WILLIAM BLAKE.
The implication here, is that our imaginations can create the world in their own image. That they do some creating is obvious. But it is surely no less obvious that there is a limit to their powers. Blake himself half admits it. If the doors of perception are cleansed, and if sensual enjoyment is improved, then the world will appear infinite and holy. And, in point of fact, artists and mystics do succeed, from time to time and for a brief moment, in cleansing their perception and improving their sensual enjoyment—with the happiest effects on the world in which they live. But experience shows that the processes of cleansing and improvement cannot go beyond a certain point, and that the effects cannot last for more than a very short time. We are not free to create imaginatively a world other than that in which we find ourselves. That world is given. For either, as common sense affirms, there is a thing in itself outside and independent of our consciousness, a thing which is unchangeably what it is, and so limits the creative power of the imagination in just the same way as his material limits the power of the sculptor. Or else subjective idealism is true and we create our world, but create it by means of a certain type of mind which, as it can only vary within relatively narrow limits, can only project a certain narrowly varying kind of universe. Blake wants the world to be different from what it is and asserts that, by some miracle, it will become different. And in the first moment of reading we generally believe him, because he is a great and most persuasive artist, and because what he says is always partly true and wholly desirable. No philosopher is quite so exciting as Blake; for none has the art of mingling such profound and important truths with such beautiful, wish-fulfilling errors. Add the finest poetry, or a magnificently gnomic prose, and you have a mixture that turns the strongest heads.
However, there are also mornings after. For me, to-day is one of them. I have slept off my dose of Blake and write sober.
Mes bouquins refermés sur le nom de Paphos,
Il m’amuse d’élire avec le seul génie
Une ruine, par mille écumes bénie
Sous l’hyacinthe, au loin, de ses jours triomphaux.
Coure le froid avec ses silences de faulx,
Je n’y hululerai pas de vide nénie
Si ce très blanc ébat au ras du sol dénie
A tout site l’honneur du paysage faux.
Ma faim qui d’aucuns fruits ici ne se régale
Trouve en leur docte manque une saveur égale:
Qu’un éclate de chair, humain et parfumant!
Le pied sur quelque guivre où notre amour tisonne,
Je pense plus longtemps peut-être éperdûment
A l’autre, au sein brulé d’une antique amazone.
STÉPHANE MALLARMÉ.
When the “studied lack” of fruits begins to have a savour equal to that of the fruits themselves, and the Amazon’s absent breast seems more desirable than the unamputated flesh of real women—then, surely, it is time to sound the alarm. Incapable of re-creating, except in patches and for transient moments, the world of objective reality, disappointed imagination elaborates a paradise of private and onanistic satisfactions. The process, if kept within due bounds, is salutary enough. Men need compensations and occasional holidays; must keep their spirits up by taking, from time to time, a fancied vengeance on the stubborn and recalcitrant world. But to make a system, a regular philosophy of onanism—this is appalling. And this, precisely, is what the Symbolists and some of the earlier Romantics deliberately did. The religion of imagination is a dangerous faith, liable to the most deplorable corruptions. But, all the same, how lovely Mallarmé’s sonnet is! How profoundly satisfying! Images new and yet inevitable; not an otiose word, but every phrase precise, concentrated, pregnant with significance; the sentences winding with a serpentine logic into the understanding, falling on the imagination with the rich musical thunder of enchantments and magic spells. Here is a small, but absolute perfection.
O Lady! we receive but what we give,
And in our life alone does Nature live:
Ours is her wedding-garment, ours her shroud!
And would we aught behold, of higher worth
Than that inanimate cold world, allowed
To the poor loveless, ever-anxious crowd,
Ah! from the soul itself must issue forth
A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud
Enveloping the earth—
And from the soul itself must there be sent
A sweet and potent voice, of its own birth,
Of all sweet sounds the life and element.
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE.
Coleridge is wrong. There are moments when we receive more and other things than those we give. For the most part, of course, we impose our moods on the world without us; and not our moods only, our humanity, our mode of being. Incorrigibly anthropomorphic, man insists on trying to live in a man-like world. And in civilized countries, and under a temperate sky, he is pretty successful. In the home counties of England, for example, Nature seems to most people, and for most of the time, reassuringly human—all too human, even. But every now and then something startling happens. For one reason or another Nature suddenly refuses to live with our life and partake of our moods. She turns round on the human spectator and gives him something utterly unlike his gift to her, reveals herself as a being either marvellously and beautifully, or else, more often, terrifyingly alien from man. In one of the finest passages of “The Prelude” Wordsworth has recorded this most disquieting experience. I quote it at length.
Dust as we are, the immortal spirit grows
Like harmony in music; there is a dark
Inscrutable workmanship that reconciles
Discordant elements, makes them cling together
In one society. How strange that all
The terrors, pains and early miseries,
Regrets, vexations, lassitudes interfused
Within my mind, should e’er have borne a part,
And that a needful part, in making up
The calm existence that is mine, when I
Am worthy of myself! Praise to the end!
Thanks to the means which Nature deigned to employ;
Whether her fearless visitings, or those
That came with soft alarm, like hurtless light
Opening the peaceful clouds; or she may use
Severer interventions, ministry
More palpable, as best might suit her aim.
One summer evening (led by her) I found
A little boat tied to a willow tree
Within a rocky cave, its usual home.
Straight I unloosed her chain, and stepping in
Pushed from the shore. It was an act of stealth
And troubled pleasure, nor without the voice
Of mountain echoes did my boat move on;
Leaving behind her still, on either side,
Small circles glittering idly in the moon,
Until they melted all into one track
Of sparkling light. But now, like one who rows,
Proud of his skill, to reach a chosen point
With an unswerving line, I fixed my view
Upon the summit of a craggy ridge,
The horizon’s utmost boundary; far above
Was nothing but the stars and the grey sky.
She was an elfin pinnace; lustily
I dipped my oars into the silent lake,
And, as I rose upon the stroke, my boat
Went heaving through the water like a swan;
When, from behind that craggy steep, till then
The horizon’s bound, a huge peak, black and huge,
As if with voluntary power instinct,
Upreared its head. I struck and struck again,
And growing still in stature the grim shape
Towered up between me and the stars, and still,
For so it seemed, with purpose of its own
And measured motion like a living thing,
Strode after me. With trembling oars I turned,
And through the silent water stole my way
Back to the covert of the willow tree:
There in her mooring-place I left my bark,—
And through the meadows homeward went in grave
And serious mood; but after I had seen
That spectacle, for many days my brain
Worked with a dim and undetermined sense
Of unknown modes of being; o’er my thoughts
There hung a darkness, call it solitude
Or blank desertion. No familiar shapes
Remained, no pleasant images of trees,
Of sea or sky, no colours of green fields;
But huge and mighty forms, that do not live
Like living men, moved slowly through the mind
By day, and were a trouble to my dreams.
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH.
Very few “nature poets” have had the courage to admit that their goddess lives with an unknown mode of being, that she sometimes reveals herself, unequivocally as the most terrifying and malignantly alien of deities. Wordsworth himself spent a great deal of time and energy trying to hush up the scandal. But he was too truthful to suppress all the unfavourable evidence. Symbolically, that huge black peak rises appalling from the midst of his beauty spots. Even in the best kept of rich manorial flower gardens the goddess, as Tennyson knew, could be darkly sinister.
The air is damp and hushed and close
As a sick man’s room, when he taketh repose
An hour before death;
My very heart faints and my whole soul grieves
At the moist rich smell of the rotting leaves
And the breath
Of the fading edges of box beneath
And the year’s last rose.
Heavily hangs the broad sunflower
Over its grave i’ the earth so chilly;
Heavily hangs the hollyhock,
Heavily hangs the tiger-lily.
ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON.
To a Fish
You strange, astonished-looking, angle-faced,
Dreary-mouthed, gaping wretches of the sea,
Gulping salt water everlastingly,
Cold-blooded, though with red your blood be graced,
And mute, though dwellers in the roaring waste;
And you, all shapes beside, that fishy be—
Some round, some flat, some long, all devilry,
Legless, unloving, infamously chaste:—
O scaly, slippery, wet, swift, staring wights,
What is’t ye do? What life lead? Eh, dull goggles?
How do ye vary your vile days and nights?
How pass your Sundays. Are ye still but joggles
In ceaseless wash? Still nought but gapes, and bites,
And drinks, and stares, diversified with boggles?
A Fish replies
Amazing monster! that, for aught I know,
With the first sight of thee didst make our race
For ever stare! O flat and shocking face,
Grimly divided from the breast below!
Thou that on dry land horribly dost
