Delphi Complete Poetical Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne (Illustrated) (Delphi Poets Series)

by Algernon Charles Swinburne

  Space may be made here (before we pass on to larger things if not greater) for another stray note or two on separate poems. The Crystal Cabinet, one of the completest short poems by Blake which are not to be called songs, is an example of the somewhat jarring and confused mixture of apparent “allegory” with actual “vision” which is the great source of trouble and error to rapid readers of his verse or students of his designs. The “cabinet” is either passionate or poetic vision — a spiritual gift, which may soon and easily become a spiritual bondage; wherein a man is locked up, with keys of gold indeed, yet is he a prisoner all the same: his prison built by his love or his art, with a view open beyond of exquisite limited loveliness, soft quiet and light of dew or moon, and a whole fresh world to rest in or look into, but intangible and simply reflective; all present pleasure or power trebled in it, until you try at too much and attempt to turn spiritual to physical reality— “to seize the inmost form” with “hands of flame” laid upon things of the spirit which will endure no such ardent handling — to translate eternal existence into temporal, essential into accidental, substantial into attributive; when at once the whole framework, which was meant otherwise to last out your present life, breaks up and leaves you stranded or cast out, feeble and sightless “like a weeping babe;” so that whereas at first you were full of light natural pleasure, “dancing merrily” in “the wild” of animal or childish life, you are now a child again, but unhappy instead of happy — less than a child, thrown back on the crying first stage of babyhood — having had the larger vision, and lost your hold of it by too great pressure of impatience or desire — unfit for the old pleasure and deprived of the new; and the maiden-mother of your spiritual life, your art or your love, is become wan and tearful as you, “pale reclined” in the barren blowing air which cannot again be filled with the fire and the luminous life of vision. In Mary we come again upon the main points of inner contact between Blake’s mind and Shelley’s. This frank acceptance of pleasure, this avowal without blushing or doubting “that sweet love and beauty are worthy our care,” was as beautiful a thing to Shelley as to Blake: he has preached the excellence of it in Rosalind and Helen and often elsewhere: touching also, as Blake does here, on the persecution of it by all “who amant miserè”: —

  “Some said she was proud, some called her a whore,

  And some when she passed by shut to the door;”

  for in their sight the tender and outspoken purity of instinct and innocence becomes confounded with base desire or vanity. This rather than genius or mere beauty seems to be the thing whose persecution by the world is here symbolized.

  Many others of these brief poems are not less excellent; the slightest among them have the grace of form and heat of life which are indivisible in all higher works of poetry. One, The Mental Traveller, is full of sweet and vigorous verses turned loose upon a somewhat arid and thorny pasture. By a miracle of patient ingenuity this poem has been compelled to utter some connected message; but it may perhaps be doubted whether the message be not too articulate and coherent for Blake. Thus limited and clarified, the broad chafing current of mysticism seems almost too pure and too strait to issue from such a source: a well-head of living speech that bursts up with sudden froth and steam through more outlets than one at once. To have contrived such an elaborate allegory, so welded link by sequent link together, seems an exercise of logical patience to which Blake would hardly have submitted his passionate genius, his overstrained and wayward will. Separate stanzas may be retraced wellnigh through every word in other books. The latter part seems again to record, as in two preceding poems, the perversion of love; which having annihilated all else, falls at last to feed upon itself, to seek out strange things and barren ways, to invent new loves and invert the old, to fill the emptied heart and flush the subsiding veins with perverse passion. Alone in the desert it has made, beguiled to second youth by the incessant diet of joy, fear comes upon love; fear, and seeming hate, and weariness and cunning; fruits of the second graft of love, not native to the simple stock: till reduced at last to the likeness of the two extremes of life, age and infancy, love can be no further abused or consumed. These stages of love, once seen or heard of, allure lovers to eat of the strange fruits and herd with the strange flocks of transforming or transformed desire; the visible world, destroyed at the first advent of love and absorbed into the soul by a single passion, is again felt nearer; the trees bring forth their pleasure, and the planets lavish their light. For the second love, in its wayward and strange delights, is a thing half material; not alien at least from material forms, as was the first simple and spiritual ardour of equal love. Passionate and perverse emotion touches all things with some fervent colour of its own, mixes into all water and all wine some savour of the dubious honey gathered from its foreign flowers. Pure first love will not coexist with outward things, burns up with white fire all tangible form, and so, an unfed lamp, must at last burn itself down to the stage of life and sensation which breeds those latter loves. The babe that is “born a boy,” often painfully begot and joyfully brought forth, I take to signify human genius or intellect, which none can touch and not be consumed except the “woman old,” faith or fear: all weaker things, pain and pleasure, hatred and love, fly with shrieking averted faces from before it. The grey and cruel nurse, custom or religion, crucifies and torments the child, feeding herself upon his agony to false fresh youth; an allegory not even literally inapt. Grown older, and seeing her made fair with his blood and strong by his suffering, he weds her, and constrains her to do him service, and turns her to use; custom, the daily life of men, once married to the fresh intellect, bears fruit to him of profit and pleasure, and becomes through him nobler than she was; but through such union he grows old the sooner, soon can but wander round and look over his finished work and gathered treasure, the tragic passions and splendid achievements of his spirit, kept fresh in verse or colour; which he deals to all men alike, giving to the poorest of this divine meat and drink, the body and the blood of genius, caught in golden vessels of art and rhyme, that sight and hearing may be fed. This, the supreme and most excellent delight possible to man, is the fruit of his pain; of his suffering at the hands of life, of his union with her as with a bride. The “female babe” sprung from the fire that burns always on his hearth, is the issue or result of genius, which, being too strong for the father, flows into new channels and follows after fresh ways; the thing which he has brought forth knows him no more, but must choose its own mate or living form of expression, and expel the former nature — casting off (as theologians say) the old man. The outcast intellect can then be vivified only by a new love, or by a new aim of which love is the type; a bride unlike the first, who was old at root and in substance, young only in seeming and fair only through cruel theft of his own life and strength; unlike also the art which has now in its ultimate expression turned against him; love which can change the face of former things and scatter in sunder the gatherings of former friends; love which masters the senses and transfigures the creatures of the earthly life, leaving no light or sustenance but what comes of itself. Then follow the stages of love, and the phases of action and passion bred from either stage; of these we have already taken account. If this view of the poem be wholly or partially correct, then we may roughly sum up the problem by saying that its real obscurity arises in the main from a verbal confusion between the passion of art and the passion of love. These are always spoken of by Blake in terms which prove that in his nature the two feelings had actually grown into each other; had become interfused past all chance of mutual extrication. Art was to him as a lust of the body; appetite as an emotion of the soul. This saying, true as to some extent it must be of all great men, was never so exclusively and finally true of any other man as of this one. It is no bad sample of Blake’s hurried manner of speech, that having sustained half-way through his poem an allegory of intellect in its relations to art and to common life, he should suddenly stumble over a type of his own setting up, and be l
ed off into a new allegory of love which might better have made a separate poem. As it is, the two symbols are welded together not without strength and cunning of hand.

  Some further and final notice may here be taken of the manifold designs scattered about the MS. pages which we have found so prodigal of verse. Among the most curious of these we rank a series of drawings not quite so roughly pencilled as the rest, each inscribed with a brief text or metrical motto. Many of these have been wrought up into the “Gates of Paradise”; many more remain to speak and shift for themselves as they may. Published as it stands here, the series would exceed in length the whole of that little book: and there is evidently some thread of intended connexion between all, worn thin and all but broken. They are numbered in a different order from that in which they stand, which is indeed plainly a matter of chance. Several have great grace and beauty; one in especial, where Daphne passes into the laurel; her feet are roots already and grasp the ground with strong writhing fibres; her lifted arms and wrestling body struggle into branch and stem, with strange labour of the supple limbs, with agony of convulsed and loosening hair. One of the larger designs seems to be a rough full-length study for Adam and Eve, with these lines opposite by way of suggested epigraph:

  “What is it men in women do require?

  The lineaments of gratified desire.

  What is it women do in men require?

  The lineaments of gratified desire.”

  These are barely to be recognised in the crude sketch: the faces are merely serious and rather grim: though designed to reproduce the sweet silence of beauty, filling features made fair with soft natural pleasure and a clear calm of soul and body. There is however a certain grace and nobility of form in the straight limbs and flowing hair, not unworthy the typical man and woman. Another design which deserves remark is a fine sketch after the manner of the illustrations to Blake’s prophecies, in which a figure caught in the fierce slanting current of a whirlwind is drifted sideways like a drowning swimmer under sea, below the orbit of three mingling suns or planets seen above thick drifts of tempestuous air. Other and better notices than ours, of various studies hidden away in the chaos of this MS., the reader will find on reference to that admirable Catalogue which will remain always the great witness for Blake’s genius before the eyes of all who read his life.

  We have done now with the lyrical side of this poet’s work, and pass on to things of less direct attraction. Those who have found any in the record of his life and character, the study of his qualities and abilities, may safely follow him further. The perfect sweetness and sufficiency of his best lyrics and his best designs, we may not find; of these we take now farewell, with thanks and final praise such as we have to give; but we shall not fail to find the traces of a great art and an exalted spirit, to feel about us the clear air of a great man’s presence.

  III. — THE PROPHETIC BOOKS.

  Before entering upon any system of remark or comment on the Prophetic Books, we may set down in as few and distinct words as possible the reasons which make this a thing seriously worth doing; nay, even requisite to be done, if we would know rather the actual facts of the man’s nature than the circumstances and accidents of his life. Now, first of all, we are to recollect that Blake himself regarded these works as his greatest, and as containing the sum of his achieved ambitions and fulfilled desires: as in effect inspired matter, of absolute imaginative truth and eternal import. We shall not again pause to rebut the familiar cry of response, to the effect that he was mad and not accountable for the uttermost madness of error. It must be enough to reply here that he was by no means mad, in any sense that would authorise us in rejecting his own judgment of his own aims and powers on a plea which would be held insufficient in another man’s case. Let all readers and all critics get rid of that notion for good — clear their minds of it utterly and with all haste; let them know and remember, having once been told it, that in these strangest of all written books there is purpose as well as power, meaning as well as mystery. Doubtless, nothing quite like them was ever pitched out headlong into the world as they were. The confusion, the clamour, the jar of words that half suffice and thoughts that half exist — all these and other more absolutely offensive qualities — audacity, monotony, bombast, obscure play of licence and tortuous growth of fancy — cannot quench or even wholly conceal the living purport and the imperishable beauty which are here latent.

  And secondly we are to recollect this; that these books are not each a set of designs with a text made by order to match, but are each a poem composed for its own sake and with its own aim, having illustrations arranged by way of frame or appended by way of ornament. On all grounds, therefore, and for all serious purpose, such notices as some of those given in this biography are actually worse than worthless. Better have done nothing than have done this and no more. All the criticism included as to the illustrative parts merely, is final and faultless, nothing missed and nothing wrong; this could not have been otherwise, the work having fallen under hands and eyes of practical taste and trained to actual knowledge, and the assertions being therefore issued by authority. So much otherwise has it fared with the books themselves, that (we are compelled in this case to say it) the clothes are all right and the body is all wrong. Passing from some phrase of high and accurate eulogy to the raw ragged extracts here torn away and held up with the unhealed scars of mutilation fresh and red upon them, what is any human student to think of the poet or his praisers? what, of the assertion of his vindicated sanity with such appalling counterproof thrust under one’s eyes? In a word, it must be said of these notices of Blake’s prophetic books (except perhaps that insufficient but painstaking and well-meant chapter on the Marriage of Heaven and Hell) that what has been done should not have been done, and what should have been done has not been done.

  Not that the thing was easy to do. If any one would realize to himself for ever a material notion of chaos, let him take a blind header into the midst of the whirling foam and rolling weed of this sea of words. Indeed the sound and savour of these prophecies constantly recall some such idea or some such memory. This poetry has the huge various monotonies, the fervent and fluent colours, the vast limits, the fresh sonorous strength, the certain confusion and tumultuous law, the sense of windy and weltering space, the intense refraction of shadow or light, the crowded life and inanimate intricacy, the patience and the passion of the sea. By no manner of argument or analysis will one be made able to look back or forward with pure confidence and comprehension. Only there are laws, strange as it must sound, by which the work is done and against which it never sins. The biographer once attempts to settle the matter by asserting that Blake was given to contradict himself, by mere impulse if not by brute instinct, to such an extent that consistency is in no sense to be sought for or believed in throughout these works of his: and quotes, by way of ratifying this quite false notion, a noble sentence from the Proverbs of Hell, aimed by Blake with all his force against that obstinate adherence to one external opinion which closes and hardens the spirit against all further message from the new-grown feelings or inspiration from the altering circumstances of a man. Never was there an error more grave or more complete than this. The expression shifts perpetually, the types blunder into new forms, the meaning tumbles into new types; the purpose remains, and the faith keeps its hold.

  There are certain errors and eccentricities of manner and matter alike common to nearly all these books, and distinctly referable to the character and training of the man. Not educated in any regular or rational way, and by nature of an eagerly susceptible and intensely adhesive mind, in which the lyrical faculty had gained and kept a preponderance over all others visible in every scrap of his work, he had saturated his thoughts and kindled his senses with a passionate study of the forms of the Bible as translated into English, till his fancy caught a feverish contagion and his ear derived a delirious excitement from the mere sound and shape of the written words and verses. Hence the quaint and fervent imitation of st
yle, the reproduction of peculiarities which to most men are meaningless when divested of their old sense or invested with a new. Hence the bewildering catalogues, genealogies, and divisions which (especially in such later books as the Jerusalem) seem at first invented only to strike any miserable reader with furious or lachrymose lunacy. Hence, though heaven knows by no fault of the originals, the insane cosmogony, blatant mythology, and sonorous aberration of thoughts and theories. Hence also much of the special force and supreme occasional loveliness or grandeur in expression. Conceive a man incomparably gifted as to the spiritual side of art, prone beyond all measure to the lyrical form of work, incredibly contemptuous of all things and people dissimilar to himself, of an intensely sensitive imagination and intolerant habit of faith, with a passionate power of peculiar belief, taking with all his might of mental nerve and strain of excitable spirit to a perusal and reperusal of such books as Job and Ezekiel. Observe too that his tone of mind was as far from being critical as from being orthodox. Thus his ecstacy of study was neither on the one side tempered and watered down by faith in established forms and external creeds, nor on the other side modified and directed by analytic judgment and the lust of facts. To Blake either form of mind was alike hateful. Like the Moses of Rabbinical tradition, he was “drunken with the kisses of the lips of God.” Rational deism and clerical religion were to him two equally abhorrent incarnations of the same evil spirit, appearing now as negation and now as restriction. He wanted supremacy of freedom with intensity of faith. Hence he was properly neither Christian nor infidel: he was emphatically a heretic. Such men, according to the temper of the times, are burnt as demoniacs or pitied as lunatics. He believed in redemption by Christ, and in the incarnation of Satan as Jehovah. He believed that by self-sacrifice the soul should attain freedom and victorious deliverance from bodily bondage and sexual servitude; and also that the extremest fullness of indulgence in such desire and such delight as the senses can aim at or attain was absolutely good, eternally just, and universally requisite. These opinions, and stranger than these, he put forth in the cloudiest style, the wilfullest humour, and the stormiest excitement. No wonder the world let his books drift without caring to inquire what gold or jewels might be washed up as waifs from the dregs of churned foam and subsiding surf. He was the very man for fire and faggot; a mediæval inquisitor would have had no more doubt about him than a materialist or “theophilanthropist” of his own day or of ours.