The Portable William Blake (3 page)

Against priesthood:

Against the “moral law.” He denies that man is born with any innate sense of morality—all moral codes are born of education—and thinks education a training in conformity. He is against all belief in sin; to him the tree in Eden is the gallows on which freedom-seeking man is hanged by dead-souled priests. He savagely parodied a Dr. Thornton’s new version of the Lord’s Prayer:

Our Father Augustus Caesar, who art in these thy Substantial Astronomical Telescopic Heavens, Holiness to Thy Name or Title, & reverence to thy Shadow.... Give us day by day our Real Taxed Substantial Money bought bread, deliver from the Holy Ghost whatever cannot be taxed...

 

He is against every conception of God as an omnipotent person, as a body, as a Lord who sets in train any lordship over man:

He believes that all restraint in obedience to a moral code is against the spirit of life:

Blake is against all theological casuistry that excuses pain and admits evil; against sanctimonious apologies for injustice and the attempt to buy bliss in another world with self-deprivation in this one. The altar is a place on which the serpent has vomited out its poison; the priest is a blind old man with shears in his hand, to cut the fleece off human sheep. Sex is life, and no one can be superior to it or honestly content with less than true gratification:

Restraint, in fact, follows from the organized injustice and domination in society:

He is against all forms of human exploitation, and all rationalizations of it in human prejudice:

Against war, especially holy ones; against armies, and in pity for soldiers; against the factory system, the labor of children, the evaluation of anything by money.

In “London,” one of his simplest and greatest poems, Blake paints the modem city under the sign of man’s slavery, the agony of children, the suffering Soldier and the Whore:

“Charter’d” means “bound.” In his first draft of this poem, Blake wrote “dirty Thames,” but characteristically saw that he could realize more of the city’s human slavery in describing the river as bound between its London shores. His own place in the poem is that of the walker in the modem inhuman city, one isolated man in the net which men have created. “I wander thro’ each charter’d street For him man is always the wanderer in the oppressive and sterile world of materialism which only his imagination and love can render human. In a more difficult poem, characteristic of his deeper symbolism, he speaks of the world of matter

In “London,” however, the wandering is not a symbolic expression. In the modern city man has lost his real being, as he has already lost his gift of vision in the “fathomless and boundless” deep of his material nature. Blake here describes one man, himself, in a city that is only too real, the only city he ever knew—yet the largest in the world, the center of empire. The city stands revealed in the cry of
every
Man, in every Infant’s cry of fear. The wanderer in the chartered streets is concerned with a social picture and, in the face of so much suffering, with the social evil that some create and all permit. The extraordinary terseness of the poem stems from Blake’s integral vision of the suffering of man and his alienation from institutions as one. His indignation gives him the power of movement; it also leads him into the repetitions which dominate the tonal order of the poem —the
every
cry of
every
Man, the Infant’s
cry of fear,
till his tender vehemence swells into the generality of
in every voice, in every ban.

Every
is magic to Blake. Poetically he cannot go wrong on it, for it carries such a kernel of glory to his mind, it points so immediately to his burning human solidarity, that in using it he knows himself carried along by what is deepest to him. The
mind-forg’d manacles,
as central to his thought as any phrase he ever used, follows with a triumphant sweep right after it, and for an obvious reason. For he is one with every voice, every ban, and can now make his judgment. On this fresh creative impulse he leaps ahead to what is so complex, but for him so natural, a yoking of images:

The young Chimney-sweeper is always dear to Blake, especially when he is condemned to get the soot out of the churches—an impossible task. He is the symbol of the child who is lost. He works among the waste-dirt of the Church, itself black with dogma and punitive zeal, and his own suffering makes it even blacker.
Black’
ning is a verb of endless duration in present time for Blake. In his drawing to this poem, the Chimney-sweeper is shown in one comer struggling before a black flame. At the top of the page he stands in defiance before the blind and tottering old man, the fossilized Church, who seems to be pouring out fresh soot. The walls are the stone blocks of a prison. The whole page is marked, like the turn of the hand on a vehement signature, by a fierce black border. Pictorially and verbally we thus rise to a climax at the word
appalls.
The Church is not appalled by the Chimney-sweeper’s cry; the cry of the child, out of the midst of the Church, makes the Church appalling. Blake’s thrust is so swift and deep that he characteristically puts the whole burden of his protest, with its inner music, into four words. Every black and blackening Church is appalling, and in every way. The tone of
palls
to his ear, carrying the image of death, the grief and shame that will not rest, clangs with reverberations.

The unhappiness of the Soldier is not that of a man bleeding before a palace of which he is the sentry. Blake means that the Soldier’s desperation runs, like his own blood, in accusation down the walls of the ruling Palace. Blake’s own mind ran in so many channels at once, his vision of human existence was so total, that it probably never occurred to him that
blood
would mean anything less to others than it did to him. “Runs in blood down palace walls” is what Blake sees instantaneously in his mind when he thinks of the passivity and suffering of the Soldier. Blake is too much abreast of the reality he sees to use similes; he cannot deliberate to compare something to another. And he is equally incapable of using a metaphor with self-conscious daring. He saw the blood running down the ruler’s walls before thinking of blood as a “powerful” image. There is no careful audacity in him, the preparation for the humor of T. S. Eliot’s

Blake’s poetic urge, it is clear, was not to startle, to tease the. mind into fresh combinations, but to make tangible, out of the wealth of relationships he carried in his mind, some portion of it equal to his vision of the life of man. How swiftly and emphatically he turns, at the first line of the fourth stanza, to

But most
stands for: what I have described thus far is not the full horror of London, my city; not anything like what I have to tell you! And he then gives back, in eighteen words, the city in which young girls are forced into prostitution; in which their exile from respectable society, like the unhappiness of the Soldier, expresses itself in a physical threat to another. The Soldier accuses the Palace with his blood; the prostitute curses with infection the young husband who has been with her; the “plague” finally kills the new-born child. The carriage that went to the church for a marriage ends at the grave as a hearse. Nothing can equal the bite of “blights with plagues,” the almost visible thrust of the infection. And thanks to Blake’s happy feeling for capitals, which he used with a painter’s eye to distinguish the height of his concepts, Marriage stands above the rest in the last sentence of the poem, and swiftly falls into a hearse.

 

These are some of the poem’s details, but they are not the poem. For the poem is to be grasped only by the moral imagination, as a shuddering vision of the mind. The title is a city, as the city is the present human world on the threshold of the industrial revolution. We are to read from the title to the last word, from London to its inner death, in one movement of human sympathy and arousal. This, in its simplest sense, is the key to Blake’s meaning of vision. Vision is his master-word, not mysticism or soul. For vision represents the total imagination of man made tangible and direct in works of art. And as the metric structure of the poem encloses, in each line-frame of sharply enclosed syllables, the sight of man entering fully into the city with all his being—
hearing
“the mind-forg’d manacles,” the harlot’s disease
blasting
“the new born infant’s tear,” so the whole poem carries us along, in a single page, while the border designs meanwhile extend the vision by another art.

Blake was artist and poet; he designed his poems to form a single picture. Trained to engraving as a boy, he invented for himself a method of etching a hand-printed poem and an accompanying design on the same page. Only two of his works were ever printed—his first book,
Poetical Sketches,
most of which he wrote between the ages of twelve and twenty-one, and a long and declamatory celebration of the new world after ’89 called
The French Revolution.
Neither of these works was ever published.
Poetical Sketches
was run off for him, with a patronizing and apologetic preface by a Reverend Mathew, who with his wife formed a provincial intellectual society that Blake burlesqued in
An Island In The Moon. The French Revolution
was printed by a bookseller, Joseph Johnson, who was the center of a radical circle in London that included Blake, William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Thomas Paine. After England became embroiled with France and a reactionary witch-hunt set after radical intellectuals and sympathizers with the French Republic, Johnson became panicky and left the book in proof. Some of Blake’s greatest poems—“The Everlasting Gospel,” “Auguries of Innocence,” the lyrics that follow
Songs of Innocence and of Experience
—were found in “The Rossetti Manuscript,” which was bought by Dante Gabriel Rossetti for ten shillings from an attendant at the British Museum. Blake’s most famous works,
Songs of Innocence and of Experience
and
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,
along with his Prophetic Books—
The Book of Thel, Visions of the Daughters of Albion, America, Europe, The Book of Urizen, Milton, Jerusalem,
etc.—were done entirely by his method of “illuminated printing.” Blake said he got the inspiration for this technique from the spirit of his dead brother Robert, the only member of his family with whom he had common sympathies. This may be true, but it is a pity that Blake had to say so, for it has given people the idea ever since that Blake’s visions were of the kind limited to a séance.

Blake’s general technique is now clear. He etched his poems and designs in relief, with acid on copper. He corroded with acid the unused portions of the plate—characteristically, this became a symbol in
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
of the corrosion of dead matter by the visionary human imagination. Each print-page as it was taken off the press was colored by hand. Each copy of a work was planned in a different color scheme. There are probably no handmade books in the world more beautiful. The only models for Blake were, of course, the illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages. But Blake worked in an entirely different spirit. The medieval manuscripts, impressive as they are, remain . pictorial and remote; they were created by copyists, ornamentalists and pious scribes who worked in a liturgical spirit. Blake’s designs are the accessories of a single creative idea. His conception of the beautiful book, as Laurence Binyon said, was one of a complete unity, “in which the lettering, the decoration, the illustrations, the proportions of the page, the choice of paper, surpassed even the conceptions of the medieval scribes and miniaturists.” Yet Blake was not aiming at a “beautiful book” for its own sake, or at the kind of isolated luxury product which we usually associate with book illustration by a master artist. To him all the arts were simultaneously necessary, in their highest creative use and inner proportion, to give us the ground essence of his vision and a stimulus to our own. What was most important to him was that he should get all his vision down, through all the arts open to him, in work done entirely in his own person.