On Blake and His Critics

o£ simplicity; and the most curious thing about it is the direct way in which the author assumes that he has to deal with the Prophetical Books; almost as i£ Blake had never written any other books. He admits that the Prophetical Books are "difficult" as compared with the other books. What he does not seem to me to admit sufficiently, or at least to emphasize sufficiently, is the ordinary fact, o£ criticism or literature, that, as compared with the other books, the Prophetical Books are tolerably bad books. It is not merely that they are difficult to understand. There are turns and sequences in Blake's strongest lyrics that are decidedly difficult to understand. But the ordinary cultivated critic does know that the lyric is strong; whereas he might be 'tempted to think that the Prophetical Book is weak. The one is a real rush of words, like the flowering of a tree, or the flight of a flock of wild geese or swallows. The other, when all is allowed, does often seem to be a wilderness of words. In fact, the finest imaginative work of Blake may be found in some of those compressed couplets, almost crushed together in their creative pressure. Nobody who really understands Imagination, or how near it seems to Inspiration, would hesitate to give pages of the rambling epics about Albion and Urizen, for four lines like these, which I quote from memory and probably wrong:

As the chimney-sweeper's sigh Every blackened church appals; Or the slaughtered soldier's cry-Runs in blood down palace walls.

Those are two lightning-flashes revealing two separate Visions of Judgment. Notice the earthquake ellipsis, by which the soot of the chimney-sweep is transferred to the church; as if it were blasted and blackened by the black hands of a giant. And note that the second picture is a burning transparency of some portent upon Potsdam or Versailles, as memorable as the Feast of Belshazzar. It seems to me that, after all, Blake was most striking in these blinding strokes. It may be worth while to find out what he meant in the epic about America, which was not about America; or the great work about Milton, which had next to nothing to do with Milton. But we do not need to ask what he meant by the blackened church or the blood on the palace wall.

He meant exactly what he said: and he said exactly what he meant; and there is here perhaps a difference of literary test. For I am one of those who think that the poet stands separate and supreme among men, in that simple fact that the poet can say exactly what he means, and that most men cannot. I think, in other words, that the other name of Poet is Pontifex; or the

Builder of the Bridge. And i£ there is not a real bridge between his brain and ours, it is useless to argue about whether it has broken down at our end or at his. He has not got the communication. It seems to me that Blake did get the communication in his Poetical Books, and did not get it in his Prophetical Books. I will take another example, also from memory. Mr. Middleton Murry describes with great insight and sympathy how Blake, though recoiling from most contemporary religion, in the sense of theology, yet recoiled with equal violence from the Rationalism of the Deists and all that is now called Scientific Education. This, Mr. Murry explains to us, is described in one of the Prophetical Books in a passage in which, after various vast and unrecognizable giants have seized and grasped various things, one of them grasps the book; and his name is apparently Newton; not a common name among giants. This does undoubtedly mean what Mr. W. B. Yeats (a very acute and sensitive student of Blake) himself expressed with more wit and lucidity in one of his plays: "I tell you that Sin and Death came into the world when Newton ate the apple. — Oh, I know he only saw it falling, but the principle is the same." Blake did most heartily believe that the new scientific scepticism was utterly hollow and hopeless. Whether he was right or not will still be disputed; which means that there are still any number o£ disputants on Blake's side. But the point is that the reference in the Prophetical Book is cloudy and confusing; even the image is cloudy and confusing. Here are four lines that Blake wrote to exactly the same effect, when his style was really effective:

Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau, Mock on, mock on; 'tis all in vain: You throw the sand against the wind And the wind blows it back again.

That is Poetry; that is a clear and direct image which does convey perfectly what is meant; the futility of the fight of what is dull and heavy against what is full of light and living energy. It is, in fact, a full and even final example of the Image; and, therefore, of the function of Imagination.

Now the curious thing is that Mr. Middleton Murry begins his own book with a most beautiful and illuminating passage about this point of Imagination and the Image. He is describing the indescribable, and he very nearly does it. He does suggest that real imagination gives to an object a sort of ecstatic separation and sanctity; a greater reality than that of what we call the real world. It puzzles me a little that a man who sees this so clearly does not see it more clearly in the real poems of Blake than in the laborious metaphysical notebooks of Blake. For he does not disguise the intellectual disadvantages of the latter. He admits that the Prophet Blake was sometimes not only bewildering, but also bewildered. He has a theory that the whole continuity of the Prophetical Books broke down over the prophet having a quarrel with his wife; or rather, in a sense (oddly enough), broke down on his having a partial reconciliation with his wife. In short, it broke down over the prophet discovering that he was not only a prophet, but also a man, and a miserable sinner. The truth is, I take it, that Blake was like other men and miserable sinners in certain respects; including that of starting out in youth with simple and sweeping generalizations; which he thought obviously true, because they are obviously simple. It takes other men besides prophets some little time to discover that man and marriage and other realities are not obviously simple. It is easy to start out crying, with the voice of a trumpet: "Man has no body apart from his soul." But is the man quite certain that he knows what he means? Or if he does know, is it as true as he thinks it is? In a sense more practical than Blake meant, he did indeed pass from Songs of Innocence to Songs of Experience. But even on Mr. Middleton Murry's own showing, it does seem to me that a good many o£ the Prophetical Books were really Songs o£ Innocence. And I confess that I prefer the Songs of Innocence when they were really songs.

XXIII On the Instability of the State

THE foreign news which comes to us by the newest and most scientific methods o£ communication is much more confusing than it was when it was mere gossip. Good communications corrupt good manners. At any rate, they corrupt good methods;^ and certainly they corrupt good messages. The different statements, for instance, that have been made about the policy of Hitler might almost lead the superstitious to suppose that there are two Hitlers; as some legend once suggested that there were two Neros. Without deciding between the contrasted conceptions, or going at the moment into the question of the value of either of them, it may be worth remarking that one contradiction of this kind has been concerned with this pivotal problem of The Family. On the one side, it would really seem that the German Dictator is concerned to restore the sane and solid status of The Family. He has insisted, though sometimes in rather florid and foolish language, that a woman may fulfil herself rightly in the personal relation; and that she does not find her only freedom in the financial or official relation. He has said a word for large families;