William Blake, the Man

by Charles Gardner

It was by Blake’s frank proclamation of the ego that he anticipated so much of what the modern apostles of the superman have made us all familiar with. From Ibsen’s Doll’s House to Nietzsche’s Thus spake Zarathustra, confidence in the ego has been proclaimed as the means to liberty, beauty, and sovereignty; and this has been accompanied by revivals on a large scale of those ancient mystery religions that turn on the culture of the divine ego.

This was a road of excess which Blake pursued as far as an individual might. In the nineteenth century the law of the ego, the struggle for life, the survival of the fittest, brute force, were regarded as all one, and transferred from the individual to the State, till in a few years the world was plunged into war.

Blake’s voyage of rediscovery began during the Reign of Terror. The new teachers, like Swedenborg and Godwin, Tom Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft, failed to satisfy his own craving for expression. The Reign of Terror appalled him when it showed him his principle at work in the proletariat. Then it was that turning again to the Evangelists he made the wonderful discovery, which later apostles of the ego have not made, that Jesus Christ was the perfect example and embodiment of his vision. He had pictured to himself a man, impelled by a creative passion, whose character in every part should be manifestly the outcome of fiery energy. And there was the Man in the Subject of the Gospels. But he saw that Jesus Christ could not be labelled or classed. There was egoistic self-expression in Him, and there was self-renunciation. Somehow He had altogether escaped the modern dilemma of self-expression or self-sacrifice. Both were magnificently present in Him and united, because His self-expression was resting on His self-surrender to God. Give up God, and man swings perpetually between duty to neighbour and duty to self. Believe in and surrender to God, and each falls into its proper place. This was not the only synthesis in the character of Jesus. He was a union of all possible contraries. Gentleness and fierceness; non-resistance and aggressive force; non-resentment and fiery invective; forgiveness and severe justice, haughty pride and lowliness; self-confidence and utter dependence upon God, all were in Jesus. Henceforth Blake could keep his vision of Jesus and his vision of art, for they were one.

The next stage in rediscovery was to find out what the great body of dogmatic truth had affirmed about Jesus down the Christian centuries. Here he made little progress. He probably felt, as we all do at times, that the simplicity of the gospel was lost in the maze of dogmatic subtleties. The negative aspect of dogma, that it rules out all that would infringe on that simplicity, never occurred to him. His mind was governed and distracted by Hindoo pantheism, and catholic anthropomorphism filtered and diluted through Swedenborg. Even after he had repudiated Swedenborg the distraction remained. His new understanding of Christ taught him that he must accept the ultimate antinomy of good and evil, and that therefore Christ’s heaven and hell must remain; but the pantheism never abated its watery flood, and the emphatic catholic teaching of transcendence and immanence gained no sufficient hold to deliver his mind.

The truth is that Blake was not a great thinker, still less a system-builder. He ought to have found the best Christian system while young and kept to it. Then he could have lived his life of vision within coherent bounds. Clear, sharp dogma, like outline in art, would have given rest to his mind, substance to his visions, and saved him from the waste of pouring out a torrent of incoherent sayings containing scraps of gnosticism, theosophy, rosicrucianism, and almost every heresy under the sun.

The master-mind in his youth who could have given him a sound system was Dr Johnson, and he would not listen to him. How should the arch-rebel pay any attention to the arch-conservator? Dr Johnson said many foolish things about things of no great importance: he was wise in great matters. An ounce of folly, like a dead fly in the ointment, suffices to put off the fastidious rebel, who will seize hold of any excuse. Eventually Blake subscribed to the same creed as Dr Johnson. That surely is a marvellous unanimity for such diverse minds.

The master-mind in his age who could have given him a better system than his own, and to whom he was beginning to listen, was Dante. His catholicism may have been of a medieval pattern, but it was very little infected with the time-spirit; it is even now finer than Swedenborg’s fabrication, and modern compared with the gnosticism that bulked so largely in Blake’s mind.

Blake makes no disciples, and no school can claim him, but he speaks to all who have any mental equipment. His vision of Christ, if we can make it our own and fill out its defects, will put us beyond the modern worship of the superman, and take us out of that sectarianism which gains ascendancy for a little while because of its lightness and fragmentariness.

The confusion in Blake’s mental life affects his art. He declared consistently in times of clear vision that outline, form, and foundation are the essence of spiritual things. This is beyond anything to be found in Sir Joshua’s Discourses, and anticipates Benedetto Croce when he says that art is an ultimate, that “form is constant and is spiritual activity,” while “matter is changeable,” yet he accomplished many designs that Reynolds could have taught him to correct.

His later poems suffer still more. The energy in them is terrific, and they are filled with flashes of inspiration; but their atmosphere is murky, and never clears for more than fifty lines at a time. They are storehouses, but the one who would get anything out of them must bring his taper with him.