Chapter IV: Part 4

One of the strange and rooted contradictions of the eighteenth century is a combination between profound revolution and superficial conventionality. It might almost be said that the men of that time had altered morals long before they thought of altering manners. The French Revolution was especially French in this respect, that it was above all things a respectable revolution. Violence was excused; madness was excused; but eccentricity was inexcusable. These men had taken a king’s head off his shoulders long before they had thought of taking the powder off their own heads. Danton could understand the Massacres of September, but he could not understand the worship of the Goddess of Reason or all the antics of the German madman Clootz. Robespierre grew tired of the Terror, but he never grew tired of shaving every morning. It is impossible to avoid the impression that this is rather a characteristic of the revolutions which really make a difference and defy the world. The same is true of that fallacious but most powerful and genuine English monument which was covered by the words Darwin and Evolution. If there was one striking thing about the fine old English agnostics, it was that they were entirely indifferent to alterations in the externals of pose or fashion, that they seem to have supposed that the huge intellectual overturn of agnosticism would leave the obvious respectability of life exactly as it was. They thought that one might entirely alter a man’s head without in the least altering his hat. They thought that one might shatter the twin wings of an archangel without throwing the least doubt upon the twin whiskers of a mid-Victorian professor. And though there was undoubtedly a certain solemn humour about such a position, yet, on the whole, I think the mid-Victorian agnostics were employing the right kind of revolution. It is broadly a characteristic of all valuable new-fashioned opinions that they are brought in by old-fashioned men. For the sincerity of such men is proved by both facts--the fact that they do care about their new truth and the fact that they do not care about their old clothes. Herbert Spencer’s philosophy is all the more serious because his appearance (to judge by his photographs) was quite startlingly absurd. And while the Tory caricatures were deriding Gladstone because he introduced very new-fangled legislation, they were also deriding him because he wore very antiquated collars.

But though this strange combination of convention in small things with revolt in big ones is not uncommon in hearty and human reformers, there is a quite special emphasis on this combination in the case of the eighteenth century. The very men who did deeds which were more dreadful and daring than we can dream to achieve, were the very men who spoke and wrote with a mincing propriety and almost effeminate fastidious distinction such as we should scarcely condescend to employ. The eighteenth century man called the eighteenth century woman “an elegant female”; but he was quite capable of saving her from a mad bull. He described his ideal republic as a place containing all the refined sensibilities of virtue with all the voluptuous seductions of pleasure. But he would be hacked with an axe and blown out of a gun to get it. He could pursue new notions with a certain solid and virile constancy, as if they were old ones. And the explanation is partly this: that however revolutionary, they were old ones--in this sense at least, that they involved the pursuit of some primary human hope to its original home. They powdered their hair because they really thought that a civilized man should be civilized--or, if you will, artificial. They spoke of “an elegant female” because they really thought, with their whole souls, that a female ought to be elegant. The old rebels preserved the old fashions--and among others the old fashion of rebelling. The new rebels, the revolutionists of our time, are intent upon introducing new fashions in boots, beds, food or furniture; so they have no time to rebel. But if we have once grasped this eighteenth century element of the insistence upon the elegant female because she is elegant, we have got hold of a fundamental fact in the relation of that century to Blake.

It is instinctive to describe Blake as a fantastic artist; and yet there is a very real sense in which Blake is conventional. If any reader thinks the phrase paradoxical, he can easily discover that it is true; he can discover it simply by comparing Blake even in his most wild and arbitrary work with any merely modern artist who has the name of being wild; with Aubrey Beardsley or even with Rossetti. All Blake’s heroes are conventional heroes made unconventionally heroic. All Blake’s heroines are elegant females without their clothes. But in both cases they exaggerate and insist upon the traditional ideal of the sexes--the broad shoulders of the god and the broad hips of the goddess. Blake detested the sensuality of Rubens. But if he had been obliged to choose between the women of Rubens and the women of Rossetti, he would have flung himself on the neck of Rubens. For we have a false conception of what constitutes exaggeration. The end of the eighteenth century (being a dogmatic period) believed in certain things and exaggerated them. The end of the nineteenth century simply did not know what things to exaggerate; so it fell back upon merely underrating them. Blake tried to make Wallace look even bolder and fiercer than Wallace can possibly have looked. That was his exaggeration of Wallace. But Burne-Jones’ exaggeration of Perseus is not an exaggeration at all. It is an under-statement; for the whole fascination of Burne-Jones’ Perseus is that he looks frightened. Blake’s figure of a woman is aggressively and monstrously womanly. That is its fascination, if it has any. But the fascination of a Beardsley woman (if she has any) is exactly that she is not quite a woman. So much of what we have meant by exaggeration is really diminution; so much of what we have meant by fancy is simply falling short of fact. The Burne-Jones’ man is interesting because he is not quite brave enough to be a man. The Beardsley woman is interesting because she is not quite pretty enough to be a woman. But Blake’s men are brave beyond all decency: and Blake’s women are so swaggeringly bent on being beautiful that they become quite ugly in the process. If anyone wishes to know exactly what I mean, I recommend him to look at one of those extraordinary designs of nymphs in which a woman (or, as Blake loved to call it, the Female Form) is made to perform an impossible feat of acrobatics. It is impossible, but it is quite female; perhaps the words are not wholly inconsistent. A living serpent might perform such a piece of athletics; but even then only a female living serpent. But nobody would ask a Burne-Jones or Beardsley female to perform any athletics at all.

Blake in pictorial art was not a mere master of the moonstruck or the grotesque. On the contrary, he was, as artists go, exceptionally a champion of the smooth and sensible. In so far as being “modern” means being against the great conventions of mankind, indifferent to the difference of the sexes, or inclined to despise doctrinal outline, then there was never any man who was so little of a modern as Blake. He may have been mad; but there are varieties even in madness. There are madmen, like Blake, who go mad on health, and there are madmen who go mad on sickness.

The distinction is a solid one. You may think the queerly and partially clothed women of Aubrey Beardsley ugly. You may think the naked women of William Blake ugly. But you must perceive this peculiar and extraordinary effect about the women of William Blake, that they are women. They are exaggerated in the direction of the female form; they swing upon big hips; they let out and loosen long and luxuriant hair. Now the queer females of Aubrey Beardsley are queerest of all in this, that they are not even female. They are narrow where women have a curve and cropped where women have a head of hair. Blake’s women are often anatomically impossible. But they are so far women that they could not possibly be anything else.

This comparison between Blake’s art and such art as Aubrey Beardsley’s is not an invidious impertinence, it is really an important distinction. Blake’s work may be fantastic; but it is a fantasia on an old and recognisable air. It exaggerates characteristics. Blake’s women are too womanish, his young men are too athletic, his old men are too preposterously old. But Aubrey Beardsley does not really exaggerate; he understates. His young men have less than the energy of youth. His women fascinate by the weakness of sex rather than by its strength. In short, if one is really to exaggerate the truth, one must have some truth to exaggerate. The decadent mystic produces an effect not by exaggerating but by distorting. True exaggeration is a thing both subtle and austere. Caricature is a serious thing; it is almost blasphemously serious. Caricature really means making a pig more like a pig than even God has made him. But anyone can make him not like a pig at all; anyone can create a weird impression by giving him the beard of a goat. In Aubrey Beardsley the artistic thrill (and there is an artistic thrill) consists in the fact that the women are not quite women nor the men quite men. Blake had absolutely no trace of this morbidity of deficiency. He never asks us to consider a tree magical because it is a stunted tree; or a man a magician merely because he has one eye. His form of fantasy would rather be to give a tree more branches than it could carry and to give a man bigger eyes than he could keep in his head. There is really a great deal of difference between the fantastic and the exaggerative. One may be fantastic by merely leaving something out. One might call it a fantasy if the official portrait of Wellington represented him without a nose. But one could hardly call it an exaggeration.

There is an everlasting battle in which Blake is on the side of the angels, and what is much more difficult and dangerous, on the side of all the sensible men. The question is so enormous and so important, that it is difficult to state even by reason of its reality. For in this world of ours we do not so much go on and discover small things; rather we go on and discover big things. It is the details that we see first; it is the design that we only see very slowly; and some men die never having seen it at all. We all wake up on a battle-field. We see certain squadrons in certain uniforms gallop past; we take an arbitrary fancy to this or that colour, to this or that plume. But it often takes us a long time to realise what the fight is about or even who is fighting whom. One may say, to keep up the metaphor, that many a man has joined the French army from love of the Horse Guards Blue; many an old-fashioned eighteenth century sailor has gone over to the Chinese merely because they wore pigtails. It is so easy to turn against what is really yourself for the sake of some accidental resemblance to yourself. You may envy the curled hair of Hercules; but do not envy curly hair until you wish that you were a nigger. You may regret that you have a short nose; but do not dream of its growing longer and longer till it is like the trunk of an elephant. Wait until you know what the battle is broadly about before you rush roaring after any advancing regiment. For a battle is a complicated thing; each army contains coats of different colour; each section of each army advances at a different angle. You may fancy that the Greens are charging the Blues exactly at the moment when both are combining to effect a fine military manœuvre. You may conceive that two similar-looking columns are supporting each other at the very instant when they are about to blaze at each other with cannon, rifle, and revolver. So in the modern intellectual world we can see flags of many colours, deeds of manifold interest; the one thing we cannot see is the map. We cannot see the simplified statement which tells us what is the origin of all the trouble. How shall we manage to state in an obvious and alphabetical manner the ultimate query, the primordial pivot on which the whole modern problem turns? It cannot be done in long rationalistic words; they convey by their very sound the suggestion of something subtle. One must try to think of something in the way of a plain street metaphor or an obvious analogy. For the thing is not too hard for human speech; it is actually too obvious for human speech.

The fundamental fight in which, despite all this heat and headlong misunderstanding, William Blake is on the right side, is one which would require a book about the battle and not about William Blake. By an accident at once convenient and deceptive, it can largely be described as geographical as well as philosophical. It is crudely true that there are two types of mysticism, that of Christendom and that of Orientalism. Now this scheme of east and west is inadequate; but it does happen to fit in with the working facts. For the odd thing is this, not only are most of the merely modern movements of idealism Oriental, but their Orientalism is all that they have in common. They all come together, and yet their only apparent point of union is that they all come from the East. Thus a modern vegetarian is generally also a teetotaller, yet there is certainly no obvious intellectual connection between consuming vegetables and not consuming fermented vegetables. A drunkard, when lifted laboriously out of the gutter, might well be heard huskily to plead that he had fallen there through excessive devotion to a vegetable diet. On the other hand, a man might well be a practised and polished cannibal and still be a strict teetotaller. A subtle parallelism might doubtless be found; but the only quite obvious parallelism is that vegetarianism is Buddhist and teetotalism is Mahometan. In the same way, it is the cold truth that there is no kind of logical connection between being an Agnostic and being a Socialist. But it is the fact that the Chinese are as agnostic as oxen; and it is the fact that the Japanese are as socialistic as rats. These appalling ideas, that a man has no divine individual destiny, that making a minute item in the tribe or hive, is his only earthly destiny, these ideas do come all together out of the same quarter; they do in practise blow upon us out of the East, as cold and inhuman as the east wind.

Nevertheless, I do not accept this dull definition by locality; I think it is a spirit in Asia, and even a spirit that can be named. It is approximately described as an insane simplicity. In all these cases we find people attempting to perfect a thing solely by simplification; by obliterating special features: this cosmos is full of wingless birds, of hornless cattle, of hairless women, and colourless wine, all fading into a formless background. There is a Christian simplicity, of course, opposed to this pessimist simplicity. Both the western and eastern mystic may be called children; but the eastern child treads the sand-castle back into sand, and enjoys seeing the silver snow man melt back into muddy water. This return to chaos and a comfortless simplicity is the only intelligent meaning of the words reaction and reactionary. In this sense much of modern science is reaction, and most modern scientists are reactionaries. But where this reversion to the void can be seen most clearly is in all the semi-oriental sects to which I have referred. Teetotalism is a simplification; its objection to beer is not really that beer makes a man like a beast. On the contrary, its real objection is that beer most unmistakably separates a man from a beast. Vegetarianism is a simplification; the herb-eating Hindoo saint does not really dislike the carnivorous habit because it destroys an animal. Rather, he dislikes it because it creates an animal; renews the special aims and appetites of the separate animal, man. Agnosticism, the ancient creed of Confucius, is a simplification; it is a shutting out of all the shadowy splendours and terrors; an Arcadian exclusiveness; _il faut cultiver son jardin_. Japanese patriotism, the blind collectivism of the tribe, is a simplification; it is an attempt to turn our turbulent and varied humanity into one enormous animal, with twenty million legs, but only one head. There is an utterly opposite kind of simplicity that springs from joy; but this kind of simplicity certainly is rooted in despair.

Now, for practical purposes, there is an antagonistic order of mysticism; that which celebrates personality, positive variety, and special emphasis: just as in broad fact the mystery of dissolution is emphasized and typified in the East, so in practice the mystery of concentration and identity is manifest in the historic churches of Christendom. Even the foes of Christianity would readily agree that Christianity is “personal” in the sense that a vulgar joke is “personal”: that is corporeal, vivid, perhaps ugly. This being so, it has been broadly true that any mystic who broke with the Christian tradition tended to drift towards the eastern and pessimist tradition. In the Albigensian and other heresies the East crawled in with its serpentine combination of glitter and abasement, of pessimism and pleasure. Every dreamer who strayed outside the Christian order strayed towards the Hindu order, and every such dreamer found his dream turning to a nightmare. If a man wandered far from Christ he was drawn into the orbit of Buddha, the other great magnet of mankind--the negative magnet. The thing is true down to the latest and the most lovable visionaries of our own time; if they do not climb up into Christendom, they slide down into Thibet. The greatest poet now writing in the English language (and it is surely unnecessary to say that I mean Mr Yeats) has written a whole play round the statement, “Where there is nothing there is God.” In this he sharply and purposely cuts himself off from the real Christian position, that where there is anything there is God.

But though, by an almost political accident, Oriental pessimism has been the practical alternative to the Christian type of transcendentalism, there is, and always has been, a third thing that was neither Christian in an orthodox sense nor Buddhistic in any sense. Before Christianity existed there was a European school of optimist mystics; among whom the great name is Plato. And ever since there have been movements and appearances in Europe of this healthier heathen mysticism, which did not shrink from the shapes of things or the emphatic colours of existence. Something of the sort was in the Nature worship of Renaissance philosophers; something of the sort may even have been behind the strange mixture of ecstacy and animality in the isolated episode of Luther. This solid and joyful occultism appears at its best in Swedenborg; but perhaps at its boldest and most brilliant in William Blake.

The present writer will not, in so important a matter, pretend to the absurd thing called impartiality; he is personally quite convinced that if every human being lived a thousand years, every human being would end up either in utter pessimistic scepticism or in the Catholic creed. William Blake, in his rationalist and highly Protestant age, was frequently reproached for his tenderness towards Catholicism; but it would have surprised him very much to be told that he would join it. But he would have joined it--if he had lived a thousand years, or even perhaps a hundred. He was on the side of historic Christianity on the fundamental question on which it confronts the East; the idea that personality is the glory of the universe and not its shame; that creation is higher than evolution, because it is more personal; that pardon is higher than Nemesis, because it is more personal; that the forgiveness of sins is essential to the communion of saints; and the resurrection of the body to the life everlasting. It was a mark of the old eastern initiations, it is still a mark of the grades and planes of our theosophical thinkers, that as a man climbs higher and higher, God becomes to him more and more formless, ethereal, and even thin. And in many of these temples, both ancient and modern, the final reward of serving the god through vigils and purifications, is that one is at last worthy to be told that the god doesn’t exist.

Against all this emasculate mysticism Blake like a Titan rears his colossal figure and his earthquake voice. Through all the cloud and chaos of his stubborn symbolism and his perverse theories, through the tempest of exaggeration and the full midnight of madness, he reiterates with passionate precision that only that which is lovable can be adorable, that deity is either a person or a puff of wind, that the more we know of higher things the more palpable and incarnate we shall find them; that the form filling the heavens is the likeness of the appearance of a man. Much of what Blake thus wildly thundered has been put quietly and quaintly by Coventry Patmore, especially in that delicate and daring passage in which he speaks of the bonds, the simpleness and even the narrowness of God. The wise man will follow a star, low and large and fierce in the heavens; but the nearer he comes to it the smaller and smaller it will grow, till he finds it the humble lantern over some little inn or stable. Not till we know the high things shall we know how lowly they are. Meanwhile, the modern superior transcendentalist will find the facts of eternity incredible because they are so solid; he will not recognise heaven because it is so like the earth.

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Transcriber’s Note

In this file, text in _italics_ is indicated by underscores, and text in =bold= is indicated by equals signs.

The following corrections were made to the text by the transcriber:

Page 30, “Mary Woolstonecroft” corrected to “Mary Wollstonecraft”.

Page 46, “Erywhon” corrected to “Erewhon”.

Page 60, “Leonardo de Vinci” corrected to “Leonardo da Vinci”.

Page 70, “rheindeer” corrected to “reindeer”.

Page 88, “four of five different poems” corrected to “four or five different poems”.

Page 91, “Oh, Mr Cromek, how do you do?” corrected to “Oh, Mr. Cromek, how do you do?”

Page 161, “If pure lines existed only on the human mind” corrected to “If pure lines existed only in the human mind”.