James Thomson

“ THE POEMS OF WILLIAM BLAKE 243 The message of Cowper has been heard (it was not a very great announcement, and he uttered it neatly and distinctly and honestly) , has been laid to heart by the many for whom it was sufficient, and is now in due season passing out of mind with the fulfilment of its purpose. Very little of his poetry can be expected to survive our century. Burns will live with the language; but it must be remembered that his poetry is not blossom and promise ; it is consummate fruition ; it points to the past more than to the future ”

“ These pieces are not perfect in art, but they are perfect in the spirit of their art ; they have certain laxities and redundances of rhythm, and are here and there awkward in diction, but such youthful sweet errors rather grace than spoil "that large utterance of the early gods." They have the grandeur of lofty simplicity, not of laboured pomp, a grandeur like that which invests our imaginations of the patriarchs. ”

“ Metaphysically we are absolutely unable to prove any existence : we believe that those things really exist which we find pretty constant and consistent in their relations to us — a very sound practical but very unsound philosophical belief. Blake and Swedenborg and other true mystics (Jesus among them) undoubtedly had senses other than ours ; it is as futile for us to argue against the reality of their perceptions as it would be false in us to pretend that our perceptions are the same. ”

“ The poet lives forty years after giving this glorious song to his people, devotedly loyal to his highest inspirations, pure, poor, obscure ; and when he dies, it is here and there casually remarked that a clever madman has at length reached the sanity of the grave. ”

“ Its supreme tendency is to remain or to become again childlike, its supreme aspiration is not virtue, but innocence or guilelessness : so that we may say with truth of those whom it possesses, that the longer they live the younger they grow, as if "passing out to God by the gate of birth, not death." ”

“ Briefly, in almost every couplet of this poem, Blake has attempted what all profound poets and thinkers have ever most earnestly attempted — to seize a rude but striking image of some sovereign truth, and to stamp it with roughest vigour on the commonest metal for universal circulation. To such attempts we owe all the best proverbs in the world ; the abounding small currency of our intellectual commerce, more invaluably essen- tial to our ordinary daily business than nuggets of gold, than rubies, and pearls, and diamonds. ”

“ What is true of common breathing, is true more conspicuously of breathing idealised and harmonised, of the breathing of song in which psychical have superseded the physical rhythms. The adult cannot sing like a child ; but Blake in these Songs does so : he did not act the infantine, for he was infantine, by a regeneration as real while as mysterious as ever purest saint experienced in the religious life. ”

“ The experience is that of a sensitive and thoughtful boy, troubled by the first perceptions of evil where he has believed all good, thinking the whole world cruel and false since some playmate-friend has turned unkind, seeing life all desolate and blank since some coveted object has disappointed in the possession ; in short, through very lack of experience, generalising one untoward event into a theory of life that seems more bitterly hopeless than grey-haired cynical pessimism. ”

“ Their nest is in the sea, but they shall roam Like eagles for their prey. ' Our sons shall rise from thrones in joy, each one Buckling his armour on ; Morning shall be Prevented * by the gleaming of their swords, And Evening hear their songs of victory. ”

“ Giant voices Are heard from out the hills ; the enormous sons Of Ocean run from rocks and caves ; wild men Naked, and roaring like lions, hurling rocks. And wielding knotty clubs, like oaks entangled, Thick as a forest ready for the axe. ”

“ Yet assuredly there are still men in England with an infallible sense for poetry, however disguised and however far removed from ordinary associations ; men who know Shakespeare in despite of the com- mentators, and understand Browning in contempt of 26o CRITICAL STUDIES the critics, and laugh quietly at the current censures and raptures of the Reviews : and these men would scarcely consider it a waste of time to search into the meaning of the darkest oracles of William Blake. I wish to add a few words on the relations subsist- ing between our author and succeeding English poets. ”

“ Byron was born in 1788, Shelley in 1792, Keats in 1796. The poems in this first volume had been written by Blake in the interval, 1768-17 7 7, between the ages of eleven and twenty years. Never, perhaps, was a book of verse printed more strange to the literature of its period; and one scarcely knows whether to account the novelty more or less wonderful because relative and not absolute, because the novelty of the long dead past come back to life rather than of a new future just born. ”

“ He is great, exceedingly great; but great as the expression of intense life, and of such thought only as is the mere tool and weapon of life, never great as the expression of thought above and beneath life commanding and sustaining it. He had just ideality enough to shed a poetic glow upon powers and passions all essen- tially commonplace, but very uncommonly vigorous, overflowing with the energy of daemonic possession — an energy most mysterious, but in itself most impatient of mysticism. Keats, who shall dare to judge? ”

“ The gloom and chill of our English clime, physical and moral and intel- lectual, could not but be fatal to these children of the sun. England and France are so proudly in the van of civilisation that it is impossible for a great poet to live greatly to old age in either of them. 266 CRITICAL STUDIES His meditation at the best is that of a good leading- article ; he is a pensioner on the thought of his age. He is continually petty with that littleness of the second degree which makes a man brag aloud in avoiding some well-known Uttleness of the first degree. ”

“ Nothing gives one a keener insight into the want of robustness in the educated English intellect of the age than the fact that nine-tenths of our best-known literary men look upon him as a profound philosopher. ”

“ Shakespeare made perfect the English drama, and there has arisen no English drama since ; Burns made perfect Scottish song, and there has arisen no Scottish song since. When the genius of a nation has attained (human) perfection in any one form and mode, it leaves to ambitious mediocrity all future rivalry with that monumental perfection, itself seeking to become perfect in some new form or mode. Blake's first volume of poetry was printed (one cannot zA^l published) in 1783, about the same time as the first volume of Cowper and a little before that of Burns ”

“ He had none of the feverish raptures and hypochondriac remorses which even in the best of those who are commonly called saints excite a certain contemptuous pity in the midst of love and admiration : he was a thoroughly healthy and liappy religious soul, whose happi- ness was thoroughly unselfish and noble. As to the "Christian Evidences," as they are termed, of which the mass of good people are so enamoured, in trying to argue themselves and others into a sort of belief in a sort (and such a sort !) ”

“ By a well beneath a palm tree, stands one who wears but a linen turban and a simple flowing robe, and who but watches browsing sheep and camels drink- ing; yet no modern monarch, however gorgeously arrayed and brilliantly surrounded, can compare with him in majesty. The Selections from the first volume printed by Blake include extracts from a dramatic work, " Edward the Third." It was an attempt to revive the great English Historical Drama, an attempt which failed, and of which all repetitions are pretty sure to fail ”

“ In some of his shorter poems, however, and in the snatches of Orphic song prefixed to some of his essays (as "Compensation," "Art," " History," " Heroism ") , any one with ears to hear may catch pregnant hints of what poetry possessed by this inspiration can accomplish, and therefore will accomplish; for no pure inspiration having once 268 CRITICAL STUDIES come down among men ever withdraws its influence until it has attained (humanly) perfect embodiment. ”

“ A great school of the poets is dying out : it will die decently, elegantly, in the full odour of respecta- bility, with our Laureate. Robert Browning, a really great thinker, a true and splendid genius, though his vigorous and rest- less talents often overpower and run away with his genius so that some of his creations are left but half redeemed from chaos, has this simplicity in abundant measure. ”

“ While it cannot be pretended that he is a great sculptor, he is certainly an exquisite carver of luxuries in ivory ; but we must be content to admire the caskets, for there are no jewels inside. simply ignoring the Bumbleism and Christianity, except in so far as the Bumbleism obstructed his poetic career, unperturbed save by the first throes of creative art, developed himself in the regions from which he sprang — Pagan and Hellenic in his themes, his ideas, his perceptions, his objects. ”

“ So the Spirit of the Ages, the Zeitgeist, is developed universally and independently by its own mysterious laws throughout mankind ; and the eminent men from whom it first radiates the expression of what we call a new aspect (the con- tinuous imperceptible increments of change having accumulated to an amount of change which we can clearly perceive, and which even our gross standards are fine enough to measure) , the illustrious prototypes of an age, really cast but a faint reflex upon those beneath them ”

“ Men and Women " and " Dramatis Personge," its light burns so clear and steadfast through the hurrying clouds of his language (Tenny- son's style is the polished reflector of a lamp) that one can only wonder that people in general have not yet recognised it. I cannot recommend a finer study of a man possessed by the spirit of which I THE POEMS OF WILLIAM BLAKE 267 am writing than the sketch of Lazarus in Browning's " Epistle of Karshish, an Arab Physician." EHzabeth Barrett Browning, also, had much of it, yet never succeeded in giving it fair expression. ”

“ Prevented, I need hardly say, is used here in the old sense of anticipated. 250 CRITICAL STUDIES of this song, as it stands in Blake's earliest volume or in manuscript, should be given at any rate in an appendix if not in the body of the work. For this chant belongs to the whole British people ; it is one of the most precious among the most precious heir- looms bequeathed to us by our forefathers; it is a national jewel of such magnificence that no one man, however honest and skilful, can be trusted to cut it and set it in accordance with his private opinion. ”

“ It thus ignores or pays little heed to the countless complexities and distinctions of our modern civilisation and science, a knowledge of which is generally esteemed the most useful information and most valuable learning. ”

“ And the whole universe being the volume of the Scrip- tures of the living word of God, this above all is to be heeded, that man should not dwell contented on the lovely language and illustrations, but should live beyond these in the sphere of the realities which they signify. ”

“ Every man living in seclusion and developing an intense interior life, gradually comes to give a quite peculiar significance to certain words and phrases and emblems. Metaphors which to the common bookwrights and journalists are mere handy counters, symbols almost as abstract and unrelated in thought to the things they represent as are the x and y and z used in solving an algebraic problem, are for ht?n burdened with rich and various freights of spiritual experience ”

“ The Tiger " is a magnificent expression of boyish wonder and admiring terror ; " The Crystal Cabinet " is a fairy dream of early youth; "The Golden Net" is a fine dream of adolescence. Perhaps in only three more of his briefer poems do we find Blake mature THE POEMS OF WILLIAM BLAKE 255 (it must be borne in mind that his second maturity unfolded itself in pictures rather than songs) ; "Broken Love," " Auguries of Innocence," and the Letter in verse, dated from Felpham, to his friend, Mr. ”

“ And this regeneration, so far as we can learn, was effected without the throes of agony and doubt and despair, which the saints all pass through in being born again. I am merely writing a few remarks on the poet, not sketching the life and character of the man ”

“ His studies, also, have somewhat injured his style with technicology, making him in his own despite look at Nature through the old church and school windows, often when he should be with her in the rustic air. ”

“ His object was not to expand a small fact into a universal truth, but to concentrate the full essence of a universal truth into a small fact. He was intent on making great laws portable, not little THE POEMS OF WILLIAM BLAKE 257 events insupportable. "Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing ? ”

“ She ^ was often in- toxicated, too, with her own vehemence. "Aurora Leigh " sets out determined to walk the world with the great Shakespearian stride, whence desperate entanglement of feminine draperies and blinding swirls of dust. The sonnets entitled "From the Portuguese " reveal better her inmost simple nature. Emerson stands closest of all in relation to Blake, his verse as well as his essays and lectures being little else than the expression of this mystical simplicity. ”