The Portable William Blake (65 page)

I put down in my journal the following insulated remarks. Jacob Böhmen was placed among the divinely inspired men. He praised also the designs to Law’s translation of Böhmen. Michael Angelo could not have surpassed them.

“Bacon, Locke, and Newton are the three great teachers of Atheism, or Satan’s Doctrine,” he asserted.

“Irving is a higly gifted man—he is a
sent
man; but they who are sent sometimes go further than they ought.”

Calvin. I saw nothing but good in Calvin’s house. In Luther’s there were Harlots. He declared his opinion that the earth is flat, not round, and just as I had objected the circumnavigation dinner was announced. But objections were seldom of any use. The wildest of his assertions was made with the veriest indifference of tone, as if altogether insignificant. It respected the natural and spiritual worlds. By way of example of the difference between them, he said,
“You
never saw the spiritual Sun. I have. I saw him on Primrose Hill.” He said, “Do you take me for the Greek Apollo?” “No!” I said.
“That
(pointing to the sky) that is the Greek Apollo. He is Satan.”

Not everything was thus absurd. There were glimpses and flashes of truth and beauty: as when he compared moral with physical evil. “Who shall say what God thinks evil? That is a wise tale of the Mahometans—of the Angel of the Lord who murdered the Infant.”—The Hermit of Parnell, I suppose.—“Is not every infant that dies of a natural death in reality slain by an Angel?”

And when he joined to the assurance of his happiness, that of his having suffered, and that it was necessary, he added, “There is suffering in Heaven; for where there is the capacity of enjoyment, there is the capacity of pain.”

I include among the glimpses of truth this assertion, “I know what is true by internal conviction. A doctrine is stated. My heart tells me It
must
be true.” I remarked, in confirmation of it, that, to an unlearned man, what are called the
external
evidences of religion can carry no conviction with them; and this he assented to.

After my first evening with him at Aders’s, I made the remark in my journal, that his observations, apart from his Visions and references to the spiritual world, were sensible and acute. In the sweetness of his countenance and gentility of his manner he added an indescribable grace to his conversation. I added my regret, which I must now repeat, at my inability to give more than incoherent thoughts. Not altogether my fault perhaps.

On the 17th I called on him in his house in Fountain’s Court in the Strand. The interview was a short one, and what I saw was more remarkable than what I heard. He was at work engraving in a small bedroom, light, and looking out on a mean yard. Everything in the room squalid and indicating poverty, except himself. And there was a natural gentility about him, and an insensibility to the seeming poverty, which quite removed the impression. Besides, his linen was clean, his hand white, and his air quite unembarrassed when he begged me to sit down as if he were in a palace. There was but one chair in the room besides that on which he sat. On my putting my hand to it, I found that it would have fallen to pieces if I had lifted it, so, as if I had been a Sybarite, I said with a smile, “Will you let me indulge myself?” and I sat on the bed, and near him, and during my short stay there was nothing in him that betrayed that he was aware of what to other persons might have been even offensive, not in his person, but in all about him.

His wife I saw at this time, and she seemed to be the very woman to make him happy. She had been formed by him. Indeed, otherwise, she could not have lived with him. Notwithstanding her dress, which was poor and dirty, she had a good expression in her countenance, and, with a dark eye, had remains of beauty in her youth. She had that virtue of virtues in a wife, an implicit reverence of her husband. It is quite certain that she believed in all his visions. And on one occasion, not this day, speaking of his Visions, she said, “You know, dear, the first time you saw God was when you were four years old, and he put his head to the window and set you a-screaming.” In a word, she was formed on the Miltonic model, and like the first Wife Eve worshipped God in her husband. He being to her what God was to him. Vide Milton’s Paradise Lost—
passim.

He was making designs or engravings, I forget which. Carey’s Dante was before [him]. He showed me some of his designs from Dante, of which I do not presume to speak. They were too much above me. But Götzenberger, whom I afterwards took to see them, expressed the highest admiration of them. They are in the hands of Linnell the painter, and, it has been suggested, are reserved by him for publication when Blake may have become an object of interest to a greater number than he could be at this age. Dante was again the subject of our conversation. And Blake declared him a mere politician and atheist, busied about this world’s affairs; as Milton was till, in his (M.’s) old age, he returned back to the God he had abandoned in childhood. I in vain endeavoured to obtain from him a qualification of the term atheist, so as not to include him in the ordinary reproach. And yet he afterwards spoke of Dante’s being
then
with God. I was more successful when he also called Locke an atheist, and imputed to him wilful deception, and seemed satisfied with my admission, that Locke’s philosophy led to the Atheism of the French school. He reiterated his former strange notions on morals—would allow of no other education than what lies in the cultivation of the fine arts and the imagination. “What are called the Vices in the natural world, are the highest sublimities in the spiritual world.” And when I supposed the case of his being the father of a vicious son and asked him how he would feel, he evaded the question by saying that in trying to think correctly he must not regard his own weaknesses any more than other people’s. And he was silent to the observation that his doctrine denied evil. He seemed not unwilling to admit the Manichæan doctrine of two principles, as far as it is found in the idea of the Devil. And said expressly he did not believe in the omnipotence of God. The language of the Bible is only poetical or allegorical on the subject, yet he at the same time denied the
reality
of the natural world. Satan’s empire is the empire of nothing.

As he spoke of frequently seeing Milton, I ventured to ask, half ashamed at the time, which of the three or four portraits in Hollis’s Memoirs (vols. in 4to) is the most like. He answered, “They are all like, at different ages. I have seen him as a youth and as an old man with a long flowing beard. He came lately as an old man—he said he came to ask a favour of me. He said he had committed an error in his
Paradise
Lost, which he wanted me to correct, in a poem or picture; but I declined. I said I had my own duties to perform.” It is a presumptuous question, I replied—might I venture to ask—what that could be. “He wished me to expose the falsehood of his doctrine, taught in the
Paradise
Lost, that sexual intercourse arose out of the Fall. Now that cannot be, for no good can spring out of evil.” But, I replied, if the consequence were evil, mixed with good, then the good might be ascribed to the common cause. To this he answered by a reference fo the
androgynous
state, in which I could not possibly follow him. At the time that he asserted his own possession of this gift of Vision, he did not boast of it as peculiar to himself; all men might have it if they would.

On the 24th I called a second time on him. And on this occasion it was that I read to him Wordsworth’s
Ode
on the supposed pre-existent State, and the subject of Wordsworth’s religious character was discussed when we met on the 18th of Feb., and the 12th of May. I will here bring together Blake’s declarations concerning Wordsworth, and set down his marginalia in the 8vo. edit. A.D. 1815, vol. i. I had been in the habit, when reading this marvellous Ode to friends, to omit one or two passages, especially that beginning:
lest I should be rendered ridiculous, being unable to explain precisely
what
I admired. Not that I acknowledged this to be a fair test. But with Blake I could fear nothing of the kind. And it was this very stanza which threw him almost into a hysterical rapture. His delight in Wordsworth’s poetry was intense. Nor did it seem less, notwithstanding the reproaches he continually cast on Wordsworth for his imputed worship of nature; which in the mind of Blake constituted Atheism.

The combination of the warmest praise with imputations which from another would assume the most serious character, and the liberty he took to interpret as he pleased, rendered it as difficult to be offended as to reason with him. The eloquent descriptions of Nature in Wordsworth’s poems were conclusive proofs of atheism, for whoever believes in Nature, said Blake, disbelieves in God. For Nature is the work of the Devil. On my obtaining from him the declaration that the Bible was the Word of God, I referred to the commencement of Genesis—In the beginning God created the Heavens and the Earth. But I gained nothing by this, for I was triumphantly told that this God was not Jehovah, but the Elohim; and the doctrine of the Gnostics repeated with sufficient consistency to silence, one so unlearned as myself.

The Preface to the Excursion, especially the verses quoted from book i. of the Recluse, so troubled him as to bring on a fit of illness. These lines he singled out:

Does Mr. Wordsworth think he can surpass Jehovah? There was a copy of the whole passage in his own hand, in the volume of Wordsworth’s poems sent to my chambers after his death. There was this note at the end: “Solomon, when he married Pharaoh’s daughter, and became a convert to the Heathen Mythology, talked exactly in this way of Jehovah., as a very inferior object of Man’s contemplations; he also passed him unalarmed, and was permitted. Jehovah dropped a tear and followed him by his Spirit into the abstract void. It is called the Divine Mercy. Sarah dwells in it, but Mercy does not dwell in Him.”

Some of Wordsworth’s poems he maintained were from the Holy Ghost, others from the Devil. I lent him the 8vo edition, two vols., of Wordsworth’s poems, which he had in his possession at the time of his death. They were sent me then. I did not recognise the pencil notes he made in them to be his for some time, and was on the point of rubbing them out under that impression, when I made the discovery.

The following are found in the 3rd vol., in the fly-leaf under the words: Poems referring to the Period of Childhood.

“I see in Wordsworth the Natural man rising up against the Spiritual man continually, and then he is no poet, but a Heathen Philosopher at Enmity against all true poetry or inspiration.”

Under the first poem:
he had written, “There is no such thing as natural piety, because the natural man is at enmity with Cod.” P. 43, under the Verses “To H. C., six years old”—“This is all in the highest degree imaginative and equal to any poet, but not superior. I cannot think that real poets have any competition. None are greatest in the kingdom of heaven. It is so in poetry.” P. 44, “On the Influence of Natural Objects,” at the bottom of the page. “Natural objects always did and now do weaken, deaden, and obliterate imagination in me. Wordsworth must know that what he writes valuable is not to be found in Nature. Read Michael Angelo’s sonnet, vol. iv. p. 179 ” That is, the one beginning

It is remarkable that Blake, whose judgements were on most points so very singular, on one subject closely connected with Wordsworth’s poetical reputation should have taken a very commonplace view. Over the heading of the “Essay Supplementary to the Preface” at the end of the vol. he wrote, “I do not know who wrote these Prefaces; they are very mischievous, and direct contrary to Wordsworth’s own practice” (p. 341). This is not the defence of his own style in opposition to what is called Poetic Diction, but a sort of historic vindication of the
unpopular
poets. On Macpherson, p. 364, Wordsworth wrote with the severity with which all great writers have written of him. Blake’s comment below was, “I believe both Macpherson and Chatterton, that what they say is ancient is so.” And in the following page, “I own myself an admirer of Ossian equally with any other poet whatever. Rowley and Chatterton also.” And at the end of this Essay he wrote, “It appears to me as if the last paragraph beginning ‘Is it the spirit of the whole,’ etc., was written by another hand and mind from the rest of these Prefaces; they are the opinions of [a] landscape-painter. Imagination is the divine vision not of the world, nor of man, nor from man as he is a natural man, but only as he is a spiritual man. Imagination has nothing to do with memory.”

1826

19th Feb.
It was this day in connection with the assertion that the Bible is the Word of God and all truth is to be found in it, he using language concerning man’s reason being opposed to grace very like that used by the Orthodox Christian, that he qualified, and as the same Orthodox would say utterly nullified all he said by declaring that he understood the Bible in a Spiritual sense. As to the natural sense, he said Voltaire was commissioned by God to expose that. “I have had,” he said, “much intercourse with Voltaire, and he said to me, ‘I blasphemed the Son of Man, and it shall be forgiven me, but they (the enemies of Voltaire) blasphemed the Holy Ghost in me, and it shall not be forgiven to them.”’ I ask him in what language Voltaire spoke. His answer was ingenious and gave no encouragement to cross-questioning : “To my sensations it was English. It was like the touch of a musical key; he touched it probably French, but to my ear it became English.” I also enquired as I had before about the form of the persons who appeared to him, and asked why he did not
draw
them. “It is not worth while,” he said. “Besides there are so many that the labour would be too great. And there would be no use in it.” In answer to an enquiry about Shakespeare, “he is exactly like the old engraving —which is said to be a bad one. I think it very good.” I enquired about his own writings. “I have written,” he answered, “more than Rousseau or Voltaire—six or seven Epic poems as long as Homer and 20 Tragedies as long as Macbeth.” He shewed me his ‘Version of Genesis,’ for so it may be called, as understood by a Christian Visionary. He read a wild passage in a sort of Bible style. “I shall print no more,” he said. “When I am commanded by the Spirits, then I write, and the moment I have written, I see the words fly about the room in all directions. It is then published. The Spirits can read, and my MS. is of no further use. I have been tempted to burn my MS., but my wife won’t let me.” She is right, I answered; you write not from yourself but from higher order. The MSS. are their property, not yours. You cannot tell what purpose they may answer. This was addressed ad
hominem.
And it indeed amounted only to a deduction from his own principles. He incidentally denied causation, every thing being the work of God or Devil. Every man has a Devil in himself, and the conflict between his
Self
and God is perpetually going on. I ordered of him to-day a copy of his songs for 5 guineas. My manner of receiving his mention of price pleased him. He spoke of his horror of money and of turning pale when it was offered him, and this was certainly unfeigned.