William Blake

by G. K. Chesterton

THE MORNING STARS (1821)

It is instinctive to describe Blake as a fantastic artist; and yet there is a very real sense in which Blake is conventional. If any reader thinks the phrase paradoxical, he can easily discover that it is true; he can discover it simply by comparing Blake even in his most wild and arbitrary work with any merely modern artist who has the name of being wild; with Aubrey Beardsley or even with Rossetti. All Blake’s heroes are conventional heroes made unconventionally heroic. All Blake’s heroines are elegant females without their clothes. But in both cases they exaggerate and insist upon the traditional ideal of the sexes—the broad shoulders of the god and the broad hips of the goddess. Blake detested the sensuality of Rubens. But if he had been obliged to choose between the women of Rubens and the women of Rossetti, he would have flung himself on the neck of Rubens. For we have a false conception of what constitutes exaggeration. The end of the eighteenth century (being a dogmatic period) believed in certain things and exaggerated them. The end of the nineteenth century simply did not know what things to exaggerate; so it fell back upon merely underrating them. Blake tried to make Wallace look even bolder and fiercer than Wallace can possibly have looked. That was his exaggeration of Wallace. But Burne-Jones’ exaggeration of Perseus is not an exaggeration at all. It is an under-statement; for the whole fascination of Burne-Jones’ Perseus is that he looks frightened. Blake’s figure of a woman is aggressively and monstrously womanly. That is its fascination, if it has any. But the fascination of a Beardsley woman (if she has any) is exactly that she is not quite a woman. So much of what we have meant by exaggeration is really diminution; so much of what we have meant by fancy is simply falling short of fact. The Burne-Jones’ man is interesting because he is not quite brave enough to be a man. The Beardsley woman is interesting because she is not quite pretty enough to be a woman. But Blake’s men are brave beyond all decency: and Blake’s women are so swaggeringly bent on being beautiful that they become quite ugly in the process. If anyone wishes to know exactly what I mean, I recommend him to look at one of those extraordinary designs of nymphs in which a woman (or, as Blake loved to call it, the Female Form) is made to perform an impossible feat of acrobatics. It is impossible, but it is quite female; perhaps the words are not wholly inconsistent. A living serpent might perform such a piece of athletics; but even then only a female living serpent. But nobody would ask a Burne-Jones or Beardsley female to perform any athletics at all.

Blake in pictorial art was not a mere master of the moonstruck or the grotesque. On the contrary, he was, as artists go, exceptionally a champion of the smooth and sensible. In so far as being “modern” means being against the great conventions of mankind, indifferent to the difference of the sexes, or inclined to despise doctrinal outline, then there was never any man who was so little of a modern as Blake. He may have been mad; but there are varieties even in madness. There are madmen, like Blake, who go mad on health, and there are madmen who go mad on sickness.

The distinction is a solid one. You may think the queerly and partially clothed women of Aubrey Beardsley ugly. You may think the naked women of William Blake ugly. But you must perceive this peculiar and extraordinary effect about the women of William Blake, that they are women. They are exaggerated in the direction of the female form; they swing upon big hips; they let out and loosen long and luxuriant hair. Now the queer females of Aubrey Beardsley are queerest of all in this, that they are not even female. They are narrow where women have a curve and cropped where women have a head of hair. Blake’s women are often anatomically impossible. But they are so far women that they could not possibly be anything else.

THE WHIRLWIND (1825)

This comparison between Blake’s art and such art as Aubrey Beardsley’s is not an invidious impertinence, it is really an important distinction. Blake’s work may be fantastic; but it is a fantasia on an old and recognisable air. It exaggerates characteristics. Blake’s women are too womanish, his young men are too athletic, his old men are too preposterously old. But Aubrey Beardsley does not really exaggerate; he understates. His young men have less than the energy of youth. His women fascinate by the weakness of sex rather than by its strength. In short, if one is really to exaggerate the truth, one must have some truth to exaggerate. The decadent mystic produces an effect not by exaggerating but by distorting. True exaggeration is a thing both subtle and austere. Caricature is a serious thing; it is almost blasphemously serious. Caricature really means making a pig more like a pig than even God has made him. But anyone can make him not like a pig at all; anyone can create a weird impression by giving him the beard of a goat. In Aubrey Beardsley the artistic thrill (and there is an artistic thrill) consists in the fact that the women are not quite women nor the men quite men. Blake had absolutely no trace of this morbidity of deficiency. He never asks us to consider a tree magical because it is a stunted tree; or a man a magician merely because he has one eye. His form of fantasy would rather be to give a tree more branches than it could carry and to give a man bigger eyes than he could keep in his head. There is really a great deal of difference between the fantastic and the exaggerative. One may be fantastic by merely leaving something out. One might call it a fantasy if the official portrait of Wellington represented him without a nose. But one could hardly call it an exaggeration.

There is an everlasting battle in which Blake is on the side of the angels, and what is much more difficult and dangerous, on the side of all the sensible men. The question is so enormous and so important, that it is difficult to state even by reason of its reality. For in this world of ours we do not so much go on and discover small things; rather we go on and discover big things. It is the details that we see first; it is the design that we only see very slowly; and some men die never having seen it at all. We all wake up on a battle-field. We see certain squadrons in certain uniforms gallop past; we take an arbitrary fancy to this or that colour, to this or that plume. But it often takes us a long time to realise what the fight is about or even who is fighting whom. One may say, to keep up the metaphor, that many a man has joined the French army from love of the Horse Guards Blue; many an old-fashioned eighteenth century sailor has gone over to the Chinese merely because they wore pigtails. It is so easy to turn against what is really yourself for the sake of some accidental resemblance to yourself. You may envy the curled hair of Hercules; but do not envy curly hair until you wish that you were a nigger. You may regret that you have a short nose; but do not dream of its growing longer and longer till it is like the trunk of an elephant. Wait until you know what the battle is broadly about before you rush roaring after any advancing regiment. For a battle is a complicated thing; each army contains coats of different colour; each section of each army advances at a different angle. You may fancy that the Greens are charging the Blues exactly at the moment when both are combining to effect a fine military manœuvre. You may conceive that two similar-looking columns are supporting each other at the very instant when they are about to blaze at each other with cannon, rifle, and revolver. So in the modern intellectual world we can see flags of many colours, deeds of manifold interest; the one thing we cannot see is the map. We cannot see the simplified statement which tells us what is the origin of all the trouble. How shall we manage to state in an obvious and alphabetical manner the ultimate query, the primordial pivot on which the whole modern problem turns? It cannot be done in long rationalistic words; they convey by their very sound the suggestion of something subtle. One must try to think of something in the way of a plain street metaphor or an obvious analogy. For the thing is not too hard for human speech; it is actually too obvious for human speech.

The fundamental fight in which, despite all this heat and headlong misunderstanding, William Blake is on the right side, is one which would require a book about the battle and not about William Blake. By an accident at once convenient and deceptive, it can largely be described as geographical as well as philosophical. It is crudely true that there are two types of mysticism, that of Christendom and that of Orientalism. Now this scheme of east and west is inadequate; but it does happen to fit in with the working facts. For the odd thing is this, not only are most of the merely modern movements of idealism Oriental, but their Orientalism is all that they have in common. They all come together, and yet their only apparent point of union is that they all come from the East. Thus a modern vegetarian is generally also a teetotaller, yet there is certainly no obvious intellectual connection between consuming vegetables and not consuming fermented vegetables. A drunkard, when lifted laboriously out of the gutter, might well be heard huskily to plead that he had fallen there through excessive devotion to a vegetable diet. On the other hand, a man might well be a practised and polished cannibal and still be a strict teetotaller. A subtle parallelism might doubtless be found; but the only quite obvious parallelism is that vegetarianism is Buddhist and teetotalism is Mahometan. In the same way, it is the cold truth that there is no kind of logical connection between being an Agnostic and being a Socialist. But it is the fact that the Chinese are as agnostic as oxen; and it is the fact that the Japanese are as socialistic as rats. These appalling ideas, that a man has no divine individual destiny, that making a minute item in the tribe or hive, is his only earthly destiny, these ideas do come all together out of the same quarter; they do in practise blow upon us out of the East, as cold and inhuman as the east wind.