’s accusation of cruelty his own father, a rich slave owner in Demerara who had made two million francs from the sale of human flesh, while in his last letter to another ‘childhood friend’, the Duke of Westminster, he invoked all the lightning available on the head of the great assassin of Constantinople.
Parnell, convinced that such liberalism would yield only to force, united behind him every element of Irish life and began to march, treading on the verge of insurrection. Just six years after his entrance into Westminster he held in his hands the fate of the government. He was imprisoned, but in his cell at Kilmainham he concluded a pact with the ministers who had imprisoned him. When the attempt at blackmail failed with Pigott’s confession and suicide, the Liberal government offered him a portfolio. Parnell not only refused it, he ordered all his followers as well to refuse ministerial duties, and forbade the municipalities and public corporations in Ireland to receive officially any member of the British royal house until the English government should restore autonomy to Ireland. The Liberals had to accept these humiliating conditions, and in 1886 Gladstone read the first Home Rule Bill at Westminster.
Parnell’s fall came in the midst of these events like lightning from a clear sky. He fell hopelessly in love with a married woman, and when her husband, Captain O’Shea, asked for a divorce, the ministers Gladstone and Morley openly refused to legislate in favour of Ireland if the sinner remained as head of the Nationalist Party. Parnell did not appear at the hearings to defend himself. He denied the right of a minister to exercise a veto over the political affairs of Ireland, and refused to resign.
He was deposed in obedience to Gladstone’s orders. Of his 83 representatives only 8 remained faithful to him. The high and low clergy entered the lists to finish him off. The Irish press emptied on him and the woman he loved the vials of their envy. The citizens of Castlecomer threw quicklime in his eyes. He went from county to county, from city to city, ‘like a hunted deer’, a spectral
figure with the signs of death on his forehead. Within a year he died of a broken heart at the age of 45.
The ghost of the ‘uncrowned king’ will weigh on the hearts of those who remember him when the new Ireland in the near future enters into the palace ‘fimbriis aureis circumamicta varietatibus’; but it will not be a vindictive ghost. The melancholy which invaded his mind was perhaps the profound conviction that, in his hour of need, one of the disciples who dipped his hand in the same bowl with him would betray him. That he fought to the very end with this desolate certainty in mind is his greatest claim to nobility.
