Blake and the New Age (Routledge Revivals)

Kathleen Raine

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136663949
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria dei generi gotico, romantico e horror

First published in 1979, this is a very welcome reissue of Kathleen Raine's seminal study of William Blake -England's only prophet. He challenged with extraordinary vigour the premises which now underline much of Western civilization, hitting hard at the ideas of a naive materialist philosophy which, even in his own day, was already eating at the roots of English national life. In his insistence that 'mental things are alone real', Blake was ahead of his time. Materialist views are now challenged from various quarters; the depth psychologies of Freud and Jung, the study of Far Easter religion and philosophy, the reappraisal of myth and folk lore, the wealth of psychical research have all prepared the way for an understanding of Blake's thought. We are ready to acknowledge that in attacking 'the sickness of Albion' Blake penetrated to the inner worlds of man and explored them in a way that is quite unique.

Dr Raine, who has made a long study of Blake's sources, presents him as a lonely powerful genius who stands within the spiritual tradition of Sophia Perennis, 'the Everlasting Gospel'. From the standpoint of this great human Norm, our immediate past described by W.B. Yeats as 'the three provincial centuries', is a tragic deviation; catastrophic, as Blake believed, in its spiritual and material consequences. Only now do we possess the necessary knowledge to understand William Blake and the ever-growing number of people who turn to him surely justifies his faith in the eternal truths he strove to communicate.

1 England’s Prophet

William Blake might almost be called a poet of the twentieth century; for it was not until 1927 that Geoffrey Keynes’s Nonesuch edition made his complete writings available to the nation for whom he wrote. Blake has been called a mystic; a word which suggests an other-wordly contemplative. But Blake’s genius was not of that kind. He called himself a prophet; Blake was England’s single prophet, ‘one who speaks for God’, addressing himself to the English nation on matters of public concern.

In 1927 Blake was a still relatively unknown poet with a reputation for obscurity and eccentricity, shadowed by rumours of madness. The rumours are unfounded – Blake’s only mental abnormality was an altogether exceptional degree of sanity. But so strange did Blake’s ideas seem to the nineteenth century, so incomprehensible his unknown mythology, that the imputation is not surprising. Yet so great was the respect Blake had inspired among his contemporaries, so deep the devotion of those who called his poor dwelling ‘the House of the Interpreter’, that he yet remained a radiant figure throughout a century in which his written works were unprinted and his best paintings mouldered in attics. His young disciples remembered that to walk with him was ‘like walking with the Prophet Isaiah’.

When Alexander Gilchrist was writing his life of Blake (completed after his death by William Michael Rossetti and published in 1893) he was still able to draw upon the memories of Samuel Palmer, Calvert, George Richmond and others still living who remembered Blake. These testified to the simple majesty of the old engraver who had been the master and the inspiration of the young painters who called themselves ‘the Shoreham Ancients’. Samuel Palmer, writing in 1885 to Gilchrist, recalls Blake as he recollected him nearly thirty years after his death:

In him you saw at once the Maker, the Inventor; one of the few in any age: a fitting companion for Dante. He was energy itself, and shed around him a kindling influence; and atmosphere of life, full of the ideal ... He was a man without a mask; his aim was single, his path straightforwards, and his wants few; so he was free, noble and happy . . . His eye was the finest I ever saw: brilliant, but not roving, clear and intent, yet susceptible; it flashed with genius, or melted in tenderness. It could also be terrible. Cunning and falsehood quailed under it, but it was never busy with them. It pierced them and turned away . . .

Such was Blake as I remember him. He was one of the few to be met with in our passage through life, who are not, in some way or other, ‘double-minded’ and inconsistent with themselves; one of the very few who cannot be depressed by neglect, and to whose name rank and station could add no lustre . . . He ennobled poverty, and, by his conversation and the influence of his genius, made two small rooms in Fountain Court more attractive than the threshold of princes.

Even now any reader who plunges unprepared into Milton or Jerusalem will share the bewilderment of earlier generations, for these obscure English poems offer no narrative clue or sequential argument, no familiar earthly landscape, no identifiable characters of this, or any other world. If some names are familiar (Milton’s, for example) it is as if we were to meet a person of that name in a bewildering dream. If we read on it is for the joy of some sudden illumination, some radiant fragment of heavenly vision, or earthly common sense which shatters hypocrisy and shocks and shakes us into amazed admiration. But these sudden illuminations are in a context, a matrix as turbulent as Lear’s ‘vexed sea’; as Yeats wrote,

The surface is perpetually, as it were, giving way before one, and revealing another surface below it, and that again dissolves when we try to study it. The making of religion melts into the making of the earth, and that fades away into some allegory of the rising and the setting of the sun. It is all like a great cloud full of stars and shapes through which the eye seeks a boundary in vain. When we seemed to have explored the remotest division some new spirit floats by muttering wisdom.
(Blake’s Prophetic Books Ellis & Yeats, Vol. I p. 287)

Yeats gave a clue to Blake’s Prophecies in suggesting that these unexplained transformations follow the Swedenborgian law of ‘correspondence’, in accordance with which scenes and the whole aspect of things, changes with our thoughts, as indeed happens continuously in dreams. But Blake is not describing dreams; rather a state of clearer knowledge he called ‘vision’. Plato, he said ‘has made Socrates say that Poets & Prophets do not know or Understand what they write or Utter; this is a most Pernicious Falsehood. If they do not, pray is an inferior kind to be call’d Knowing?’ (K. 605)

He himself was in no doubt as to the value of what he had to impart. He makes a clear promise to his readers so simple and so immense that we do believe him, notwithstanding our own incomprehension,

I give you the end of a golden string,

Only wind it into a ball,

It will lead you in at Heaven’s Gate

Built in Jerusalem’s wall.

(K. 551)

That clue leads us on and on, from the simple beginnings of Songs of Innocence and Experience; we wind our way through the relatively easy Book of Thel and Visions of the Daughters of Albion into the great labyrinth of Jerusalem. Those who persist are not disappointed: Blake keeps his word. The threading of his maze has the value of an initiation, a transformation of consciousness, exhilarating and liberating. It is not the world that is changed but ourselves; we see with new eyes.

The only book of Blake’s which during his lifetime found any publisher but himself was his charming collection of juvenilia, Poetical Sketches. The French Revolution reached the proof stage; but even his radical friend Johnson the bookseller and publisher of St Paul’s Churchyard did not dare, in the end, to issue this now unreadable work. No great loss: for although as a young man Blake had Jacobin sympathies his was not to be a political revolution, but, far more radical, a spiritual apokatastasis.

It is true that Songs of Innocence and Experience were republished several times during the nineteenth century. In Gilchrist’s Life of William Blake long passages from the Prophetic Books were printed; but not until 1887 (in a limited and costly edition) were the whole of the Prophetic Books first published; imperfectly edited by Edwin J. Ellis and W. B. Yeats. Only then did Blake begin to be known for the giant he was. Readers expecting to find a naive mystic of almost child-like simplicity were daunted by those ‘stupendous works,’ products of a volcanic imagination welded by the force of powerful intellectual energy. Swinburne, doubtless delighted by Blake’s advocacy of ‘free love,’ and taking literally his announcement of the ‘Bible of Hell’, acclaimed our national prophet as the poet of ‘Evil’. The Decadents, the Surrealists, the Marxists, have all in turn laid claim to him, but he is not to be contained in any of their smaller measures.

The editorial and bibliographical labours of Sir Geoffrey Keynes over the last half century have made Blake accessible, but not comprehensible. Now however a whole body of knowledge necessary to the understanding of Blake has begun to be uncovered in the records of the past, or discovered in fields of study altogether new. Blake, laboriously engraving and illuminating the few copies of his marvellous books for which he was able to find purchasers, was a hundred years in advance of his time. Yet he had the assurance of a knowledge which he almost alone then possessed, that a time would come when he would be understood. To the future he addressed himself in his preface to Milton: A Prophecy.

Rouze up, O Young Men of the New Age! Set your foreheads against the ignorant Hirelings! For we have Hirelings in the Camp, the Court & the University, who would, if they could, for ever depress Mental, & prolong Corporeal War. Painters! on you I call. Sculptors! Architects! (K. 480)

Such a challenge issued in a work which did not find one purchaser might seem pathetic, indeed tragic, were it not for the vindication of Blake’s faith in the fulness of time. It is the young men of the ‘Age of Aquarius’ who chalk on the walls of Blake’s native London, ‘The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction’ and other aphorisms from the Marriage of Heaven and Hell. If fifty years ago the problem of an editor was to vindicate a neglected poet, the mystery now to be explained is why Blake’s works should take their place among the sacred books of a ‘new age’. It is doubtful whether the writers of slogans understand Blake any better than his first readers, or have read beyond the Marriage of Heaven and Hell whence their revolutionary aphorisms are mined. But their instinctive recognition that Blake’s teaching is for their new ‘Age of Aquarius’ would be deepened and confirmed were they to do so, although their ideas about the character of that age might be much changed in the process. Blake did loose a Tyger on the world, and in Aleister Crowley’s words ‘the beast that broke through the mazes of heaven was so vast that its claws spanned star and star.’

Blake was indeed the first poet to speak of a New Age. That Age was neither his own nor that of the revolutions of his time (in which however he certainly read the signs of its advent) but the fulfilment of the prophecy of Emanuel Swedenborg; who had even given a date – 1757 – for its advent in ‘the heavens’ (by which he meant the inner worlds of the mind.) Blake was born in that year, and this doubtless added to his sense of being a chosen instrument for the fulfilment of his teacher’s prophecy.

I do not remember that before the Second World War, or for many years after it, writers or artists ever spoke of a new age. True, T. S. Eliot and others of his generation spoke of the end of European civilization and the advent of a new ‘dark age’. Those in whom Eliot might have seen portents of that coming darkness wished to be (in Rimbaud’s words) ‘absolument moderne’, Herbert Read was the spokesman of the ‘modern movement’ and ‘modern art’. Some, like the Surréalists, declared themselves ‘revolutionary,’ or even, in the political sense, ‘au service de la révolution’. But this avant-gardism was quite another thing from the proclamation of the mutation of an age. That proclamation came, paradoxically enough, from Yeats who was looked upon by the moderns of his day as ‘reactionary’ because he did not write ‘free verse’ or subscribe to Marxist politics.

But Yeats had understood that Blake’s new age was something more radical than the innovation of a new style in art. What both these poets foresaw was indeed the end of that European Christendom of which Eliot is perhaps the last great English- speaking poet, and the advent of an epoch not to be (as the evolutionists suppose) a farther development of existing knowledge but a reversal of values, a change in the premises of knowledge itself. Blake’s Tygers of Wrath foreshadow Yeats’s:

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

(The Second Coming)

This reversal might be seen less as a revolution than as a restoration; and it is interesting to note that two earlier movements owing much to Blake had named themselves ‘the Shoreham Ancients,’ and the ‘Pre-Raphaelites’. Both names indicating rather a wish to restore, to rediscover lost knowledge, than to follow existing ‘progressive’ trends.

Yeats’s own Prophetic Book, A Vision (first published, in an edition of only six hundred copies, in the same year as Keynes’s Nonsuch edition of Blake – 1927) describes history in terms of a diagram in the form of triangles (or cones) each with its apex touching the other’s base; between the two poles the cycle of the years for ever turns in ‘gyres.’ This idea was known to antiquity. Plato in the Laws speaks of the reversal of the revolutions of the world which takes place as Golden Age and Iron Age succeed one another in perpetual alternation. He too uses the idea of gyrations, describing the world as either guided in its revolutions by God, or left to itself, to run down like a spring released, by its own momentum.

The precession of the equinox was known to Egypt and Babylon; and it was universally believed, in antiquity, that a new age was announced at the transition of the equinox from one sign of the zodiac to the next; an event which occurs approximately every two thousand years. Virgil was held by the early Church to be a prophet of Christ because in the Fourth Eclogue he writes of the advent of a Golden Age. The Apocalypse of St John announces the same event as a ‘new heaven and new earth’. Doubtless both authors were familiar with the supposed mutation of an age at the beginning of the Great Year which began when the equinox moved from Aries to Pisces. Yeats, himself an astrologer, was familiar with this tradition and to him the advent of the ‘Age of Aquarius’ when the equinox leaves Pisces, was well known. But within the Judeaeo-Christian tradition, time is conceived as linear, and the world as having a beginning and an end; a view not shared (or shared only with misgivings) by Blake, who speaks of the ‘endless circle’ of the time-world, therefore whereas both Swedenborg (in his concept of ‘Churches’) and Boehme saw the successive ages as leading to the Christian Millennium at the end of time, Blake in several passages in the Prophetic Books gives evidence of Plato’s influence on his thought in this matter. Does the cycle, having reached its end, begin again? Blake, in sympathy with the American and French Revolutions (at least as a young man) viewed the immediate changes with optimism, no doubt strengthened by his belief, as a Swedenborgian, that the age about to begin – the ‘church’ of the ‘Divine Human’ – was to bring mankind nearer the millennium. But later, when he wrote that strange poem The Mental Traveller he seems to have come nearer to Plato’s view. This poem – one of the principle sources of Yeats’s A Vision – is a mythical narrative expressing the idea to which Yeats gave diagrammatic form in his gyres, of the continual movement between two opposite principles, each, as it were, growing at the other’s expense.

Why (whether or not their time be marked on the clock-face of the heavens) do such changes come about? Swedenborg (who was by profession a scientist) may have been near the truth in his view that everything in this world, whether a living organism, a ‘church’ or a civilization, begins with a spiritual impulse and ends in a fixed form; the form complete, the force is spent. This is a law of nature; and when some civilization has expressed fully the possibilities inherent in the impulse from which it originated, it must, however great its achievement, come to its end. Every effort to ‘save civilization’ must be as futile as to prolong life beyond its natural span. Political preferences do not matter; and as Blake’s optimism was tempered by the knowledge that every new impulse will in time be spent, so Yeats’s pessimism about the immediate future was tempered by the knowledge that ‘gyres run on’ and all that seems lost will return.

Blake saw the Messiah of the new age as the ‘frowning Babe,’ whom he called Orc. He is the hairy Esau, Yeats’s ‘rough beast.’ Orc, with his ‘fiery limbs and flaming hair,’ ‘the new-born terror,’ ‘the son of fire in his eastern cloud,’ dominates The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and the earlier Prophetic Books. Orc is, like the Tyger, a symbol of ‘evil, or energy,’ as opposed to the ‘good’ of ‘reason’; and of Blake’s exultation in the new birth and the impending overthrow of all the senile institutions of the old order, there can be no doubt.

Blake’s ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are not, of course, in themselves good or evil in an absolute sense; they are the ‘contraries’ without which there is ‘no progression’; for with a new age comes a reversal of values. Blake, who undertook to write ‘the Bible of Hell’ declares that what reason calls evil – irrational energy, the spirit of prophecy, and ‘the grandeur of Inspiration’ – is to be the law of the new age. The ‘Messiah, or Reason’ of the old order (not to be confused with Blake’s ‘Jesus, the Imagination’ who ‘was all virtue, and acted from impulse, not from rules’) was the governor of the unwilling.

Reason calls the irrational energies ‘evil’. Conversely, the supreme figure of Reason becomes for the new-born spirit of Orc, ‘Aged Ignorance’ who clips the wings of life. The claims to of the blind rational faculty to be ‘God’, the figures so memorably depicted as aged Urizen, have imposed a tyranny both moral and intellectual. Blake attacked at once the cold Deism of a rationalised religion and the new Goddess Reason of the Enlightenment. He saw in the various revolutionary movements of his youth the protest of life, ignorant, joyous and ever-young, against the systems and institutions of a civilization dominated by rational deductions from the evidence of the five senses; held, by Locke and others whom Blake attacks, to be the only sources of knowledge.

By the younger generation of the ‘Age of Aquarius’ Blake is seen as a figure of power because he first manifested the reversal of an archetypal situation. For these young people of the ‘New Age’ the symbolic figure of ‘Old Nobodaddy’, the paternal figure of (to borrow a term from Jung) the ‘wise old man,’ has been replaced by the puer eternus, the Divine Child, the life-principle, not the reason. ‘Life delights in life’, Blake said; words which express the best in the new spirit of a generation for whom the holy is indeed a reality; but not in the guise of old forms and institutions of churches, not in the ‘man of sorrows’ but in Shiva Nataraja, ‘Lord of the dance’. These find all they need of Blake in the figure of Orc, new-born to overthrow the aged tyrant Urizen. But those who seek deeper will find more.

Blake’s New Age was to be the Swedenborgian age of the ‘divine human’. Early readers of Blake, unfamiliar with the Swedenborgian teachings, have supposed that because Blake has attacked certain shortcomings in his early ma...