The Outsider (42 page)

Fox began to solve his own Outsider problem when he accepted his destiny as a prophet. The Outsider is primarily a critic, and if a critic feels deeply enough about what he is criticizing, he becomes a prophet.

William Blake prefaced his epic poem
‘
Milton
⁵
with a quotation from the Book of Numbers:
‘
Would to God that all
the Lord
’
s people were prophets.
⁵
This is a sentiment that Fox heartily endorsed. Yet Fox made it his business to try to make all the Lord
’
s people into prophets, and his approach was so popular that he had a great deal of success. Blake, on the other hand, spent his life in complete obscurity; the prophetic note never left his voice, but he never spoke from the popular pulpit. During his lifetime, he was considered a madman and a crank; even his friends would have refused to vouch for his genius. Blake didn
’
t worry; he worked on steadily, producing his unpopular paintings and his even less popular epic poems, living as best he could. He took the healthy view of the Greek Stoic, that he lacked nothing that he really needed:

I have mental joy and mental health

And mental friends and mental wealth

I
’
ve a wife I love and that loves me

I
’
ve all but riches bodily
²⁰

Blake
’
s struggle was very like Nietzsche
’
s; and the resemblances between the two men
’
s way of seeing the world are astonishing, considering the eighty years between their births that made Blake a contemporary of Dr. Johnson, and Nietzsche of Dostoevsky. Blake, at all events, was lucky in having a wife to share his struggle, a completely docile girl who always regarded her husband as a great man. Such a wife might have saved Nietzsche
’
s sanity.

Fame, Blake believed, is unnecessary to the man of genius. Man is born alone and he dies alone. If he allows his social relations to delude him into forgetting his fundamental loneliness, he is hving in a fool
’
s paradise. From the beginning he was preoccupied with the problem of Solipsism, that you cannot be certain of the existence of anything or anybody except yourself:

Nought loves another as itself

Nor venerates another so

Nor is it possible to thought

A greater than itself to know.
²¹

This is Ivan Karamazov
’
s starting-point; in the face of it, what meaning has the Christian idea of loving your
neighbor
as yourself, or a love of God that could lead Abraham to sacrifice Isaac? Blake was determined to get his foundations right before he began, and if getting his foundations right meant attacking the
‘
fundamentals
’
of religion, well, so much the worse for the fundamentals. He states his principle in the opening paragraph of one of his earliest works:

As the true method of knowledge is experiment, the true faculty of knowing must be the faculty that experiences.
²²

This is scientific common sense; it would not be out of place in a Secular Society pamphlet. But in the next paragraph, Blake plunges into his own mysticism:

...
the poetic genius is the true man, and that the body, or outward form of man, is derived from the poetic genius. Likewise, the forms of all things are derived from their genius, which by the ancients was called Angel and Spirit and Demon.

The poetic genius is everywhere called the spirit of prophecy.

Again, the emphasis on prophecy. We can see that Ivan
’
s Grand Inquisitor would have felt inclined to add Blake to his bonfire as well as George Fox and Christ.

I have already quoted passages that show Blake thinking along Nietzschean lines—
’
Energy is eternal delight
’
; that is, not towards a Christian ethic that proclaims: Blessed are the poor in spirit, but towards a vitalist ethic that exalts the man of genius. Before the end of this book, we shall have to analyse these terms
‘
Christian
’
and
‘
vitalist
’
, but at this point, I should only
like
to observe that vitalism is not necessarily a philosophy that regards life as the be-all and end-all, to which all other moral values are subservient. It may be only a way of deriving those values or of renewing them. When Aristotle wrote:
‘
Not to be born is the best thing, and death is better than life
’
; he expressed the view that can be said to he at one extreme of religion. At the other extreme is vitalism; Kirilov
’
s
‘
everything is good
’
(note that Kirilov professed himself an atheist). In this sense, vitalism can be regarded as an antinomian reaction:

The worship of God is: Honouring his gifts in other men, each according to his genius, and loving the greatest men best
...
²³

and Blake ends a demonstration that Jesus broke all the ten commandments with the statement:

I tell you, no virtue can exist without breaking these ten commandments. Jesus was all virtue, and acted from impulse and not from rules.
²⁴

We can see in such a statement the beginnings of a defence of Raskolnikov and Stavrogin. All impulse is good.
‘
Energy is eternal delight.
’
In Jerusalem
⁵
, Blake wrote—

When thought is closed in caves

Then love shall show its root in deepest Hell...
²⁶

In other words, when self-expression is denied, then energy will find its outlet in crime or violence. Repeatedly in his work, Blake shows indifference to moral issues when self-expression is at stake:
‘
Rather murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unsatisfied desire
’
,

That he who will not defend truth may be compelled to

defend a lie
...
That enthusiasm and life shall not cease.
²⁶

In many other ways Blake was an iconoclast; on the subject of sex, for instance. A century and a half before D. H. Lawrence wrote
Lady Chatterle
y’
s Lover,
Blake had preached that sex can raise man to visionary insight. He also preaches that the way to overcome vices is to give them full self-expression; the result will be virtue:

But Covet was poured full

Envy fed with fat of lambs

Wrath with Lion
’
s gore

Wantonness lulled to sleep

With the virgin
’
s lute

Or sated with her love

Til Covet broke his locks and bars

And slept with open doors

Envy sung at the rich man
’
s feast

Wrath was followed up and down

By a little ewe lamb

And wantonness on his own true love

Begot a giant race.
²⁷

(
‘
Book of Los
’
, IV and V.)

There is even a tradition that Blake was so confirmed in his opinion of the senses
’
fundamental innocence that he proposed to go to bed with his wife
’
s maid, an arrangement that Mrs. Blake refused to permit. But the proposal had been in accord with his teaching in the Prophetic Books. In
‘
Visions of the Daughters of Albion
’
, he makes his heroine promise her husband (Theotormon):

…
to catch for thee girls of mild silver or of furious gold I
’
ll lie beside thee on a bank and view their wanton play In lovely copulation, bliss on bliss, with Theotormon.
²⁸

This was not mere libertinism; it was a part of Blake
’
s religious doctrine. He makes Oothoon ask:

How can one joy absorb another? Are not different joys

Holy, eternal, infinite? and each joy is a love.

The question that must be asked is obviously: What was the end of Blake
’
s system? From these extracts, it seems to have a suspicious smell of Rousseau
’
s
‘
back to Nature
’
doctrine.

The end, in a word, was Vision, Yea-saying. This was Blake
’
s ultimate, just as it was Nietzsche
’
s and Rilke
’
s.
‘
To praise in spite of,
dennoch preisen.

For, like Van Gogh and Nietzsche after him, Blake had had moments when he had seen the world as entirely positive, entirely good. Blake also was a painter. Van Gogh had painted cornfields so that they seemed to blaze upward; he painted self-portraits against the same distorted, brilliant background, as if he could not even look at his own face in a mirror without all his vital energies breaking loose and trying to flow out of his paint-brush. Blake
’
s outlook was the same, but his training was
different; he knew how to express vital energy only in two ways: through the human form, and through colour. He preferred water-colours because they are less heavy than oils, and he painted Michelangelesque men and women against vivid backgrounds of light. Unfortunately, Blake was not a great draughtsman like Michelangelo, nor did he know as much about the effects of light as Turner or Monet. His painting is often vivid and electrifying, but it is too light-weight to be really great, in the way that Van Gogh
’
s painting is great. There i
s not the intensity.

Nevertheless, the paintings are valuable as a part of Blake
’
s exposition of his
^‘
world view
’
in a way that Van Gogh
’
s are not.

Van Gogh
’
s mysticism was all unconscious, and there is no exposition of it in his prose. Blake made all of his work, as well as his life, a systematic exposition of his mysticism.

At this point, it would not be unreasonable to ask: What exactly do we mean by mysticism? And, in fact, there could be no better point at which to ask it, for Blake can provide us with the answer.

Mysticism is derived from the Greek
ìýåéí
,
to shut the eyes: exactly what Blake meant by it.
‘
Seeing
’
is not simply using the eyes. The retina of the eye records impressions which are carried to the brain, which interprets them. If the brain becomes lazy and ceases to interpret the impressions that the eye carries to it, one literally ceases to see. The experience is familiar to everyone. You are reading a book, and you are tired; your mind begins to drift, and suddenly you realize you have read half a page without its meaning anything to you. Your eyes have read it, but your brain failed to interpret it; therefore, to all intents and purposes, you have not read it. It is the same with seeing. You are on a long train journey; at the beginning of the journey you watch the fields passing with interest; the new sights stimulate all kinds of thoughts and impressions; at the end of the journey, you are almost asleep; nothing arouses the interest, nothing makes an impression. You are no longer seeing.

Rimbaud grasped the essence of this experience when he wrote to a friend: The poet should be a visionary; one should
make oneself a visionary.
...
’
‘
One makes oneself a visionary by a long, immense, ordered derangement of the senses.
’
He claimed that he had trained himself to visual hallucinations, to see
‘
a mosque instead of a factory
...
calashes on the roads of the sky, a drawing-room at the bottom of a lake
’
. Rimbaud had realized that seeing is an affair of the brain, and the brain can be affected by the will. Man
’
s own inner being orders what he sees.