William Blake

by G. K. Chesterton

THE SELFHOOD OF DECEIT (1807)

Modesty is too fierce and elemental a thing for the modern pedants to understand; I had almost said too savage a thing. It has in it the joy of escape and the ancient shyness of freedom. In this matter Blake and Whitman are merely among the modern pedants. In not admiring sexual reticence these two great poets simply did not understand one of the greatest poems of humanity.

I have given as an instance his disregard of the idea of mystery and modesty as involved in dress; it was an unpoetical thought that there should be no curtains of gold or scarlet round the shrine of the Holy Spirit. But there is stronger instances in his theology and philosophy. Thus he imbibed the idea common among early Gnostics and not unknown to Christian Science speculators of our day, that it was a confession of weakness in Christ to be crucified at all. If he had really attained divine life (so ran the argument) he ought to have attained immortal life; he ought to have lived for ever upon the earth. With an excess of what can only be called impudence, he even turned Gethsemane into a sort of moral breakdown; the sudden weakness which accepted death. The general claim that vices are poetical is largely unfounded; and this is an excellent example of how unpoetical is the vice of profanity. Blasphemy is not wild; blasphemy is in its nature prosaic. It consists in regarding in a commonplace manner something which other and happier people regard in a rapturous and imaginative manner. This is well exemplified in poor Blake and his Gnostic heresy about Jesus. In holding that Christ was weakened by being crucified he is certainly a pedant, and certainly not a poet. If there is one point on which the spirit of the poets and the poetic soul in all peoples is on the side of Christianity, it is exactly this one point on which Blake is against Christianity—“was crucified, dead and buried.” The spectacle of a God dying is much more grandiose than the spectacle of a man living for ever. The former suggests that awful changes have really entered the alchemy of the universe; the latter is only vaguely reminiscent of hygienic octogenarians and Eno’s Fruit Salts. Moreover, to the poet as to the child, death must be dreadful even if it is desirable. To talk (as some modern theosophists do) about death being nothing, the mere walking into another room, to talk like this is not only prosaic and profoundly un-Christian; it is decidedly vulgar. It is against the whole trend of the secret emotions of humanity. It is indecent, like persuading a decent peasant to go without clothes. There is more of the song and music of mankind in a clerk putting on his Sunday clothes than in a fanatic running naked down Cheapside. And there is more real mysticism in nailing down a coffin lid than in pretending, in mere rhetoric, to throw open the doors of death.

I have given two cases of the presence in Blake of these anti-human creeds which I call fads—the case of clothes and the case of the crucifixion. I could give a much larger number of them, but I think their nature is here sufficiently indicated. They are all cases in which Blake ceased to be a poet, through becoming entirely, instead of only partially, separated from the people. And this, I think, is certainly connected with that quality in him to which I referred in analysing the eighteenth century; I mean the element of oligarchy and fastidiousness in the mystics and masonries of that epoch. They were all founded in an atmosphere of degrees and initiations. The chief difference between Christianity and the thousand transcendental schools of to-day is substantially the same as the difference nearly two thousand years ago between Christianity and the thousand sacred rites and secret societies of the Pagan Empire. The deepest difference is this: that all the heathen mysteries are so far aristocratic, that they are understood by some, and not understood by others. The Christian mysteries are so far democratic that nobody understands them at all.

THE SHEPHERDS (1821)

When we have fairly stated this doubtful and even false element in Blake’s philosophy, we can go on with greater ease and thoroughness to state where the solid and genuine value of that philosophy lay. It consisted in its placid and positive defiance of materialism, a work upon which all the mystics, Pagan and Christian, have been employed from the beginning. It is not unnatural that they should have fallen into many errors, employed dangerous fallacies, and even ruined the earth for the sake of the cloudland. But the war in which they were engaged has been none the less the noblest and most important effort of human history, and in their whole army there was no greater warrior than Blake.

One of the strange and rooted contradictions of the eighteenth century is a combination between profound revolution and superficial conventionality. It might almost be said that the men of that time had altered morals long before they thought of altering manners. The French Revolution was especially French in this respect, that it was above all things a respectable revolution. Violence was excused; madness was excused; but eccentricity was inexcusable. These men had taken a king’s head off his shoulders long before they had thought of taking the powder off their own heads. Danton could understand the Massacres of September, but he could not understand the worship of the Goddess of Reason or all the antics of the German madman Clootz. Robespierre grew tired of the Terror, but he never grew tired of shaving every morning. It is impossible to avoid the impression that this is rather a characteristic of the revolutions which really make a difference and defy the world. The same is true of that fallacious but most powerful and genuine English monument which was covered by the words Darwin and Evolution. If there was one striking thing about the fine old English agnostics, it was that they were entirely indifferent to alterations in the externals of pose or fashion, that they seem to have supposed that the huge intellectual overturn of agnosticism would leave the obvious respectability of life exactly as it was. They thought that one might entirely alter a man’s head without in the least altering his hat. They thought that one might shatter the twin wings of an archangel without throwing the least doubt upon the twin whiskers of a mid-Victorian professor. And though there was undoubtedly a certain solemn humour about such a position, yet, on the whole, I think the mid-Victorian agnostics were employing the right kind of revolution. It is broadly a characteristic of all valuable new-fashioned opinions that they are brought in by old-fashioned men. For the sincerity of such men is proved by both facts—the fact that they do care about their new truth and the fact that they do not care about their old clothes. Herbert Spencer’s philosophy is all the more serious because his appearance (to judge by his photographs) was quite startlingly absurd. And while the Tory caricatures were deriding Gladstone because he introduced very new-fangled legislation, they were also deriding him because he wore very antiquated collars.

But though this strange combination of convention in small things with revolt in big ones is not uncommon in hearty and human reformers, there is a quite special emphasis on this combination in the case of the eighteenth century. The very men who did deeds which were more dreadful and daring than we can dream to achieve, were the very men who spoke and wrote with a mincing propriety and almost effeminate fastidious distinction such as we should scarcely condescend to employ. The eighteenth century man called the eighteenth century woman “an elegant female”; but he was quite capable of saving her from a mad bull. He described his ideal republic as a place containing all the refined sensibilities of virtue with all the voluptuous seductions of pleasure. But he would be hacked with an axe and blown out of a gun to get it. He could pursue new notions with a certain solid and virile constancy, as if they were old ones. And the explanation is partly this: that however revolutionary, they were old ones—in this sense at least, that they involved the pursuit of some primary human hope to its original home. They powdered their hair because they really thought that a civilized man should be civilized—or, if you will, artificial. They spoke of “an elegant female” because they really thought, with their whole souls, that a female ought to be elegant. The old rebels preserved the old fashions—and among others the old fashion of rebelling. The new rebels, the revolutionists of our time, are intent upon introducing new fashions in boots, beds, food or furniture; so they have no time to rebel. But if we have once grasped this eighteenth century element of the insistence upon the elegant female because she is elegant, we have got hold of a fundamental fact in the relation of that century to Blake.