Charles Gardner

“ Eternity, which is present and within, rolled wide apart, “leaving ruinous fragments of life.” Rent from eternity, Urizen becomes a clod of clay, and Los, beholding him, becomes like him, and is compelled to continue the work of creation in constricted forms. With his hammer he forges links of hours, days, and years. Man with his head, spine, heart, appears; then are formed his eyes, ears, nostrils, throat, tongue, feet—little members that hide from him eternity, and cause him to see the things that are within as though they were without, like the stars of night seen through a great telescope. ”

“ All this explains finally why the great Memory to which Blake refers so often in Jerusalem cannot redeem a man. It is shut up in the cosmos. Memory would keep man in the cosmos even though he were reincarnated a million times. Memory’s real work, whether for creative art or man’s redemption, is in the fact that she gives man standing ground amid the horrors of infinity, until he takes strong hold of Him who overcame the world, and is lifted by Him into His ascension glory beyond the maddening whir of the cosmic wheels. ”

“ Europe stood for Blake in his rebellious mood as the symbol of tradition, authority, science, religion. It was the dead past. “Enitharmon slept eighteen hundred years. Man was a dream, the night of Nature and their harps unstrung.” Europe, during this long sleep, was without vision, inspiration, art, and true nature. Her religion, divorced from art, was repressive, and existed by trading on men’s fears. ”

“ Moser had scant respect for Michael Angelo and Raphael, while he extolled to the skies the more fleshly works of Le Brun and Rubens. Some of us may wish that Moser had taught Blake to admire Rubens. But an angel from Heaven could not have done that. Clear outline was a necessity to keep him sane; blurred outline always gave him nightmare. Only the mystic who loves the flesh can rejoice in the roly-poly curves and tints of Rubens’ fat Venuses. Moser did his best, and being an old man of seventy-three, felt he might advise a young man in his art studies. ”

“ It is of course interesting to the literary mind to discover Ben Jonson in How sweet I roamed, Beaumont and Fletcher in My Silks and fine Array, Webster in the Mad Song, and Shakespeare in King Edward the Third; but these intimations of kinship are only such as are found in original geniuses of the same age. That which gives life and immortality and irresistible sweetness to the songs is Blake’s own child-spirit seeing with wide-eyed simplicity the simple commonplace things of this world that God made, and that are to the pure in heart the immediate revelation of Him. ”

“ Design XIV.—The creation and the immense joy of it. There is the creation of the whole cosmos, when the morning Stars sang together, and all the Sons of God shouted for joy. Never was such joy again till the beginning of the New Creation, when the Son of God was born in Bethlehem, as Luke, artist and saint, narrates with such artless simplicity and beauty. The Scriptures assure us of a time when that joy shall be eternal. Meanwhile it is the artists who in true creation have a foretaste of the joy. It is Blake who has presented it in its most spiritual and universal aspect. ”

“ With certain reservations he dips on the Christian side. He travels round the cosmos, but in a spiral; and the top of his spiral—his Jacob’s Ladder—reaches not to the seventh plane but to the Throne of God, which is far above the charmed circle. Hence man is able to climb beyond the defiled cosmos into the pure heaven of God. That is his redemption.
Blake’s vision, then, ranging freely among the planes of consciousness, gives him access to the great Memory which is within the cosmos; and at rare moments he goes beyond the cosmos, and then his words proceed from the highest inspiration. ”

“ Innocence was a favourite word, and Swedenborg saw the celestial angels both innocent and naked. There is nothing more innocent than a lamb, and therefore Blake by a sure instinct and in childlike joy piped his song about the lamb, satisfying at once his feeling for the lamb, the child, and the Maker of the lamb who was called the Lamb of God.
The song called The Divine Image shows Swedenborg’s influence at its best. So many men with Blake’s mystic proclivities rush into vague abstractions. To-day we hear of Infinite Love and Infinite Wisdom, Infinite Life, and all personality denied to God. ”

“ Hogarth saw, we may say detected, in the scenes that marked the progresses of the Rake and the Harlot, a full pulsing life and an unexpected beauty. When he would express what he saw, with a mighty stretch he shook off all foreign influences and set about to express himself naturally and in his own way. His hand appropriated to its use the power of the line, more particularly the vitality of the curved line, with the amazing result that the moment we forget his “moralities,” we see in him an exuberant artist of the beautiful. Blake was wholly with him in all this. ”

“ Blake, for his part, was enormously attracted by Chaucer. He saw in him a first-rate example of the poetic genius that can pierce through to the underlying reality of every kind of man, and embrace him with genial warmth. He was observer and contemplator, and there was present just that element of imagination which always produces something original and creative.
The first happy result of Blake’s capture by Chaucer was that he forgot for a time his horrid symbolism. ”

“ If he remains in these ideas and does not raise his mind above them he is nowise able to perceive anything spiritual and Divine, for he involves them in ideas which derive from space and time; and in proportion as he does this, the light—the lumen—of his understanding becomes merely natural. To think from the lumen in reasoning about spiritual and Divine things, is like thinking from the thick darkness of night concerning the things which appear only in the light of day. ”

“ Tiriel at the hour of his death realized why his paradise was fallen, and he had found nought but the drear sandy plain. His description of his own upbringing, shocking as it is, is that of the great bulk of mankind. The instant a child is born, the dull, blind father stands ready to form the infant head; and if the child, like Blake, has vision, the father, like Mr Blake, uses the whip to rouse the sluggish senses to act and to scourge off all youthful fancies. ”

“ Thus Blake leads man back into his ancient simplicity and unity. Order is restored; and the four mighty ones that warred within to man’s distraction, led captive by Los, are content each to perform his proper function, and so to prevent any further disturbance of the peace.
That is a fine consummation, but it is not Blake’s last word. Perfect man must have a perfect City to dwell in. Albion redeemed must build Jerusalem. Blake began Milton with the fond contemplation of England’s fields and meadows that he had loved in his youth. ”

“ Had his father been a rich man, able to pay a heavy premium that his son might be taught by one of the popular engravers of the day, we should have had the distressing picture of Blake moulded different and moulded wrong by a Woollett, a Bartolozzi, or an Angelica Kaufmann, and his whole soul in rebellious and ineffectual protest. As it was, Basire was master of the technical part of his craft, he believed in accurate, definite outline, and not being a man of genius, did not think it necessary that his pupils should turn out servile copies of himself. ”

“ Passion is always fire, and as such it is energy. To-day we are apt to use the word only for sex. In the eighteenth century passion was of any kind, and appetite stood for sex. With Blake, passion is man’s vital worth. It may flame along many forbidden avenues, but once it has mounted to the imagination, and is controlled by spirit, then it is the driving force that makes man’s works beautiful and his character spontaneous. ”

“ His first glimpse of the country was to him as our first trip abroad to us. The trees, the hills, the grass and the cattle spoke obliquely to an imagination that already had a bias. He loved them—with discretion. To him London was older than the country. Nature has a way of disguising her great age in an ever renewed youthful present. London’s present drives one to the past. Nature bewitches her children and will not allow them to transcend her. ”

“ Even Job’s friends, who pour out pithy things in rich poetical language surpassing that attained by all laureates, are rebuked for uttering only what everybody knows. Yet so universal is the Book in its symbolism that it can afford, if need be, to dispense with picturesque details of its authorship and date, and stand simply on its merits as an inspired dramatic epic of Man’s passage from his consciousness of degradation as a worm, and his stubbornness as a wild ass’s colt, to the dignity and power of a son of God. ”

“ A natural man building his character on a natural religion must be as cruel as his mother. The cruelty finds periodic vent in the lust of war.
Yet why there is so much cruelty in Nature remains a mystery, even to the man who has been driven by her to supernaturalism. Blake maintained that there were two ways of regarding Nature. The natural man, with only five senses to inform him, looks at her and sees a very small portion of the infinite, without ever suspecting the infinite. If he sees her loveliness it will arrest him and hold him fast. ”

“ Hayley had passed out of his life. Cromek could make the money out of him that he could not make for himself. Stothard, he believed, had acted with his eyes open. As he brooded on these things, anger and resentment took possession of him. His courage was failing. His resentments secreted poison that was surely spreading through his entire being and threatening to turn the once overtrustful Blake into a disillusioned and bitter old man. ”

“ All fierce extremes met in Him. Here was what Blake had been seeking all his life—that for which he had been a rebel. Just here, in the old gospel, looming out of the past, he gained his supreme vision of One who satisfied his utmost need. He gazed, and worshipped Him in His immense energy and strength, His lowliness and meekness, Who had deserved all that His chosen [Pg 168] people could give Him, yet had borne no resentment when they despised and rejected Him. Slowly Blake saw his life as a mere blot by the side of that resplendent life. Then all resentment died in him. ”

“ All these, abstract philosophy, abstract law, the Mahometan Bible, Codes of War, with the Churches, Hospitals, Castles, Palaces, which they involve, while seeking to catch the joys of eternity, serve in reality to obliterate and erase eternity altogether, and the children of men schooled in these philosophies behold the vast of Nature shrunk before their shrunken eyes. After the shrinkage there can only arise a philosophy of the five senses, and then Newton and Locke, especially Locke, Rousseau and Voltaire, have it all their own way. ”

“ Man has negative rights but no positive rights.
Nothing further is requisite, but the improvement of his reasoning faculty, to make him virtuous and happy. Freedom of will is a curse. It is not free or independent of understanding, and therefore it follows understanding, and fortunately is not free to resist it. Man becomes free as he obeys it. It follows that our disapprobation of vice will be of the same nature as our disapprobation of an infectious distemper.
A scheme of self-love is incompatible with virtue.
The only means by which truth enters is through the inlet of the senses. ”

“ Los embraces her, and she begets a child in her own image—a Human Shadow, who is named Orc (passion) .
Thus grows up a world of men, women, children, with their various hungers and needs. The Eternals try to provide for these needs by science and religion; but as they can build their science and religion only from their experience and observation of the contracted universe, the science is sand, and religion a web, and earth’s wretched children remain under the cruel rule and curse of Urizen and his sons, calling his laws of Prudence the Eternal Laws of God. ”