The mind of Blake lay open to eternity as a seed-plot lies open to the sower. In 1802 he writes to Mr. Butts from Felpham: 'I am not ashamed, afraid, or averse to tell you what ought to be told—that I am under the direction of messengers from heaven, daily and nightly.' 'I have written this poem,' he says of the Jerusalem, 'from immediate dictation, twelve or sometimes twenty or— thirty lines at a time, without premeditation, and even against my will.' 'I may praise it,' he says in another letter, 'since I dare not pretend to be any other than the secretary; the authors are in eternity.' In these words, the most precise claim for direct inspiration which Blake ever made, there is nothing different in kind, only in degree, from what must be felt by every really creative artist and by every profoundly and simply religious person. There can hardly be a poet who is not conscious of how little his own highest powers are under his own control. The creation of beauty is the end of art, but the artist should rarely admit to himself that such is his purpose. A poem is not written by the man who says: I will sit down and write a poem; but rather by the man who, captured by rather than capturing an impulse, hears a tune which he does not recognize, or sees a sight which he does not remember, in some 'close corner of his brain,' and exerts the only energy at his disposal in recording it faithfully, in the medium of his particular art. And so in every creation of beauty, some obscure desire stirred in the soul, not realized by the mind for what it was, and, aiming at most other things in the world than pure beauty, produced it. Now, to the critic this is not more important to remember than it is for him to remember that the result, the end, must be judged, not by the impulse which brought it into being, nor by the purpose which it sought to serve, but by its success or failure in one thing: the creation of beauty. To the artist himself this precise consciousness of what he has done is not always given, any more than a precise consciousness of what he is doing. Only in the greatest do we find vision and the correction of vision equally powerful and equally constant.
To Blake, as to some artists and to most devout people, there was nothing in vision to correct, nothing even to modify. His language in all his letters and in much of his printed work is identical with the language used by the followers of Wesley and Whitefield at the time in which he was writing. In Wesley's journal you will find the same simple and immediate consciousness of the communion of the soul with the world of spiritual reality: not a vague longing, like Shelley's, for a principle of intellectual beauty, nor an unattained desire after holiness, like that of the conventionally religious person, but a literal 'power of conversing with Paradise,' as Blake called it, and as many Methodists would have been equally content to call it. And in Blake, as in those whom the people of that age called 'enthusiasts' (that word of reproach in the eighteenth century and of honor in all other centuries), there was no confusion (except in brains where 'true superstition,' as Blake said, was 'ignorant honesty, and this is beloved of God and man') between the realities of daylight and these other realities from the other side of day. Messrs. Ellis and Yeats quote a mysterious note written in Blake's handwriting, with a reference to Spurzheim, page 154. I find that this means Spurzheim's Observations on the Deranged Manifestations of the Mind, or Insanity (1817), and the passage in the text is as follows: 'Religion is another fertile cause of insanity. Mr. Haslam, though he declares it sinful to consider religion as a cause of insanity, adds, however, that he would be ungrateful, did he not avow his obligations to Methodism for its supply of numerous cases. Hence the primitive feelings of religion may be misled and produce insanity; that is what I would contend for, and in that sense religion often leads to insanity.' Blake has written: 'Methodism, etc., p. 154. Cowper came to me and said: "Oh! that I were insane, always. I will never rest. Can not you make me truly insane? I will never rest till I am so. Oh! that in the bosom of God I was hid. You retain health and yet are mad as any of us all-over us all—mad as a refuge from unbelief—from Bacon, Newton, and Locke."' What does this mean but that 'madness,' the madness of belief in spiritual things, must be complete if it is to be effectual, and that, once complete, there is no disturbance of bodily or mental health, as in the doubting and distracted Cowper, who was driven mad, not by the wildness of his belief, but by the hesitations of his doubt?
Attempts have been made to claim Blake for an adept of magic. But whatever cabbalistical terms he may have added to the somewhat composite and fortuitous naming of his mythology ('all but names of persons and places,' he says, 'is invention, both in poetry and painting'), his whole mental attitude was opposed to that of the practicers of magic. We have no record of his ever having evoked a vision, but only of his accepting or enduring visions. Blake was, above all, spontaneous: the practiser of magic is a deliberate craftsman in the art of the soul. I can no more imagine Blake sitting down to juggle with symbols or to gaze into a pool of ink than I can imagine him searching out words that would make the best effects in his lyrics, or fishing for inspiration, pen in hand, in his own ink-pot. A man does not beg at the gate of dreams when he is the master for whose entrance the gate stands open.
Of the definite reality of Blake's visions there can be no question; no question that, as he once wrote, 'nothing can withstand the fury of my course among the stars of God, and in the abysses of the accuser.' But imagination is not one, but manifold; and the metaphor, professing to be no more than metaphor, of the poet, may be vision as essential as the thing actually seen by the visionary. The difference between imagination in Blake and in, say, Shakespeare, is that the one (himself a painter) has a visual imagination and sees an image or metaphor as a literal reality, while the other, seeing it not less vividly but in a more purely mental way, adds a 'like' or an 'as,' and the image or metaphor comes to you with its apology or attenuation, and takes you less by surprise. But to Blake it was the universe that was a metaphor.
[WILLIAM BLAKE]
I
The origin of the family of William Blake has not yet been found; and I can claim no more for the evidence that I have been able to gather than that it settles us more firmly in our ignorance. But the names of his brothers and sister, their dates and order of birth, and the date of his wife's birth, have never, so far as I know, been correctly given. Even the date of his own birth has been contested by Mr. Swinburne 'on good MS. authority,' which we know to be that of Frederick Tatham, who further asserts, wrongly, that James was younger than William, and that John was 'the eldest son.' Gilchrist makes no reference to John, but says, wrongly, that James was 'a year and a half William's senior,' and that William had a sister 'nearly seven years younger than himself'; of whom, says Mr. Yeats, we hear little, and among that little not even her name.' Most of these problems can be settled by the entries in parish registers, and I have begun with the registers of the church of St. James, Westminster.
I find by these entries that James Blake, the son of James and Catherine Blake, was born July 10, and christened July 15, 1753; John Blake ('son of John and Catherine,' says the register, by what is probably a slip of the pen) was horn May 12, and christened June I, 1755; William Blake was born November 28, and christened December 11, 1757; another John Blake was born March 20, and christened March 30, 1760; Richard Blake was born June 19, and christened July 11, 1762; and Catherine Elizabeth Blake was born January 7, and christened January 28, 1764. Here, where we find the daughter's name and the due order of births, we find one perplexity in the name of Richard, whose date of birth fits the date given by Gilchrist and others to Robert, William's favorite brother, whose name he has engraved on a design of his 'spiritual form' in Milton, whom he calls Robert in a letter to Butts, and whom J. T. Smith recalls not only as Robert, but as 'Bob, as he was familiarly called.' In the entry of 'John, son of John and Catherine Blake,' I can easily imagine the clerk repeating by accident the name of the son for the name of the father; and I am inclined to suppose that there was a John who died before the age of five, and that his name was given to the son next born. Precisely the same repetition of name is found in the case of Lamb's two sisters christened Elizabeth, and Shelley's two sisters christened Helen. 'My brother John, the evil one,' would therefore be younger than William; but Tatham, in saying that he was older, may have been misled by there having been two sons christened John.
There are two theories as to the origin of Blake's family; but neither of them has yet been confirmed by the slightest documentary evidence. Both of these theories were put forth in the same year, 1893, one by Mr. Alfred T. Story in his William Blake, the other by Messrs. Ellis and Yeats in their Works of William Blake. According to Mr. Story, Blake's family was connected with the Somerset family of the Admiral, through a Wiltshire family of Blakes; but for this theory he gives merely the report of 'two ladies, daughters of William John Blake, of Southampton, who claim to be second cousins of William Blake,' and in a private letter he tells me that he has not been able to procure any documentary evidence of the statement. According to Messrs. Ellis and Yeats, Blake's father was Irish, and was originally called O'Neil. His father, John O'Neil, is supposed to have changed his name, on marrying Ellen Blake, from O'Neil to Blake, and James O'Neil, his son by a previous union, to have taken the same name, and to have settled in London, while a younger son, the actual son of Ellen Blake, went to Malaga. This statement rests entirely on the assertion of Dr. Carter Blake, who claimed descent from the latter; and it has never been supported by documentary evidence. In answer, to my inquiry, Mr. Martin J. Blake, the compiler of two volumes of Blake Family Records (first series, 1300-1600; second series, 1600-1700), writes: 'Although I have made a special study of the genealogies of the Blakes of Ireland, I have not come across any Ellen Blake who married John O'Neil who afterwards (as is said by Messrs. Ellis and Yeats) adopted the surname of Blake.'