The third thing to note about this picture is that for Blake the ghost of a flea means the idea or principle of a flea. The principle of a flea (so far as we can see it) is bloodthirstiness, the feeding on the life of another, the fury of the parasite. Fleas may have other nobler sentiments and meditations, but we know nothing about them. The vision of a flea is a vision of blood; and that is what Blake has made of it. This is the next point, then, to be remarked in his make-up as a mystic; he is interested in the ideas for which such things stand. For him the tiger means an awful elegance; for him the tree means a silent strength.
If it be granted that Blake was interested, not in the flea, but in the idea of the flea, we can proceed to the next step, which is a particularly important one. Every great mystic goes about with a magnifying glass. He sees every flea as a giant—perhaps rather as an ogre. I have spoken of the tall castle in which these giants dwell; but, indeed, that tall tower is the microscope. It will not be denied that Blake shows the best part of a mystic’s attitude in seeing that the soul of a flea is ten thousand times larger than a flea. But the really interesting point is much more striking. It is the essential point upon which all primary understanding of the art of Blake really turns. The point is this: that the ghost of a flea is not only larger than a flea, the ghost of a flea is actually more solid than a flea. The flea himself is hazy and fantastic compared to the hard and massive actuality of his ghost. When we have understood this, we have understood the second of the great ideas in Blake—the idea of ideas.
To sum up Blake’s philosophy in any phrase sufficiently simple and popular for our purpose is not at all easy. For Blake’s philosophy was not simple. Those who imagine that because he was always talking about lambs and daisies, about Jesus and little children, that therefore he held a simple gospel of goodwill, entirely misunderstand the whole nature of his mind. No man had harder dogmas; no one insisted more that religion must have theology. The Everlasting Gospel was far from being a simple gospel. Blake had succeeded in inventing in the course of about ten years as tangled and interdependent a system of theology as the Catholic Church has accumulated in two thousand. Much of it, indeed, he inherited from ancient heretics who were much more doctrinal than the orthodoxy which they opposed. Notable among these were the Gnostics, and in some degree the mad Franciscans who followed Joachim de Flor. Very few modern people would know an Akamoth or an Æon if they saw him. Yet one would really have to be on rather intimate terms with these old mystical gods and demons before one could move quite easily in the Cosmos which was familiar to Blake.
THE CRUCIFIXION (1804)
Let us, however, attempt to find a short and popular statement of the position of Blake and all such mystics. The plainest way of putting it, I think, is this: this school especially denied the authority of Nature. Some went the extreme length of the mad Manichæans, and declared the material universe evil in itself. Some, like Blake, and most of the poets considered it as a shadow or illusion, a sort of joke of the Almighty. But whatever else Nature was, Nature was not our mother. Blake applies to her the strange words used by Christ to Mary, and says to Mother-Earth in many poems: “What have I to do with thee?” It is common to connect Blake and Wordsworth because of their ballads about babies and sheep. They were utterly opposite. If Wordsworth was the Poet of Nature, Blake was specially the Poet of Anti-Nature. Against Nature he set a certain entity which he called Imagination; but the word as commonly used conveys very little of what he meant by it. He did not mean something shadowy or fantastic, but rather something clear-cut, definite, and unalterable. By Imagination, that is, he meant images; the eternal images of things. You might shoot all the lions on the earth; but you could not destroy the Lion of Judah, the Lion of the Imagination. You might kill all the lambs of the world and eat them; but you could not kill the Lamb of the Imagination, which was the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sins of the world. Blake’s philosophy, in brief, was primarily the assertion that the ideal is more actual than the real: just as in Euclid the good triangle in the mind is a more actual (and more practical) than the bad triangle on the blackboard.
Many of Blake’s pictures become intelligible (or as intelligible as they can become) if we keep this principle in mind. For instance, there is a fine design representing a naked and heroic youth of great beauty tracing something on the sand. The reader, when he looks at the title of it, is interested to discover that this is a portrait of Sir Isaac Newton. It was not so much of an affectation as it seems. Blake from his own point of view really did think that the Eternal Isaac Newton as God beheld him was more of an actuality than the terrestrial gentleman who happened to be elderly or happened by some sublunary accident to wear clothes. Therefore, when he calls it a “portrait” he is not, from his own point of view, talking nonsense. It is the form and feature of someone who exists and who is different from everyone else, just as if it were the ordinary oil-painting of an alderman.
The most important conception can be found in one sentence which he let fall as if by accident, “Nature has no outline, but imagination has.” If a clear black line when looked at through a microscope was seen to be a ragged and confused edge like a mop or a doormat, then Blake would say, “So much the worse for the microscope.” If pure lines existed only in the human mind, then Blake would say, “So much the better for the human mind.” If the real earth grew damp and dubious when it met and mixed itself with the sea, so much the worse for the real earth. If the idea of clean-cut truth existed only in the intellect, that was the most actual place in which anything could exist. In short, Blake really insisted that man as the image of God had a right to impose form upon nature. He would have laughed to scorn the notion of the modern evolutionist—that Nature is to be permitted to impose formlessness upon man. For him the lines in a landscape were boundaries which he drew like frontiers, by his authority as the plenipotentiary ambassador of heaven. When he drew his line round Leviathan he was drawing the divine net around him; he tamed his bulls and lions even by creating them. And when he made in some picture a line between sea and land that does not exist in Nature, he was saying by supernatural right, “Thus far shalt thou come, and no farther, and here shall thy proud waves be stayed.”
I select the symbol of the sea partly because Blake was himself fond of such elemental images, and partly because it is an image especially appropriate to Blake’s great conception of the outline in the eternal imagination. Nearly all phrases about the sea are specially and spiritually false. People talk of the sea as vast and vague, drifting and indefinite; as if the magic of it lay in having no lines or boundaries. But the spell of the sea upon the eye and the soul is exactly this: that it is the one straight line in nature. They talk of the infinite sea. Artistically it would be far truer to talk of an infinite haystalk; for the haystalk does slightly fade into a kind of fringe against the sky. But the horizon line is not only hard but tight, like a fiddle-string. I have always a nervous fear that the sea-line will snap suddenly. And it is exactly this mathematical decision in the sea that makes it so romantic a background for fighting and human figures. England was called in Catholic days the garden of Mary. The garden is all the more beautiful because it is enclosed in four hard angular walls of sapphire or emerald. Any mere tuft or twig can curve with a curve that is incalculable. Any scrap of moss can contain in itself an irregularity that is infinite. The sea is the one thing that is really exciting because the sea is the one thing that is flat.