An Introduction to the Study of Blake

Max Plowman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317381280
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

First published in 1927 (this edition in 1967), this book is about Blake, his symbols, and their meanings. As Ward says in his forward, the volume goes beyond Blake, becoming universal and timeless, and is about Religion. Plowman's book presents itself, not as a critical text, but an interpretative one, and the study therefore illuminates the work of the author, as well as that of William Blake.

Chapter IX The Beams of Love

DOI: 10.4324/9781315675145-9

If one were asked to give in a phrase a clue to the whole of Blake’s work, one could hardly do better than quote the sentence from “The Little Black Boy”,

And we are put on earth a little space

That we may learn to bear the beams of love.

It contains the idea that man is an eternal spirit definitely put upon this earth. It suggests that the world from which he comes is a place of such intense light that he needs the shade of mortality to be able to bear its beams, thereby inferring that the ultimate joy of man is the appreciation and love of God. It puts the period of human life into Blake’s proportion as “a little space”, and, while it assumes that life itself is a discipline, it declares that that discipline has the most beneficent purpose we can imagine, since to be as fully as possible the recipient of love is the natural desire of every human heart.

The lines are finely characteristic of Blake in that, while they are full of the tenderest sentiment, they do not show the least sign of toppling over into sentimentality. They are a profound statement of spiritual truth expressed with the maximum of simplicity and human feeling. Above all, they seem to me to succeed in placing the emotion of love, and to be able to do that is perhaps the last word of human wisdom. In our attitude to love we all stand naked, shamelessly revealed for what we are and whereunto we have attained. Love admits of no disguise. If you would conceal yourself do not speak of love; for the most subtle disguise is the most apparent means of self-revelation. Shakespeare is to be measured by his attitude to love. Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra, Timon of Athens, Julius Caesar, indeed every single play of Shakespeare might be made a touchstone of Shakespeare’s attitude to human love and seen as illustrative of his idea of the purpose and place love had in human existence. Among other reasons, Shakespeare is Shakespeare because he knew the geography of the human heart from the equator to the poles, and because he knew, moreover, that while the human frame depends upon its central pumping-station, the heart does not exist to show its blood, but to enable the human form to live in sentient relationships. Love was to Shakespeare the means of life and not, as it is in the hands of the second-rate novelist, the end.

Blake too is to be measured by his attitude to love. Indeed, he invites that estimate with a frankness that is startling; for he never seriously adopts the attitude of humour—that short cut to synthesis so dear to the mind that baulks sublimity. He is the most intimate of the poets. His poems are really love passages where the disguises of behaviour are thrown off and beauty is revealed by the uttermost candour. His passionate desire for spiritual freedom leaves him without a rag of disguise to conceal weakness that would pass unnoticed had he elected to appear in any traditional form. Had he restricted his canvas to man in society, as Shakespeare did, or to man as distinct from God, as Milton did, or to man in his relation to Nature, as Wordsworth did, he would have been a far less challenging author, far more easily acceptable, because he would have presented us with a portion of that externality which is acceptable to all. As it is, his mirror ultimately presents us with the image of his own soul, naked and unashamed: a spectacle of sublime wonder and infinite beauty, or of pitiable and mortal weakness, according to the love and sympathy of the beholder. It is ultimately not by precept or exposition—not by the clearest enunciation of principles that were essential to his own understanding, that Blake conveys his unique gift; but, standing in all the simple majesty of a soul in the adoration of truth, he becomes in measure transformed into the likeness of what he beholds and in his own person justifies the ways of God to man. This is divine humility, or outrageous pride, again according to our love and sympathy.

But Blake’s theme determined his method for him. Simplicity is the language of the soul: it cannot speak without candour. Humour is impossible to the soul, for it cannot make proportionate the Infinite. What the soul has to say about love will not be polite, because politeness is an equivocal consideration, and such considerations the soul literally cannot make. “Let us therefore change the subject”, say those to whom behaviour is the essence of life. But Blake was not of them. He had no drawingroom in his house of life. There were only two rooms in his apartment at Fountain Court, and one of them was both bedroom and workshop, a significant association.

Blake had not finished the Songs of Innocence before he found that man was a dual creature with contrary principles embedded in his nature. Instinct and Imagination warred within him and presented attitudes to life which were both opposite and antagonistic. There they were, the Lamb and the Tiger, and much as the Lamb might be loved and consecrated, the Tiger made short work of it in this world. Of course the contrast was slurred by reasonable people who went amiably about their ways and never troubled to wonder if there could be any spiritual meaning behind the fact that black was black and white white. Religion appeared to uphold the Lamb; but, as far as the Tiger was concerned, religion bade men hide their eyes in the sand with the ostrich. This did not satisfy Blake, who held with Thomas Hardy:

If way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst.

So he looked at the Tiger with a gaze that did not flinch. He looked on human love with the same eyes and there he saw

Love seeketh not Itself to please

Nor for itself hath any care,

But for another gives its ease

And builds a Heaven in Hell’s despair,

and then he also saw that it is equally true

Love seeketh only Self to please

To bind another to Its delight

Joys in another’s loss of ease

And builds a Hell in Heaven’s despite.

Kind, religiously-minded critics of Blake have unwittingly attempted to destroy this poem by explaining that in the second of these verses Blake, of course, did not mean Love, but Lust. Certain it is that if he did, the poem was not worth writing; for so worded it states a truism. Blake, however, said Love, and Love he meant.

Here are contraries that are true and must remain coexistent. They are reverse and obverse faces of the same medal. Without self-pleasing there can be no love. “The lineaments of gratified desire” can never be seen without the love that seeketh only self to please. Invertebrate sentimental self-negation is the destiny of those who think love can be comprehended by the love that seeketh not itself to please. Divided from its contrary, such love inevitably leads to hypocrisy—the hypocrisy that has made modern Christianity a disease

Let man wear the fell of the lion, woman the fleece of the sheep.

Love that seeks not its own can only be the fulfilment of love that seeks naught but its own; and this fulfilment can only be achieved through the power of imagination. Love is a process of becoming one, and the fulfilment of two desires is necessary to that end. In so far as that unity is incomplete (as incomplete it must be while we remain in individual bodies) individual and separate desires exist to be gratified in the activity of love.

But, on the contrary, selfishness that leads to self-loathing is the fate of those who believe that love can be comprehended by the love that seeketh only self to please. In so far as love has achieved unity and is complete, the lover seeks only the joy of the beloved; for having, by imagination, become the beloved, two desires become identical. Yet we cannot give unless we possess. Self-assertion is essential to individuality, and until we have reached individuality through self-assertion, imagination cannot function. Love without desire is sterile; but love is redeemed from greed by imagination. That is the miracle. But those who will have love to be either selfishnesses or self-denial cannot know love. For it is neither. It is at once self-expression and atonement through imagination, and thus the prototype of all man’s highest activity.

In Blake’s conception duality is an inherent condition of human life; for at birth man is separated from God-as-essence in order that man may have consciousness of individual life. The means whereby individual life comes to birth is instinct. The means whereby it attains consciousness is imagination. Instinct is the primary condition of mortal life: it is the separating power whereby the particles of the stream of life are to be distinguished from the stream itself; therefore, the assertion of instinct is essential to individuality. To deny instinct is to deny individual life and attempt the merging of unique individual consciousness in a general consciousness of that God from whom man was separated at birth for a distinct and specific reason. This specific purpose Blake describes as

to bring Albion again

With Luvah into light eternal in his eternal day;

but the denial of instinct creates an abstract God and destroys the hope of individual perception. This was to Blake perversion against which he contended with all his vigour from the day he wrote The Marriage of Heaven and Hell to the end of his life.

Blake’s acceptance of instinct did not, however, blind him, as it blinded Nietzsche to the ultimate purpose of human life. This purpose Blake conceived of as the reunion of man with God, not by any retrogressive step in the direction of Innocence, involving the denial of instinct, but in full acceptance of instinct, by the redemption of instinct through the power of Imagination. That was Blake’s conception of the Christian religion. The object of creation was not that the soul should again be absorbed in the essence of God, but that, in the biblical phrase, the soul should return to the bosom of God individualized as the bride of the Lamb. Man, Blake held, was never made God-like by being less than man, and on the other hand, by “attempting to be more than man we become less”.

Thus Blake parts company for ever with those who live in fear of instinct, just as he parts company with those who believe that the expression of instinct is the whole purpose of life. As Desire is necessary that Reason may have ideas to build on, so Instinct is essential that Imagination may have a soul to save.

In Visions of the Daughters of Albion, Blake made his most passionate assertion of the rights of instinct, and there the persistent cry of Oothoon is that individuality is its own justification. The wisdom of instinct is illustrated by the actions of the chicken, the pigeon, the bee, the mouse, and the frog. The distinctive purpose of instinct is shown by comparisons between the instincts of different animals. That it is impossible for joy to express itself through conformity is shown by the differing experiences which give pleasure to different kinds of men. The fearful effects of imposed law upon instinct are described with a penetrative particularity that sends a shudder through the mind. Blake saw that without freedom of choice the soul could never know individuality: that love which was bound by the fetter of a single consideration, other than that of its object, was a form of self-love preventing the soul from its true incarnation. The poem is youth’s passionate plea for absolute freedom of instinct in order that choice may be the individual assertion of the soul.

Because of his frank and wholehearted acceptance of instinct, Blake has been dubbed an advocate of “free love”.

It was inevitable that it should be so, and need not be regretted. Popular ideas of greatness inevitably suffer from inadequacy. No doubt the mole thinks that the eagle moves without circumspection; and if so, we need not therefore blame the mole or the eagle. “Free love” is a loose phrase that has happily passed out of general currency among educated people because it came to mean anything and therefore nothing. Its literal alternative is “bound love”, and bound love is a contradiction in terms. When the phrase had currency it used to denote a want of spiritual integrity and a personal abandon for the sake of sense gratification. “Free love” meant an indiscriminate, and therefore superficial, planting of the affections, its very virtue consisting in the weakness of its roots and the ease with which they might be transferred capriciously to more pleasure-yielding soil.

Such characteristics hardly consort with the elements of Blake’s nature. It is fabled that he once wished to add a concubine to his household. Forty concubines could not have so altered the nature of Blake as to make him a superficial lover. The prophet of imagination was the least likely of all poets to be beguiled by vagrant fancy. Freedom he adored and demanded as the soul’s inherent right; but the freedom he sought and found was a condition of spiritual activity, not of laxity such as dalliance might wander into. Blake’s idea of passion as a heightened and enlarged state of the soul forbids the notion that he could be the advocate of the weak and craving desire for spiritual props. They do not “learn to bear the beams of love” whose love is the flickering light of will-o’-the-wisp. The difference between the free choice of the soul and the beguiling of the senses is the difference between love of God and acceptance of the serpent’s gift, and Blake drew the line between them sharp and clear. Not to observe that line is to read Blake upside down, or “black” where he wrote “white”.

This has literally happened in regard to such a passage as that in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell where Blake says that the consummation of the whole creation “will come to pass by an improvement of sensual enjoyment”. The passage has been interpreted to mean that Blake thought a general riot of the senses was a desirable consummation. The contrary is his meaning. The “improvement” he prophesies first waits upon the expulsion of “the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul”, and apparently Blake gives another four thousand odd years for the penetration of this notion into the consciousness of man. Again, a “sensual enjoyment” which is dependent upon the recognition of body as “a portion of Soul” is obviously the antithesis of that sensuality which is essentially soulless. A “sensual enjoyment” which makes the whole creation “appear infinite and holy” must be very unlike the Hell of “being shut up in corporeal desires”. Blake is, of course, speaking of the liberation of the body from the confines of contracted senses, and not the handing over of the soul to the tormenting confines of sensuality—of spiritual enfranchisement, not of slavery to finite senses.

So long as the soul is regarded as so much precious burden which the body as an ass is called upon to bear, the fate of the soul in this world will be that of those travellers in the fable who ended their journey by carrying the beast that should have borne them. But when the senses (and Blake speaks of all five and not only of the sense of touch, which is sex) are enjoyed as “inlets of soul”—avenues through which spiritual perceptions can be made, then matter will no longer hamper the soul, the doors of perception being cleansed, everything will appear as it is, infinite. “The cloud will vanish” when man perceives that the senses are not blind alleys of pleasure, but avenues of the soul enabling him to “see small portions of the eternal world that ever groweth” and “to pass out what time he please”. And this is the “improvement of sensual enjoyment” of which Blake speaks.

More specifically he clearly intended to indicate his belief that sexual intercourse, prompted and sustained by imagination, was the redemption of Eden itself. It was an eating of the Tree of Life whereby the disseparate creation of male and female was “consumed” and man and woman were again united into one being. For Blake believed that the separation of sex was a mortal condition which would be surpassed in eternity where there was neither marrying nor giving in marriage. But he not ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Max Plowman and Blake
• Preface
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• I. Corporeal Understanding
• II. The Imaginative Image
• III. The Use of Symbols
• IV. A Reasonable Man
• V. The Circle of Happiness
• VI. Two Examples
• VII. The Divine Imagination
• VIII. The Human Instinct
• IX. The Beams of Love
• X. Forgiveness of Sins