by Unknown
And may not this play reflect a crisis in the mind of its writer? Earlier, at the end of ‘John Bull’s Other Island’, the crisis was set forth. Shaw, as well as his latest protagonist, has had a profane and unruly past. Fabianism, vegetarianism, prohibitionism, music, painting, drama — all the progressive movements in art and politics — have had him as champion. And now, perhaps, some divine finger has touched his brain, and he, in the guise of Blanco Posnet, is shewn up.
James Joyce
The Home Rule Comet
1910
The idea of Irish autonomy has gradually become surrounded with a pallid and tenuous substantiality, and just a few weeks ago, when a royal decree dissolved the English parliament, something pale and wavering was seen dawning in the East. It was the Home Rule comet, vague, distant, but as punctual as ever. The sovereign Word which in an instant made twilight fall on the demi-gods at Westminster had called from the darkness and the void the obedient and unknowing star.
This time, however, it could be made out very poorly because the skies were cloudy. The fog which usually covers the British shores grew so thick that it cloaked them in a fixed and impenetrable cloud bank, behind which could be heard the orchestral music of the electoral elements in discord — the fiddles of the nobles agitated and hysterical, the raucous horns of the people, and, from time to time, a passing phrase on the Irish flutes.
The uncertainty of the political situation in England is evident from the fact that their agencies hurl forth from morning to night enigmatic dispatches which contradict themselves. In fact, the tenor of the debates held recently in the United Kingdom makes an impartial examination of the situation very difficult. Aside from the three party heads, Asquith, Balfour, and Redmond, who always know how to maintain a certain dignified bearing not unbecoming to fatuous leaders, the electoral campaign which has just ended indicates a significant lowering of the tone of English public life. Has such a speech ever been heard from the lips of the Chancellor of the Exchequer? the Conservatives are asked. But the jibes of the warlike Welsh minister pale before the vulgar vituperations of Conservatives like representative Smith, and the well known lawyer Carson and the director of the ‘National Review’, while the two Irish factions, forgetting their common enemy, have waged underground war in an attempt to exhaust the gamut of coarse language.
Another cause of confusion is that the English parties no longer answer to their names. It is the Radicals who want to continue the present political tariff policy of free trade, while the Conservatives champion tariff reform at the top of their voices. It is the Conservatives who want to take away the legislative power from Parliament and give it instead to the nation as a whole by means of the plebiscite. Finally, it is the clerical and intransigent Irish party which comprises the majority of an anticlerical and Liberal government.
This paradoxical situation is accurately reflected in the characters of the party heads. Not to speak of Chamberlain or Rosebery, who have gone, respectively, from extreme Radicalism and Glad- stonian Liberalism to the ranks of Imperialism (while the young minister Churchill has made his ideal voyage in the opposite direction), we find the causes of Anglican Protestantism and of conciliatory Nationalism led by a religious renegade and a converted Fenian.
Balfour, in fact, a worthy disciple of the Scottish school, is a sceptic rather than a politician, who, urged more by the instinct for nepotism innate in the Cecil family than by individual choice, assumed the leadership of the Conservative party after the death of his uncle, the lamented Marquis of Salisbury. Not a day passes that the reporters fail to point out his distracted and quibbling attitude. His tricks make his own followers laugh. And even if the orthodox army has met with three consecutive clashes under his vacillating flag, each more serious than the last, his biographer (who perhaps will be another member of the Cecil family) will be able to say of him that in his philosophical essays he dissected and laid bare with great art the intimate fibres of the religious and psychological principles whose champion he became by a turn of the parliamentary wheel. O’Brien, the ‘leader’ of the Irish dissidents, who calls his band of 10 representatives the ‘All for Ireland’ party, has become what every good fanatic becomes when his fanaticism dies before he does. Now he fights in league with the Unionist magistrates who would probably have issued a warrant for his arrest twenty years ago; and nothing remains of his fiery youth except those violent outbursts which make him seem epileptic.
In the midst of such confusions it is easy to understand how the dispatches contradict themselves, and announce that Home Rule is at the door, and write its obituary six hours later. The uninitiated cannot be too sure in the case of comets, but at any rate the passage of the celestial body so long awaited has been communicated to us by the official observatory.
* * * *
Last week, the Irish leader Redmond proclaimed the happy news to a crowd of fishermen. English democracy, he said, has broken the power of the Lords once and for all, and within a few weeks, perhaps, Ireland will have her independence. Now, it is necessary to be a voracious nationalist to be able to swallow such a mouthful. As soon as it is seated on the ministerial benches, the Liberal cabinet will be confronted by a conglomeration of troubles, among which the foremost is the double balance. When this matter is settled for good or for bad, peers and commoners will declare a treaty of peace in honour of the coronation of George V. So far the way is clear, but only prophets can tell us where a government as heterogeneous as the present one will end. To remain in power, will it try to appease the Welsh and the Scots with ecclesiastical and agrarian measures? If the Irish exact autonomy as the price for the support of their votes, will the cabinet hasten to blow the dust off one of their many Home Rule bills and present it to the House again?
The history of Anglo-Saxon liberalism teaches us the answer to these and similarly ingenuous questions very clearly. The Liberal ministers are scrupulous men, and once again the Irish problem will cause symptomatic rifts in the body of the cabinet, in the face of which it will plainly appear that the English electorate really did not authorize the government to legislate in its favour. And, following the Liberal strategy (which aims to wear down the separatist sentiment slowly and secretly, while creating a new, eager social class, dependent, and free from dangerous enthusiasms, by means of partial concessions), if the government introduces a reform bill, or the semblance of one, which Ireland will haughtily refuse, will not that be the propitious moment for the intervention of the Conservative party? Faithful to its cynical tradition of bad faith, will it not take this occasion to declare the Irish dictatorship intolerable, and start a campaign to reduce the number of Irish members from 80 to 40 on the basis of the depopulation, more unique than rare in a civilized country, which was and still is the bitter fruit of misgovernment?
The connection, then, between the abolition of the Lords’ veto and the granting of autonomy to the Irish is not as immediate as some would have us believe. In the final count, that is the business of the English themselves, and admitting that the English people no longer have the worship for their spiritual and temporal fathers that they once had, it is still probable that they will proceed with the reform of the upper house as slowly and cautiously as they are proceeding with the reform of their medieval laws, with the reform of their pompous and hypocritical literature, with the reform of their monstrous judicial system. And in anticipation of these reforms, it will matter very little to the credulous ploughman in Ireland whether Lord Lansdowne or Sir Edward Grey rules the lot of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
* * * *
The fact that Ireland now wishes to make common cause with British democracy should neither surprise nor persuade anyone. For seven centuries she has never been a faithful subject of England. Neither, on the other hand, has she been faithful to herself. She has entered the British domain without forming an integral part of it. She has abandoned her own language almost entirely and accepted the language of the conqueror without being able to assimilate
the culture or adapt herself to the mentality of which this language is the vehicle. She has betrayed her heroes, always in the hour of need and always without gaining recompense. She has hounded her spiritual creators into exile only to boast about them. She has served only one master well, the Roman Catholic Church, which, however, is accustomed to pay its faithful in long term drafts.
What long term alliance can exist between this strange people and the new Anglo-Saxon democracy? The phrase-makers who speak so warmly about it today will soon see (if they do not see it already) that between the English nobles and the English workers there is a mysterious communion of blood; and that the highly praised Marquis of Salisbury, a refined gentleman, spoke not only for his caste but for his race when he said: ‘Let the Irish stew in their own juice.
James Joyce
William Blake
1912
...of an ethical and practical interpretation, are not moral aphorisms. Looking at St. Paul’s cathedral, Blake heard with the ear of the soul the cry of the little chimney sweep, who symbolizes oppressed innocence in his strange literary language. Looking at Buckingham Palace, he sees with the eye of the mind the sigh of the hapless soldier running down the palace wall in the form of a drop of blood. While he was still young and vigorous, remaking himself with these visions, he had the power to etch their image in a hammered verse or a sheet of copper, and these verbal or mental etchings often comprise an entire sociological system. The prison, he writes, is built with stones of law; the brothel with bricks of religion. But the continual strain of these voyages into the unknown and the abrupt return to natural life slowly but inexorably corrode his artistic power. The visions, multiplying, blind the sight; and toward the end of his mortal life, the unknown for which he yearned covered him with the shadows of vast wings, and the angels with whom he conversed as an immortal with immortals hid him in the silence of their garments.
If I have evoked from the shades with bitter words and violent verses the figure of a weak, second or third rank politician, I have given you the wrong idea of Blake’s personality. Asa young man he belonged to the literary-revolutionary school that included Miss Wollstonecraft, and the famous, perhaps I should say the notorious, author of the Rights of Man, Thomas Paine. Even among the members of this circle, Blake was the only one with the courage to wear in the street the red cap, emblem of the new era. He soon took it off, though, never to wear it again, after the massacres in the Paris prisons that occurred in September 1792. His spiritual rebellion against the powers of this world was not made of the kind of gunpowder, soluble in water, to which we are more or less accustomed. In 1799, he was offered the position of drawing master to the royal family. Afraid that in the artificial atmosphere of the court his art might die of inanition, he refused it; but at the same time, in order not to offend the king, he gave up all the other lower-class students that formed his major source of income. After his death, Princess Sophia sent his widow a private gift of a hundred pounds sterling. Mrs. Blake sent it back, thanking her politely, saying that she was able to get along on little, and that she didn’t want to accept the gift because, if it were used for another purpose, the money might help to restore the life and hopes of someone less fortunate than her.
There was evidently a distinct difference between that undisciplined and visionary heresiarch and those most orthodox church philosophers, Francesco Suarez, Europae atque orbis universi magister et oculus populi Christiani, and Don Giovanni Mariana di Talavera, who had written for the stupefaction of posterity a logical and sinister defence of tyrannicide in the preceding century. The same idealism that possessed and sustained Blake when he hurled his lightning against human evil and misery prevented him from being cruel to the body even of a sinner, the frail curtain of flesh, as he calls it in the mystical book of Thel, that lies on the bed of our desire. The episodes that show the primitive goodness of his heart are numerous in the story of his life. Although he had difficulty making a living and spent only half a guinea a week to maintain the little house where he lived, he gave forty pounds to a needy friend. Having seen a poor, phthisic art student pass his window each morning with a portfolio under his arm, he took pity on him and invited him into the house, where he fed him and tried to cheer his sad and dwindling life. His relations with his younger brother Robert recall the story of David and Jonathan. Blake loved him, supported him, and took care of him. During his long sickness, he spoke to him of the eternal world and comforted him. For many days before his death, he watched over his sickbed without interruption, and at the supreme moment he saw the beloved soul break loose from the lifeless body and rise toward heaven clapping its hands for joy. Then, serene and exhausted, he lay down in a deep sleep and slept for seventy-two hours in a row.
I have already referred to Mrs. Blake two or three times, and perhaps I should say something about the poet’s married life. Blake fell in love when he was twenty years old. The girl, who was rather foolish it seems, was named Polly Woods. The influence of this youthful love shines through Blake’s first works, the Poetical Sketches and Songs of Innocence, but the incident ended suddenly and brusquely. She thought him crazy, or little better, and he thought her a flirt, or something worse. This girl’s face appears in certain drawings in the prophetic book of Vala, a soft and smiling face, symbol of the sweet cruelty of woman, and of the illusion of the senses. To recuperate from this defeat, Blake left London and went to live in the cottage of a gardener named Bouchier.This gardener had a daughter, Catherine, about twenty-four, whose heart was filled with compassion at hearing of the young man’s misfortune in love. The affection born from this pity and its recognition finally united them. 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 this chapter of Blake’s life.
Like many other men of great genius, Blake was not attracted to cultured and refined women. Either he preferred to drawing- room graces and an easy and broad culture (if you will allow me to borrow a commonplace from theatrical jargon) the simple woman, of hazy and sensual mentality, or, in his unlimited egoism, he wanted the soul of his beloved to be entirely a slow and painful creation of his own, freeing and purifying daily under his very eyes, the demon (as he says) hidden in the cloud. Whichever is true, the fact is that Mrs. Blake was neither very pretty nor very intelligent. In fact, she was illiterate, and the poet took pains to teach her to read and write. He succeeded so well that within a few years his wife was helping him in his engraving work, retouching his drawings, and was cultivating in herself the visionary faculty.
Elemental beings and spirits of dead great men often came to the poet’s room at night to speak with him about art and the imagination. Then Blake would leap out of bed, and, seizing his pencil, remain long hours in the cold London night drawing the limbs and lineaments of the visions, while his wife, curled up beside his easy chair, held his hand lovingly and kept quiet so as not to disturb the visionary ecstasy of the seer. When the vision had gone, about daybreak his wife would get back into bed, and Blake, radiant with joy and benevolence, would quickly begin to light the fire and get breakfast for the both of them. We are amazed that the symbolic beings Los and Urizen and Vala and Tiriel and Enitharmon and the shades of Milton and Homer came from their ideal world to a poor London room, and no other incense greeted their coming than the smell of East Indian tea and eggs fried in lard. Isn’t this perhaps the first time in the history of the world that the Eternal spoke through the mouth of the humble?
So the mortal life of William Blake unfolded. The bark of his married life that had weighed anchor under the auspices of pity and gratitude sailed among the usual rocks for almost half a century. There were no children. In the early years of their life together there were discords, misunderstandings easy to understand if we keep in mind the great difference in culture and temperament that separated the young couple. It is even true, as I said before, that Blake almost followed Abr
aham’s example of giving to Hagar what Sarah refused. The vestal simplicity of his wife ill accorded with the temperament of Blake, for whom until the last days of his life exuberance was the only beauty. In a scene of tears and accusations that occurred between them, his wife fell in a faint, and injured herself in such a way that she was unable to have children. It is a sad irony to think that this poet of childish innocence, the only writer who has written songs for children with the soul of a child, and who has illuminated the phenomenon of gestation with a light so tender and mystical in his strange poem The Chrystal Cabinet, was destined never to see the sight of a real human child at his fireside. To him who had such great pity for everything that lives and suffers and rejoices in the illusions of the vegetable world, for the fly, the hare, the little chimney sweep, the robin, even for the flea, was denied any other fatherhood than the spiritual fatherhood, intensely natural though it is, that still lives in the lines of 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.
Over Blake’s fearless and immortal spirit, the rotting grave and the king of terrors had no power. In his old age, surrounded at last by friends and disciples and admirers, he began, like Cato the Elder, to study a foreign language. That language was the same in which tonight I try, by your leave, in so far as I can, to recall his spirit from the twilight of the universal mind, to detain it for a minute and question it. He began to study Italian in order to read the Divina Commedia in the original and to illustrate Dante’s vision with mystical drawings. Gaunt and weakened by the afflictions of illness, he would prop himself up on several pillows and spread a large drawing-book on his knees, forcing himself to trace the lines of his last vision on the white pages. It is the attitude in which he lives for us in Phillips’ drawing in the National Gallery in London. His brain did not weaken; his hand did not lose its old mastery. Death came to him in the form of a glacial cold, like the tremors of cholera, which possessed his limbs and put out the light of his intelligence in a moment, as the cold darkness that we call space covers and extinguishes the light of a star. He died singing in a strong, resounding voice that made the rafters ring. He was singing, as always, of the ideal world, of truth, the intellect and the divinity of the imagination. ‘My beloved, the songs that I sing are not mine,’’ he said to his wife, ‘no, no, I tell you they are not mine.’’