William Blake

Verily, Omar Khayyám was not the first, nor Alcofribas Nasier the last, of the Angelical Doctors of the Theological Schools of Dionysus. The Word of the Oracle was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, this most arcane monosyllable of the Adepts: trinc. For Dionysus is he whose sire is Zeus made manifest to Earth in the form of the golden rain from Heaven; and the child, threatened by the malice of Respectability, conceals himself beneath the paternal purple, within that hollow reed wherein Prometheus brought down Fire from Olympus. This reed is also that of Pan; and it is Aaron’s Rod that budded, the Sacred Lance of Parzival, the Sword that pruned the vine of John the Baptist, filling the charger of Herod with his perfumed and prophetic blood. It is Charles Baudelaire who urges us: “One must be always drunk,” adding this scholion, that the means of intoxication may be absinthe for the one and music for another. Each man must discover for himself the method most suitable in his own case whereby he may attain to cry “It is finished,” so that the Veil of the Temple may be rent from the top to the bottom. Hark! This is the moment of the Man-God to his earthly life, the birth of the God-Man to Life immortal. Destroy this temple, and within three days I will raise it up—a Temple not made with hands, Eternal in the Heavens!

Because “Every thing that lives is holy,” and because the Mystery of Ungodliness consists simply in the fact that there is a mystery at all before the face of Truth; therefore a “genius” may be defined as one who is able to express the genius—the daimon of Socrates, the angœides, âdi-buddha, the “Holy Guardian Angel” of a Man—which is in him. “I am the flame that burns in every heart of man, and in the core of every star.” It is theoretically possible for all of us to split the valve of our muddy, weed-covered, calcareous husk, and reveal the Pearl of Great Price which we secrete. The common failure of mankind to do so is due to the fear of exposing to destruction that slimy succulent life of humanity which we foolishly seek to preserve, forgetting that Death the Oysterman will surely wedge his steel in our shell, that the harlot Babalon, on whose forehead is written “Mystery,” may devour us!

For this cause, when first the Candidate for Initiation is restored to Light for a moment, his eyesight tells him of a dreadful God, sable and scarlet, and, thunder to that levin, he hears the words of awe

Fear is failure, and the forerunner of failure: be thou therefore without

Fear, for in the heart of the coward Virtue abideth not. Pass thou on!

Instantly the hoodwink is replaced; instantly silence swoops like an hawk upon a sparrow; instantly he is dragged fiercely forward through the voiceless darkness —-

It is not given to many of the sons of men to tear the bandage from their brows with ruthless rage, demanding to face the Reality of the Universe, even should they have succeeded in striking the fetters from their hands and feet. Few know, will, dare, to force an Oracle from the Silence, even though the Speech of the Sphinx be the one Word of Power to avail them in their souls’ sore need. Yet the Vision shews always ΘΕΛΗΜΑ, and the Voice says always: trinc.

Some there are who achieve “genius.” A man there may be who hath wrought his own Nothung, hath smitten on the spear of Wotan, and with his own right arm hath gotten himself the victory, passing through Loki’s fires to the Virgin Valkyrie of the World, his own immaculate Soul. But the natural “genius” is one to whom that fatuous circle is congenitally apparent as phantasmal, and by whom it is more or less easily dissoluble at the will of either party.

The Universe being a coherent whole, each item thereof is equal and opposite to the sum of the remainder. The corollary is obvious: “Every number is infinite; there is no difference.” So also: “Every man and every woman is a star.”

Anglo-Saxon hypocrisy has charms which only the most deplorable lack of taste would care to criticize; but historians are notoriously defective in the sense of propriety. They have abused their privileges, in the present issue, by observing that the Little English matrimonial conventions which support the Equilibrium of the Solar System hoped to conceal the illuminating fact—the devastating fact—that William Blake was an O’Neil. The artists’ curious devotion to places with such names as Felpham, and his attempted identification of London with Jerusalem—a tast nobly seconded and ably executed in later days on different lines—mask still more indecipherably the Celtic face of him. The soul of Eire is visible only in those eyes like coals of fire of the Most High, and her voice in the melancholy yet enraptured melody of that mystical mouth, that vivid, that virginal vessel of Musick!

It is not the traditional Catholic Ecstasy of the Isle of the Saints that quickens his pulse, but the almost mechanical rhapsodies of a Teutonic-Scandinavian visionary, which form the intellectual lens of his manifestation in art.

He is nevertheless the most authentically Gælic spirit in history, the more essentially so, it may be, for the very reason that it is emancipated so completely from the formal warrants of ethnology; the absence of racial stigmata guarantees the noumenal validity no less of its creative Wisdom that of its transmissive Innocence.

Like all true artists, William Blake is a Pantheist. To him the Holy Ghost is immanent in the All, equally in its every part. We find him therefore a partisan of the legendary Jesus who rebuked the exclusiveness and restrictions of the Pharisees, and of the Miltonic Satan who fulminates against the same qualities as they appear in Christianity. He is, in brief, the Master of the Temple who is vowed to understand, to love, to control, and to harmonize all things; finally to “interpret every phenomenon as a particular dealing of God with his soul.” His only opponents are the “Brothers of the Left-Hand Path,” that is, the representatives of the spirit that resists change, defies “love under will”, and endeavours to shut itself out from the operation of the universal flux; that seeks to make a difference “between any one thing & any other thing”, whereby “cometh hurt.” (How admirable is the choice of this word “hurt,” from heurter, “to jostle”!) That is the only evil, the only illusion; the conflict and division between any two things which refuse to recognize their identity, to assert it and enjoy it by means of “love under will.”

The comprehension of this attitude, intuitively certain as it was in him, is the Master-Key to his Art. He has been neglected abominably for his merits, and praised undiscerningly for his defects. Neither Swinburne nor Yeats, still less the chorus of caterwauling critics which have beset him in this present century, have been capable of the Master’s simplicity; or, perceiving it from Pisgah, have been content to leave it as it is. Yet all his serious poems are variations on this Theme, and all his symbolic pictures hieroglyphs of this Arcanum!

Whether he is with the burning Tyger in the forests of the night, or in the Crystal Cabinet, or with Sultan-Jesus in the Porch of Pythagoras, his sublimely single Experience is the Identity of Contraries.

In him, from the beginning, the barrier between the conscious and Unconscious is tenuous–-almost too tenuous, for the surge of the latter washes over into the former so mightily that the intellectual machinery of his mind was never brought to perfection. His natural tendency to skepticism saves him indeed from the serfdom of gross sectarianism in its more fatal forms, but there are times when one cannot but feel irritated at his insistence on a symbolism which does not even possess, like that of the Hebrew Qabalah, a traditional instrument of interpretation. It may well be, of course, that the abominable crime of the dastard who destroyed the bulk of Blake’s manuscripts was successful to the extend of depriving us of some general key to his formal modes of thought. We are aware indeed that the Tree of Life in the Chokmah Nesethrah framed the code of his thought in some respects, that the ideas of Emanuel Swedenborg dominated his early development, and that the full fruit of his genius was ripened by the Sun of the Fraternity of A∴A∴, although the secrecy to which he was pledged by that Holy Order forbade him to employ Its symbols openly or even organically. There is also the influence of the more mystical sections of the Bible, interpreted skeptically and diabolically. This method is decidedly untidy and dangerous, owing to the absence of any philosophical unity in the divers books of that heterogeneous encyclopedia of unscientific material. 

The spontaneity of Blake’s genius is thus, for ourselves, his most serious defect. It is necessary to build the Temple of Intellect with extreme accuracy before it is safe to invoke the Holy Spirit to indwell its sanctuary.

What then is the supreme significance of the work of the Master? It is, to speak plainly, absurd to pretend that his existing remains are in themselves so super-excellent and unique either for matter or for form. They are unfinished on the hand, and in the ruins on the other. Many of his ideas are totally unintelligible to us; others appear mere fads. There is no single masterpiece to which we can point as supremely perfect, as satisfying any of our deepest instincts to the uttermost. It is the existence of the man himself which compels us. For he is “a man of like passions as we are,” exercising two arts with abundant ability; yet his subject-matter is not the Universe of the common tailless primate, chief of the mammals and placental amniotes. His reality is that of the philosopher, but it is an object of direct sense-preception. Instead of proclaiming the actuality of the “invisible world,” and proving it by syllogisms, he relies upon the direct appeal to sense: “I see it.” The man who does not “believe in fairies” is not an unphilosophical man, but a man with cataract. Varley tells us that Blakem asked to sketch Edward III or some such historical character, “as he exists in the other world,” might have to wait for the model to take the pose. Once,, when he was drawing Corinna the Theban, Isis of Corinth stepped in front of her and insisted on her portrait being executed before allowing the completion of the other. [Note 1]

To us Blake is therefore rather the great man of science than the artist in idea or in form. He demonstrated an extension of human faculties no less than did Röntgen and Bell. The objectivity of his visions, the degree of validity of his clairaudience, the interpretation of his statements from an ontological point of view: these are minor matters. What is important is the fact that he himself took all that he saw and heard au pied de la lettre without losing touch with the world of the man in the street. He was not hallucinated in the sense in which the alienists use the word; for his “other world,” while interpenetrating that of ordinary sense-perception, did not supplant it or even distort it. His conversations with Elijah did not interrupt his communications with his earthly friends. He strove to discover the laws of the spiritual world and to measure its relation with the material world, as a physicist should; and the reality of that did not diminish, but increase, that of this, any more than the establishment of the electromagnetic properties of steel make it any less fit to forge into a sword.

Every new Christ demands a John Baptist; every Renaissance is preceded by its proper prophet. This prophet is commonly himself an artist—Elias Artista, as Paracelsus calls him—of pantomorphous achievement. Thus the Child born at that Renaissance of French art which found twin sister in our own Pre-Raphaeliste movement was brought into the light by that successor of Merlin, Alphonse Louis Constant, or (as he chose to translate his name) Éliphas Lévi Zahed. This great, neglected, misinterpreted man was not only the most famous magician of his generation, but a writer whose prose would be recognized as worthy of Apollo but for the oracular darkness with which he veiled his utterance. The Israelites did not comprehend the Sinaitic glooms and splendours of Moses; they continued to adore the golden Calf; but they went forward to the Promised Land. So also Lévi was a curious draughtsman, not for the sake of the work, but as a medium for his ideas. “Maker of hieroglyphs” were a better term. But his supreme importance to us is that in saying–two generations ago!--”a fine style is an aureole of holiness,” he made Baudelaire, Verlaine, Swinburne, Manet, Whistler et hoc genus omne possible in a world which had neglected manner for matter.

The Italian Renaissance had similarly its own prophets. Luther, Andrea, and—precipue—Pope Alexander VI stood Satanfathers to that Child. Rabelais, once more, laid down the philosophical principles which determined the destiny of Shakespeare in literature and Bacon in science. We find the inscrutable shadow of Maximinus looming behind Julian, that of Weishaupt whispering wisdom to the revolutionary spirit which culminated in ‘48. Thus then stands the terrific Titan, Blake, as Hierophant of those Mysteries whose Neophytes were Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Byron, even Wordsworth. For he came at the end of that Eighteenth Century of artificiality and arrogance which, while indeed it had ground into powder the false gods, had left the people prone before profaned and crownless pedestals. The Zeitgeist appears simultaneously in Protean phases to innumerable individuals, each of whom perceives but one facet. They need not know their prophet, or communicate consciously with each other, in order to fulfil the Word of the Lord. But the Pantheism of William Blake created the comet of Byron, the evening star of Poe, the sun of Shelley, and the moon of Keats. He is responsible equally for Kubla Khan and for the “Intimations of Immortality”; for it is he whose attitude to life made transcendentalism the formula of Art, whose magical gesture destroyed the god of the Firmament Shu, or Zeus, whose strength had sundered Seb from Nuit. With the fall of Jehovah the heavens fell; so (did not the proverb tell us?) we were able to catch skylarks!

It was Swinburne who wrote the pantheistic pæan “Hetha,” and announced the antinomian atonement, the formula of “Salvation by Sin,” that discovered the Daimon Blake. It was Yeats who wrote The Tables of the Law and other secret books, proclaiming fearfully the dispensation of the Holy Ghost, so fearfully that he suppressed them, that analyzed the mighty seer who talked with Satan and Elijah as familiar friends. But the dull world has failed to grasp the hilt of this atrocious yataghan. We have sleepily acquiesced in Blake as a craftsman in words and forms; we have overpraised him idly for the qualities that he would himself have scorned to claim, being in truth unimportant to him, and of secondary value to the world.

The Unconscious surged furiously through the frail dyke of his spiritual diaphragm, and expressed itself in terms which are for the most part utterly inadequate, incomplete, unpolished, and unintelligible. As a technician, Blake was overweighted by the omniscience of his omnipresence. In him the Idea was too portentous; the wizard could not control the tempest evoked by his enchantments; his command of Form was shaken by the energy of his enthusiasm. There is in fact no Work of his extant to which we can point with serene confidence, and say: Ecce Homo! What can we put against the “Ode to Psyche,” the “Ancient Mariner,” Prometheus Unbound, or even The Monk? We stultify ourselves, and blaspheme Blake, when we emphasize his attainment as an artist. What went ye out into the wilderness for to see? A prophet, and more than a prophet. Otherwise, he is but a reed, albeit the reed of Pan, shaken by the wind, the wind of the Spirit of Pan!

There has been at no time any true critical genius of the first rank in England; the national character is fatal to its development. [Note 2] We must be always praising away, and blaming à propos de bottes. As a tragedian, Shakespeare was the brain of the barnstormers of the Surrey Side; as a theologian, Milton was a superstitious pedant; yet we concur in the verdict of the “Chorus of Camberwell Costermongers” and the “Consistory of Cold Boiled Calvinists."

But—shall not the judge of the whole Earth do right? Assuredly; and his name is Perspective, graduate of the devil’s school whose presiding genius is the Muse of History. The time has come for the children of Wisdom to justify their mother: we can see the members of this Revolutionary group in their true aspect as antagonists of the atrophying influence of the “glories” of George the Third, exactly as Swinburne and Whistler were antitoxins to the sleeping-sickness of Victorian complacency.

No task is more important to the philosopher than this identification of the Zeitgeist through inspection of the Coat of Many Colours which he wears; we can place the men of genius of a period as we can place the elements in the spectrum. Our analysis of the galaxy which burst out so suddenly and spontaneously nearly a century and a half ago—though it seems to us as yesterday—nay! as yesterday, today, and forever!---shows the Light of William Blake as almost wholly in the ultraviolet. He is the highest and holiest vibration of that Light; but for this very reason, he is not wholly appreciable by our optical apparatus as human beings. He operated obscure chemical changes in the soul of the epoch; we wrong him when we try to assign to him definite lines in the blue, green, or orange. But without the lower vibrations which we perceive as Art, still less of those sombre and viewless tremors beyond the red which we know only as religious and political revolution. As a reformer, in the vulgar sense of the word, we may call him imperfect; but as a spiritual current of the highest potential we must call him absolute. The “limit velocity” is that of the Light of the Unconscious which initiated William Blake.

Notes