Arise from out the dewy gra.s.s!
Night is worn And the Morn Rises from the slumbrous ma.s.s.
"Turn away no more; Why wilt thou turn away?
The starry floor The watery sh.o.r.e Is given thee till break of day."
If I were asked to name a writer whose work conveys to one"s mind, free of any admixture of rhetoric or of any alloy of cleverness, thevery impact and shock of pure inspired genius, I would unhesitatingly name William Blake. One is strangely conscious in reading him of the presence of some great unuttered power--some vast demiurgic secret--struggling like a buried t.i.tan just below the surface of his mind, and never quite finding vocal expression.
Dim shapes--vast inchoate shadows--like dreams of forgotten worlds and shadows of worlds as yet unborn, seem to pa.s.s backwards and forwards over the brooding waters of his spirit. There is no poet perhaps who gives such an impression of primordial creative force--force hewing at the roots of the world and weeping and laughing from sheer pleasure at the touch of that dream stuff whereof life is made. Above his head, as he laughs and weeps and sings, the branches of the trees of the forest of night stir and rustle under the immense s.p.a.ces, and, floating above them, the planets and the stars flicker down upon him with friendly mysterious joy.
No poet gives one the impression of greater strength than William Blake; and this is emphasised by the very simplicity and childishness of his style. Only out of the strength of a lion could come such honeyed gentleness. And if he is one of the strongest among poets he is also one of the happiest.
Genuine happiness--happiness that is at the same time intellectual and spontaneous--is far rarer in poetry than one might suppose. Such happiness has nothing necessarily to do with an optimistic philosophy or even with faith in G.o.d. It has nothing at all to do with physical well-being or the mere animal sensations of eating and drinking and philandering. It is a thing of more mysterious import and of deeper issues than these. It may come lightly and go lightly, but the rhythm of eternity is in the beating of its wings, and deep calls to deep in the throbbing of its pulses.
As Blake himself puts it--
"He who bends to himself a joy Does the winged life destroy; But he who kisses the joy as it flies Lives in Eternity"s sun-rise."
In the welling up, out of the world"s depths, of happiness like this, there is a sense of calm, of serenity, of immortal repose and full-brimmed ecstasy. It is the "energy without disturbance" which Aristotle indicates as the secret of the life of the eternal Being himself. It is beyond the ordinary pleasures of s.e.x, as it is beyond the ordinary difference between good and evil. It is human and yet inhuman. It is the happiness of da Vinci, of Spinoza, of Goethe. It is the happiness towards which Nietzsche all his life long struggled desperately, and struggled in vain.
One touches the fringe of the very mystery of human symbols--of the uttermost secret of _words_ in their power to express the soul of a writer--when one attempts to a.n.a.lyse the child-like simplicity of William Blake"s style. How is it that he manages with so small, so limited a vocabulary, to capture the very "music of the spheres"? We all have the same words at our command; we all have the same rhymes; where then lies this strange power that can give the simplest syllables so original, so personal, a shape?
"What the hammer? What the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? What dread grasp Dare its deadly terrors clasp?"
Just because his materials are so simple and so few--and this applies to his plastic art as well as to his poetry--we are brought to pause more sharply and startlingly in his case than that of almost any other, before the primordial mystery of human expression and its malleableness under the impact of personality. Probably no poet ever lived who expressed his meaning by the use of such a limited number of words, or of words so simple and childish. It is as though William Blake had actually transformed himself into some living incarnation of his own Virgilian child-saviour, and were stammering his oracles to mankind through divine baby-lips.
What matter? It is the one and the same Urbs Beata, Calliopolis, Utopia, New Rome, New Atlantis, which these child-like syllables announce, trumpet heralded by the angels of the Revelation, chanted by the high-souled Mantuan, sung by David the King, or shouted "over the roofs of the world" by Walt Whitman.
It is the same mystery, the same hope for the human race.
"I will not cease from mental strife Nor shall my sword sink from my hand Till I have built Jerusalem In England"s green and pleasant Land!"
One of the most curious and interesting things in Blake"s work is the value he places upon tears. All his n.o.ble mythological figures, gathering in verse after verse, for the great battle against brutality and materialism, come "weeping" to the help of their outraged little ones. G.o.ds and beasts, lions and lambs, Christ and Lucifer, fairies and angels, all come "weeping" into the struggle with the forces of stupidity and tyranny.
He seems to imply that to have lost the power of shedding tears is to have dehumanized oneself and put oneself outside the pale. "A tear is an intellectual thing," and those who still have the power of "weeping" have not quite lost the key to the wisdom of the eternal G.o.ds. It is not only the mysterious and foreordained congruity of rhyme that leads him to a.s.sociate in poem after poem--until for the vulgar mind, the repet.i.tion becomes almost ludicrous--this symbolic "weeping" with the sweet sleep which it guards and which it brings.
The poet of the veiled child at the heart of the world is naturally a poet of the mystery of tears and the mystery of sleep. And William Blake becomes all this without the least tincture of sentimentality.
That is where his genius is most characteristic and admirable. He can come chanting his strange gnomic tunes upon tears and upon sleep, upon the loveliness of children, upon life and death, upon the wonder of dews and clouds and rain and the soft petals of flowers which these nourish, without--even for one moment--falling into sentiment or pathos.
All through his strange and turbulent life he was possessed of the power of splendid and terrible anger. His invectives and vituperations bite and flay like steel whips. The "buyers and sellers"
in the temple of his Lord are made to skip and dance. He was afraid of no man living--nor of any man"s G.o.d.
Working with his own hands, composing his poems, ill.u.s.trating them, engraving them, printing them, and binding them in his own workshop, he was in a position to make Gargantuan sport of the "great" and the "little" vulgar.
He went his own way and lived as he pleased; having something about him of that shrewd, humorous, imperturbable "insouciance"
which served Walt Whitman so well, and which is so much wiser, kindlier and more human a shield for an artist"s freedom, than the sarcasms of a Whistler or the insolence of a Wilde.
Careless and nonchalant, he "travelled the open road," and gave all obscurantists and oppressors to ten million cart-loads of horned devils!
It is my privilege to live, on the South Coast, not so many miles from that village of Felpham where he once saw in his child-like fantasies, a fairy"s funeral. That funeral must have been followed after Blake"s death by many others; for there are no fairies in Felpham now. But Blake"s cottage is there still--to be seen by any who care to see it--and the sands by the sea"s edge are the "yellow sands," flecked with white foam and bright green sea-weed of Ariel"s song; and on the sea-banks above grow tufts of Homeric Tamarisk.
It is astonishing to think that while the laconic George Crabbe, "Nature"s sternest painter," was writing his rough couplets in the metre of Alexander Pope, and while Doctor Johnson was still tapping the posts of his London streets, as he went his way to buy oysters for his cat, William Blake--in mind and imagination a contemporary of Nietzsche and Whitman--should have been a.s.serting the artist"s right (why should we not say the individual"s right, artist or no artist?) to live as he pleases, according to the morals, manners, tastes, inclination and caprices, of his own absolute humour and fancy.
This was more than one hundred years ago. What would William Blake think of our new world,--would it seem to him to resemble his New Jerusalem of child-like happiness and liberty?--our world where young ladies are fined five dollars if they go into the sea without their stockings? Well! at Felpham they do not tease them with stockings.
What makes the genius of William Blake so salutary a revolutionary influence is the fact that while contending so savagely against puritanical stupidity, he himself preserves to the end, his guilelessness and purity of heart.
There are admirable writers and philosophers, whose work on behalf of the liberation of humanity is rendered less disinterested by the fact that they are fighting for their personal inclinations rather than for the happiness of the world at large. This could never be said of William Blake. A more unselfish devotion to the spiritual interests of the race than that which inspired him from beginning to end could hardly be imagined. But he held it as axiomatic that the spiritual interests of the race can only be genuinely served by means of the intellectual and moral freedom of the individual. And certainly in his own work we have a beautiful and anarchical freedom.
No writer or artist ever succeeded in expressing more completely the texture and colour of his thoughts. Those strange flowing-haired old men who reappear so often in his engravings, like the "splendid and savage old men" of Walt Whitman"s fancy, seem to incorporate the very swing and sweep of his elemental earth-wrestling; while those long-limbed youths and maidens, almost suggestive of El Greco in the way their bodies are made, yearn and leap upwards towards the clear air and the cloudless blue sky, in a pa.s.sion of tumultuous escape, in an ecstasy of resurrection.
It is extraordinary how Blake"s peculiar use of very simple rhymes, with the same words repeated over and over again, enhances the power of his poetry--it does more than enhance it--it is the body of its soul. One approaches here the very mystery of style, in the poetic medium, and some of its deepest secrets. Just as that "metaphysic in sensuality" which is the dominant impulse in the genius of Remy de Gourmont expresses itself in constant echoes and reiterated liturgical repet.i.tions--such as his famous "fleur hypocrite, fleur du silence"--until one feels that the "refrain" in poetry has become, in an especial sense, his predominant note, so these constantly recurring rhymes in the work of Blake, coming at the end of very short lines, convey, as nothing else could do, the child-like quality of the spirit transfused through them. They are childlike; and yet they could not have been written by any one but a grown man, and a man of formidable strength and character.
The psychology of the situation is doubtless the same as that which we remark in certain very modern artists--the ones whose work is most of all bewildering to those who, in their utter inability to become as "little children," are as completely shut out from the kingdom of art as they are from the kingdom of heaven.
The curious spell which these simple and in some cases infantile rhymes cast over us, ought to compel the more fanatical adherents of "free verse" to rearrange their ideas. Those who, without any prejudice one way or the other, are only anxious to enjoy to the full every subtle pleasure which the technique of art is able to give, cannot help finding in the unexpected thrill produced by these sweet, soft vibrations of verbal melody--like the sound of a golden bell rung far down under the humming waters--a direct revelation of the tender, strong soul behind them, for whose hidden pa.s.sion they find a voice.
After all, it is in the final impression produced upon our senses and intellect by a great artist, and not in any particular quality of a particular work of art, that--unless we are pedantic virtuosos--we weigh and judge what we have gained. And what we have gained by William Blake cannot be over-estimated.
His poems seem to a.s.sociate themselves with a thousand evanescent memories of days when we have been happy beyond the power of calamity or disappointment. They a.s.sociate themselves with those half-physical, half-spiritual trances--when, suddenly in the outskirts of a great city perhaps, or on the banks of some inland river, we have remembered the long line of breaking surf, and the murmurs and the scents of the sea. They a.s.sociate themselves with the dreamy indescribable moments when crossing the wet gra.s.s of secluded misty meadows, pa.s.sing the drowsy cattle and the large cool early morning shadows thrown by the trees, we have suddenly come upon cuckoo flowers or marigolds, every petal of which seems burdened with a mystery almost intolerably sweet.
Like the delicate pictures of early Italian art, the poems of Blake indicate and suggest rather than exhaust or satiate. One is never oppressed by too heavy a weight of natural beauty. A single tree against the sky--a single shadow upon the pathway--a single petal fallen on the gra.s.s; these are enough to transport us to those fields of light and "chambers of the sun" where the mystic dance of creation still goes on; these are enough to lead us to the hushed dew-drenched lawns where the Lord G.o.d walks in the garden "in the cool of the day."
One a.s.sociates the poetry of William Blake, not with the mountain peaks and gorgeous foliage and rushing torrents of a landscape that clamours to be admired and would fain overpower us with its picturesque appeal, but with the quietest, gentlest, softest, least a.s.suming background to that "going forth" to our work, "and our labour until the evening," which is the normal destiny of man.
The pleasant fields of Felpham with their hawthorne hedges, the little woods of Hertfordshire or Surrey with their patches of bluebells, were all that he needed to set him among the company of the eternal G.o.ds.
For this is the prerogative of imagination, that it can reconcile us to life where life is simplest and least adorned; and this is the reluctance and timidity of imagination that it shrinks away into twilight and folds its wings, when the pressure of reality is too heavy, and the materials of beauty too oppressive and tyrannous.
BYRON
It is in a certain sense a lamentable indictment upon the sheepishness and inertness of the average crowd that a figure like that of Byron should have been so exceptional in his own day and should be so exceptional still. For, G.o.dlike rascal as he was, he was made of quite normal stuff.
There was nothing about him of that rare magical quality which separates such poets as Sh.e.l.ley or Edgar Allan Poe or Paul Verlaine from the ma.s.s of ordinary people. The Byronic type, as it is called, has acquired a certain legendary glamour; but it is nothing, when we come really to a.n.a.lyse it, but the universal type of vain, impetuous, pa.s.sionate youth, a.s.serting itself with royal and resplendent insolence in defiance of the cautious discretion of middle-aged conventions.
Youth is essentially Byronic when it is natural and fearless and strong; and it is a melancholy admission of something timid and sluggish in us all that we should speak "with bated breath and whispering humbleness" of this brilliant figure. A little more courage, a little less false modesty, a little more sincerity, and the lambs of our democratic age would all show something of that leonine splendour.
There is nothing in Byron so far above the commonplace that he is out of the reach of average humanity. He is made of the same clay as we all are made of. His vanity is our vanity, his pride our pride, his vices our vices.
We are on the common earth with him; on the natural ground of our normal human infirmities; and if he puts us to shame it is only because he has the physical force and the moral courage to be himself more audaciously and frankly than we dare to be.
His genius is no rare hot-house flower. It is no wild and delicate plant growing in a remote and inhuman soil. It is simply the intensification, to a point of fine poetic fury, of emotions and att.i.tudes and gestures which we all share under the pressure of the spirit of youth.
It is for this reason--for the reason that he expressed so completely in his wayward and imperious manner the natural feelings of normal youthfulness--that he became in his own day so legendary and symbolic a personage, and that he has become in ours a sort of flaming myth. He would never have become all this; he would never have stirred the fancy of the ma.s.ses of people as he has; if there were not in his temperament something essentially simple, human, and within the comprehension of quite ordinary minds.
It might indeed be maintained that what Oscar Wilde is to the rarer and more perverse minority, Byron is to the solid majority of downright simple philistines.