Charles Gardner

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Symbolism is beautiful only as it is universal, or can become so. It should be one language against many tongues. But Blake’s is not even the tongue of a nation or a tribe. It is his own private invention, and, incidentally, uncouth, forbidding, unintelligible, and in actual fact a little insane. It is true that we can learn his symbolism after much labour; but a beautiful and catholic symbolism is the one thing that we have a right to understand, without learning, through the imagination, which Blake always affirmed to be divine. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ With perfect justice he pointed out that if Whitefield confessed his sins before all the world, and never pretended to be free from the passions that burn in other men, he was certainly an honest and sincere man. To pounce on a Christian who inadvertently falls, and call him a hypocrite, is as usual now as in Blake’s day, but it comes with astonishing gracelessness from the lips of those who have spent their youthful passions in wanton waste, and, wearied and bored, are bidding for a respectable middle age. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Blake, while submissive to Hayley, was humble, but at the risk of his birthright.
Hayley, exerting himself to find rich neighbours to sit for Blake to paint in miniature, was kind, but he was suffocating his genius.
To the scribes and Pharisees, Christ meek would have been Christ weak.
Modesty in one who does not know that all things that live are holy is prudery.
To pity oneself or another for the troubles that come through slackness is effeminacy. The true virtue here is to damn. Hence the right place for a man clothed from head to foot in hypocritic graces is hell, his right name is Satan. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Thus Godwin was rationalist, altruist, anarchist, and non-resister. It is not probable that Blake ever read Political Justice, his patience not being equal to the task. While ardently desiring political justice and liberty, it was soon plain to him from his personal knowledge of Godwin that all his first principles were false. It was not true that man’s character originates in his external circumstances, although these do act on him. The differences between men are traceable to a fundamental inequality. One man turns everything he touches into dross, another into gold. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ We blame a man’s times, or birth, or church, or what not for his failures, when we should look for some fundamental lack in his own equipment. That Blake was not quite one of our conquerors, then, we will not attribute to the eighteenth century or to Swedenborg’s predominant influence in his early life, but simply to the fact that he lacked the strong, virile reason that could keep pace with the on-rush of his visions. He was all Los: Urizen, whom he repudiated with such scorn, alone could have balanced his nature and led him to the supreme achievement. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Perhaps we shall eventually all come to believe in both evolution and a special creation to account for man’s unique place in the universe. At any rate a denial of the fall involves a definite departure from historical Christianity, and it is important to see that it was an integral part of Blake’s scheme and without it that scheme falls to pieces. Not that he pressed the letter of the Adam and Eve story. It stood for him as a divinely simple witness of an ancient simplicity and unity from which man has departed by disobedience and the assertion of a life and a self independent of God. ”