Ideas of Good and Evil

by W. B. Yeats

This letter may have been the expression of a moment’s enthusiasm, but was more probably rooted in one of those intuitions of coming technical power which every creator feels, and learns to rely upon; for all his greatest work was done, and the principles of his art were formulated, after this date. Except a word here and there, his writings hitherto had not dealt with the principles of art except remotely and by implication; but now he wrote much upon them, and not in obscure symbolic verse, but in emphatic prose, and explicit if not very poetical rhyme. In his Descriptive Catalogue, in The Address to the Public, in the notes on Sir Joshua Reynolds, in The Book of Moonlight—of which some not very dignified rhymes alone remain—in beautiful detached passages in The MS. Book, he explained spiritual art, and praised the painters of Florence and their influence, and cursed all that has come of Venice and Holland. The limitation of his view was from the very intensity of his vision; he was a too literal realist of imagination, as others are of nature; and because he believed that the figures seen by the mind’s eye, when exalted by inspiration, were ‘eternal existences,’ symbols of divine essences, he hated every grace of style that might obscure their lineaments. To wrap them about in reflected lights was to do this, and to dwell over-fondly upon any softness of hair or flesh was to dwell upon that which was least permanent and least characteristic, for ‘The great and golden rule of art, as of life, is this: that the more distinct, sharp and wiry the boundary-line, the more perfect the work of art; and the less keen and sharp, the greater is the evidence of weak imitation, plagiarism and bungling.’ Inspiration was to see the permanent and characteristic in all forms, and if you had it not, you must needs imitate with a languid mind the things you saw or remembered, and so sink into the sleep of nature where all is soft and melting. ‘Great inventors in all ages knew this. Protogenes and Apelles knew each other by their line. Raphael and Michael Angelo and Albert Dürer are known by this and this alone. How do we distinguish the owl from the beast, the horse from the ox, but by the bounding outline? How do we distinguish one face or countenance from another but by the bounding-line and its infinite inflections and movements? What is it that builds a house and plants a garden but the definite and determinate? What is it that distinguished honesty from knavery but the hard and wiry line of rectitude and certainty in the actions and intentions? Leave out this line and you leave out life itself; and all is chaos again, and the line of the Almighty must be drawn out upon it before man or beast can exist.’ He even insisted that ‘colouring does not depend upon where the colours are put, but upon where the light and dark are put, and all depends upon the form or outline’—meaning, I suppose, that a colour gets its brilliance or its depth from being in light or in shadow. He does not mean by outline the bounding-line dividing a form from its background, as one of his commentators has thought, but the line that divides it from surrounding space, and unless you have an overmastering sense of this you cannot draw true beauty at all, but only ‘the beauty that is appended to folly,’ a beauty of mere voluptuous softness, ‘a lamentable accident of the mortal and perishing life,’ for ‘the beauty proper for sublime art is lineaments, or forms and features capable of being the receptacles of intellect,’ and ‘the face or limbs that alter least from youth to old age are the face and limbs of the greatest beauty and perfection.’ His praise of a severe art had been beyond price had his age rested a moment to listen, in the midst of its enthusiasm for Correggio and the later Renaissance, for Bartolozzi and for Stothard; and yet in his visionary realism, and in his enthusiasm for what, after all, is perhaps the greatest art, and a necessary part of every picture that is art at all, he forgot how he who wraps the vision in lights and shadows, in iridescent or glowing colour, having in the midst of his labour many little visions of these secondary essences, until form be half lost in pattern, may compel the canvas or paper to become itself a symbol of some not indefinite because unsearchable essence; for is not the Bacchus and Ariadne of Titian a talisman as powerfully charged with intellectual virtue as though it were a jewel-studded door of the city seen on Patmos?

To cover the imperishable lineaments of beauty with shadows and reflected lights was to fall into the power of his ‘Vala,’ the indolent fascination of nature, the woman divinity who is so often described in ‘the prophetic books’ as ‘sweet pestilence,’ and whose children weave webs to take the souls of men; but there was yet a more lamentable chance, for nature has also a ‘masculine portion’ or ‘spectre’ which kills instead of merely hiding, and is continually at war with inspiration. To ‘generalize’ forms and shadows, to ‘smooth out’ spaces and lines in obedience to ‘laws of composition,’ and of painting; founded, not upon imagination, which always thirsts for variety and delights in freedom, but upon reasoning from sensation which is always seeking to reduce everything to a lifeless and slavish uniformity; as the popular art of Blake’s day had done, and as he understood Sir Joshua Reynolds to advise, was to fall into ‘Entuthon Benithon,’ or ‘the Lake of Udan Adan,’ or some other of those regions where the imagination and the flesh are alike dead, that he names by so many resonant phantastical names. ‘General knowledge is remote knowledge,’ he wrote; ‘it is in particulars that wisdom consists, and happiness too. Both in art and life general masses are as much art as a pasteboard man is human. Every man has eyes, nose and mouth; this every idiot knows. But he who enters into and discriminates most minutely the manners and intentions, the characters in all their branches, is the alone wise or sensible man, and on this discrimination all art is founded.... As poetry admits not a letter that is insignificant, so painting admits not a grain of sand or a blade of grass insignificant, much less an insignificant blot or blur.’

Against another desire of his time, derivative also from what he has called ‘corporeal reason,’ the desire for a ‘tepid moderation,’ for a lifeless ‘sanity in both art and life,’ he had protested years before with a paradoxical violence. ‘The roadway of excess leads to the palace of wisdom,’ and we must only ‘bring out weight and measure in time of dearth.’ This protest, carried, in the notes on Sir Joshua Reynolds, to the point of dwelling with pleasure on the thought that ‘The Lives of the Painters say that Raphael died of dissipation,’ because dissipation is better than emotional penury, seemed as important to his old age as to his youth. He taught it to his disciples, and one finds it in its purely artistic shape in a diary written by Samuel Palmer, in 1824: ‘Excess is the essential vivifying spirit, vital spark, embalming spice of the finest art. There are many mediums in the means—none, oh, not a jot, not a shadow of a jot, in the end of great art. In a picture whose merit is to be excessively brilliant, it can’t be too brilliant, but individual tints may be too brilliant.... We must not begin with medium, but think always on excess and only use medium to make excess more abundantly excessive.’

These three primary commands, to seek a determinate outline, to avoid a generalized treatment, and to desire always abundance and exuberance, were insisted upon with vehement anger, and their opponents called again and again ‘demons’ and ‘villains,’ ‘hired’ by the wealthy and the idle; but in private, Palmer has told us, he could find ‘sources of delight throughout the whole range of art,’ and was ever ready to praise excellence in any school, finding, doubtless, among friends, no need for the emphasis of exaggeration. There is a beautiful passage in ‘Jerusalem’ in which the merely mortal part of the mind, ‘the spectre,’ creates ‘pyramids of pride,’ and ‘pillars in the deepest hell to reach the heavenly arches,’ and seeks to discover wisdom in ‘the spaces between the stars,’ not ‘in the stars,’ where it is, but the immortal part makes all his labours vain, and turns his pyramids to ‘grains of sand,’ his ‘pillars’ to ‘dust on the fly’s wing,’ and makes of ‘his starry heavens a moth of gold and silver mocking his anxious grasp.’ So when man’s desire to rest from spiritual labour, and his thirst to fill his art with mere sensation and memory, seem upon the point of triumph, some miracle transforms them to a new inspiration; and here and there among the pictures born of sensation and memory is the murmuring of a new ritual, the glimmering of new talismans and symbols.

It was during and after the writing of these opinions that Blake did the various series of pictures which have brought him the bulk of his fame. He had already completed the illustrations to Young’s Night Thoughts—in which the great sprawling figures, a little wearisome even with the luminous colours of the original water-colour, became nearly intolerable in plain black and white—and almost all the illustrations to ‘the prophetic books,’ which have an energy like that of the elements, but are rather rapid sketches taken while some phantasmic procession swept over him, than elaborate compositions, and in whose shadowy adventures one finds not merely, as did Dr. Garth Wilkinson, ‘the hells of the ancient people, the Anakim, the Nephalim, and the Rephaim ... gigantic petrifactions from which the fires of lust and intense selfish passion have long dissipated what was animal and vital’; not merely the shadows cast by the powers who had closed the light from him as ‘with a door and window shutters,’ but the shadows of those who gave them battle. He did now, however, the many designs to Milton, of which I have only seen those to Paradise Regained; the reproductions of those to Comus, published, I think, by Mr. Quaritch; and the three or four to Paradise Lost, engraved by Bell Scott—a series of designs which one good judge considers his greatest work; the illustrations to Blair’s Grave, whose gravity and passion struggle with the mechanical softness and trivial smoothness of Schiavonetti’s engraving; the illustrations to Thornton’s Virgil, whose influence is manifest in the work of the little group of landscape-painters who gathered about him in his old age and delighted to call him master. The member of the group, whom I have already so often quoted, has alone praised worthily these illustrations to the first eclogue: ‘There is in all such a misty and dreamy glimmer as penetrates and kindles the inmost soul and gives complete and unreserved delight, unlike the gaudy daylight of this world. They are like all this wonderful artist’s work, the drawing aside of the fleshly curtain, and the glimpse which all the most holy, studious saints and sages have enjoyed, of the rest which remains to the people of God.’ Now, too, he did the great series, the crowning work of his life, the illustrations to The Book of Job and the illustrations to The Divine Comedy. Hitherto he had protested against the mechanical ‘dots and lozenges’ and ‘blots and blurs’ of Woollett and Strange, but had himself used both ‘dot and lozenge,’ ‘blot and blur,’ though always in subordination ‘to a firm and determinate outline’; but in Marc Antonio, certain of whose engravings he was shown by Linnell, he found a style full of delicate lines, a style where all was living and energetic, strong and subtle. And almost his last words, a letter written upon his death-bed, attack the ‘dots and lozenges’ with even more than usually quaint symbolism, and praise expressive lines. ‘I know that the majority of Englishmen are bound by the indefinite ... a line is a line in its minutest particulars, straight or crooked. It is itself not intermeasurable by anything else ... but since the French Revolution’—since the reign of reason began, that is—‘Englishmen are all intermeasurable with one another, certainly a happy state of agreement in which I do not agree.’ The Dante series occupied the last years of his life; even when too weak to get out of bed he worked on, propped up with the great drawing-book before him. He sketched a hundred designs, but left all incomplete, some very greatly so, and partly engraved seven plates, of which the ‘Francesca and Paolo’ is the most finished. It is not, I think, inferior to any but the finest in the Job, if indeed to them, and shows in its perfection Blake’s mastery over elemental things, the swirl in which the lost spirits are hurried, ‘a watery flame’ he would have called it, the haunted waters and the huddling shapes. In the illustrations of Purgatory there is a serene beauty, and one finds his Dante and Virgil climbing among the rough rocks under a cloudy sun, and in their sleep upon the smooth steps towards the summit, a placid, marmoreal, tender, starry rapture.

All in this great series are in some measure powerful and moving, and not, as it is customary to say of the work of Blake, because a flaming imagination pierces through a cloudy and indecisive technique, but because they have the only excellence possible in any art, a mastery over artistic expression. The technique of Blake was imperfect, incomplete, as is the technique of well-nigh all artists who have striven to bring fires from remote summits; but where his imagination is perfect and complete, his technique has a like perfection, a like completeness. He strove to embody more subtle raptures, more elaborate intuitions than any before him; his imagination and technique are more broken and strained under a great burden than the imagination and technique of any other master. ‘I am,’ wrote Blake, ‘like others, just equal in invention and execution.’ And again, ‘No man can improve an original invention; nor can an original invention exist without execution, organized, delineated and articulated either by God or man ... I have heard people say, “Give me the ideas; it is no matter what words you put them into;” and others say, “Give me the designs; it is no matter for the execution.”... Ideas cannot be given but in their minutely appropriate words, nor can a design be made without its minutely appropriate execution.’ Living in a time when technique and imagination are continually perfect and complete, because they no longer strive to bring fire from heaven, we forget how imperfect and incomplete they were in even the greatest masters, in Botticelli, in Orcagna, and in Giotto.

The errors in the handiwork of exalted spirits are as the more phantastical errors in their lives; as Coleridge’s opium cloud; as Villiers De L’Isle Adam’s candidature for the throne of Greece; as Blake’s anger against causes and purposes he but half understood; as the flickering madness an Eastern scripture would allow in august dreamers; for he who half lives in eternity endures a rending of the structures of the mind, a crucifixion of the intellectual body.

II. HIS OPINIONS ON DANTE

As Blake sat bent over the great drawing-book, in which he made his designs to The Divine Comedy, he was very certain that he and Dante represented spiritual states which face one another in an eternal enmity. Dante, because a great poet, was ‘inspired by the Holy Ghost’; but his inspiration was mingled with a certain philosophy, blown up out of his age, which Blake held for mortal and the enemy of immortal things, and which from the earliest times has sat in high places and ruled the world. This philosophy was the philosophy of soldiers, of men of the world, of priests busy with government, of all who, because of the absorption in active life, have been persuaded to judge and to punish, and partly also, he admitted, the philosophy of Christ, who in descending into the world had to take on the world; who, in being born of Mary, a symbol of the law in Blake’s symbolic language, had to ‘take after his mother,’ and drive the money-changers out of the Temple. Opposed to this was another philosophy, not made by men of action, drudges of time and space, but by Christ when wrapped in the divine essence, and by artists and poets, who are taught by the nature of their craft to sympathize with all living things, and who, the more pure and fragrant is their lamp, pass the further from all limitations, to come at last to forget good and evil in an absorbing vision of the happy and the unhappy. The one philosophy was worldly, and established for the ordering of the body and the fallen will, and so long as it did not call its ‘laws of prudence’ ‘the laws of God,’ was a necessity, because ‘you cannot have liberty in this world without what you call moral virtue’; the other was divine, and established for the peace of the imagination and the unfallen will, and, even when obeyed with a too literal reverence, could make men sin against no higher principality than prudence. He called the followers of the first philosophy pagans, no matter by what name they knew themselves, because the pagans, as he understood the word pagan, believed more in the outward life, and in what he called ‘war, princedom, and victory,’ than in the secret life of the spirit; and the followers of the second philosophy Christians, because only those whose sympathies had been enlarged and instructed by art and poetry could obey the Christian command of unlimited forgiveness. Blake had already found this ‘pagan’ philosophy in Swedenborg, in Milton, in Wordsworth, in Sir Joshua Reynolds, in many persons, and it had roused him so constantly and to such angry paradox that its overthrow became the signal passion of his life, and filled all he did and thought with the excitement of a supreme issue. Its kingdom was bound to grow weaker so soon as life began to lose a little in crude passion and naïve tumult, but Blake was the first to announce its successor, and he did this, as must needs be with revolutionists who have ‘the law’ for ‘mother,’ with a firm conviction that the things his opponents held white were indeed black, and that the things they held black, white; with a strong persuasion that all busy with government are men darkness and ‘something other than human life’; one is reminded of Shelley, who was the next to take up the cry, though with a less abundant philosophic faculty, but still more of Nietzsche, whose thought flows always, though with an even more violent current, in the bed Blake’s thought has worn.

The kingdom that was passing was, he held, the kingdom of the Tree of Knowledge; the kingdom that was coming was the kingdom of the Tree of Life: men who ate from the Tree of Knowledge wasted their days in anger against one another, and in taking one another captive in great nets; men who sought their food among the green leaves of the Tree of Life condemned none but the unimaginative and the idle, and those who forget that even love and death and old age are an imaginative art.