Suspended Judgments by John Cowper Powys

Author:John Cowper Powys
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: British Literature, Philosophy, Essays, Literary Criticism, Nonfiction
ISBN: 1165054396
Publisher: CreateSpace Publishing
Published: 1916-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

WILLIAM BLAKE

The strange and mysterious figure of William Blake seems continually to appear at the end of almost every vista of intellectual and aesthetic interest down which we move in these latter days.

The man's genius must have been of a unique kind; for while writers like Wordsworth and Byron seem now to have stiffened into dignified statues of venerated and achieved pre-eminence, he—the contemporary of William Cowper—exercises now, half way through the second decade of the twentieth century, an influence as fresh, as living, as organic, as palpable, as that of authors who have only just fallen upon silence.

His so-called "Prophetic Books" may be obscure and arbitrary in their fantastic mythology. I shall leave the interpretation of these works to those who are more versed in the occult sciences than I am, or than I should greatly care to be; but a prophet in the most true sense of that distinguished word, Blake certainly was—and to prove it one need not touch these Apocalyptic oracles.

Writing while Cowper was composing evangelical hymns under the influence of the Rev. Dr. Newton, and while Burns was celebrating his Highland Mary, Blake anticipates many of the profoundest thoughts of Nietzsche, and opens the "charmed magic casements" upon these perilous fairy seas, voyaged over by Verlaine and Hauptmann and Maeterlinck and Mallarmé.

When one considers the fact that he was actually writing poems and engraving pictures before the eighteenth century closed and before Edgar Allan Poe was born, it is nothing short of staggering to realise how, not only in literature but in art, his astounding genius dominates our modern taste.

It might almost seem as if every single one of the poets and painters of our age—all these imagists and post-impressionists and symbolists and the rest—had done nothing during the sensitive years of their life but brood over the work of William Blake. Even in music, even in dancing—certainly in the symbolic dancing of Isadora Duncan—even in the stage decorations of our Little Theatres, one traces the mystical impulse he set in motion, and the austere lineaments, not exactly classical or mediaeval, but partaking of the nature of both, of his elemental evocations.

It were, of course, not really possible to suppose that all these people—all the most imaginative and interesting artists of our day—definitely subjected themselves to the influence of William Blake. The more rational way of accounting for the extraordinary resemblance is to conceive that Blake, by some premonitory inspiration of the world-spirit "brooding upon things to come," anticipated in an age more emotionally alien to our own than that of Apuleius or of St. Anselm, the very "body and pressure" of the dreams that were to dominate the earth.

When one considers how between the age of Blake and the one in which we now live, extend no less than three great epochs of intellectual taste, the thing becomes almost as strange as one of his own imaginations.

The age of Sir Walter Scott and Jane Austen, of Wordsworth and Byron, followed immediately upon his. Then we have the age of Thackeray and Tennyson and the great Mid-Victorians.

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