by James Joyce
There are clearly quite some differences between Blake, the visionary anarchic heresiarch, and those highly orthodox ecclesiastic philosophers, Francisco Suarez, Europae atque orbis universi magister et oculus populi christiani, and Don Giovanni Mariana di Talavera who, in the previous century, had written a grim and logical defence of tyrannicide for the amazement of posterity. The same idealism that enraptured and sustained Blake when he let fly his thunderbolts against human evil or misery restrained him from cruelty even against a sinner’s body, the fragile curtain of flesh that lies on the marriage bed of our desire, as he put it in his mystic book, Thel. There is no lack of instances testifying to his goodness of heart in the story of his life. Although he struggled to live and only spent half a guinea a week to keep the small house where he lived, he lent a needy friend forty pounds. When he saw a poor consumptive art student pass by his window every morning with his portfolio under his arm, he took pity on him and invited him into his house where he gave him some food and tried to cheer up his sad and flagging life. His relationship with his younger brother is reminiscent of the story of David and Jonathan. Blake took him in, maintained him, loved him, and looked after him during his long illness; he would speak to him of the eternal world and give him comfort. He stayed up constantly by his bedside for days on end before his death and, at the last moment, he saw the soul he loved free itself from the lifeless body and rise towards heaven clapping its hands in joy. Then, exhausted and at peace, he lay down in a deep sleep that lasted for seventy-two consecutive hours.
I have referred two or three times to Mrs Blake, and perhaps I ought to say something about the poet’s wife. Blake had been in love once when he was twenty. The girl, who seems to have been rather foolish, was called Polly Woods. The influence of this young love radiates throughout Blake’s first works, the Poetical Sketches and the Songs of Innocence, However, the affair closed suddenly and abruptly. She thought him mad, or little better, while he thought her a flirt, or something worse. This girl’s face appears in some drawings from his prophetic book, Vala; a sweet, smiling face, symbol of feminine cruelty and sensual deception. To recover from this setback, Blake left London and went to live in the cottage of a market-gardener called Bouchier [sic], This gardener had a twenty-four-year-old daughter called Catherine whose heart was filled with compassion when she heard of the young man’s misadventures in love. The affection that grew out of her pity and his gratitude finally brought them together. The lines from Othello:
She loved me for the dangers I had passed,
And I loved her that she did pity them.
come to mind when we read of this chapter in Blake’s life. Blake, like many other men of great genius, was not attracted by cultivated and refined women. Either he preferred simple women with sensual and nebulous minds to those (if I may borrow a commonplace of the theatre) endowed with all the drawing-room graces and a light and broad education; or else, in his unlimited egoism, he wanted the soul of his loved one to be entirely a slow and painstaking creation of his own, liberating and purifying itself daily before his eyes, the demon (as he himself puts it) hidden in the cloud. Whatever the case may be, the fact is that Mrs Blake was neither very pretty nor intelligent. In fact, she was illiterate, and the poet had a hard time of it teaching her to read and write. He succeeded, however, since within a few years his wife was helping him with his engravings, retouching his drawings, and cultivating the visionary faculty in herself. Elementary beings and the spirits of deceased great men would often enter the poet’s room at night to speak to him about art and the imagination. Blake would then bounce out of bed and, grabbing his pencil, stay up through the long hours of the London night drawing the features and limbs of the visions while his wife crouched next to his armchair, lovingly holding his hand and staying quiet so as not to disturb the ecstasy of the seer. When the visions disappeared towards dawn, the wife would get back under the covers while Blake, radiant with joy and benevolence, would hurriedly set about lighting the fire and making breakfast for them both. Ought we to be amazed that the symbolic beings Los, Urizen, Vala, Tiriel, and Enitharmon and the shades of Homer and Milton should come from their ideal world into a poor room in London, or that the incense that greeted their coming was the smell of Indian tea and eggs fried in lard? Would this be the first time in the history of the world that the Eternal One has spoken through the mouth of the humble? That was how the mortal life of William Blake progressed. The ship of his married life set forth under the auspices of pity and gratitude and sailed towards the usual rocks for almost half a century. There were no children. In the first years of their lives together there were some slight disagreements. These misunderstandings are easy to comprehend if we bear in mind the great differences in culture and temperament that separated the young couple, differences so great that Blake, as I said before, almost devised to follow the example of Abraham and give to Hagar what Sarah refused. His wife’s vestal innocence was ill-suited to the temperament of Blake, for whom, until his dying day, pleasure was the only beauty. In a scene of tears and recriminations that took place between them, his wife fell into a swoon and injured herself in a manner that prevented the possibility of having children. It is a sad irony that this poet of childhood innocence, the only writer to have written songs for children with the soul of a child and who, in his strange poem The Crystal Cabinet, illuminated the phenomenon of gestation in such a tender and mystic light, was fated never to see the face of a human child by his fireside. He who had such great compassion for all things, who lived, suffered and rejoiced in the illusion of the vegetable world: for the fly, the hare, the little chimney-sweep, the robin redbreast, even for the flea, was denied any other fatherhood than a spiritual one. And yet it was an intensely natural fatherhood which still lives in the lines from the Proverbs,
He who mocks the Infant’s Faith
Shall be mock’d in Age & Death.
He who shall teach the Child to Doubt
The rotting Grave shall ne’er get out.
He who respects the Infant’s faith
Triumphs over Hell & Death.
The rotting grave and the king of terrors hold no power over Blake, a fearless and immortal spirit. In his old age, when he was finally surrounded by friends, disciples and admirers, he set about, like Cato the Elder, learning a foreign language. That language was the very same one in which this evening, with your forbearance, I am trying, to the best of my ability, to recall Blake’s spirit from the twilight of the universal mind and to hold it fast for a moment to investigate it. He set about studying Italian to read the Divine Comedy in the original and to illustrate Dante’s vision with mystic drawings. Weakened and exhausted by the afflictions of his illness, he propped himself up on a pile of pillows. On his knees he held open a large book of drawings, and he struggled to trace the lines of his final vision on its white pages. It is in this attitude that he lives for us in the portrait by Philips [sic] in the National Gallery of London. His brain did not become enfeebled, his hand did not lose its old mastery. Death came to him under the guise of an icy cold, like the shivers of cholera. It took over his limbs and extinguished the light of his intelligence in a moment, just as the cold darkness that we call space cloaks and puts out the light of a star. He died singing in a strong and sonorous voice that made the beams of the ceiling echo. He sang, as always, of the ideal world, of the truth of the intellect, and of the divinity of the imagination. ‘My beloved, the songs that I sing are not mine,’ he told his wife, ‘no, no, I tell you, they are not mine.’
A full study of Blake’s personality should be logically divided in three phases: the pathological, the theosophical and the artistic. I think we can dispense with the first one without too much comment. To say that a great genius is half-mad, while recognizing his artistic prowess, is worth as much as saying that he was rheumatic, or that he suffered from diabetes. Madness, in fact, is a medical expression to which a balanced critic should pay no more heed than he would to the accusation of heresy b
rought by the theologian, or to the accusation of immorality brought by the public prosecutor. If we were to lay a charge of madness against every great genius who does not share the science undergraduate’s fatuous belief in headlong materialism now held in such high regard, little would remain of world art and history. Such a slaughter of the innocents would include most of the peripatetic system, all medieval metaphysics, an entire wing in the immense, symmetrical edifice built by the angelic doctor, St Thomas Aquinas, the idealism of Berkeley and (note the coincidence) the very scepticism that leads us to Hume. As far as art is concerned, those highly useful people, the parliamentarian photographers and reporters, might just manage to save their skins. The foreboding of such an art and philosophy flourishing in the not-too-distant future under the gentle union of the two commodities most highly quoted on the stock-exchanges today, woman and the people, will, if nothing else, reconcile every artist and philosopher — even if they think differently — to the brevity of our life down here.
To determine what place Blake should be assigned in the hierarchy of western mystics goes beyond the aims of this lecture. In my opinion, Blake was not a great mystic. The true home of mysticism is the Orient. Now that linguistic studies have enabled us to understand eastern thought (if we can call thought that ideational energy which created the vast cycles of activity and passivity that the Upanishads speak of), the mystic books of the west shine, if at all, with a reflected light. Blake is probably less inspired than the Indian mystics; perhaps he is less inspired than Paracelsus, Jacob Behmen [sic], or Swedenborg; at any rate, he is less boring. In Blake, the visionary faculty is immediately connected to the artistic faculty. In the first place, one must be gifted with the patience of a fakir to be able to form an idea of what Paracelsus and Behmen mean in their cosmic pronouncements on the involution and evolution of mercury, salt and sulphur, body, soul and spirit. Blake naturally belongs to another category, that of artists; and in this category he holds, in my view, a unique position because he unites intellectual sharpness with mystic sentiment. The former quality is almost completely lacking in mystic art. St John of the Cross, for example, one of the few artists worthy of standing beside Blake, reveals neither an innate sense of form nor the coordinating force of the intellect in his book The Dark Night of the Soul, which quakes and swoons in ecstatic passion. The explanation is to be found in the fact that Blake had two spiritual masters, very different from one another, and yet similar in their formal precision: Michelangelo Buonarotti [sic] and Emanuel Swedenborg. The first of Blake’s mystical drawings that we have, Joseph of Arimathea Among the Rocks of Albion, has the words: Michelangelo pinxit in one corner. It is modelled on a draft made by Michelangelo for his Last Judgement, and it symbolizes the poetic imagination in the power of sensual philosophy. Under the drawing Blake has written: ‘This is one of the Gothic Artists who built the cathedrals in what we call the Dark Ages, wandering about in sheepskins and goatskins, of whom the world was not worthy.’ The influence of Michelangelo can be felt throughout Blake’s works, particularly in those prose pieces, collected in fragments, in which he continually insists upon the importance of the pure, clear line that evokes and creates the image against the background of the uncreated void. The influence of Swedenborg, who died in exile in London when Blake was beginning to write and to draw, can be seen in the glorified humanity that marks all Blake’s work. Swedenborg, who haunted all the invisible worlds for many years, saw heaven itself in the image of a man. For him, Michael, Raphael and Gabriel were not three angels, but three angelic choirs. Eternity, which appeared to the beloved disciple and to St Augustine as a celestial city, and to Alighieri as a celestial rose, appears to the Swedish mystic in the form of a celestial man whose every limb is animated by a fluid angelic life that eternally leaves and re-enters: the systole and diastole of love and wisdom. From this vision he developed that enormous system of what he called correspondences which pervades his masterpiece Arcana Coelestia, his new gospel which, according to him, was to be the apparition of the sign of the Son of Man as foretold by St Matthew.
Armed with this double-edged sword of Michelangelo’s art and Swedenborg’s revelations, Blake killed the dragon of natural experience and natural wisdom. By annihilating space and time and denying the existence of memory and the senses, he wanted to paint his work upon the void of the divine bosom. For him, every time less than the pulsation of an artery is equal in its period and value to six thousand years because in that infinitely brief time the poet’s work is conceived and born. For him, each space greater than a red drop of human blood was visionary, created by the hammer of Los, while in each space smaller than this we approached eternity of which our vegetable world was but a shadow. So the soul must not look with but rather through the eye because the eye, born in the night while the soul slept in the rays of light, would also die in the night.
In his book The Divine Names, Dionysius the pseudo-Areopagite arrives at the throne of God by denying and overcoming every moral and metaphysical attribute; in the final chapter he falls into an ecstasy and prostrates himself before the divine obscurity, the unnameable immensity that antedates and encompasses the highest wisdom and love in the eternal order. The process by which Blake reaches the threshold of the infinite is similar. His soul, flying from the infinitely small to the infinitely big, from a drop of blood to the universe of stars, is consumed by the rapidity of its flight, and finds itself renewed, winged and imperishable on the edge of the dark ocean of God.
And although he based his art upon such idealistic premises, in the conviction that eternity was in love with the products of time, the sons of God of the daughters of
[The concluding page of the manuscript is missing.]
The Centenary of Charles Dickens
The influence which Dickens has exercised on the English language (second perhaps to that of Shakespeare alone) depends to a large extent on the popular character of his work. Examined from the standpoint of literary art or even from that of literary craftmanship he hardly deserves a place among the highest. The form he chose to write in, diffuse, overloaded with minute and often irrelevant observation, carefully relieved at regular intervals by the unfailing humorous note, is not the form of the novel which can carry the greatest conviction. Dickens has suffered not a little from too ardent admirers. Before his centenary there was perhaps a tendency to decry him somewhat. Towards the close of the Victorian period the peace of literary England was disturbed by the inroads of Russian and Scandinavian writers inspired by artistic ideals very different from those according to which the literary works (at least of the last century) of the chief writers of fiction had been shaped. A fierce and headstrong earnestness, a resoluteness to put before the reader the naked, nay, the flayed and bleeding reality, coupled with a rather juvenile desire to shock the prim middle-class sentimentalism of those bred to the Victorian way of thinking and writing — all these startling qualities combined to overthrow or, perhaps it would be better to say, to depose the standard of taste. By comparison with the stern realism of Tolstoy, Zola, Dostoiewsky [sic], Bjornson and other novelists of ultra-modern tendency the work of Dickens seemed to have paled, to have lost its freshness. Hence, as I have said, a reaction set in against him and so fickle is popular judgement in literary matters that he was attacked almost as unduly as he had been praised before. It is scarcely necessary to say that his proper place is between these two extremes of criticism; he is neither the great-hearted, great-brained, great-souled writer in whose honour his devotees burn so much incense nor yet the common purveyor of sentimental domestic drama and emotional claptrap as he appears to the jaundiced eye of a critic of the new school.
He has been nicknamed ‘the great Cockney’: no epithet could describe him more neatly nor more fully. Whenever he went far afield to America (as in American Notes) or to Italy (as in Pictures from
Italy) his magic seems to have failed him, his hand seems to have lost her ancient cunning. Anything drearier, and therefore less Dicke
nsian, than the American chapters of Martin Chuzzlewit it would be hard to imagine. If Dickens is to move you, you must not allow him to stray out of hearing of the chimes of Bow Bells. There he is on his native heath and there are his kingdom and his power. The life of London is the breath of his nostrils: he felt it as no writer since or before his time felt it. The colours, the familiar noises, the very odours of the great metropolis unite in his work as in a mighty symphony wherein humour and pathos, life and death, hope and despair, are inextricably interwoven. We can hardly appreciate this now because we stand too close to the scenery which he described and are too intimate with his amusing and moving characters. And yet it is certainly by his stories of the London of his own day that he must finally stand or fall. Even Barnaby Rudge, though the scene is laid chiefly in London and though it contains certain pages not unworthy of being placed beside the Journal of the Plague of Defoe (a writer, I may remark incidentally, of much greater importance than is commonly supposed), does not show us Dickens at his best. His realm is not the London of the time of Lord George Gordon but the London of the time of the Reform Bill. The provinces, indeed the English country of ‘meadows trim with daisies pied’, appear in his work but always as a background or as a preparation. With much greater truth and propriety could Dickens have applied to himself Lord Palmerston’s famous Civis Romanus sum. The noble lord, to tell the truth, succeeded on that memorable occasion (as Gladstone, unless my memory misleads me, took care to point out) in saying the opposite of what he had in mind to say. Wishing to say that he was an imperialist he said that he was a Little Englander. Dickens, in fact, is a Londoner in the best and fullest sense of the word. The church bells which rang over his dismal, squalid childhood, over his struggling youth, over his active and triumphant manhood, seem to have called him back whenever, with scrip and wallet in his hand, he intended to leave the city and to have bidden him turn again, like another Whittington, promising him (and the promise was to be amply fulfilled) a threefold greatness. For this reason he has a place for ever in the hearts of his fellow-citizens and also for this reason the legitimate affection of the great city for him has coloured to no slight extent the criticisms passed upon his work. To arrive at a just appreciation of Dickens, to estimate more accurately his place in what we may call the national gallery of English literature it would be well to read not only the eulogies of the London-born but also the opinion of representative writers of Scotland, or the Colonies or Ireland. It would be interesting to hear an appreciation of Dickens written, so to speak, at a proper focus from the original by writers of his own class and of a like (if somewhat lesser) stature, near enough to him in aim and in form and in speech to understand, far enough from him in spirit and in blood to criticize. One is curious to know how the great Cockney would fare at the hands of R.L.S. or of Mr Kipling or of Mr George Moore.