The New Lifetime Reading Plan

Toward this strange, baffling man of streaky genius one has a choice of attitudes. You may put him down as a faker, though the sweetness and honesty of his whole life belie it. Some of his contemporaries, quite celebrated then, quite forgotten now, called him a harmless lunatic. A psychologist will talk of Blake's "eidetic vision," which is simply a specialized ability to project into the externai world images we usually hold in our minds. Many children have this power, Joan of Are may have had it, and rationalists cite it when trying to explain the visions of saints and even Jesus. Finally you can ponder Blake's sly and, from the viewpoint of the professional artist and poet, quite practical advice to his friends: "Work up imagination to the state of vision."

It doesn't matter. By the pragmatic test Blake is a success. His paintings, drawings, and engravings, though not of the highest order, are beautiful and moving. His finest verse, of which there is not a great deal, is original and unforgettable. His ideas, long mocked or neglected, appeal with increasing force to those who have lost faith in materialistas ability to bring happiness to the race.

Blake was that rare thing, a completely spontaneous human being. "A man without a mask," a friend called him. Living and dying in poverty, he was probably one of the most energetically joyful men of his time. He had some secret of ecstasy denied to most of us, and at times it stimulated odd behavior: He and his wife were once discovered in their little arbor, stark naked, reading Paradise Lost aloud. To the visitor he called out cheer- ily, "Come in! It's only Adam and Eve, you know."

In his rejection of most of the institutions of his time (as well as in his crankiness) he resembles other figures we shall

meet, such as Thoreau [8o], Nietzsche [97], and Lawrence [113]. His romanticism is a far deeper thing than that of the romantic poets who followed him—Wordsworth [64], Keats, Shelley. "Man is ali imagination," he tells us. "God is man and exists in us and we in him.^,> And again: "We are led to believe a lie when we see with, not through, the eye."

His scorn of what is called common sense led him to cham­pion freedom of ali kinds, in the religious, political, and sexual spheres. Calmly, in a memorable sentence, he anticipates Freud [98]: "Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires." For him "Exuberance is Beauty.^,> Nonconformists of ali stripes love to quote "Damn braces. Bless relaxes." He hated ali those virtues arising out of measure and calculation: "The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction."

Blake has the defect of his qualities. His interior world was so vivid that he often lost touch with the exterior world. He may wrap piercing truth in a cloud of frenzy. But the cloud is there; he can be a bad communicator. His private mythology is contained in the so-called Prophetic Books. Scholars keep on trying to unravel them. To most of us they will seem like delir- ium interrupted by gorgeous eloquence.

Blake's nature mingled high natural intelligence and pierc­ing intuition. In his aphorisms and his best verse the two ele- ments are held in balance. His poetry is not artless—Blake was an excellent craftsman with his pen as well as with his pencil and graver. But in the best sense it is childlike—that is, pure, flowing, simple in diction, wildly imaginative. T. S. Eliot's [116] severe and just judgment is really a tribute: "Dante [30] is a classic, and Blake only a poet of genius."

For ali his extravagance and seeming mooniness, Blake must be seen as essentially a moralist, of the prophetic rather than the reflective order. His defense of imagination and instinct is religious in tone. Whether he writes about children or spirits, his concern is "to cleanse the doors of perception." His thought can be merely odd or ill-balanced: Blake shows that uncertain sense of proportion often possessed by self- educated geniuses. But just as frequently it goes straight to the heart of what is wrong with an industrial society disfigured by its "dark, Satanic mills." Yet there is no do-goodism in Blake. He is a hard-core rebel, like Shaw [99], and, like Shaw, a dan- gerous man.