THE TOMB (1806)
Puritanism was an honourable mood; it was a noble fad. In other words, it was a highly creditable mistake. We have all felt the frame of mind in which one wishes to smash golden croziers and mitres merely because they are golden. We all know how natural it is at certain moments to feel a profound thirst to kick clergymen simply because they are clergymen. But if we seriously ask ourselves whether in the long run humanity is not happier with gold in its religion rather than mere drab, then we come to the conclusion that the gold on cross or cope does give more pleasure to most men than it gives pain, for a moment, to us. If we really ask ourselves if religions do not work better with a definite priesthood to do the drudgery of religion, we come to the conclusion that they do work better. Anti-clericalism is a generous and ideal mood; clericalism is a permanent and practical necessity. To put the matter in an easier and more everyday metaphor, it is natural for any poor Londoner to feel at times an abstract aspiration to beat the Lord Mayor of London. But it does not follow that it would really have been a kindness to poor Londoners to abolish the Lord Mayor’s Show.
Now it is in this sense that we may truly say that Blake (upon one side of his mind) was something worse than a maniac—he was a faddist. He did permit aspirations or prejudices which are accidental or one-sided to capture and control him at the expense of things really more human and enduring: things which he shared with all the children of men. I do not allude to his supernaturalism; for on that he is in no sense alone, nor even specially eccentric. I do not refer to his love of the gorgeous, the terrible or even the secretive of temples, initiations, and hieroglyphic religion. For that sort of mystery is really quite popular and even democratic. That sort of secrecy is a very open secret.
It is usual to hear a man say in modern England that he has too much common sense to believe in ghosts. But common sense is in favour of a belief in ghosts, the common sense of mankind. It is usual to hear a man say that he likes common sense and does not like the mummeries and flummeries of church ritual. But common sense is in favour of mummery and ritualism, the common sense of mankind. The man who attempts to do without symbols is a prophet so austere and isolated as to be dangerously near to a madman. The man who does not believe in ghosts is a solitary fanatic and lonely dreamer among the sons of men. Therefore I do not in any sense count even his craziest visions or wildest symbols among the real fads or eccentricities of Blake. But he had mental attitudes which were really fads and eccentricities, in this essential sense, that they were not exaggerations of a general human feeling but definite denials of it. He did not lead humanity, but attacked or even obstructed it. Many instances might be given of the kind of thing I mean; there was something of it in Blake’s persistent and even pedantic insistence that war as war is evil. There was something of Tolstoy in Blake; and that means something that is inhuman as well as something that is heroic. But his allusions to this were occasional and perhaps even accidental, and better cases could certainly be found. The essential of all the cases is, however, that when he went wrong it was as an intellectual and not as a poet.
Take, for example, his notion of going naked. Here I think Blake is merely a sort of hard theorist. Here, in spite of his imagination and his laughter, there was even a touch of the prig about him. He was obscene on principle. So to a great extent was Walt Whitman. A dictionary is supposed to contain all words, so it has to contain coarse words. “Leaves of Grass” was planned to praise all things, so it had to praise gross things. There was something of this pedantic perfection in Blake’s escapades. As the hygienist insists on wearing Jäger clothes, he insisted on wearing no clothes. As the æsthete must wear sandals, he must wear nothing. He is not really lawless at all; he is bowing to the law of his own outlawed logic.
There is nothing at all poetical in this revolt. William Blake was a great and real poet; but in this point he was simply unpoetical. Walt Whitman was a great and real poet; but on this point he was prosaic and priggish. Two extraordinary men are not poets because they tear away the veil from sex. On the contrary it is because all men are poets that they all hang a veil over sex. The ploughman does not plough by night, because he does not feel specially romantic about ploughing. He does love by night, because he does feel specially romantic about sex. In this matter Blake was not only unpoetical, but far less poetical than the mass of ordinary men. Decorum is not an over-civilised convention. Decorum is not tame, decorum is wild, as wild as the wind at night.
“Mysterious as the moons that rise
At midnight in the pines of Var.”
