Eternity's Sunrise: The Imaginative World of William Blake

by Damrosch, Leo

  It is interesting that when Blake did try to study geometry, he couldn’t see the point of formal proofs as opposed to immediate intuition. Thomas Taylor, whose translations of Plato Blake used, undertook to tutor him. According to someone who knew Taylor, they got as far as the fifth proposition in Euclid, “which proves that any two angles at the base of an isosceles triangle must be equal. Taylor was going through the demonstration, but was interrupted by Blake exclaiming, ‘Ah, never mind that—what’s the use of going to prove it? Why, I see with my eyes that it is so, and do not require any proof to make it clearer.’”10

  29. Newton, by Eduardo Paolozzi

  A note about the process by which Blake produced this print can add to our appreciation, and it accounts for the striking contrast between the enamel-like human form and the blurry vegetation. A painter friend of his explained how it was done:

  When he wanted to make his prints in oil, he took a common thick millboard, and drew in some strong ink or colour his design upon it strong and thick. He then painted upon that in such oil colours and in such a state of fusion that they would blur well. He painted roughly and quickly, so that no colour would have time to dry. He then took a print of that on paper, and this impression he coloured up in watercolours, repainting his outline on the millboard when he wanted to take another print. This plan he had recourse to because he could vary slightly each impression; and each having a sort of accidental look, he could branch out so as to make each one different. The accidental look they had was very enticing.11

  Blake has thus given visual embodiment to the contrast between the clarity of the human form and the confused, stifling materiality of the world as Newton and the empiricists conceived of it.

  In modern times Blake’s Newton inspired a remarkable sculpture by Eduardo Paolozzi (figure 29), erected in 1995 outside the British Library in London. Constructed of weighty metal plates that are visibly bolted together, and peering through tight-fitting eyeglasses that resemble goggles, this Newton provides a thought-provoking reimagining of Blake’s picture. A commentator calls him “a three-dimensional machine man,” reinforcing Blake’s critique of Newtonian science by emphasizing its artificiality.12

  7. “THE GATE IS OPEN”

  A Vision of Light

  BY 1800 commercial jobs were distressingly few, and more than ever, the Blakes were pinched by poverty. Then an unexpected offer appeared. A well-to-do poet and patron of artists, William Hayley, invited them to settle on the south coast near his country home in Sussex, in a thatched cottage with a view of wheat fields and the sea. His kindly plan was to promote Blake’s work among his friends and neighbors. The brick and flint cottage, little changed over the years and still thatched, survives to this day (figure 30).

  The move to the village of Felpham was a major undertaking. What with the disassembled printing press and the complete stock of engraved copper plates, sixteen heavy boxes were needed. Blake’s sister, Catherine—his mother, sister, and wife all had the same name—helped with the move.

  In a recently discovered letter to George Cumberland, a fellow radical, Blake included some verses that indicate his emotional state at the time. Discouraged by condescension and neglect, he claimed to be sick of the great city where he had spent his first forty-three years, and to be thrilled by the beauty and peace of the countryside.

  Dear generous Cumberland, nobly solicitous for a friend’s welfare: behold me

  30. Blake’s cottage at Felpham

  Whom your friendship has magnified, rending the manacles of London’s dungeon dark;

  I have rent the black net and escaped. See my cottage at Felpham in joy

  Beams over the sea, a bright light over France, but the web and the veil I have left

  Behind me at London resists every beam of light, hanging from heaven to earth

  Dropping with human gore. Lo! I have left it! I have torn it from my limbs,

  I shake my wings ready to take my flight! Pale, ghastly pale, stands the city in fear.1

  Just before setting out, Blake had written to Hayley at his home in Eartham, a few miles from Felpham: “Eartham will be my first temple and altar. My wife is like a flame of many colours of precious jewels whenever she hears it named. . . . My fingers emit sparks of fire with expectation of my future labours.” This was more than metaphor, since Blake was interested in the “animal magnetism” theorized by the physicist Franz Anton Mesmer, who gave his name to mesmerism. The notion was that sick people could be cured by magnetizing an invisible bodily fluid that was related somehow to electricity. Hayley owned an “electrical machine” from which he received healing “shower baths,” and a few years later Blake reported to him that Catherine’s rheumatism was benefiting from “electrical magic.”2

  At first, all was exhilarating. Shortly after arrival Blake wrote to Thomas Butts, a civil servant who was his loyal patron and affectionate friend, “A roller and two harrows lie before my window. I met a plow on my first going out at my gate the first morning after my arrival, and the plowboy said to the plowman, ‘Father, the gate is open.’ I have begun to work and find that I can work with greater pleasure than ever.” Butts replied sympathetically, “You have the plow and the harrow in full view, and the gate, you have been prophetically told, is open. Can you then hesitate joyfully to enter into it?”3

  A week later Blake described an extraordinary experience, this time in ecstatic verse:

  To my friend Butts I write

  My first vision of light.

  On the yellow sands sitting,

  The sun was emitting

  His glorious beams

  From heaven’s high streams;

  Over sea over land

  My eyes did expand

  Into regions of air

  Away from all care,

  Into regions of fire

  Remote from desire,

  The light of the morning

  Heaven’s mountains adorning.

  In particles bright

  The jewels of light

  Distinct shone and clear—

  Amazed and in fear

  I each particle gazed

  Astonished amazed,

  For each was a man

  Human formed; swift I ran

  For they beckoned to me

  Remote by the sea. . . .

  My eyes more and more

  Like a sea without shore

  Continue expanding,

  The heavens commanding,

  Till the jewels of light

  Heavenly men beaming bright

  Appeared as one man

  Who complacent began

  My limbs to enfold

  In his beams of bright gold. . . .

  And the voice faded mild,

  I remained as a child,

  All I ever had known

  Before me bright shone.

  A psychologist might call this a state of altered consciousness, and in religious terms it is a mystical experience—not the kind that seeks to escape from sensory experience but the kind that transforms it. “The extrovertive mystic,” a philosopher writes, “using his physical senses, perceives the multiplicity of external material objects—the sea, the sky, the houses, the trees—mystically transfigured so that the One, or the Unity, shines through them.”4 The whole of nature is humanized for Blake in this way, as in A Sunshine Holiday. And although he describes his senses as heightened, they are calm and “remote from desire.” He is a child again, readmitted to the world of Innocence.

  It is notable that the sun always had a special emotional charge for Blake. He imagined a questioner demanding, “What, when the sun rises do you not see a round disk of fire somewhat like a guinea?” “O no no,” he would reply, “I see an innumerable company of the heavenly host, crying Holy Holy Holy is the Lord God Almighty.” Blake not only perceives the sun as a heavenly host, he hears the host singing. The sun also appears, with spectacular beauty, in a watercolor entitled Hyperion, inspired by a rather casual allusion in a poem by Thom
as Gray. Hyperion was a Greek name for the sun god, and Gray imagined his “glittering shafts” dispelling a series of afflictions—Labor, Disease, Sorrow, and so on.5 In Blake’s magnificent image (color plate 19), Hyperion is an archer in a celestial chariot, and his sunbeams are the arrows routing the spectres below.

  “I Am under the Direction of Messengers from Heaven”

  It wasn’t long before the euphoria began to wane. Hayley was well meaning and generous, but also officious and given to controlling his protégés. He saw the world, Gilchrist said, through “a fog of amiability,” and at times could be absurd: “A persevering and fearless rider, he was in the eccentric habit of using an umbrella on horseback to shade his eyes; the abrupt unfurling of which was commonly followed, naturally enough, by the rider’s being forthwith pitched on his head.”6 One is reminded of the White Knight in Through the Looking Glass.

  Hayley expected his generosity to be repaid with a steady diet of compliments, and Blake’s notebook contains a number of acerbic epigrams:

  To H——

  Thy friendship oft has made my heart to ache,

  Do be my enemy for friendship’s sake.

  On H—— the Pickthank

  I write the rascal thanks till he and I

  With thanks and compliments are quite drawn dry.

  One might suppose that Blake made up the word “pickthank,” but Shakespeare uses it, and there is a character called Pickthank in Pilgrim’s Progress.7

  Blake’s distress had deeper causes, too. In Milton he refers bitterly to those who “dare to mock with the aspersion of madness.” He knew all too well that he was often called mad, and it is hard to doubt that deep psychic disturbances do indeed lie at the heart of his work. Blake scholars used to reject the suggestion defensively, but to do that is to misrepresent the nature of his achievement. In a valuable study entitled Madness and Blake’s Myth, Paul Youngquist comments that nobody denies that Van Gogh was intermittently insane, or that the startling colors and astounding energy in his paintings owe much to his psychic distress.8

  Even before going to Felpham, Blake was afflicted with what was then called melancholy, and would now be called clinical depression. It is possible that there were manic-depressive symptoms too, in which case the “vision of light” at Felpham could be seen as an episode of extreme elation. Two months before the move he wrote to Cumberland, “I begin to emerge from a deep pit of melancholy, melancholy without any real reason for it, a disease which God keep you from and all good men.”9

  A constant source of unease was Blake’s fear that his neglect of remunerative work was a shameful indulgence to be overcome. In the letter to Cumberland he went on to say, “I myself remember when I thought my pursuits of art a kind of criminal dissipation and neglect of the main chance, which I hid my face for not being able to abandon as a passion which is forbidden by law and religion, but now it appears to be law and Gospel too.” In other words, Blake had decided that to create art in his own unique mode was actually a religious duty. There was a long-standing Protestant tradition of dedication to one’s vocation or calling, and Blake was rediscovering his.

  As time went on, drudging at uncongenial tasks was profoundly discouraging, and it was especially galling that Hayley, who regarded himself as a major poet, showed not the slightest interest in Blake’s illuminated books. Milton, begun in 1804 after Blake’s return to London, contains a heavily allegorized drama in which Hayley tries in vain to usurp Blake’s prophetic role—a spiritual quarrel of which Hayley himself probably had no inkling. One line in the poem is especially telling: “Corporeal friends are spiritual enemies.”10

  Suddenly, in August 1803, there was a shocking crisis. Soldiers were quartered nearby, to be on hand at the coast in the event of a French invasion, and one of them blundered drunkenly into Blake’s garden. He refused to leave, there was a quarrel, and Blake hustled him away. The soldier then declared that Blake had uttered damning statements against the king. What Blake had feared for many years now came to pass: he was to be put on trial for sedition. Hayley lost no time engaging a first-rate lawyer, and at the trial, early the next year, witnesses testified that they had been nearby and had heard no seditious language. Blake was acquitted, and in a letter to Butts he acknowledged, “Perhaps the simplicity of myself is the origin of all offenses committed against me.” He enclosed a wrenchingly painful poem:

  O why was I born with a different face,

  Why was I not born like the rest of my race?

  When I look each one starts! when I speak I offend

  Then I’m silent and passive and lose every friend.

  Then my verse I dishonour; my pictures despise,

  My person degrade and my temper chastise,

  And the pen is my terror, the pencil my shame

  All my talents I bury, and dead is my fame.

  (“Pencil,” in those days, meant “paintbrush.”) Blake was taking to heart the fate of the servant who buried his talent instead of investing it: “For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath. And cast ye the unprofitable servant into outer darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”11

  Whether or not there was an element of bipolar disorder, Blake also experienced phenomena that would now be called schizoid. He heard voices, saw visions, believed that forces beyond himself directed him to write, and at times nursed paranoid suspicions against his friends. Not even Hayley was exempt:

  When H——y finds out what you cannot do

  That is the very thing he’ll set you to.

  If you break not your neck ’tis not his fault

  But pecks of poison are not pecks of salt,

  And when he could not act upon my wife

  Hired a villain to bereave my life.

  Although Hayley was suspected of preferring men to women, it is possible that he did make advances to Catherine. It is inconceivable, however, that he paid the drunken soldier to accuse Blake. Curiously, that last line—“Hired a villain to bereave my life”—was lifted verbatim from a Gothic ballad that Blake had written in his teens.12

  Blake felt a special kinship with the poet William Cowper, who had died just before Blake’s move to Felpham and whose biography Hayley was engaged in writing. Cowper was institutionalized for insanity in his early thirties, and afterward experienced a conversion to Methodism. He then wrote hymns, including Light Shining Out of Darkness with its well-known lines, “God moves in a mysterious way / His wonders to perform.” But for Cowper that was no comforting faith, for he learned in a dream that he was condemned to eternal damnation. His harrowing poem The Castaway takes as its metaphor an able-bodied sailor who, in a fierce gale, falls from a ship that has no way to turn back and rescue him. In the line from The Castaway that Mr. Ramsay booms out in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, “We perished, each alone.”

  Still more harrowing is Cowper’s Lines Written during a Period of Insanity, describing a biblical sinner whom the earth swallowed up:

  Him the vindictive rod of angry justice

  Sent quick and howling to the center headlong;

  I, fed with judgment, in a fleshly tomb, am

  Buried above ground.

  Blake didn’t believe in damnation, but he did empathize with Cowper’s distress. Hayley saw the similarity. To Cowper’s cousin Lady Hesketh he wrote that he was befriending Blake “from a motive that I know our dear angel Cowper would approve, because this poor man, with an admirable quickness of apprehension and with uncommon powers of mind, has often appeared to me on the verge of insanity.” The emphasis is Hayley’s. He added that Blake was fortunate to have “an invaluable helpmate, perhaps the only woman on earth who could have perfectly suited him as a wife.”13 Unfortunately, when Blake completed a portrait of Cowper for the projected biography, Lady Hesketh was appalled by it. She thought it revealed all too clearly that her cousin had been insane.

  Years later Blake
acquired Johann Spurzheim’s Observations on the Deranged Manifestations of the Mind, or Insanity, perhaps in order to investigate the possibility that he might indeed be mad. Spurzheim remarks that “religion is a fertile cause of insanity” and that Methodism supplies “numerous cases.” To this Blake retorted in the margin, “Cowper came to me and said, ‘O that I were insane, always. I will never rest. Can you not make me truly insane? I will never rest till I am so. O that in the bosom of God I was hid! You retain health and yet are as mad as any of us all—over us all—mad as a refuge from unbelief—from Bacon, Newton, and Locke.’” This is strikingly similar to the claim of the counterculture psychiatrist R. D. Laing that schizophrenia can be a refuge from the collective madness of society, “a successful attempt not to adapt to pseudo-social realities.”14 As Blake describes it, Cowper’s mistake was to accept a cruel theology of damnation. If he could have opened his imagination to true religion, he would then have been received into God’s bosom. Even so, his contemporaries would have continued to regard him as insane.

  The turmoil of the Felpham period convinced Blake that to obey Hayley and confine himself to “the mere drudgery of business” would be to fail in his solemn calling. To Butts he wrote, “I am under the direction of messengers from Heaven daily and nightly. . . . But if we fear to do the dictates of our angels and tremble at the tasks set before us, if we refuse to do spiritual acts because of natural fears or natural desires! Who can describe the dismal torments of such a state!”15