William Blake, the Man

by Charles Gardner

Yet there was something in Paine that appealed to Blake. They were both worshippers of liberty, and while they could not meet on theological ground, they were stirred alike by the portentous and successive crises on the other side of the Channel. Paine felt that he still had work to do. He had served his apprenticeship in America, he would now put forth his whole strength in his Rights of Man, and help forward the sacred cause of Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité.

There were other rebels—Holcroft, playwright and translator, friend of Godwin, afterwards to be sent to Newgate; Hardy and Thelwall; Horne Tooke, who raised subscriptions for the relief of Americans and spoke of the transactions at Lexington and Concord as “inhuman murders.” He was to be tried along with Holcroft and sentenced to twelve months’ imprisonment.

Now Blake sympathized with all these rebels in their political aspirations; but whereas their watchword was reason, and their revolt was in the name of reason, he believed that reason carried one very little way, and that the elemental deeps of life and passion that lie far under reason must be stirred and aroused if the work of rebellion was to bring forth lasting fruit. In any case, the reason-bound men had little to teach him. He had looked to Swedenborg, he had taken knowledge of his advanced contemporaries. Godwin rebelled for political liberty, Mary Wollstonecraft for liberty of women and children, Tom Paine for liberty of man. What was left for Blake? The sex question had never been dragged out into the light. The subject was unclean. Sexual morality consisted in repression. Nowhere as here does repression breed such poisonous fruits. Was not sex a part of that vital fire and passion in which Blake believed with his whole heart? Was it not true that whatsoever lives is holy? Must not there be liberty for the sexual instinct if it was to be kept clean? For the next ten years Blake became the advocate of bodily liberty, indistinguishable from free-love. This was to be the recurring theme again and again in his prophetic books. This was to be his contribution towards the new kind of man or superman for whom he was groping. Afterwards, when he had given substance and form in his prophecies to the vague and indefinite thoughts that lay in him, he was to learn how to estimate and place them. Not until he had walked the road of mental excess was he to arrive at the palace of wisdom. Once there, he was to revise even his ideas on rebellion.

Keeping these persons and things steadily in view, let us now follow in order and detail the works of Blake’s most rebellious period.

As was fitting, Blake sounded the note of rebellion in a poem on the French Revolution.

At this stage—1790-91—the Revolution had not advanced far. The Reign of Terror and the execution of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were still in the future. But the Bastille had fallen, and the noise of its fall set the nerves of the overstrung English liberals vibrating. The battle in prose was waged by Paine, Mackintosh, and Mary Wollstonecraft against Burke, and their names came at once into notoriety. Blake was as outspoken, and even more fearless, for he wore publicly the bonnet rouge as the outward and visible sign of his faith, but fortunately for him, his natural medium of expression was poetry, and that of a kind hitherto unknown, and so, say what he would, no one paid him the smallest attention. What came doubtlessly as a surprise to himself was that his poem found a publisher; and the first Book, with the promise that the remaining Books of the Poem, which were finished, should be published in their order, was announced to the world by bookseller Johnson in 1791, at the modest price of one shilling.

Blake has a strange allegorical method of dealing with the Revolution which can only irritate those who are not accustomed to his ways. Thus he speaks of the seven dark and sickly towers of the Bastille. To these he gives the descriptive names of Horror, Darkness, Bloody, Religion, Order, Destiny, the Tower of God, and he gives descriptions of the prisoners in the towers corresponding to their names. All these were imprisoned because in some form or other they had bidden for liberty. One was the author of “a writing prophetic”; another, a woman, “refused to be whore to the Minister and with a knife smote him”; another had raised a pulpit in the city of Paris and “taught wonders to darkened souls.” The horror of their condition is described with great power, although with too congested an accumulation of baneful images. Thus: “In the tower named Darkness was a man pinioned down to the stone floor, his strong bones scarce covered with sinews; the iron rings were forged smaller as the flesh decayed.” That is a Dantesque touch. But when one reads farther down of “an old man, whose white beard covered the stone floor like weeds on margin of the sea, shrivelled up by heat of day and cold of night; his den was short and narrow as a grave dug for a child, with spiders’ webs wove and with slime of ancient horrors covered, for snakes and scorpions are his companions,” then the piled-up details prevent a clear image, and detract from the value of what has gone before. In contrast to the wretched inhabitants of the Bastille, we are presented with the King and his nobles. Here are names, but no portraits. The King stands for the spirit of kingship in all ages and his nobles are those who uphold “this marble-built heaven,” and “all this great starry harvest of six thousand years.” They must resist to the death the crooked sickle stretched out over fertile France “till our purple and crimson is faded to russet, and the Kingdoms of earth bound in sheaves, and the ancient forests of chivalry hewn, and the joys of the combat burnt for fuel.” (As Blake penned these fine words something of his early Elizabethan passion must have stirred in him.) The King, through whom the spirits of ancient Kings speak, peers through the darkness and clouds, and involuntarily sees the truth: “We are not numbered among the living.” Life is with the prisoners who have burst their dens. Let Kings “shivering over their bleached bones hide in the dust! and plague and wrath and tempest shall cease.”

The Archbishop of Paris, symbol of traditional religion, arises and addresses the King. For him revolution can only mean atheism. “God so long worshipped departs as a lamp without oil.... The sound of prayer fails from lips of flesh, and the holy hymn from thickened tongues.”

Clergy as well as nobles vanish, mitre as well as crown. “The sound of the bell, and voice of the sabbath, and singing of the holy choir is turned into songs of the harlot in day, and cries of the virgin in night. They shall drop at the plough and faint at the harrow, unredeemed, unconfessed, unpardoned; the priest rot in his surplice by the lawless lover, the holy beside the accursed, the King, frowning in purple, beside the grey ploughman, and their worms embrace together.”

This, fine as it is, calls out a still finer speech from Orleans. “Can nobles be bound when the people are free, or God weep when His children are happy?” Then to the Archbishop he cries: “Go, thou cold recluse, into the fires of another’s high flaming rich bosom, and return unconsumed, and write laws. If thou canst not do this, doubt thy theories, learn to consider all men as thy equals, thy brethren, and not as thy foot or thy hand, unless thou first fearest to hurt them.”