Complete Works of James Joyce (365 page)

European criticism has struggled for several generations with a persistence that is not entirely well-meaning to illuminate the mystery of the immense world conquest achieved by that hybrid race which lives a tough life on a small island in the northern sea, gifted with none of the intellect of the Latin, the forbearance of the Jew, the zeal of the German, nor the sensitivity of the Slav. For some years European caricature has amused itself by contemplating (with a pleasure unmixed with discomfort) an overgrown man with an ape’s jaw, dressed in checkered clothes that are too short and tight and with huge feet; or else John Bull, the plump bailiff with his vacuous and ruddy moon-shaped face and miniature top hat. Neither of these two comic figures would have conquered an inch of land in a thousand centuries. The true symbol of the British conquest is Robinson Crusoe who, shipwrecked on a lonely island, with a knife and a pipe in his pocket, becomes an architect, carpenter, knife-grinder, astronomer, baker, shipwright, potter, saddler, farmer, tailor, umbrella-maker, and cleric. He is the true prototype of the British colonist just as Friday (the faithful savage who arrives one ill-starred day) is the symbol of the subject race. All the Anglo-Saxon soul is in Crusoe: virile independence, unthinking cruelty, persistence, slow yet effective intelligence, sexual apathy, practical and well-balanced religiosity, calculating dourness. Whoever re-reads this simple and moving book in the light of subsequent history cannot but be taken by its prophetic spell.

Saint John the Evangelist saw on the island of Patmos the apocalyptic collapse of the universe and the raising up of the walls of the eternal city splendid with beryl and emerald, onyx and jasper, sapphires and rubies. Crusoe saw but one marvel in all the fertile creation that surrounded him, a naked footprint in the virgin sand: and who knows if the latter does not matter more than the former?

James Joyce

William Blak
e

[Please note: ten pages of manuscript are missing from the surviving text]

of an ethical and practical interpretation are not moral aphorisms. While looking at St Paul’s Cathedral, he heard in the ear of his soul the cry of the little chimney-sweep who, in Blake’s strange literary language, represented downtrodden innocence. While looking at Buckingham Palace, in his mind’s eye he saw the sigh of the unhappy soldier running down the wall of the palace as a drop of blood. While still young and strong, he could, when he had come round from these visions, engrave the image of them in a hammered verse or in a copper plate; and often engravings such as these in words or metal would assume an entire sociological system. Prison, he writes, is made from the stones of the law; the brothel from the bricks of religion. But the continuous exertion of these journeys into the unknown and the abrupt returns to normal life slowly but infallibly eroded his artistic power. The myriad visions blinded his vision; and, towards the end of his mortal life, the unknown that he had sought covered him under the shadows of its vast wings. The angels with whom he used to speak as an immortal to immortals cloaked him in the silence of their vestments.

If, through his bitter words and violent poetry, I have called up from the shadows the image of some broken-winded, second or third-rate demagogue, then I have given you the wrong idea of the personality of Blake. From his youth he was a member of the literary-revolutionary coterie that included Miss Wollstonecraft and the celebrated (perhaps I should say notorious) author of the
Rights of Man
, Thomas Paine.
 
In fact, of the members of that circle, Blake was the only one with the courage to wear the red cap in the street, the emblem of the new age. He soon removed it, though, never to wear it again following the massacres that took place in the Paris prisons in 1792. His spiritual rebellion against the powerful of this world was not made of that type of water-soluble gunpowder to which we have more or less accustomed ourselves. In 1799, he was offered a position as drawing master to the royal family. He refused it, fearing that his art would die of inanition in the artificial environment of the court, but, at the same time, so as not to offend the sovereign, he gave up all his other lower-class students who formed the greater part of his income. After his death, Princess Sophia sent his widow a private gift of one hundred pounds. The widow sent it back with courteous thanks, saying that she could manage without and did not want to accept it because, put to other use, the money might perhaps serve to give life and hope back to someone more unfortunate than herself.

There are clearly quite some differences between Blake, the visionary anarchic heresiarch, and those highly orthodox ecclesiastic philosophers, Francisco Suarez,
Europae atque orbis universi magister et oculus populi christiani,
and Don Giovanni Mariana di Talavera who, in the previous century, had written a grim and logical defence of tyrannicide for the amazement of posterity. The same idealism that enraptured and sustained Blake when he let fly his thunderbolts against human evil or misery restrained him from cruelty even against a sinner’s body, the fragile curtain of flesh that lies on the marriage bed of our desire, as he put it in his mystic book,
Thel.
There is no lack of instances testifying to his goodness of heart in the story of his life. Although he struggled to live and only spent half a guinea a week to keep the small house where he lived, he lent a needy friend forty pounds. When he saw a poor consumptive art student pass by his window every morning with his portfolio under his arm, he took pity on him and invited him into his house where he gave him some food and tried to cheer up his sad and flagging life. His relationship with his younger brother is reminiscent of the story of David and Jonathan. Blake took him in, maintained him, loved him, and looked after him during his long illness; he would speak to him of the eternal world and give him comfort. He stayed up constantly by his bedside for days on end before his death and, at the last moment, he saw the soul he loved free itself from the lifeless body and rise towards heaven clapping its hands in joy. Then, exhausted and at peace, he lay down in a deep sleep that lasted for seventy-two consecutive hours.

I have referred two or three times to Mrs Blake, and perhaps I ought to say something about the poet’s wife. Blake had been in love once when he was twenty. The girl, who seems to have been rather foolish, was called Polly Woods. The influence of this young love radiates throughout Blake’s first works, the
Poetical Sketches
and the
Songs of Innocence
, However, the affair closed suddenly and abruptly. She thought him mad, or little better, while he thought her a flirt, or something worse. This girl’s face appears in some drawings from his prophetic book,
Vala;
a sweet, smiling face, symbol of feminine cruelty and sensual deception. To recover from this setback, Blake left London and went to live in the cottage of a market-gardener called Bouchier [sic], This gardener had a twenty-four-year-old daughter called Catherine whose heart was filled with compassion when she heard of the young man’s misadventures in love. The affection that grew out of her pity and his gratitude finally brought them together. The lines from
Othello:

She loved me for the dangers I had passed,

And I loved her that she did pity them.

come to mind when we read of this chapter in Blake’s life. Blake, like many other men of great genius, was not attracted by cultivated and refined women. Either he preferred simple women with sensual and nebulous minds to those (if I may borrow a commonplace of the theatre) endowed with all the drawing-room graces and a light and broad education; or else, in his unlimited egoism, he wanted the soul of his loved one to be entirely a slow and painstaking creation of his own, liberating and purifying itself daily before his eyes, the demon (as he himself puts it) hidden in the cloud. Whatever the case may be, the fact is that Mrs Blake was neither very pretty nor intelligent. In fact, she was illiterate, and the poet had a hard time of it teaching her to read and write. He succeeded, however, since within a few years his wife was helping him with his engravings, retouching his drawings, and cultivating the visionary faculty in herself. Elementary beings and the spirits of deceased great men would often enter the poet’s room at night to speak to him about art and the imagination. Blake would then bounce out of bed and, grabbing his pencil, stay up through the long hours of the London night drawing the features and limbs of the visions while his wife crouched next to his armchair, lovingly holding his hand and staying quiet so as not to disturb the ecstasy of the seer. When the visions disappeared towards dawn, the wife would get back under the covers while Blake, radiant with joy and benevolence, would hurriedly set about lighting the fire and making breakfast for them both. Ought we to be amazed that the symbolic beings Los, Urizen, Vala, Tiriel, and Enitharmon and the shades of Homer and Milton should come from their ideal world into a poor room in London, or that the incense that greeted their coming was the smell of Indian tea and eggs fried in lard? Would this be the first time in the history of the world that the Eternal One has spoken through the mouth of the humble? That was how the mortal life of William Blake progressed. The ship of his married life set forth under the auspices of pity and gratitude and sailed towards the usual rocks for almost half a century. There were no children. In the first years of their lives together there were some slight disagreements. These misunderstandings are easy to comprehend if we bear in mind the great differences in culture and temperament that separated the young couple, differences so great that Blake, as I said before, almost devised to follow the example of Abraham and give to Hagar what Sarah refused. His wife’s vestal innocence was ill-suited to the temperament of Blake, for whom, until his dying day, pleasure was the only beauty. In a scene of tears and recriminations that took place between them, his wife fell into a swoon and injured herself in a manner that prevented the possibility of having children. It is a sad irony that this poet of childhood innocence, the only writer to have written songs for children with the soul of a child and who, in his strange poem
The Crystal Cabinet
, illuminated the phenomenon of gestation in such a tender and mystic light, was fated never to see the face of a human child by his fireside.
 
He who had such great compassion for all things, who lived, suffered and rejoiced in the illusion of the vegetable world: for the fly, the hare, the little chimney-sweep, the robin redbreast, even for the flea, was denied any other fatherhood than a spiritual one. And yet it was an intensely natural fatherhood which still lives in the lines from the
Proverbs,

He who mocks the Infant’s Faith

Shall be mock’d in Age & Death.

He who shall teach the Child to Doubt

The rotting Grave shall ne’er get out.

He who respects the Infant’s faith

Triumphs over Hell & Death.

The rotting grave and the king of terrors hold no power over Blake, a fearless and immortal spirit. In his old age, when he was finally surrounded by friends, disciples and admirers, he set about, like Cato the Elder, learning a foreign language. That language was the very same one in which this evening, with your forbearance, I am trying, to the best of my ability, to recall Blake’s spirit from the twilight of the universal mind and to hold it fast for a moment to investigate it. He set about studying Italian to read the
Divine Comedy
in the original and to illustrate Dante’s vision with mystic drawings. Weakened and exhausted by the afflictions of his illness, he propped himself up on a pile of pillows. On his knees he held open a large book of drawings, and he struggled to trace the lines of his final vision on its white pages. It is in this attitude that he lives for us in the portrait by Philips [sic] in the National Gallery of London. His brain did not become enfeebled, his hand did not lose its old mastery. Death came to him under the guise of an icy cold, like the shivers of cholera. It took over his limbs and extinguished the light of his intelligence in a moment, just as the cold darkness that we call space cloaks and puts out the light of a star. He died singing in a strong and sonorous voice that made the beams of the ceiling echo. He sang, as always, of the ideal world, of the truth of the intellect, and of the divinity of the imagination. ‘My beloved, the songs that I sing are not mine,’ he told his wife, ‘no, no, I tell you, they are not mine.’

A full study of Blake’s personality should be logically divided in three phases: the pathological, the theosophical and the artistic. I think we can dispense with the first one without too much comment. To say that a great genius is half-mad, while recognizing his artistic prowess, is worth as much as saying that he was rheumatic, or that he suffered from diabetes. Madness, in fact, is a medical expression to which a balanced critic should pay no more heed than he would to the accusation of heresy brought by the theologian, or to the accusation of immorality brought by the public prosecutor. If we were to lay a charge of madness against every great genius who does not share the science undergraduate’s fatuous belief in headlong materialism now held in such high regard, little would remain of world art and history. Such a slaughter of the innocents would include most of the peripatetic system, all medieval metaphysics, an entire wing in the immense, symmetrical edifice built by the angelic doctor, St Thomas Aquinas, the idealism of Berkeley and (note the coincidence) the very scepticism that leads us to Hume. As far as art is concerned, those highly useful people, the parliamentarian photographers and reporters, might just manage to save their skins. The foreboding of such an art and philosophy flourishing in the not-too-distant future under the gentle union of the two commodities most highly quoted on the stock-exchanges today, woman and the people, will, if nothing else, reconcile every artist and philosopher — even if they think differently — to the brevity of our life down here.

To determine what place Blake should be assigned in the hierarchy of western mystics goes beyond the aims of this lecture. In my opinion, Blake was not a great mystic. The true home of mysticism is the Orient. Now that linguistic studies have enabled us to understand eastern thought (if we can call thought that ideational energy which created the vast cycles of activity and passivity that the
Upanishads
speak of), the mystic books of the west shine, if at all, with a reflected light. Blake is probably less inspired than the Indian mystics; perhaps he is less inspired than Paracelsus, Jacob Behmen
[sic],
or Swedenborg; at any rate, he is less boring. In Blake, the visionary faculty is immediately connected to the artistic faculty. In the first place, one must be gifted with the patience of a fakir to be able to form an idea of what Paracelsus and Behmen mean in their cosmic pronouncements on the involution and evolution of mercury, salt and sulphur, body, soul and spirit. Blake naturally belongs to another category, that of artists; and in this category he holds, in my view, a unique position because he unites intellectual sharpness with mystic sentiment. The former quality is almost completely lacking in mystic art. St John of the Cross, for example, one of the few artists worthy of standing beside Blake, reveals neither an innate sense of form nor the coordinating force of the intellect in his book
The Dark Night of the Soul,
which quakes and swoons in ecstatic passion. The explanation is to be found in the fact that Blake had two spiritual masters, very different from one another, and yet similar in their formal precision: Michelangelo Buonarotti [sic] and Emanuel Swedenborg. The first of Blake’s mystical drawings that we have,
Joseph of Arimathea Among the Rocks of Albion,
has the words:
Michelangelo pinxit
in one corner. It is modelled on a draft made by Michelangelo for his
Last Judgement
, and it symbolizes the poetic imagination in the power of sensual philosophy. Under the drawing Blake has written: ‘This is one of the Gothic Artists who built the cathedrals in what we call the Dark Ages, wandering about in sheepskins and goatskins, of whom the world was not worthy.’ The influence of Michelangelo can be felt throughout Blake’s works, particularly in those prose pieces, collected in fragments, in which he continually insists upon the importance of the pure, clear line that evokes and creates the image against the background of the uncreated void. The influence of Swedenborg, who died in exile in London when Blake was beginning to write and to draw, can be seen in the glorified humanity that marks all Blake’s work. Swedenborg, who haunted all the invisible worlds for many years, saw heaven itself in the image of a man. For him, Michael, Raphael and Gabriel were not three angels, but three angelic choirs. Eternity, which appeared to the beloved disciple and to St Augustine as a celestial city, and to Alighieri as a celestial rose, appears to the Swedish mystic in the form of a celestial man whose every limb is animated by a fluid angelic life that eternally leaves and re-enters: the systole and diastole of love and wisdom. From this vision he developed that enormous system of what he called correspondences which pervades his masterpiece
Arcana Coelestia,
his new gospel which, according to him, was to be the apparition of the sign of the Son of Man as foretold by St Matthew.