William Blake, the Man

by Charles Gardner

There are many passages in The Four Zoas to show how alive he was to Nature’s loveliness and cruelty. Her cruelty alone convinced him that she could not be taken as a basis for religion. A natural man building his character on a natural religion must be as cruel as his mother. The cruelty finds periodic vent in the lust of war.

Yet why there is so much cruelty in Nature remains a mystery, even to the man who has been driven by her to supernaturalism. Blake maintained that there were two ways of regarding Nature. The natural man, with only five senses to inform him, looks at her and sees a very small portion of the infinite, without ever suspecting the infinite. If he sees her loveliness it will arrest him and hold him fast. The spiritual man, on the contrary, looks not at but through Nature, to the spiritual world of which it is a vegetable mirror.

Here a difficulty presents itself. If Nature be a vegetable mirror of the eternal world, then her cruelties must reflect eternal cruelties. The spiritual man may see Nature far differently from the natural man, but that does not mean that she is merely the picture thrown by man’s subjective self on the great abyss. If man were altogether exterminated her cruelties would still continue. Since Blake did not deny all existence to Nature, he was finally obliged to accept the old Christian explanation so finely summed up by St Paul in the eighth chapter of his Epistle to the Romans. Sin and disorder originate in the unseen heavens of the cosmos, where the principalities and powers dwell. Man repeats their sins, and Nature reflects the disorder of their cosmos. Hence there is no redemption in the cosmic heavens. Man enters on his redemption only when he bows the knee to Him who was raised above all heavens. And though “the whole creation groaneth and travaileth together until now,” yet at the great manifestation of the sons of God she also “shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God.”

If the fall be denied, then the sufferings of nature and man must be referred to evolution, which taken alone solves something, but not the whole, of the ancient and baffling mystery.

All this explains finally why the great Memory to which Blake refers so often in Jerusalem cannot redeem a man. It is shut up in the cosmos. Memory would keep man in the cosmos even though he were reincarnated a million times. Memory’s real work, whether for creative art or man’s redemption, is in the fact that she gives man standing ground amid the horrors of infinity, until he takes strong hold of Him who overcame the world, and is lifted by Him into His ascension glory beyond the maddening whir of the cosmic wheels.

In these poems we get Blake’s final attitude towards sex and passion.

Passion is always fire, and as such it is energy. To-day we are apt to use the word only for sex. In the eighteenth century passion was of any kind, and appetite stood for sex. With Blake, passion is man’s vital worth. It may flame along many forbidden avenues, but once it has mounted to the imagination, and is controlled by spirit, then it is the driving force that makes man’s works beautiful and his character spontaneous.

The passion of sex is, no doubt, the strongest of all. In the early prophetic books, when Blake was in a fever of rebellion, he affirmed that the sex passion was holy and should be free. Now in these later “prophecies” he still maintains, without wavering, the holiness of sex, but he no longer insists on free-love. He has no place for perversions. He steadily contemplates the normal impulse, and sees it as the principle of life impelling to love and children.

Each man has to solve his own sex problem. Blake’s nature was exceptionally full and passionate. We caught a glimpse of him in his early married life panting in the whirlwind of sexual desire. It is probably true that he even contemplated following the patriarchal custom. But inconveniently for man’s theories he has it brought home to him sooner or later that no man can live to himself alone. Mrs Blake had her feelings; and though she was the most submissive and loyal of wives, yet she had the instinctive and normal objection to sharing her husband with others. Blake might argue that her objection was unreasonable, and that a truly unselfish woman should rise above such appropriation. But the stubborn fact remains that the woman who does so rise is either indifferent to her husband or abnormal, and Mrs. Blake, at any rate, both loving and unselfish to a heroic degree, was just here inflexible. King Solomon has sung the praises of a virtuous wife. We may take it as granted that her price is far above rubies. But the man who imperils his treasure by putting into practice some theory of free-love, however good that theory may seem in his own eyes, is worse than a fool; and if he cannot endure some inconvenience for the sake of keeping the best gift that Heaven can bestow, he is unworthy to receive it.

Besides these facts, which must have forced their full attention on Blake as the years went by, time was modifying his early notions in other ways. He was an indefatigable worker. When one realizes the immense energy expended in creative work, and that Blake carried this on day after day, one sees that much of the sex energy must pass into another channel to supply the necessary power.