William Blakes’
soujourn in “Paradise ”
“If a Man is the Enemy of my
Spiritual Life while he pretends to be the Friend of my Corporeal, he is a real
enemy..”
William Blake, letter to
Thomas Butts, Felpham April 25th 1803
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| William Blake |
That wonderful,
fiery, genius William Blake whose ‘flashing eye’ expressed the indignation he
felt at all forms of injustice and tyranny!
This ‘flashing eye’ and the vehement shouts of ‘False!’ were all that a
young Chichester lad recalled in his old age of the famous trial of William
Blake for evil, seditious and treasonable expressions against King George
111. *
This trumped up charge was the
strange and malevolent ending of a period in Blake’s life that had at first
promised to be financially successful; a time when he was apparently at his
happiest. Blake had as a friend a man
called John Flaxman, a well meaning, though mundanely inspired person, who felt
sympathetic towards Blake and wanted to help him along the ladder of
success. Flaxman recommended Blake as an
artist-engraver to another friend of his, named William Hayley, a country
gentleman who rather fancied himself as a poet.
Hayley was interested and agreed to befriend Blake and push his fortunes
up the ladder of fame. It was indeed a
splendid opportunity for Blake and could have been a turning point in his
career if he had so chosen.
Thus in 1800, Blake and his
wife, Catherine, were invited to move to the pretty seaside hamlet of Felpham,
where Hayley lived, so that he would be the closer to his new patron. Blake now had a charming six-roomed cottage
by the sea in exchange for the small residence in his beloved Lambeth which had
been his for so many London Neptune for an
embrace”.
“we are safely arrived at our
Cottage which is more beautiful than I thought it..... Heaven opens here on all
sides her golden Gates; her windows are not obstructed by vapours; voices of
Celestial inhabitants are more distinctly heard and their forms more distinctly
seen; and my Cottage is also a Shadow of their houses...... And Now Begins a
New life because another covering of Earth is shaken off ” (letter to Flaxman written
Sept.21.1800 Sunday Morning)
At the time that Blake wrote this
letter uneasiness even then made its insidious undermining at the roots of his
soul, the Dark Stranger had already entered Blake’s life and waited invisible
in the wings. We sense the underlying
feeling of sacrifice of dreams, visions and all that upheld Blake’s inner soul,
being traded in with a wrenching saturnine reluctance for the sober effort of
now having to get down to life’s nitty gritty, like it or not. Blake, after all, is what Jung would call a
puer type, an eternal child as are so many creative geniuses. Life’s boring realities are always at odds
with the celestial vision. But we all
need bread and a roof over our heads and here was Blake’s chance to make good
and make some money, fame and fortune.
Yet with all this promising
beginning, this paradisical setting, that lurking God, whom Blake both adored
and feared deeply and alternately named Satan, Urizen, Christ (as opposed to
the mystical, loving figure of the man Jesus) crept in within a mere three years
to sour it all, ending with the unpleasant incident of the trespassing soldier
and a court case. Thus the soldier in
his way took the role of the serpent whose sinuous undermining led to the
eviction of Adam and Eve from their Paradise
home, a theme that Blake was forever depicting in his poetry and art.
The
Soldier’s Story:
Sometime in July of 1803
Blake’s apparently innocent and peaceful Felpham Paradise was invaded by a
private from the troop of Royal Dragoons stationed nearby. The man had been invited in to help cut the
lawn by the gardener who omitted mentioning this to Blake. He was deeply angry
for he hated soldiers, war-mongers and other minions of the State. He had been an advocate of revolution,
followed the works of Thomas Paine, Godwin and other outspoken people of the
time, though like all these found the disturbing, grim reality nothing like the
ideal. Plus Blake was paranoid about his
privacy; a loner who felt immensely threatened and invaded by the outside
world. He therefore asked the man to
leave his garden. The soldier was
impertinent in reply; Blake asked again, the man threatened most unpleasantly
to knock his eyes out. Now Blake was
known as a peaceable, good-natured man
and at his later trial many attested to his kindliness and peacefulness. But there was
a hot tempered side to him as well. Here
intruded therefore his own inner warmonger, the invasive soldier within, into
the apparent peaceful temenos of his
Felpham cottage. Blake’s intense
emotional reaction smacks of a Shadow issue.
An incident which was nothing in itself suddenly became a regular drama.
The incident took place some
time between July and August 1803. Blake was already tired of William Hayley and
his demands and planning to return to the more secluded atmosphere of London
However, at the trial held at
Chichester Jan.11th 1804 10.am, the
soldier was proved to be a down and out ruffian and liar and Blake was aquitted
amidst the cheers of his many friends and well-wishers. The whole incident was nonetheless a peculiar
culmination to this time in his life when Blake could have chosen the easy path
of conforming to what his patron Hayley needed and for once securing himself a
less precarious mode of living which he sometimes seemed to yearn for. But did he really stand a chance? Flaxman, in introducing Blake to Hayley, had
hinted that Blake would do best at teaching engraving and drawing, making “neat
drawings of different kinds” and would be best to be discouraged from “any
dependence on painting large pictures, for which he is not qualified either by
habit or study”. This led to Hayley’s
well-meant rejection of Blake’s grander and individualistic ideas from the start.
“Natural
Friends are Spiritual Enemies”.
Flaxman and Hayley were true friends,
one might say, but Blake would later state the fact that “natural friends are
spiritual enemies”. What did he mean by
this, we wonder? And why were
friendships and general dealings with the collective always so problematic for
him?
These “friends” meant well from a
worldly point of view, but Blake was not a worldly person. If he had followed this path, sacrificed his
visions and stuck to ‘neat drawings’ we would have yet another mediocre
eighteenth artist who would have faded into obscurity with many others. Blake constantly found himself passed over
by those of lesser talents, illustrating books of inferior poets to
himself. By the time the incident took
place with the soldier, he had already come to the end of his tether and this
incident was probably an expression of his frustration and anger that Paradise had after all turned so sour. He felt that it was in his native place, in
Soho, London South Molton St. Milton
Angels
and Devils, visions of Heaven and Hell.
I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor
shall my Sword sleep in my Hand
Till
we have built Jerusalem
On England
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For a Sagittarian, with a
Sun-Jupiter conjunction, Blake was strangely insular by nature. But he has Cancer Rising plus the Moon in
that sign in the 12th house. Emotionally
and by habit, he preferred the introverted, inward poetic gaze to the external,
limited world of form. Form came through his fiery poetry and pictures. Though
he adored Nature he never did landscape drawing for he saw everything with the
mythic, imaginative eye that found meaning in all things. Nature was suffused with the Divine and played
upon his deepest emotions and feeling imbues all his works.
If we take a look again at this
important period round 1800-3 we sense
an inner reluctance to give up his dramatic, noble, fiery visions and
spiritual values for cramping, dulling, rational, materialistic ones. His visions are as meaningful now as they
were then. In fact, Blake was a very
modern man and many of his pictures border on surrealism. It is no wonder he appeals to modern man who
is equally tormented by the same strange Faustian mixture of atheism, mysticism,
cynicism and who tries to make sense of a politically correct ideal world were all is acceptable and united
in an all-embracing fusion yet oddly disintegrated, separate, chaotic,
boundary-less and full of incessant anxieties and horrors.
Blake did at least acknowledge
that he had both an Angel and a Devil in him which is more than most of us do
and his major works were centred round Milton who wrote Paradise Lost and
Regained and Dante’s visions of Heaven and Hell, which Blake magnificently
illustrated. Basically Blake felt his
view of God was all angelic and he criticised Dante ‘who sees Devils where I
see None’ but this was palpably not the case.
True his tendency was to be positive and optimistic and joyful and see
the good in everyone but this naturally had its judgmental, rejecting opposite lurking
in the Shadow. In fact, Blake had a
peculiar, confused and tormented vision of God yet there is also the opposing
vision of joyfulness, simplicity and colour, song, beauty which he called Orc,
his “spiritual Sun”...as opposed to the natural Sun which he called Satan, the
Greek Apollo. Here he seems to speak of
his own inner intuition of the Self, his inner core identity. He tried over and over again to embody this
fierce, highly personal vision of God in his work and to understand Him through
it. He painted, wrote of it all in his
verses and songs and gloriously illustrated books with intense passion (Mercury
in Scorpio square Mars-Neptune in Leo); the eternal struggle of the visionary
against the cramping, stifling bonds of realism. It also indicates the problems he always felt
over well meaning friends who, while feeling intuitively that he was a talented
person and genuinely trying to help him, seemed unable to truly understand his
work or appreciate his real genius except towards the end of his life.
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| Glad Day |
Basically Blake was a true
alchemist who had to follow the solitary path of his own Great Work, magician,
distiller, dissolver, working unceasingly on his vision till the end of his
life. He needed to be alone and retreat from the world for he was engaged on a
supreme task. His efforts were the
superhuman efforts towards unity and cohesion of the disparate and confused
pieces of oneself that float about in the psyche like the pieces of Osiris
flung here and there by Dark Seth. His
beloved wife Catherine who worked patiently beside him, sublimating her own
personality to help him, was his Isis, his soror mystica, the spiritual
sister who labours with the alchemist on his task. If anyone was Blake’s true friend it was this
woman who gave up her life for him, grateful, loving, worshipping God through
him – his companion till the end.
William Blake was born 28th November 1757 and died 12th August 1827
* The Life of William Blake by Alexander
Gilchrist Ch. X1X p.172. Everyman (J.M.Dent & Sons Ltd. )London
It is first mentioned to Hayley in the letter
dated Aug 16th 1803 but there is no mention of it to Butts in a letter dated
July 6th 1803.
see P.171-2 of Gilchrist’s book. for date of trial, charge against Blake.
Other
books used: The Portable William
Blake: Viking Press New York
William Blake by Kathleen Raine Thames and Hudson ,
London
