BOOKS The batsman and the bat

JOHN BAYLEY

Kathleen Raine's Blake and Tradition (Routledge and Kegan Paul, two volumes, igeos) is an expanded text of the Mellon Lectures delivered at Washington in 1962. Like most of that excellent series it is eclectic, moving from one art form to an-

other and combining them to illustrate its thesis: the hermetic sources of Blake's poems, related to his engravings and pic-

tures. The Little Girl Lost and Found is

analysed in comparison with the Portland vase figures, engraved by Blake for Dar-

win's Botanic Garden in 1791; and with Gothic tombs designed for Blair's Grave, influenced by Blake's early drawings of the royal tombs in Westminster Abbey: The lyger, by Stubbs's superb beast of the Tate Gallery, exhibited when Blake was twelve years old at the house where he attended drawing-school.

Miss Raine is an erudite Blake scholar and, in the judgment of a reviewer who is not one, she has produced not only by far the most illuminating and comprehensive account to date of Blake's wide range of sources, but also the best commentary on

the Prophetic Books. This is not to depreci- ate the recent very good Blake work by

Beer, Blackstone, and others: Miss Raine has the resources of the Mellon Foundation behind her, and apart from the sheer scale of her undertaking she is able to incarnate her ideas and explanations in a sumptuous visual form which enormously assists our grasp of these abstruse matters.

But she is also clear, rational, undog- matic. Though she is completely sold on Blake's vision she has no mad gleam in her own eye; she makes no effort to corner the interpretation market in the teeth of other expert opinion, though she is rightly a little hard on the 1926 Concordance to Blake's symbolic system by Sloss and Wallis. She acknowledges much to Wicksteed, and the

prodigious commentary of Ellis and Yeats ums her unstinted approval, as do the notes

of Yeats's own little edition of the poems in the Muses' Library, now reissued (Rout- ledge and Kegan Paul 21s).

So good is her book that it raises (as such a book should) queries outside its own scope, queries of the most elementary critical sort. We can hardly open Blake without being amazed by the piercing in- telligence of his vision and by his intuitive understanding of the whole background of mystical thought. Moreover his humanity is

as colossal as his humour is devastating: in matters of war, religion, and politics it is scarcely possible for the liberal of today to disagree with him. But the query remains: Where and how is he a great poet and artist?

If we are converted we may cease to bother about the plural mechanics of the painter's or the poet's language; we may be content to say, everything that is here is holy; but the traditional experience and understanding of art cannot afford to lose touch with the order and separation of the visible world. the world of appearance Which Blake's metaphysics reject. Miss Raine justly observes: if Blake had not been more than a poet he would not have been a poet at all, since his entire symbolic expression is informed by the metaphysical vision that underlies it . . . Blake's finest passages cannot be ex- perienced as poetry if we refuse to consider them as a formulation of essential reality.'

The Prophetic Books, revealed to Blake as he said 'without labour or study', are thus outside the ordinary canons of criticism, which must remain 'the single vision'.

In one of her rare judgments Miss Raine says that 'I saw a Chapel all of Gold' is not a good poem while 'The Sick Rose' is. The first is however a remarkably reveal- ing poem, as anyone can see; the second indefinitely mysterious. Maintaining that it restates the theme of the other, Miss Raine none the less temporises of 'The Sick Rose' that `to sort out the symbolic content of the worm symbol in logical terms would be to lose its essence, which is imaginative and mysterious.' This seems a falling back. A riddle, if it has an answer, may make a fine poem, but not a puzzle or a confusion. Revelation (it is its paradox) must be pre- cisely and logically meaningful, or it is nothing. Blake does not go in for the one is all and all is one kind of vagueness.

I am the batsman and the bat I am the bowler and the ball, The umpire, the pavilion cat . .

A consistent exponent of Blake's mysticism would work by the rule of thumb that what is best revealed is best.

Blake's spiritual mentors — Boehme and Swedenborg, Plotinus and Trismegistus enter without bar into his vision and ima- gination. But his models in art — Michel- angelo and Raphael. Virgil, Dante and Mil- ton, down to Ossian and Watts—cannot be so easily assimilated. Revelation is fluid and plastic: art (great art in its traditional sense and instances) hard and unyielding. Nature herself, 'Satan's wife', Wordsworth's 'vege- table universe', is evil to Blake, the realm of Satan and Urizen, the prison house of spec- tres forced into fleshly being and imprisoned in clay. Imagination and art are in eternity, 'above the light of the morning star', but unfortunately they are also created in the here and now, on canvas and in words, and their imprisonment in those things is both their glory and their justification.

Blake would not have disagreed, for they remain symbols and emblems of immortal- ity. But the technical problem remains. Miss Raine shows how well Blake knew the tradi- tional mystical iconography of poetry and painting, but not that he was able to make use of it. Many of his figures are badly drawn, badly muscled. The energy that is in them is horribly compromised to the un- visionary eye by their enthusiastic imitative- ness. Raphael's angel in The Expulsion of Heliodorus from the Temple is a creature to send the blood to one's heart and the hair up on one's head. Many of Blake's. which seem to echo him, leave one cold. Palmer could be inspired by Blake's vision as Blake could not be by Raphael's art.

The rhythms of Ossian, which Blake uses for the Prophetic Books, are well adapted to their atmosphere of darkling romance and their permissive imagery of power, war, and the glamorous past. Blake is using this vague model to set down precise and mean- ingful metaphysical systems and explana- tions. And the reader becomes confused and often bored, Miss Raine quotes pas- sages from Paradise Lost when expounding the Prophetic Books, and the contrast is emphatic and painful. On the one hand we have created art, the harmonious achieve- ment of Pandemonium; on the other, the fleeting raw material of vision. Milton's created world is the world of Satan in Blake's view, but so is that of all great art. By the fact of permanence and solidity, architrave and lapid phrase, it brings into being an ordered world that at once justifies and interprets itself.

No wonder Saurat opined that Blake was of Satan's party without knowing it—all great artists must be. and yet Saurat (as Miss Raine asserts) is wrong, for Blake re- nounces the worldly claim to be 'a great artist' in this sense. The generalisations of aesthetic harmony not to he confused with the vagueness of Ossianic romanticism) must for him always be compromised. And though he has none of Milton's architec- tonic power he has also none of the in- superable metaphysical problems which it brought into being -- the problems which bedevil Milton criticism as doctrine be- devilled the fathers of the church, and on which Professor Empson expended so much ingenuity in Milton's God. Blake's God is incontrovertibly sane, unimpeachably divine: Milton's is cramped and chained in dark ambiguity and doctrinal paradox, And yet Paradise Lost is infinitely greater art than the Prophetic Books, for the Satan `who is lord of this world' is lord also of its aesthetic and proportion.

Blake's main doctrine is divinely clear. but its exposition can he puzzling and un- satisfying to the aesthetic sense, and the dis- crepancy between vision and creation often occurs even in the finest of his short poems. such as the epilogue to 'The Gates of Para- dise': Truly. My Satan. thou art but a Dunce. And dost not know the Garment from the Man.

Every Harlot was a Virgin once, Nor can'st thou ever change Kate into Nan.

Tho' thou art Worship'd by the Names Divine Of Jesus & Jehovah, thou art still The Son of Morn in weary Night's decline. The lost Traveller's Dream under the Hill.

At once familiar, epigrammatic. and haunt- ingly strange, these two verses seem to offer their meaning to the reader moderately ex- perienced in Blake without too much diffi- culty. Satan cannot destroy our essence; the demiurgc of creation is ignorant of the eter- nity which resides alike in human flesh and spirit, unchanged by mortal accident, but this demiurge is worshipped as God by the deluded under the hill, which Miss Raine takes to be Dante's hill of purgatory. And yet the tone of the last two lines is surely quite other than their Blakean meaning, and affect's ns with a sense of radical ambiguity when we are instructed in that meaning? `Thou art still the Son of Morn in weary Night's decline'—together with the engrav- ing The Traveller hasteth in the Evening- gives us so powerful an image of human hope and yearning that we cannot easily associate the 'Son of Morn' with the Satan so scornfully addressed in the first stanza. It is not so much that Blake is mysterious as that he is quite lacking in the elerrient of self-consciousness and showmanship with which art usually takes good care to impress itself on us. The meaning was clear to hint, and always had been, so any inadvertence in expression meant nothing.

No wonder Lytton Strachey and A. E. Housman preferred to leave the 'sense' out altogether, but Blake is a poet whose intelli- gence strikes us with such shocks of lucidity that we must look for them on every occa- sion, and be disappointed when we do not find them. We are surely entitled to say that 'The Clod and The Pebble', with its terse and exact mating of language and sense and its deep and clear perspective of human meaning, is a successful poem, while 'Hear the voice of the Bard!'—for all its plangent and mysterious beauty—remains an unsuc- cessful one?

Yeats, that profound student of Blake (he might have said with Fuseli, 'Blake is damn good to steal from') was well aware of these problems. The element of showmanship in him, of unabashed fraudulence (compared with Blake's candour) comes from the com- promise he makes between mysticism and the secular body—the spectre as it were— of art. Art in this world's sense always wins in Yeats; he has no emanation of Jesus and Jerusalem, the uncompromising spirit of the eternal. When Yeats proposed to devote his life to the mysteries of the invisible world the spirits hastened to assure him that they had come to give 'metaphors for poetry'. When he writes: 'It seems that I must bid the muse go pack,/Choose Plato or Plo- tinus for a friend—' we know that he will do nothing of the sort. The Apollonian Muse sees to it that every poem of his is a success or failure on its own terms, without reference to hermetic secrets. Hence nothing Yeats wrote has the astonishing and and unselfconscious passion of Blake's lines: My Spectre round me night & day Like a Wild beast guards my way My Emanation far within Weeps incessantly for my Sin.

It is perhaps no accident that Blake's most famous poem is also his most 'objec- tive' celebration of that magnificent spectral creation — the tiger. As Urizen and the female principle lure man into the bonds of flesh and create his spectral being here below, in the forests of the night, so Urizen- Satan creates the greatest symbol of fallen energy in his workshop of clay (the stanza that describes the process Blake wisely cut out, for it is repetitive and holds up the remorseless prowl of the poem). In an ad- mirable analysis Miss Raine points out the precision of the lines: , In what distant deeps or skies Burnt the fire of thine eyes

which are not 'a piece of cosmic landscape painting' but a very precise opposition, more clearly conveyed in the second can- celled draft in the Rossetti Ms:

Burnt in distant deeps or skies The cruel fire of thine eyes?

Could heart descend or wings aspire?

Is the tiger a symbol of eternity, or of the demiurge's creative power in this world? The answer is the latter. The Four Zoas make it clear that the demiurge fell from heaven 'when the stars threw down their

spears' and created the tiger as he created mortal man—'Did he smile his work to see?' takes on a positively diabolical signi- ficance. The lamb was made in eternity, the tiger down here in hell:

`What, in the light of all this, is the answer we are to give to the final question of The Tyger: "Did he who made the Lamb make thee?" Are we to answer it in some such words as Boehme used: "The God of the Holy World and the God of the Dark World are not two Gods. There is but one only God. He is Evil and Good; Heaven and Hell; Light and Darkness . . . " The abyss and the heavens are the two eternal contra- ries that make up the unity of the "one thing".... Blake, I believe, left his ques- tion unanswered not because he did not know the answer or was in doubt, but because the answer is itself a no and yes of such depth and complexity.'

If we follow Miss Raine here 'the bats- man and the bat' seem not far off. Could we not say instead that for once Blake allows spectral art its head? The immortal hand or eye, the hand or eye of the im- agination, whether of God or of Blake him- self—can they frame (significant word) the symmetry of the tiger, the masterpiece of the creation of Urizen? One marvel of 'The Tyger' is that it may be a supreme anti- Blake poem by Blake himself. Looking at Stubbs's picture he may have glimpsed the triumphant if malignant otherness of spectral art, and later paid it tribute accordingly. Because it was so different from his own imagination Stubbs's picture may have inspired his greatest poem; while Raphael, whom he regarded as a friend and fellow-emanation, could only be copied in his pictures.