ON BLAKE AS A PROPHET
By A. CLUTTON-BROCK
MEN have always lost their heads over prophets, and prophets have often lost their heads over themselves. The word itself expresses a common misunderstanding. The prophet is not a tipster—if he has any power of foretelling, it is only a part of his wisdom; he is a man in whom the universal man speaks, not the lower or generic or animal universal, but that higher universal to which individuals and societies sometimes attain. You may, of course, disbelieve in it altogether, in which case the prophet is to you merely one who talks nonsense; but he himself is aware of it when it speaks in him, and it makes him vehement, hasty, impatient both of his own medium of language and of all opposition or failure to understand. It is to him an absolute which forces him to utter that, true always and everywhere; but he has to express it in human language, a medium relative to human wants and human conditions. So his expression is always imperfect and cannot be understood except with the goodwill of the hearer. This goodwill he demands, not from egotism, but because he is uttering the universal, and the refusal of it exasperates him. I have piped to you and you have not danced—is always the cry of the prophet. Argument he hates and the dialectic of Dons, because his universal is not to be proved, its convincing power is in itself. It is the truth which, like beauty, is believed when seen; and, if you will not believe it, that is because you refuse to see or hear it. You are like the deaf adder that stoppeth its ears, and you are refusing to see your own truth as well as his; you are refusing to find yourself in the universal. Who are you, says Whitman, that wanted a book to encourage you in your nonsense? Your nonsense is your private opposition to the universal, the obstacle which you set up in yourself to your own wisdom and happiness; and with this the prophet has no patience. He will make no terms with it; he will not attempt a worldly lucidity or even the contrivance of the artist. It is not he who speaks but the universal that speaks in him, often beautifully but careless even of beauty, finding what human words it can; and men must not look this gift-horse in the mouth, must not criticise him, for it is not he who speaks as an individual but—my father that speaketh in me.
So many men, whether they stone the prophet or accept him, misunderstand him always; after they have stoned or ignored him, they worship him as a magician. In the past he was to them one who foretold the future; now they find an equal value in all that he says and does. Any words of his have a biblical authority, and he is the one genuine prophet, compared with whom all others are impostors. They do not know that the chief reason for believing prophets is that they all say the same thing, that this universal of theirs is a real universal, quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus. When they assert that their particular prophet has a monopoly of the truth, they are depriving him of his chief authority, turning his universal into a particular; and this they do because they will not be at the pains to seek the universal in his works. It must be recognised by its own quality, and every man must recognise it for himself; but they, flinching from the effort of recognition, seek a gospel made authentic by the name of its author; the prophet has said it and it must be true.
Unfortunately the prophet himself often shares this infirmity and believes that he is always a prophet; he becomes a disciple of himself, and sets himself above criticism, not from mere egotism and conceit so much as because he too flinches from the task of discerning his own universal. The prophetic vehemence becomes a habit with him; and he despises the artist's patience and contrivance; he may even believe that he is a prophet because he himself does not clearly understand what he says; he may mistake the automatism, which lies in wait for everyone who constantly practises any art, for the universal speaking in him and imperiously snatching at language to express itself.
Now Blake was artist as well as prophet, a great artist in two arts; but everything conspired to make him confuse the functions of artist and prophet, which indeed are easily confused. A man is helped to understand himself by the understanding of others; and Blake had no one to understand him, as artist or as prophet. His masters were in the past; his own achievements belonged to the future; he lacked that contemporary education which is best worth having. There was no one even for him to talk to, but only a few listeners who were not sure that he was sane. As artist, he was a prophet in the literal sense; he did what men were going to do as well as what they had done long ago. Naturally he believed that, as artist, he was always right, while Reynolds and the other popular ones of his own time were always wrong. He had a blood-feud with them, and was in love with his own work; he believed that the universal, which sometimes possessed him, possessed him always, because his writing and his drawing were unlike those of other men of his time. So he made a myth about himself to express his lack of criticism, namely, that his works were dictated to him by an angel, they were not his, and it was not his business to improve or judge them.
In his own time he was neglected; but now he is subject to the other kind of misunderstanding. He has disciples who are as uncritical of his works as he was, for whom he is always prophet, never artist, or rather an infallible artist because a prophet. They tell us that, if we enjoy his poems as poems or his pictures as pictures, we have not found the key to them. With the key of his symbolism we can enter a sanctuary beyond beauty in which the secrets of the universe are revealed. But they cannot tell us what these secrets are any more than Blake could; and I would rather believe that he told us all he could by the methods proper to a writer, and that the faults of the artist are not the virtues of the prophet; that where in verse that begins beautifully he becomes incoherent, uses catchwords not to be understood except by reference to other writings and often not then, he is himself confusing the artist with the prophet and making the mistake of his disciples.
If you are in danger of believing in the magic of Blake, of treating him as our pious grandparents treated the Hebrew prophets, you may recover your senses by considering his other art; for in that the difference between his artistic failures and successes is plain. I myself believe that Blake was the greatest master of design among all modern artists, that for the shaping imagination you must go back to Tintoret to find his equal. But, whereas in poetry he freed himself easily from all influences foreign to his own character and genius, in his other art he was free only intermittently and blindly. There are two kinds of drawing which I will call rhythmical and constructional, although, of course, there is rhythm in all good constructional drawing and some construction in all good rhythmical drawing. But the difference is one of kind, it is the difference between Cimabue and Michelangelo. Cimabue expresses himself mainly in rhythm to which the descriptive shapes of things are subordinate—it is enough if you can recognise them. Michelangelo's line itself constructs, it tells us how things are made and insists upon their functions. It is the line natural to an age eager for consecutive thought; it is, as it were, an arguing line. Now, Blake was by nature, by conviction, by habit, a rhythmical draughtsman, and all his best work is rhythmical rather than constructive; he is not arguing with us, he is telling us, in line as in words. It is enough for him if we can recognise his shapes for what they are; he expresses his real content in the sway of lines, as if it were a dance or a gesture, and he is most at his ease when his shapes are like flames blown in the wind, almost transformed by his own emotion. And yet he was not often at his ease in drawing, for all his life he was, like Fuseli, haunted by the ghost of Michelangelo, whose actual works he had never seen. Even he was subdued by the prestige of a master whose method was poison to his genius. In poetry he could be inspired by the past art of his own country, and in his earliest poems alone does he speak for a few words, in the language of his time. "And Phœbus fired my vocal rage"; but his drawings are infested by formulæ taken second-hand from Michelangelo. It is only now and then, in the decorations to books which he printed himself, in the magnificent woodcuts for Thornton's Pastorals, in some of the Dante illustrations, that he quite frees himself from a pretence of constructional drawing. If you would excel in that, you must study the particular fact passionately, you must get your construction from the fact, not from your own mind; but Blake, like so many imitators of Michelangelo, did not study the fact; he gives us a pretence of constructional drawing in formulæ often struggling to be rhythmical and failing because they are formulæ of construction. There he is like St. Paul, who sometimes spoils matter that should be prophetic with a pretence of Greek dialectic, who makes a bad argument for the Resurrection out of an image. Even in his most famous design, the Morning Stars of the Book of Job, the rhythm of the wings and garments is cramped by the drawing, anatomical without freshness, of the bodies. Compare this with the last drawing but one of the series, where rhythm is master of all, and you will see how Blake, even in his great maturity, only practised his true method by accident, and when there was no association to mislead him; the nude was a snare to him, and seldom could he find a method of his own for it. Often he was merely an inferior Fuseli; and bits of Fuseli obtrude even in his finer works. Nothing could be more tiresome than the drawing of some of his faces, and no one could for a moment suppose that there was any prophetic infallibility in these failures; they are as dull as late Roman sculpture or the efforts of Reynolds in the grand style.
But, if Blake is not infallible as a draughtsman, he is not infallible at all; for he himself would sometimes claim infallibility in all his works; by the common infirmity of prophets, when they cease to be prophetic, he assumed a status different from that of the artist, and so was induced to set down whatever came into his mind, as if an angel were dictating to him or he had command of the pencil of the Holy Ghost. But the artist and the prophet are both what they are by effort not by status; if they rely on status they become bores or charlatans; and that is true of all human beings, of Blake no less than of Habakkuk. If ever he seems to have written nonsense, then we must take it to be nonsense until we find sense in it; we must pay no heed if we are told that the seeming nonsense is symbolism.
Even in his finest poems we must not assume a clearer purpose than we find. Take, for instance, the third verse of the Tiger:
And what shoulder, and what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? and what dread feet?
We may persuade ourselves that there is some peculiar virtue in the two broken questions of the last line; but the original draft of the poem[9] proves that Blake did not at first mean them to be broken questions at all. They were continued in the next stanza:
[9] The original draft is given in the excellent Oxford edition of Blake's Poetical Works, published by Mr. Milford, and edited by Mr. John Sampson, at the price, in 1913, of 1s. 6d. net. In spite of the price, it is the most complete edition of the poems, and contains all the shorter Prophetic Books, including the French Revolution, with extracts from the longer ones.
Could fetch it from the furnace deep
And in thy horrid ribs dare steep
In the well of sanguine woe, etc.
Blake seeing, what was obvious, that this did not promise well and was leading nowhere, gave it up and changed the punctuation of the preceding stanza which had run simply—"What dread hand and what dread feet"—to its present form, so as to finish off the stanza to the eye, if not to the mind.
It is a masterful way out of a difficulty, but it takes the risk that we shall ask what the dread hand and feet are there to do? The original draft tells us—to fetch the tiger's heart from the furnace deep; but in the poem as we know it we may guess for ourselves, and there is no answer. This is not the dark sublimity of the prophet, but the wilfulness of the poet, who, having hit upon a fine sounding line, prefers it to sense. (There is also another reading which may come from Blake himself—"What dread hand forged thy dread feet?" It is not "prophetic," but it does make sense.)
It does not matter much, for the rhythm of the poem carries one through obscurities of detail; but the broken questions are not an added beauty or sublimity, they are merely Blake's way out of a difficulty that may beset any poet.
So I come, gradually and cautiously, to the Prophetic Books themselves, and to my contention that they too are to be judged, like the works of the Hebrew Prophets, as literature, since they were written for men to read. We must make a reasonable allowance for all mystics; they try to say what is very hard to say, what they have seen as in a glass darkly. If you think them worth reading at all, you believe that they are concerned with a reality men do not perceive naturally and immediately with the senses, a reality that we are aware of, if at all, only by hints and whispers. There are no commonly accepted sense-data for this reality, upon which we can reason as we can reason about the movements of the stars. Men are most fully aware of it when they are in an exalted state of mind—a state which expresses itself in images rather than in syllogisms. You may say, of course, that this state of mind is "purely subjective" and therefore only of artistic value; but the mystic himself denies that. He believes that he is aware of a reality not himself, though himself is a part of it; and aware of it, not by the normal use of the senses, but by a more immediate perception of the spirit. He knows it, perhaps, through sense perceptions, but by means of a faculty beyond them; he knows it with the whole of himself, that self which is not often enough of a unity to attain to this kind of knowledge. This you too must believe, or at least not refuse to believe, if you are to take him seriously; but the mystic, even if he does speak to us of an independent reality, speaks with a personal expression of his own, like the artist. Lâo-tsze has put it better than anyone: "It is the way of Heaven not to speak, but it knows how to obtain an answer." When he says Heaven he implies an independent reality; but men make other men aware of it by the answer they give to it, and this answer is personal to them.
So a man must convince us of his experience of this Heaven, this reality not perceived by the senses, by his own expression of it, his own answer. He must say what moves us by the ordinary means of expression; he must not pretend that he has a secret to tell us which we can understand only if he will play his game with his counters, his symbols, and allegories. If he has seen heaven, then it knows how to obtain an answer from him, exoteric in its power if esoteric in its meaning, and leading men into its meaning by its power. The power is in the answer, if the meaning is in the heaven he has seen, and that heaven is to be known by its fruits.
You must, of course, read a mystic with attention; but you should be able to gather his meaning as you read; it is to be found in each sentence and in the whole of each work, not by reference to some other work; for it is the mark of a bad writer not to be able to say what he has to say in the sentence he is writing, to give us always jam yesterday, or jam to-morrow, but never jam to-day. Yet that is what the Blake-fanatics offer us in the Prophetic Books. You cannot understand this unless you know that the key to it is in that. You must grasp Blake's "system" if you are to profit by him. They are like the Gnostics for whom nothing in the Gospels meant what it seemed to mean; they alone could give you the key to Christ's inner meaning.
Master Eckhart says that the eternal birth which God the father bore and bears unceasingly in eternity is now born in time and in human nature. "St. Augustine says this birth is always happening. But, if it happen not in me, what does it profit me? What matters is that it shall happen in me." So what matters for the mystic, and his readers, is that the eternal truth shall happen and be expressed in him, in his actual words. We must not be told that we can find it by turning from one work to another and by piecing them all together. He must utter it sentence by sentence, and it must happen in his sentences, with pain and labour perhaps, but still here and now and in these very words.
In Blake's Prophetic Books sometimes it happens and sometimes it does not, and often Blake by his very method seems to prevent it from happening. He has the weakness of many mystics, the desire for a vast geometrical system equivalent to the reality he believes himself to be aware of. Such a system, if once a man will abandon his mind to it, can unroll itself almost automatically, like a fugue. But many fugues are empty of content; they persuade the composer that he is saying something with the mechanical inevitability of their form; and they may also persuade the hearer. It is the very mechanism that prevents him from saying anything and the hearer from seeing its emptiness. We do not yet understand that automatism of the mind which can produce form without content so easily; the automatism of improvisation in many arts, which you find in some cubist pictures, in much music, and in Prophetic Books of all ages, especially in the Bible. Blake himself speaks of it, with seeming inconsistency, in his preface to Jerusalem: "When this verse was first dictated to me, I considered a monotonous cadence like that used by Milton and Shakespeare, and all writers of English Blank Verse, derived from the modern bondage of Riming, to be a necessary and indispensable part of verse. But I soon found that in the mouth of a true Orator such monotony was not only awkward but as much a bondage as rime itself. I therefore have produced a variety in every line, both of cadences and number of syllables. Every word and every letter is studied and put into its fit place." You may ask how there could be this choice and study where the verse was dictated; but Blake means, no doubt, to describe a process of writing half-conscious and half-unconscious, as a composer might choose to write a fugue and then let it write itself. We may use Sheridan's words of this method: "Easy writing makes damned hard reading"; and Jerusalem is not easy to read.
Yet it contains great passages and ideas, of which Messrs. Maclagan and Russell give a very clear account in their edition of it. Like all the great mystics, Blake was a foreteller of the discoveries of modern psychology; he knew the evils of "suppression"—Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires—and his story, in so far as there is one, is the story of the human mind in its effort to reach unity, not by suppression but by "sublimation." Yet it seems to me that his ideas often lost their way in the myth which he made about them; it is like allegorical painting in which there is a conflict between the allegory and the people and things represented, and a sacrifice of one conflicting element to the other. In Blake's story you have to remember that the characters are not men and women but different parts or faculties of the human mind; this requires a kind of double attention fatal in itself to the experience of a work of art, a double attention like that sometimes demanded by symphonic poems, in which you have to remember the story while you are listening to the music. If you are writing about the faculties of the human mind it must be best, both for yourself and for your readers, to call them by their names and to see them as themselves; so will you think most clearly and so will the reader understand most easily.
The subject-matter of Jerusalem is really philosophy and psychology, and it is better expressed in the prose sentences of the Marriage of Heaven and Hell than in myth. This should be read first by those who wish to understand Blake's ideas. Like Nietzsche, he went "beyond good and evil." Good according to the religious, he says, is the passive that obeys reason; evil is the active that springs from energy; but for Blake himself the conflict between this active and passive is the real evil; it is what makes men prefer dreams to reality. By the Marriage of Heaven and Hell he means the reconciliation of reason and energy and the destruction of the delusive, dreamer's, sense of a sin which yet allures. He who desires but acts not breeds pestilence. If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise. The pride of the Peacock is the glory of God. Exuberance is beauty. Energy is eternal delight. "Those who restrain Desire," he says, "do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained; and the restrainer or Reason usurps its place and governs the unwilling." To Blake Christ means the harmonious man in whom desire is master, and uses reason as an instrument. From this follows his belief, which is the belief underlying all religion, that true, supreme and harmonious desire is for reality, and that from it alone can reality be discovered. "Everything possible to be believed is an image of the truth." But, of course, belief to Blake means real belief, belief of the whole self, belief that is acted upon, not the acceptance of anything on authority. "I asked—Does a firm persuasion that a thing is so, make it so? He replied—All poets believe that it does, and in ages of imagination this firm persuasion removed mountains; but many are not capable of a firm persuasion of anything." Firm persuasion is that unity of the self which, for Blake as for all mystics, is salvation.
Blake is united to Christianity by his mystical doctrine of forgiveness; that is what makes him one of the great designers or creators of Christianity, those who know what Christ himself meant, in whom his passion is born anew, and to whom his theology is natural truth. This doctrine expresses itself in Blake's poetry without symbol; we need no key to understand it, and, whenever it possesses him, it lifts him to its own height and clearness. The evil of unforgivingness, to him, is in the remembrance of sin which keeps the sin itself alive:
To record the sin for a reproach, to let the Sun go down
In a remembrance of the sin, is a woe and a horror,
A brooder of an evil day, and a Sun rising in blood.
Come then, O Lamb of God, and take away the remembrance of sin.
That is so, whether a man remembers the sin of others or his own; and he who remembers the sin of others will remember his own. The sense of sin comes of the conflict between reason and desire; what we have to do is to end that conflict and attain to supreme desire and firm persuasion; thinking of the conflict only perpetuates it. The religion of Jesus was for Blake freedom from the past, and we attain to it by forgetting the sins of others; then we can forgive, and forget, our own past selves. Hence his doctrine that Jesus, the child of desire, was born in the forgiveness of sin; and the most beautiful passage in Jerusalem is the forgiveness of Mary by Joseph and her song that follows, "O Forgiveness and Pity and Compassion! If I were pure I should never have known Thee: If I were unpolluted I should never have glorified thy Holiness, or rejoiced in thy great Salvation." There is the same doctrine in the last section of the Everlasting Gospel, and it runs all through the Songs of Innocence and Experience. God Himself for Blake, as for Christ, is, by the very logic of the idea God, He who pities and forgives, He who blots out the past; the divine energy pours itself out in pity and forgiveness, making life and growth and beauty out of sin itself, justifying even evil, since, by the forgiving and forgetting of it, it is changed into a good more subtle, more entrancing, more assured of an infinite increase than any pure good that needs no change or forgiveness.
In his expressions of this doctrine Blake rises above all our poets by reason of the richness of his mastered content. He is simpler and deeper, more passionate and more philosophic, and attains in art to that harmony which he foretells in life. When I think of it, I am in danger myself of seeing in him the one prophet, the one poet, the infallible. I am sure, at least, that he will seem greater through all the new discoveries and enlarged experience of posterity.