Myth, History and Nationalism: Poetry of the British Isles

… an essay by David Aberbach.

From Nationalism and Ethnosymbolism: History, Culture and Ethnicity in the Formation of Nations (edited by Athena S. Leoussi and Steven Grosby: Edinburgh University Press, 2007) pp.84-96.

MYTH, HISTORY AND NATIONALISM: POETRY OF THE BRITISH ISLES

by David Aberbach


Just as poetic myth as part of nation-building has been neglected in studies of nationalism, so also nationalism has been ignored in studies of myth. The work of Anthony D. Smith is notable, among many reasons, for helping create an intellectual framework bridging studies of poetry and myth in the arts with more traditional studies of nationalism in History and the Social Sciences. This chapter explores uses of myth and history in the poetry of the British isles, particularly works by Scott, Tennyson and Yeats. In doing so, it illustrates the general significance to cultural nationalism of poetry – the royal road to a nation’s identity.

English poetry, rooted in myth and history transformed to myth, largely defined the modern concept of national identity. Medieval England absorbed much foreign influence through invasion and conquest: by Germanic tribes (fifth century), the Danes (ninth century) and the Normans (1066). Its adoption of Christianity by the seventh century and the growth of Old English, which has the oldest Western European literature in the vernacular, ensured Britain’s cultural distinctiveness.

The poetry of the British isles seems to reach artistic peaks in moments of heightened national self-awareness, when independence is threatened or lost, whether because of foreign invasion or internal wars or disasters. The battle of Maldon fought against the Viking invaders in 991 is commemorated in a magnificent Old English poetic fragment culminating in the death of the old warrior Byrhtwold. Raising shield and shaking spear, he emboldens his men with dying breath:

Strength fails, spirit must be firmer,
heart bolder, courage greater.

Britain’s greatest crisis after the Norman invasion, the Black Plague in the mid-fourteenth century, in which an estimated one-third of Europe’s population died, was followed by literary flourishing, including works of Chaucer, Langland’s Piers Ploughman and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The Reformation and the conflict with Spain are the background to much Elizabethan poetry, notably Spenser and Shakespeare. The deposition and execution of Charles I and the Civil War in the 1640s, Cromwell’s rule and the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, were crucial influences on Milton’s poetry, above all Paradise Lost. The French Revolution and Napoleonic wars marked English poetry in the Romantic period as did the two world wars in the twentieth century.

These crises and others appear in the poetry of England, Ireland, Wales and Scotland both as separate and shared histories, each country distinct in time of conflict with one another but in peacetime united as parts of Great Britain. There is a significant literature in Welsh, Scottish Gaelic and Irish Gaelic, in which relations with England are a common thread. In ‘The True-Born Englishman’ (1701), Defoe savagely mocks what he sees as the violent indecent yokings-together that created ‘the mongrel half-bred race’ of English identity:

In eager rapes, and furious lust begot,
Betwixt a painted Briton and a Scot:
Whose gend’ring off spring quickly learnt to bow,
And yoke their heifers to the Roman plough:
From whence a mongrel half-bred race there came,
With neither name nor nation, speech or fame
In whose hot veins new mixtures quickly ran,
Infus’d betwixt a Saxon and a Dane.
While their rank daughters, to their parents just,
Receiv’d all nations with promiscuous lust.
This nauseous brood directly did contain
The well-extracted blood of Englishmen … (336–47)

This jaundiced swipe at English national identity, which recalls the prophetic denunciations of Israel as harlot (for example, Hosea 1–2, Ezekiel 23), can paradoxically signify the nation’s strength: Colley describes these lines as a ‘powerful demonstration of English confidence. Far more than the Welsh and Scots felt able to do, the English could – occasionally – ridicule themselves because they had a strong sense of who they were and of their own importance’ (1992: 15–16).

The British isles might have lain down a slut, as Defoe suggests, but rose a woman of valour. After centuries of turmoil and mixing, some of the greatest poets writing in English were Scottish (Byron), Irish (Yeats), and Welsh (Dylan Thomas). Monogamous nationalism exacted a price, though. By the nineteenth century, poetry in Welsh and Gaelic was greatly diminished by English intrusion and emigration. Nevertheless this poetry retains its power to inspire a strong, even militant national identity.

MEDIEVAL WALES AND SCOTLAND

Memories of Welsh and Scottish independence survive in medieval poetry. Scottish poems, such as John Barbour’s The Bruce (c. 1370) and Blind Harry’s epic Wallace (c. 1460), record Scottish courage and defiance. Though Scotland and England have shared a monarch since 1603 and a Parliament (1707–1999), Scotland preserves in poetry the memory of its revolt against England under Robert the Bruce and its triumph over England in 1314 in the battle of Bannockburn, after which (in 1328) England recognised Scottish independence.

Long before the loss of Welsh independence in 1282, there was a remarkable tradition of Welsh poetry, notably the Hengerdd (old song). Welsh history, particularly the medieval struggle against the Normans, stimulated some of its greatest poetry, affirming Welsh national identity in Welsh, such as Cynddelw Brydydd Mawr’s elegy for Madog ap Maredudd, prince of Powys, who died in 1160:

Door of a fort he was, companion shield,
Buckler on battlefield, and in brave deeds:
A tumult like flame blazing through heather,
Router of enemies, his shield stopped their way;
Lord sung by a myriad, hope of minstrels,
Crimson, irresistible, unswerving companion. (Conran 1967: 118)

In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Wales was transformed from an autonomous state under Welsh rule into a feudal vassal of England. Gruff udd ab yr Ynad Coch wrote a haunting lament for Llywelyn ap Gruff udd, the last prince of independent Wales, killed by the English in 1282:

Mine now to rage against Saxons who’ve wronged me,
Mine for this death bitterly to mourn.
Mine, with good cause, to cry protest to God
Who has left me without him. (Ibid. 128)

In Wales, the annual Eisteddfod (bardic festival), which dates from 1176, when Wales was still independent, has a strong nationalist character. It preserves memory of past, and hope of future, Welsh independence.

ENGLISH MYTH: FROM SHAKESPEARE TO TENNYSON

Myth and mythical history dominate much English poetry. English nationalism commonly flares up in crisis. Poetry often results. Shakespeare’s histories, for example, date mostly from the 1590s, after the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, ‘the years of the Spanish war at its fiercest’ (Hastings 1997: 207). Henry V’s speech at the battle of Harfleur is a classic of nationalist propaganda:

And you, good yeomen,
Whose limbs were made in England, show us here
The mettle of your pasture; let us swear
That you are worth your breeding; which I doubt not;
For there is none of you so mean and base
That hath not noble lustre in your eyes.
I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips,
Straining upon the start. The game’s afoot:
Follow your spirit; and, upon this charge
Cry ‘God for Harry! England and Saint George!’ (III, i, 25–34)

Again, on the night before the battle of Agincourt (1415) Henry V inspires his men with a fighting national spirit:

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile
This day shall gentle his condition:
And gentlemen in England, now a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day. (IV, iii, 60–7)

There is little proof that Henry V actually said anything like this, but this is what he should have said.

In a later age of crisis, when France threatened to invade, Coleridge in ‘Fears in Solitude’ (1798) declared love for Britain almost as a divine being. The Madonna-like national image in this poem is as far removed from reality as Defoe’s slut, yet such national feelings in crisis are common. In quieter, more stable periods, English poets often seem more vulnerable to doubts. As the British empire reached the height of its power in the nineteenth century, some English poets, such as Tennyson and Kipling, became uneasy. They feared the corruption of power and imperial decline. In some cases, their poetry was a form of spiritual revitalisation, providing moral guidance through British historical figures and events. Tennyson, Poet Laureate from 1850 to 1892, wrote a series of historical dramas, Queen Mary (1875), Harold (1876) and Becket (1884), each illustrating the strengthening effect of crisis. In poems such as ‘Puck’s Song’ (1906), Kipling called up defining historic moments associated with spots in the English landscape:

See you our stilly woods of oak,
And the dread ditch beside?
O that was where the Saxons broke
On the day that Harold died.
See you the windy levels spread
About the gates of Rye?
O that was where the Northmen fled,
When Alfred’s ships came by.

POETRY AND MYTH IN SCOTTISH NATIONALISM

The Scottish poets Macpherson, Burns and Scott have had especially strong influence on Scottish nationalism, drawing on Scotland’s rich store of history and myth either to support independence from or union with England. Burns’ use of myth is less apparent than that of Macpherson and Scott. The poetic fragments of the legendary third century CE bard, Ossian, however fraudulently presented by Macpherson in the late eighteenth century (Samuel Johnson derided them as ‘impudent forgeries’), roused Scottish nationalism. Macpherson’s poetry, like that of Burns, is poetry of Scottish defiance after its defeat by England at Culloden in 1746. The controversy over Ossian was not just over scholarly authenticity, but also over national authenticity: did Scotland have a national identity distinct from that of England? The fame of Ossian, amounting to a craze, in eighteenth and nineteenth-century continental Europe, brought the past alive in the nation’s hopes.

Scott is unusual as at different times he hoped for Scottish independence from England and supported union with England. His deep-bred Scottish nationalism was at times neutered by his commitment to Britain and Tory politics. Scott was raised in late eighteenth-century Edinburgh in an atmosphere of resentment at the Treaty of Union of 1707 and the Scottish defeat and humiliation in the uprising of 1745–6, the atrocities of the English army, the consequent English military presence, the proscription of Highland customs and the Highland clearances. As a child, Scott absorbed Scottish culture – the language, stories, songs, the great medieval poems and ballads, and folk culture – from people who, in some cases, had seen or taken part in the Scottish revolt. In the introduction to Canto III of Marmion (1808), Scott called up childhood memories of Scottish lore and heroism:

… ever, by the winter hearth,
Old tales I heard of woe or mirth,
Of lovers’ slights, of ladies’ charms,
Of witches’ spells, of warriors’ arms;
Of patriot battles, won of old
By Wallace wight and Bruce the bold;
Of later fields of feud and fight,
When, pouring from their Highland height,
The Scottish clans, in headlong sway,
Had swept the scarlet ranks away.

Scott could easily have become a revolutionary but was born too late. In 1813, after he stopped writing poetry, he confessed:

I am very glad I did not live in 1745 for though as a lawyer I could not have pleaded Charles’s right and as a clergyman I could not have prayed for him yet as a soldier I would I am sure against the convictions of my better reason have fought for him even to the bottom of the gallows. (Scott 1932, III: 302)

In time, the bitterness of the Scottish defeat shrank. Scotland kept its own Church and legal system, which came to symbolise Scottish independence. Scott trained in law, as did many Scottish historians, philosophers, literary artists and essayists. The Scottish Enlightenment was an outburst of new-found confidence of a rational, modern people. Crucial in Scotland’s psychological transformation was that for an entire generation in the Napoleonic wars the English and the Scots had a common enemy – the French – and fought bravely and successfully side by side. The Union on paper was sealed in blood. Scott’s career as a poet was almost entirely confined to the Napoleonic period, when French invasion of Britain was a constant threat. According to Sutherland, Scott’s choice in Marmion of the Scottish defeat by England at Flodden in 1513 – ‘the greatest catastrophe in Scottish history’ – ‘seems to have been in the service of a higher patriotism towards Britain’ (1995: 125). There is an ‘extinction of Scotland’ in Marmion. In the first Epistle, for example, instead of ‘Scotland’ and ‘Scottish’, ‘Britain’ and ‘British’ appear twelve times (and ‘English’ once), and the poem is pure English, with no trace of Scottish dialect (Sutherland 1995: 126). Had Marmion been published in 1758 rather than 1808, the stress would probably have been on Scottish nationalism and English villainy.

The omission of Scotland seems to reflect the unification of the British isles by war with France. Yet, Scott regretted Scotland’s loss of independence. His wavering to and from Scottish nationalism continued after he turned from poetry, poleaxed by Byron’s success in Childe Harold (1812), to the novel: the hero of Waverley (1814) is both Jacobite and Hanoverian and fights on both sides.

Scott’s Romantic Scots nationalism was watered down both by Enlightenment internationalism and by self-interested (but not bogus) loyalty to Great Britain. The strands of Scottish nationalism and commitment to Great Britain are intertwined in Scott’s life and works, which themselves became an act of union. From childhood, Scott was drawn more to coarse and primitive but alive Scottish language than to the genteel, elegant English of the Enlightenment. He admired the work of Fergusson and Burns to revive Scottish poetic language. One of Scott’s earliest publications, before he became a poet and novelist, was his collection of Scottish ballads, The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802), influenced by Bishop Percy’s ballad collection, Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) and by the German Romantics, by Herder and Goethe. Poetry as a tool of national survival and regeneration is implicit in Scott’s The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805). The evil dwarf magician is driven away when the minstrels join together to sing songs of the past. Though the poem is set in sixteenth-century Scotland, it reflects Scottish national feeling of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when the minstrel was needed as ‘an apostolic link with that period [the sixteenth century]’ when, as Scott (anticipating Heine) put it in his 1824 essay on ‘Romance’, ‘poets were the historians and often the priests of their society’ (Sutherland 1995: 100).

Scott’s narrative poems helped to define Scottish national identity within Great Britain. Scottish customs, speech, dress and landscape first became widely known through Scott’s narrative poems. The Lady of the Lake (1810) set off a wave of Scottish tourism at a time when the Grand Tour of continental Europe was impossible because of the Napoleonic wars. At the same time, as a successful writer, Scott became a leader of the British Establishment. His politics were High Tory and he eventually became a baronet and – his financial coffin – laird of Abbotsford. During the war with France, he joined the Edinburgh Volunteers Light Dragoons (Burns, similarly, after early sympathy with the French Revolution, joined the Dumfries Volunteers), his military zeal at odds with his writings, in which war is cruel and senseless. He supported Henry Dundas, Scotland’s virtual ruler, despised by Scottish nationalists as a traitor. His conservatism was such that, panicked at the thought of popular revolt, he defended the Peterloo massacre in 1819. When George IV visited Scotland in 1822, Scott escorted and introduced him as the monarch of the Highland clansmen. Scott’s complex form of nationalism was not unlike that of the exiled Jews after the loss of territorial sovereignty who, while remaining scrupulously loyal to the countries where they lived, preserved a healing memory of past glory, of noble battles and great men and women – but in culture, not aimed at political action. Daiches sums up the therapeutic ambivalence to Scottish nationalism in Scott’s writings:

Scott’s aim in much of his writing was a healing one: to present the glamour of Scottish history and landscape, with the heroic violence that made part of the glamour modulated quietly into the past tense so that Scotland could be seen now as part of a peaceful and enlightened Britain. (1971: 83)

THE BRITISH EMPIRE AND TENNYSON’S REVIVAL OF ARTHURIAN LEGEND

Tennyson’s revival of the legends of the fifth-century King Arthur coincided with the emergence of Britain as the most powerful empire in history. These legends are taken for granted as part of ‘British national consciousness’. Yet, as in the case of many other mythologies, such as the Kalevala, this literature, much of which derived from oral tradition, was largely forgotten until the Victorian age. The rediscovery of Arthur and the Round Table was mainly the work of Tennyson, in his epic poem and life work, Idylls of the King. The poem was begun in the 1830s and not published in its complete twelve-part form until 1885. Prior to the imperial age, Milton and Wordsworth had rejected Arthur as an inappropriate subject for an English national epic. Sir Thomas Malory’s fifteenth-century epic, Morte d’Arthur, Tennyson’s chief source, was never widely popular. Consequently, the stories were unknown to the English-reading public. On publication of the first edition of Tennyson’s Idylls, in 1859 (comprising ‘Enid’, ‘Vivien’, ‘Elaine’ and ‘Guinevere’), the Saturday Review described the material as ‘a forgotten cycle of fables which never attained the dignity or substance of a popular mythology’ (Shaw 1973: 83). The stories of Arthur did not stay forgotten for long: the Idylls sold 10,000 copies in the first week (Shaw 1973: 82).

Tennyson was influenced by nineteenth-century research into ancient texts as part of the recovery and invention of tradition and by the suggestion of Albert, the Prince Consort (himself a German prince), that ‘the Arthurian cycle was the equivalent of Germany’s national epic, the Niebelungenlied’ (Jordan 1988: 157). Occasionally, Tennyson could strike a militant, even chauvinist note, for example in the poems he wrote after the French coup d’état of 1851 (‘RISE, Britons, rise, if manhood be not dead’). Yet, he was chiefly an introspective, spiritual poet (‘the saddest of poets’, as T. S. Eliot described him). Tennyson used the stories of Arthur, Queen Guinevere, Arthur’s sword Excalibur, the Knights of the Round Table, Merlin the magician, and the Holy Grail not to justify imperial conquest but, as in the poetry of the biblical prophets, to highlight spiritual ideals. There are unforgettable mythic images, such as Sir Bedivere’s return of Excalibur to the Lady of the Lake as Arthur lies dying:

Then quickly rose Sir Bedivere and ran,
And, leaping down the ridges lightly, plunged
Among the bulrush-beds, and clutch’d the sword,
And strongly wheel’d and threw it. The great brand
Made lightnings in the splendour of the moon,
And flashing round and round, and whirl’d in an arch,
Shot like a streamer of the northern morn,
Seen where the moving isles of winter shock
By night, with noises of the Northern Sea.
So flash’d and fell the brand Excalibur:
But ere he dipt the surface, rose an arm
Clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful,
And caught him by the hilt, and brandish’d him
Three times, and drew him under in the mere.
(‘The Passing of Arthur’, 301–14)

Tennyson defines heroism in biblical, not pagan, terms. Arthur’s wise mentor, Merlin, is a prophet-like bard. Conquest of enemies counts for less than conquest of the self, of the inner defiling monster of ethical frailty (particularly Guinevere’s sexual betrayal of Arthur) which ruins the social order. As in his best-known long poem, In Memoriam, loss and the prospect of loss fill his national epic and call into question Victorian power and confidence. The Idylls, like the Nibelungenlied, is concerned less with the pride and confidence of a new power than with the dark-edged dignity of an order in decline. As national poems, both foreshadow the weakening of the monarchy and in the case of Germany, its fall.

YEATS AND IRISH LEGEND

Part of the attraction of Irish legend to those who wanted independence from England was that it preceded the English conquest. England had controlled parts of Ireland for centuries but gained absolute rule only in the seventeenth century. In the Act of Union of 1801, England and Ireland became the ‘United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland’. The consequent decline of Ireland led to the rise of Irish nationalism, the revival of Irish language and an outstanding literature, dominated in poetry by Yeats. Influenced by Irish cultural nationalists such as Standish O’Grady, John O’Leary and Douglas Hyde, Yeats became a connoisseur of Irish legend. He edited several volumes, including Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1888), Stories from Carelton (1889) and Representative Irish Tales (1890), and used this material in his own poetry. Yeats discovered in this ancient literature, much of which came from oral Gaelic traditions among the western Irish peasantry, a pristine national spirit more powerful than British culture, which could be seen as corrupted by the power of the empire. Yeats wrote of the Irish legends he edited:

All that is greatest in our literature is based upon legend – upon those tales which are made by no one man, but by the nation itself through a slow process of modification and adaptation, to express its loves and its hates, its likes and its dislikes. (Pritchard 1972: 36)

Yeats saw himself not just as a teller of legends but as a legendary figure himself. According to Ellmann, Yeats believed that ‘… the artist was to conceive of himself as a representative figure, to identify himself with all men, or with Ireland, or with some traditional personage. In this way the correspondences of old legends with modern life could be established, and so, as Yeats proposed, a dead mythology might be changed to a living one’ (Ellmann 1968: 18).

In an early poem, To Ireland in the Coming Times (1892), Yeats declares his kinship with Irish national poets of the past. He uses Irish myth to unlock the national unconscious:

Nor may I less be counted one
With Davis, Mangan, Ferguson,
Because, to him who ponders well,
My rhymes more than their rhyming tell
Of things discovered in the deep,
Where only body’s laid asleep.

To Yeats, as to Shelley, poetry is meant to educate, to remind its listeners of their heroic past and unite them in hope. Heroes such as Oisin and Cuchulain are archetypes of heroic resistance. In Yeats’ ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’ (1888), the chained woman whom Oisin liberates resembles Ireland in English chains, and Oisin’s ‘battles never done’ recall the never-ending Irish struggle for independence (Ellmann 1968: 18–19). Similarly nationalistic is Yeats’ ‘Cuchulain’s Fight with the Sea’ (1892), which draws on one of the most famous images in Irish legend:

Cuchulain stirred,
Stared on the horses of the sea, and heard
The cars of battle and his own name cried;
And fought with the invulnerable tide.

Like Tennyson’s Arthur, Yeats’ creation of Cuchulain was greatly influenced by the Nibelungenlied (both the medieval poetry and Wagner’s music) as a pure expression of national spirit. Yeats in ‘September 1913’ unfairly contrasted what he then regarded as the failure of Irish nationalism, its descent into pettiness, with heroes of Irish history such as Edward Fitzgerald (1763–98), Robert Emmet (1778–1803) and Wolfe Tone (1763–98), all martyrs for Irish independence. After the 1916 revolt, Yeats implicitly admitted in ‘Easter 1916’ that he was wrong about the Irish lack of spirit: ‘a terrible beauty is born’.

By the end of his life, in ‘The Statues’ (1938), Yeats was skilfully using Irish legend for contemporary needs. Echoing Blake’s ‘The Tyger’, he writes in wonder of the Irish martyrs in the 1916 uprising who had a cult of Cuchulain – their fight being equally heroic and, in the short run, futile – remembered by the Irish government with a statue of Cuchulain in the Dublin Post Office where the rebels held out for a few days against far superior British firepower:

When Pearse summoned Cuchulain to his side,
What stalked through the Post Office? What intellect,
What calculation, number, measurement, replied?
We Irish, born into that ancient sect
But thrown upon this filthy modern tide
And by its formless spawning fury wrecked,
Climb to our proper dark, that we may trace
The lineaments of a plummet-measured face.

The contradictions inherent in Yeats’ poetry made it hard for the Irish to see him in his lifetime as a true national poet. Even as he extolled the virtues of Gaelic and the peasantry, he wrote in English (indeed, in the English Romantic tradition) and lived in cities; and much of his poetry stands out less in its Irish nationalism than in its universalism. Yet, with the passage of time, it has been possible even for the Irish to accept Yeats as a master of Irish legend and representative of national identity and hopes. (Hutchinson and Aberbach 1999).

CONCLUSION

What can we learn from poets about nation-building? Poets use myth and mythical history as a shifting tapestry of national identity. They explore or invent the unique character of the nation, emphasising what seems most original and distinctive, and most likely to enable the nation to hold together and resist oppression, to endure and prosper. They recreate national heroes, give hope in victory, wisdom in failure, unity in defeat. They instil pride in national accomplishments even when the nation is defeated and powerless. They stress core ideals to give legitimacy and power to a nation, to ‘the great Idea’, as Whitman put it, ‘that is the mission of poets’ (‘By Blue Ontario’s Shore’, 11).


REFERENCES

Colley, Linda (1992), Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837, New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
Conran, Anthony (ed. and tr.) (1967), The Penguin Book of Welsh Verse, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Daiches, David (1971), Sir Walter Scott and his World, London: Thames and Hudson.
Ellmann, Richard (1968 [1954]), The Identity of Yeats, London: Faber.
Hutchinson, John and David Aberbach (1999),‘The artist as nation-builder: William Butler Yeats and Chaim Nachman Bialik’, Nations and Nationalism, 5, 4: 501–21.
Jordan, Elaine (1988), Alfred Tennyson, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Pritchard, William H. (ed.) (1972), W. B. Yeats: A Critical Anthology, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Scott, Sir Walter (1932–7), The Letters of Sir Walter Scott, H. J. C. Grierson et al. (eds), 8 vols, London: Constable.
Shaw, M. (1973), ‘Tennyson and his public’, in D. J. Palmer (ed.), Tennyson, London: G. Bell and Sons.
Sutherland, John (1995), The Life of Walter Scott: A Critical Biography, Oxford: Blackwell.

Smith on the resources nationalists can draw upon

These quotes are from Anthony D. Smith, Myths and Memories of the Nation (Oxford University Press, 1999), Chapter ten: The Resurgence of Nationalism? Myth and Memory in the Renewal of Nations.

Previously published in the British Journal of Sociology, Volume no. 47, Issue no. 4, December 1996.

ETHNO-HISTORY AND THE ‘GOLDEN AGE’

The real question raised by the present spate of ethnic nationalisms is not, why they have re-emerged now, or why they proliferate in an era of globalization, but how we can explain both the continuing power and the diversity of expression of ethnic nationalisms.

The usual account of the power and variety of nationalism is some version of modernization theory. Its basic proposition is that modernity in one of its many guises requires the formation of nations. Some regard nationalism as a response to incipient industrialization and the nation as a necessary and functional element of industrial modernity. Others seek to derive the nation and nationalism from the modern rational state and its self-reflexive capacities, or from the interests of sub-élites who use national arguments to wrest control of the state. Still others regard nationalism, and nations, as ideological constructs of intellectuals and professionals seeking to undermine ancien régimes and establish modernized states in societies committed to the ideal of progress, or to control the mass mobilization of a democratic era.

Now, in general terms it may be true that the processes of modernization, variously defined, create the conditions for the formation of national states and the spread of ‘nationalism-in-general’ and in this respect each of the above modernization perspectives undoubtedly captures an important aspect of the phenomenon of nations and nationalism. At the same time, they are incapable of explaining the paradox of variety and persistence in nationalism, of why nations and nationalisms have such staying power in the modern epoch, yet manifest such vast differences in their content and style of expression.

This is because they fail to take seriously three sets of components, or resources, that underlie all nationalisms: the uneven distribution of ethno-history, the varying impact of religious ideals, and the differential nature and location of the ‘homeland’ or ancestral territory. By exploring the nature and influence of these sets of ethnic-symbolic resources, we are able, I believe, to give a more convincing account of the power and variety of modern nationalisms.

Let me start with uneven ethno-history and a general proposition. As I intimated, any identity is based on memory conceived of as an active principle of recall of earlier states of activity and experience of that person. By analogy, collective cultural identities are based on the shared memories of experiences and activities of successive generations of a group distinguished by one or more shared cultural elements. Ethnic identity in turn may be seen as the product of shared memories of collective experiences and activities of successive generations of a group claiming a common origin and ancestry. Ethnicity in turn may be defined as the sense of collective belonging to a named community of common myths of origin and shared memories, associated with an historic homeland.

Ernest Renan had long ago, of course, recognized the significance of shared memories of great sacrifices and battle experiences for the formation of nations. But collective memories range more widely. They include recollections not only of wars and their heroes, but of religious movements and their leaders, migrations, discoveries and colonizations, foundations of cities and states, dynasties and their kings, lawcodes and their legislators, great buildings and their architects, painters, sculptors, poets, musicians and their immortal works. Above all, the idealized memories of a ‘golden age’, or golden ages, of virtue, heroism, beauty, learning, holiness, power and wealth, an era distinguished for its collective dignity and external prestige.

It is notoriously difficult to disentangle the elements of genuine shared memory from those of exaggeration, idealization and heroization which we associate with myth and legend, since there is usually more than a kernel of truth in the latter. But we can say that the more faithfully recorded, better documented and more comprehensive a golden age, the more impact it can exert over later generations and epochs of that community (or in some cases other communities). In this respect, Periclean Athens can have a greater and more varied impact for modern Greeks and others than, say, Kievan Rus can have for modern Ukrainians.

Now there is nothing fixed or immutable about a golden age or the principle of its selection. Successive generations of the community may differ as to which epoch is to be regarded as a golden age, depending on the criteria in fashion at the time. For some it will be a golden age because it boasted religious virtuosi, saints and sages; for others because great art, drama, music and philosophy flourished; for still others because the community enjoyed its greatest territorial extent and military power; or pioneered great moral and legal codes and institutions. Thus the ethnohistory of a community may boast more than one golden age from which to choose, and different sections of the latterday community may look back to quite different golden ages, as with modern Jews who look back nostalgically to the Davidic and Solomonic kingdom, or revere the era of the Talmudic sages or dream of the Golden Age of Spain with its many poets and philosophers.

The ideal of a golden age is not simply a form of escapism or consolation for present tribulations. For later generations, the standards of golden ages come to define the normative character of the evolving community. They define what is and what is not to be admired and emulated. They define what is, and what is not, distinctive about that community. They define an ideal, which is not so much to be resurrected (few nationalists want actually to return to the past, even a golden past) as to be recreated in modern terms. Even the Jacobin leaders who dreamt of emulating Brutus the Consul, Cincinnatus and Leonidas had no intention of founding an agrarian city-republic in France, only of transposing the ethos and heroism of republican Rome and Sparta to French soil.

A second function of the ideal of a golden age is the sense of regeneration which it stimulates. Just as ‘our ancestors’ created a great culture or civilization, so surely can ‘we’, runs the leitmotif. This is important, exactly because most nationalisms, viewed from inside, start out from a sense of decline, alienation and inner exile, and go on to promise renewal, reintegration and restoration to a former glorious state. The nationalist mythology into which the memory of the golden age is inserted is one of humble, if special, origins, miraculous liberation, glorious efflorescence, divisive conflict, inner decay, even exile--and then national rebirth.

A third function of the golden age is its suggestion of potential through filiation. The emphasis is always on the descendants of heroes, sages, saints and poets having within themselves, in virtue of their blood relationship, the inner resources to become like their glorious forefathers and foremothers; and hence the inherent capacity of grandsons and granddaughters and their descendants to give birth to a civilization and culture worthy of the golden age. So the community will be purified of alien accretions, and by returning to its former faith and purity will be renewed and restored ‘as in the days of old’. In this respect, the golden age reveals to the latterday community its ‘authentic’ (usually pre-industrial and rural) self and bids it rediscover and realize that self under quite different conditions.

Finally, the memory of a golden age is closely linked to a sense of collective destiny. The road that the community expects to take in each generation is inspired and shaped by its memories of former heroic ages. Their values and symbols form the basis and spur to heroic feats of communal self-sacrifice in the future, a future that can become as glorious and fulfilling as the days of old. Memories of Irish golden ages, pagan and Christian, endowed Irish men and women with a vision of a resurrected Ireland and inspired Irish nationalists to heroic self-sacrifice on its behalf. In early twentieth-century Egypt, two visions of a resurgent Egypt, the one strictly Egyptian and territorial, the other Arab and ethnic, competed for the loyalty of Egyptians; the secular, territorial vision drew on the memories of Pharaonic grandeur to underpin a separate Egyptian destiny, whereas the more religious, ethnic vision harked back to Islam and the Fatimids for the Arab destiny which it sought. In other words, the ideal of self-renewal and the vision of collective destiny are built into the collective memory of a golden age and justify all the sacrifices that citizens may be asked to make.

So much for the concept and general functions of the golden age. In concrete historical instances, golden ages, like the ethno-histories of which they form the high points, are unevenly distributed across the globe. Just as some communities can boast full, rich and well-documented ethno-histories with more than one golden age, others must be content with only shadowy memories of a collective past and its heroes. Slovaks, for example, had great difficulty disentangling their ancient past of ‘greater Moravia’ with ninth-century heroes like Svatopluk from the better-known and fuller records of the Bohemian kingdom of the Czechs. To this day, Ukrainians seek to disentangle their closely related culture yet separate past with its golden ages in Kievan Rus and the Cossack hetmanates from the much more all-embracing culture and better documented Muscovite and ‘Great Russian’ golden ages. One must add that it is not only large and powerful nations with long-independent states like Russia, China, Japan, France and Spain that can boast rich, well-documented ethno-histories with more than one golden age to emulate. Smaller, but ancient communities like the Irish, Armenians and Jews can also point to several golden ages in their long and well-recorded ethno-histories.

On the whole, those communities with rich ethno-histories possess ‘deep resources’ on which to draw, and so can sustain themselves over long periods and maintain an extended struggle for recognition or parity. Even where they lack political and military security, their successive layers of cultural resources underpin their political claims as well as their sense of common ethnicity. This is not to say that ethnic nationalisms will only emerge in communities able to boast rich ethno-histories, but simply that such communities are unlikely to disappear or be submerged and, once aroused, can continue their struggle for long periods under adverse circumstances. Communities that lack these well-documented ethnohistorical resources may well rise up in protest, as have the Moro and Eritreans. Some of them may even succeed in gaining independence after a long struggle, but whether, in the absence of such cultural resources, they will be able to sustain their new-found sense of community forged in battle, remains an open question. If they cannot create out of their prolonged struggle an ethno-history and even a golden age of heroic resistance to be recalled and emulated in times of crisis, they will not have those ‘deep’ cultural resources to fall back upon when internal conflicts and dissensions break out. In these as in other cases, history must be turned into ethnic myths and shared memories must become the basis of an ethno-heritage.

On the other hand, their very lack of rich ethno-histories relative to other better endowed neighbours stimulates these culturally peripheral and politically disprivileged communities to remedy this deficiency in a world where power stems from culture, in the same way as relative economic deprivation often spurs resentment and political emulation. Thus analysts would do well to focus on the comparative politics of uneven ethnohistory, and more especially of golden ages, if they wish to understand both the power and variety of ethnic nationalisms.

ETHNIC ELECTION

The second major set of ‘deep resources’ on which different nationalisms can draw relates to religious belief, and more particularly to myths of ethnic election.
The general proposition here concerns the relationship between popular mobilization and sanctification. In order to mobilize large numbers of people, leaders and movements need to appeal to either material and status interests or promise individual salvation, or both. For many, status interests at least are served by a promise of individual and collective salvation. Now salvation in turn requires men and women to sanctify their lives and situations through correct belief and practice on the part of each member of a community of believers, and through the periodic ritual and moral renewal of that community.

Where a population is defined through processes of sanctification as a community of shared faith or belief, such a community tends to underpin and redefine populations united by shared memories and myths of origin, and thereby impede their politicization. To memory and myth are added collective beliefs and rituals; yet these selfsame beliefs and rituals may prevent the population in question from conceiving itself in any other way than as a ‘faith community’ or acting outside the limits of traditional orthopraxy, as occurred for some time with both Arabs and Jews.

One of the most important and influential of these collective beliefs is the myth of ethnic election. This singles out the community as a ‘chosen people’ entrusted with a sacred mission to proselytize or crusade or act as standard-bearer of the true faith. The mission sanctifies the community and the world and its fulfilment brings closer the salvation of the community and the world of which it forms the epicentre.

This is the general form of election myths that we encounter among so many peoples and communities in history from the Neo-Sumerian revival under the Third Dynasty of Ur and the ancient Egyptians of the New Kingdom to medieval Catholic France and early modern Protestant America and modern Afrikanerdom. In all these cases, election myths attach redemption through sanctification to a community of shared memories and myths of origin, turning it into a chosen people entrusted with a sacred task in the world’s moral economy and thereby helping to purify and set that community apart from outsiders. Here we have a potent source of the moral exclusiveness of so many ethnies, their belief that by being entrusted with a sacred mission they stand in a position of superiority at the moral centre of the universe.

Among some communities, a stronger form of election myth has emerged. This is the idea of ‘the covenant’, the belief in a once-for-all contract between the community and its god, which requires the members of the community to fulfil certain ritual and moral obligations which define their sacred mission in return for which the deity will accord the community a special status, protection and privileges. The covenantal scheme was pioneered in ancient Israel, but it has been adopted elsewhere by such communities as the Armenians, Ulster Irish and Afrikaners. The ideal of a covenant as the source of their ethnic election has given these communities of shared memory and origin myths a durability and self-renewing capacity which forms one of the bedrocks of their contemporary political struggles.

Covenanted peoples manifest a particular intensity and persistence in their sense of ethnic election which validates their orthodoxy and sustains their communal practice through continual acts of sanctification. These in turn strengthen their belief in collective salvation through the periodic mobilization of a sacred community. In this way, the community’s shared memories and origin myths are drawn into the covenantal scheme and are reinterpreted as sacred events in the formation and mission of a holy people.

There are a number of important consequences of such myths. Ethnic election myths, and particularly covenantal schemes, confer on the communities that evolve such beliefs an extraordinary sense of rectitude and moral superiority. This contrasts starkly, and indeed often compensates for, the many hardships and tribulations endured by the ethnic elect. These myths endow the persecuted, exiled or subject community with a determination and moral fibre which enables the community (if not all its members) to withstand a harsh fate, thereby providing the people with what Herder would have regarded as a deep well-spring of energy (Kraft).

Second, myths of ethnic election offer the members of a community a chronological scheme of status reversal. The elect may be persecuted now and subjects today; but in time their sufferings will be recognized and their virtue rewarded. They will, in the end, triumph over their enemies and attain the goal of their journey in history. This is particularly vividly expressed in covenantal schemes of which the Israelite Exodus from Egypt stands as the prototype, but it also applies to peoples without a clear covenantal scheme like the Catholic Irish or the Welsh who nevertheless regard themselves as an elect community. Conversely, the triumphant elect, those communities that are regnal and dominant like the Castilian, French or Amhara, credit their high status and privilege to the fulfilment of their sacred mission and the virtue of their members.

Linked to the ideas of mission and status reversal is the broader ideal of collective destiny which draws on the concept of chosenness to chart a unique path for the elect community. Reinforced in its mission by a sense of election, the nation can look forward confidently to a unique and glorious future commensurate with its true status. This sense of a distinctive and peculiar destiny has become, in secular form, part of the rhetoric of party politicians and statesmen; but it also has important moraleboosting and unifying functions in times of crisis and danger, as in Churchill’s or de Gaulle’s speeches to the British and French during the Second World War.

Fourth, ethnic election myths and especially covenantal schemes draw a strict boundary between the members of the elect and outsiders who cannot be redeemed. It is because they have accepted the obligations of their sacred mission that they have in turn been sanctified and chosen as a community. Conversely, it is because the outsiders have rejected those obligations and that mission that they have become profane and excluded, even damned. Such a sharp boundary demarcation appears to justify the ethnic elect in programmes of self-purification through exclusion and segregation of outsiders.

Finally, ethnic election myths are demotic. The energy they tap is that of the people, the whole community and not a particular segment; similarly, it is only through the mobilization of the people, the whole community, that the sacred mission can be achieved. The mission in turn requires every member to fulfil their sacred duties and regards every member as being equally eligible to enjoy the privileges of ethnic election--something that is particularly clear in covenantal schemes which are always contracts between whole peoples and their god.

SACRED TERRITORIES

The third set of ‘deep resources’ relates to historic territories and more specifically an ‘ancestral homeland’.

In general, a specific geographical area or space becomes associated with a particular collectivity, in the eyes of its members and of those around, in so far as it provides the location and arena for, and is felt to contribute uniquely to, key moments or turning points in the past experiences of the collectivity. The mountains, rivers, lakes and forests of a particular geographical space have afforded a special place and provided the scene for historic events--battles, treaties, revelations, oaths, shrines, migrations and so on--associated with a given community, and in subsequent lore have become an indispensable part of the shared memories and mythology of that community.

For ethnies a particular geographical area has become associated with a given community either as the traditional place of origin (in the origin myth) or as the locus of its liberation, settlement and golden ages. The association is threefold: first, as the unique and indispensable setting of events and experiences that moulded the community; second, in so far as the ethnic landscape is felt to have influenced and contributed to the course of events and the efflorescence of the community; and third, and perhaps most important, as the final resting-place of our forefathers and foremothers. These shrines underline the way in which a special space has come to belong to a particular community and, reciprocally, the community has become part of a specific land and particular ethnic landscapes. So, the land becomes ‘our’ territory and the ‘eternal home’ of our ancestors, an ancestral homeland, a motif that figures prominently, along with the paeans to ethnic landscapes, in the folklore and cultural heritage of ethnic communities.

This relationship between people and land is the product over the longue duree of continual myth-making and the recitation of shared memories. Through the elaboration of folktales and legends and the performance of rituals and ceremonies, successive generations are reminded of various periods of their ethnic histories, and above all, of their golden ages.

In this way, a particular territory and specific landscapes are historicized. They become essential elements of the community’s history, and the land becomes an historic homeland.

The association is even stronger where the ethnie is also a community of believers, animated by a unifying faith and cult. In these circumstances, the ancestral and historic homeland becomes also a ‘sacred territory’. A holy people must be located in an equally sanctified land, a land conferred by the deity on a sanctified people as a reward for correct belief and conduct in the execution of their sacred mission. The terms of the covenant between the community and its god requires a sacred arena set aside for the fulfilment of the spiritual mission, a ‘promised land’ When the community is sundered from it, it is said to be in a state of spiritual exile; spiritual redemption therefore requires its restoration to the ‘promised land’.

Interestingly enough, the sanctification of the land came later, as a result of the community’s sense of election, of being set apart from its neighbours in the pursuit of the sacred mission with which God had entrusted the people. Thus the land of Canaan, though it figured prominently in the early formulations of the Covenant between God and Abraham as a reward for its fulfilment, did not become sacred in the eyes of the ancient Israelites and Jews till the late eighth century B.C., although it was long revered as the site of burial of the patriarchs and other holy figures.

There is an alternative scenario. Here the elect must search for, and discover, a promised land, a territory that a community of believers will sanctify through the performance of moral and ritual actions in building an ideal ethnic and civic community. It is the believer-pioneers themselves who, in creating their New Jerusalem whether on the African veldt or the American prairie, will realize the promise of a land whose features are integral to the utopia which they hope to build in fulfilment of their sacred mission.

In both cases, the historic homeland becomes sacred partly through the same processes of myth-making and shared remembering as occurs in all ethnic communities, but also through the special heroic acts of moral and ritual conduct of a community of believers and its religious heroes. It is the memory of their example in moments of revelation and crisis that creates a special bond of holiness between the community and its homeland, as well as the piety and awe which surrounds the tombs of prophets, poets and holy men and the sepulchres of righteous kings and warriors, laid to rest in the land of their people.

The ancestral land also links memory to destiny. For it is in the reborn land, the homeland which is renewed, that national regeneration takes place. The sacred land of our ancestors is also the promised land of our descendants and posterity. It is only on our ‘native soil’ that we can realize ourselves, that the nation can become truly free and authentic again. Hence the liberation of the land from oppressors is not simply a political or economic necessity; it is demanded by a unique history that requires fulfilment in a glorious destiny through the rebirth of a community on its own terrain.

The ‘deep resource’ which an ancestral, even a sacred, homeland offers, is not isolated from the other deep resources. Usually the three sets of resources are combined. Shared memories of golden ages are always associated with attachments to ancestral homelands, even where these are not sacred territories; and myths of ethnic election require both ancestral homelands for their execution, and usually a standard or model of inspiration for future generations, the memory of a golden age in which the sacred mission was heroically fulfilled. Hence the tendency for the three sets of deep resources--ancestral homelands, golden ages and myths of ethnic electionto combine and recombine in varying forms and degrees, thereby endowing many ethnies with great resilience and staying power down the ages.

Geoffrey Ashe on the power of Myth for renewal

Geoffrey Ashe, Mythology of the British Isles (Methuen Publishing Ltd., 2002)


Epilogue [pp. 305-307]

William Blake in his conception of the giant Albion, ranged far beyond accepted legend. By making this island the source of the primeval world-order, he was able to present the giant as a symbol of humanity, Primordial Man. Yet he did not turn him into a pure abstraction. He kept in touch with the mythologies he transcended, and, in particular, with a leading figure in the mythology of Britain. He wrote:


The giant Albion, was Patriarch of the Atlantic; he is the Atlas of the Greeks, one of those the Greeks called Titans. The stories of Arthur are the acts of Albion, applied to a Prince of the fifth century.


That last sentence has an air of profundity, but what does it mean? Blake is referring to several things, but pre-eminently to an aspect of Arthur that we have glimpsed more than once. A major reason for his recurrent spell, in a variety of guises, has been his golden-age aura. Other legends express the same dream, but the Arthurian golden age has an extra dimension. The king is gone … but he is not gone for ever. He is asleep in his cave, or immortal in his magical island; he will return, and presumably bring the golden age back.


That Blake saw Arthur in this light is manifest from what he does with his Albion, chiefly in the prophetic book Jerusalem. He depicts the symbolic giant’s career in such a way that Arthur’s departure-and-return story becomes a reflection of it. Wise and glorious in his primary state, Albion goes spiritually astray and sinks into a deathlike sleep, in which he lingers for aeons. This is externalised in the ills that beset humanity through loss of vision: the apostasy of the sages, and their decline into historical Druidism, prototype of oppressive religion; war, division, perverted science, and, in Blake’s time, the factory system and the iniquities of wealth. But at last light breaks in, Albion awakens, humanity is reintegrated, the world is reborn in love and forgiveness.


Even apart from Blake, Arthur himself, in this aspect, is a distinctive contribution to world mythology. There is nobody else quite like him - no human hero, at least. Other legendary sleepers, who may or may not wake up, are very probably imitations of him. And in any case they do not carry his golden-age quality. What Arthur stands for is the idea of a long-lost glory or promise, plus a belief (as may be repeated here) that it is not truly lost; that it can be reinstated for a fresh start, with intervening corruption swept away. Belief of that kind is a real and potent motive force which is seldom given due weight as a factor in history. It has inspired, or helped to inspire, several of the most radical movements for change.


Thus, the sixteenth-century Christian reformers, both Catholic and Protestant, held that the Church once had its golden age of apostolic purity. Cumulative abuses had corrupted it, but the Reformation, however conceived, would abolish them and recapture the pristine rightness. Or again, Rousseau gave the French Revolution a driving mystique by his doctrine of a virtuous, long-ago natural society ruined by bad institutions, but capable of being restored by good ones. Engels and Lenin invigorated Marxism by adding what was not at first part of it, a classless idyll of ‘primitive communism’ at the dawn of history, which the Revolution could restore on a higher level by ending the long succession of class tyrannies. In India, under British rule, nationalists who favoured westernised progress made no headway with the masses. The leader who did rouse them was Mahatma Gandhi, who condemned westernisation and evoked a wiser pre-conquest India of village communes and handicrafts, and the need to re-create it.


More recently the same motif has appeared again in the work of some women prehistorians, drawing on the poetic insights of Robert Graves, but also on the work of so accomplished an archaeologist as Marija Gimbutas. Their view was foreshadowed some time ago by the ‘Goddess’ interpretation of the megaliths. Once, they claim, there was a ‘matristic’, Goddess-oriented epoch when both sexes had their proper status, and society had a basic balance and rightness. This was brought to an end by the advent of a patriarchal, male-dominated age of gods. Suitable enlightenment through an informed women’s movement can bring the lost rightness back.


These phenomena, and others like them, have nothing explicit to do with Arthur, and many of those concerned would reject such an association. The point, however, is that Britain has evolved a myth embodying a way of looking at things which has deep roots in human nature. Some might speak of an archetype. It may be reasonable, it may be misguided. It certainly calls into question the humanistic idea of progress. Yet it remains a fact, recurrent in history. Why this should be so, is a matter for debate. Perhaps we should see it as an affirmation of life against death, against a sense of things-closing-in, which is all too frequent and natural. The glory did exist once; therefore it is not a mere phantasm, an impossibility; it can exist again. To have created a myth expressing that affirmation, however irrelevant its literary trappings may seem, is a unique achievement for Britain’s story-tellers. Was it an accident? Or did it grow, as Blake implies, out of the whole character and life-span of Albion? Certainly, when he traced that life-span in the same terms, with an apocalypse of awakening at the last, he was creating a myth himself, in full harmony with the materials that came to his hand.

Geoffrey Ashe: The Saints and the Kings

Geoffrey Ashe, Mythology of the British Isles (Methuen Publishing Ltd., 2002)


The English Inheritance: The Saints and the Kings [pp. 299-303]

Gregory, a Roman monastic founder, afterwards pope, was walking one day through the city’s slave market. He noticed some fair-haired, blue-eyed lads and asked what country they had come from. They were heathen Angles from Deira, the southerly portion of Northumbria. ‘Not Angles but angels,’ Gregory commented, ‘if they had the Faith.’ He planned a mission and even set out himself, but was prevented, first by a message from the Pope saying he was needed in Rome, later by his own election to the papacy.


As pope he dispatched a mission led by another monk, Augustine, which arrived in the island in 597. Augustine made his first contact with King Aethelbert of Kent, at that time Bretwalda. Aethelbert’s queen, Bertha, a Frankish Christian princess, had ensured that he would be granted a hearing. Aethelbert received the clergy in the open, because he feared that if he met them indoors they could use magic against him. With growing trust, however, the king housed them at Canterbury and finally adopted the new religion. While he made no attempt to impose it on his Kentish subjects, they gradually conformed. Augustine founded a Canterbury bishopric which was to become the Church’s headquarters in England. Progress, however, was slow and slight. Aethelbert arranged a conference with the Welsh bishops, but they had little interest in evangelising the old enemy, and Augustine’s attitude estranged them. They declined to cooperate in expanding his mission. Overtures to other kings by his aides and successors established only limited bridgeheads.


Many suppose that St Augustine converted England. Many even suppose that there were no Christians in this island before 597. The latter belief is manifestly false, and the former, though not manifestly so, is false none the less. Augustine’s only solid success was in Kent, and England’s Christianisation came from several sources, over nearly a hundred years.


The most promising extension from Kent, which happened in 625, was almost totally abortive. A priest from Canterbury, Paulinus, travelled north as chaplain to Aethelbert’s daughter, who was marrying the Northumbrian king Edwin, the fifth Bretwalda. After much wavering, Edwin summoned a council to debate a change in religion. He was persuaded when a councillor compared human life to the flight of a sparrow through firelight in a hall from darkness into darkness again - and urged the value of a doctrine that shone light into the obscurity before and after. But Edwin and his nobles had not been Christian very long when a Welsh invasion threw the north into anarchy. Edwin fell in battle, the queen and Paulinus fled, and hardly any of the neophyte Christians remained. The northern Angles’ true conversion was due to Celtic monks from Columba’s community, led by the humble and endearing St Aidan. They came at the invitation of King Oswald, who had taken refuge in Iona during the invasion, become a Christian there on the Celtic model, and returned to clear out the Welsh.


Oswald reigned at Bamburgh, formerly Din Guayrdi, perhaps the home of Lancelot. Once, when he and Aidan were at dinner, the king’s almoner reported that a number of his poor subjects were outside. Oswald handed the almoner a silver dish and told him to give them the food on it, and break up the dish itself so that each could have a fragment of silver. Aidan touched the king’s right hand and exclaimed, ‘May this hand never perish!’ and it never did; after his death it was enshrined in a silver casket and remained uncorrupted. Oswald died fighting Welsh and heathen Mercians in Shropshire, where Oswestry, Oswald’s Tree, commemorates a cross he set up. Miracles were worked by earth from the spot where he fell, and pilgrims carried so much away that they scooped out a pit. Oswald was revered as a saint in many places. He is the celestial patron of Zug in Switzerland.


The differences between Romans and Celts, notably over the fixing of Easter, came to a head in 663 at the Synod of Whitby. This was held at a religious community of Celtic type, with inmates of both sexes under an abbess, St Hilda. Oswald’s brother Oswy, who had followed him as king of Northumbria, presided. Wilfrid, abbot of Ripon and a strong advocate of Roman ways, appealed to the practice of the Church everywhere else, in conformity with the Pope, St Peter’s successor. As he put it, ‘The only people stupid enough to disagree are these Scots and their obstinate adherents the Picts and Britons, who inhabit only a portion of these two islands in the remote ocean.’ Colman, for the Celts, cited St Columba and others.


Arguments and precedents were tossed back and forth, till Wilfrid quoted Christ’s words to Peter, appointing him as the gatekeeper of heaven. Oswy turned to Colman: ‘Is it true that Our Lord said this to Peter?’ Colman acknowledged that it was. Oswy persisted: ‘Did he say anything like that to Columba?’ ‘No.’ ‘Then,’ said Oswy, with a smile of relief at having found a way to close the dispute, ‘I must rule in favour of Peter, or he may not let me in.’ So Rome won. Peripheral rumblings and mutterings lingered on, but the Church in England was henceforth united in its administration and practice, and governed from Canterbury.


Meanwhile, the slowly advancing West Saxons, themselves Christianised, had reached Glastonbury. The British monastery passed peaceably into their hands. It was the first institution in which the old and new people came together, with Christian continuity from ‘Arthurian’ times. Kings of Wessex made it a temple of reconciliation. After a while it attracted Irish scholars. The way was prepared for that fusion of traditions which gave the medieval Abbey its role in the formation of Arthurian legend.


Glastonbury’s first major patron was King Ine, a successor of Cerdic. In the ninth century it was a successor of Ine, Alfred the Great, who set England on course towards political unity, for which religious unity had laid the foundation. Alfred’s name, ‘Elf-rede’, hints at inspiration from good fairies. When he was crowned in Wessex, the other Anglo-Saxon kingdoms had been overrun by marauding Danes, and little remained of Wessex itself. It was told in later days how Danish victories reduced Alfred to a wandering resistance leader; how he refused to give up; how he spied out the camp of the Danish chief Guthrum disguised as a minstrel; how he took refuge in Athelney in the Somerset marshlands near Glastonbury; how, when deep in thought, he let a cottager’s fire burn some cakes which she had set him to watch, not knowing who he was; how the Virgin Mary appeared to him with words of encouragement; how he raised a final army, routed Guthrum at Ethandune, and forced him to retreat; how he commemorated the struggle by having a White Horse cut, or even two; how he recovered southern England and founded a navy. Let it be added that because he kept Wessex in being when the rest of the kingdoms were effaced from the map, his heirs were able to extend their domain with no rivals, and to become sovereigns of a united England, destined, for better or worse, to draw the Welsh and Scots into a united Britain.


****


What may be called the ‘St Augustine delusion’ is the last of the modern myths requiring notice, and one of the stubbornest. In its crude form it really does assert that there were no Christians in Britain till 597, and then Augustine arrived, and converted all of the population that mattered. The crudity is sometimes toned down, but much of the delusion persists. An ironic feature is its stark contradiction of the other myth about Britain’s early Christianity, that a separate and admirable Celtic Church flourished over most of the British Isles, till intrusive ‘Romans’, who had never had any jurisdiction before, enslaved and perverted it.


Neither account is anywhere near to being true. Augustine’s Kent was at one pole of the conversion process, Aidan’s Northumbria at the other, and the rest of the kingdoms were subjected to various influences over a long period, some from Kent itself and the continent, some from the north, some from Ireland. The Historia Brittonum claims that despite the Welsh bishops’ holding back, a Cymric northerner named Rhun, a son of Urien, played a leading role in the first Northumbrian mission and officiated in some way at the baptism of Edwin.


Anglo-Celtic Christianity had much to be said of it, and the uniformity following Whitby brought both gain and loss. Thanks largely to the redoubtable Wilfrid, rapid advances were made in art and architecture. The appointment in 669 of a learned Greek, Theodore of Tarsus, as Archbishop of Canterbury, helped to give the Church a firm structure and intellectual force. In the early eighth century, Bede of Jarrow was easily the foremost scholar in Europe. But the freer, more imaginative Celtic spirit lost ground. The prevalence of the continental outlook, with its fierce rejection of the old gods and all that went with them, may be part of the reason why the Anglo-Saxons fell so far short of Celtic achievement in the creation of mythology.


Alfred the Great was genuinely extraordinary. Besides his dogged resistance to the Danes, and final triumph at Ethandune (probably Edington near Westbury, where the horse is), he gave the crown of the West Saxons a new kind of lustre, and impressed himself on history as a personality. When at peace, he lived in a modest-sized manor at Cheddar, not only hawking and hunting but acquiring enough expertise in both pursuits to give advice to his falconers and kennelmen. He collected Anglo-Saxon poems and songs, welcomed travellers, and listened to their reports of distant countries. To promote his subjects’ education he founded a school for the sons of nobles (sending his own to it) and brought foreign scholars to his court, including a Welshman, Asser, who became his biographer. Part of his programme was to inform the people about their own past, and to this end he sponsored a compilation of traditions which was the first version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. He learned Latin, and presided over the translation of important books into ‘the language which we can all understand’ - an obvious thing to do, yet nobody had done it, and it was many years before anything comparable was done abroad.


He issued a code of laws drawn from the best of Kent and Mercia, as well as Wessex. Those he added himself were humane, limiting the custom of blood-feud, for instance. It will be remembered that according to Geoffrey of Monmouth, he copied laws from the ancient Britons; not so, but proof of the prestige which his code still possessed in Geoffrey’s time. That had been shown already by its adoption or imitation in other parts of England and Wales. To plan his work he invented a kind of clock, a graduated candle inside a transparent casing, which admitted air but kept out draughts so that the candle burned at a regular rate.


Several Welsh princes placed themselves under Alfred’s protection or became allies. Thanks to the Danes’ extinction of the other kingdoms, and their own waning, his son and daughter established their rule in Mercia, and his grandson Athelstan took over Northumbria. Athelstan routed a coalition of Scots, Irish and Norse, and was uncontested sovereign of the whole of England.


Alfred deserved the honour of a national epic, yet no one composed it. As a hero of legend Arthur leaves him so far behind that there is no comparison. The few Alfred legends, such as the anecdote of the cakes - probably bannocks - and his acceptance of the housewife’s rebuke, suggest that he was recalled as not only ‘great’, but human, good-natured and free from pride. Still, he had to wait a long time for a poetic celebration with any value. It came at last in G. K Chesterton’s Ballad of the White Horse, which conserves popular fiction about the Uffington horse being Alfred’s, by acutely postulating a pre-Alfred original which he restored. The Ballad is a perceptive and colourful mini-epic, with passages as fine as any poetry in English inspired by Arthur. Alfred’s companions in the poem rightly include representatives of Celtic and Roman traditions as well as Anglo-Saxon.

Blake uploaded

I have uploaded a 120KB PDF file of Kathleen Raine’s essay ‘William Blake’ to ifile and scribd. Download links here:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/18755339/William-Blake-by-Kathleen-Raine

http://ifile.it/2kpvufz

Geoffrey Ashe: Beowulf

Geoffrey Ashe, Mythology of the British Isles (Methuen Publishing Ltd., 2002)


The English Inheritance: Beowulf [pp.295-298]

Like the Scots, the Anglo-Saxons had their own minstrelsy. But with them, too, the first hero of legend in the new lands came from the legacy of the old. And he was not even one of themselves.


Beowulf is the only long Anglo-Saxon poem drawing its inspiration from pre-Christian antiquity. Its setting is in Denmark and thereabouts. In unrhymed alliterative verse, it begins by telling how the Danish king Hrothgar built a splendid hall. He named it Heorot. But when he had assembled his court in it, a frightful, half-human monster called Grendel started a series of raids, killing and eating Danish noblemen. Grendel lived in a cave under a lake. Wandering over the fens, he had seen Heorot and conceived a hatred for its lights, music and revels. The raids were his response, and he carried them out with impunity, because a devilish spell made him impervious to weapons.


Over a stretch of years he invaded Heorot many times, always after dark, and the Danes became afraid to go there except in daylight. At last Beowulf, a nephew of King Hygelac of the Geats, arrived by sea with fourteen companions and offered his help. Tall and handsome, a swimmer of unrivalled prowess, he had already dealt with water-monsters and believed he could defeat Grendel by strength alone. Hrothgar gave him leave to attempt it. That night the Geats lay down in the hall and waited. Grendel entered, slew one of them so quickly that Beowulf could not stop him, and devoured the corpse. Then he turned to Beowulf. The prince seized him in a wrestling grip. A fearful struggle ensued. The other Geats could do nothing to aid their leader, because their swords were useless against the demon. Eventually, Grendel wrenched himself free, leaving his arm in Beowulf’s grasp. He staggered back to the pool and reached his cave, but the wound was mortal.


The Geats hung the severed arm from the roof as a trophy. When the Danes saw it they rejoiced. The king and queen rewarded Beowulf’s party with many gifts. No one, however, had reckoned with a second monster, Grendel’s mother, who also dwelt under the lake and now came out to avenge her son. She carried off and killed one of Hrothgar’s most valued thanes. Hrothgar asked for Beowulf’s further help, and rode with him along the water-hag’s tracks, with a number of Danes and Geats following. One of the Danes lent Beowulf a sword called Hrunting.


The lake was a sinister place, with serpents writhing in it, and the head of the recent Danish victim lying on its rocky bank. Beowulf dived in, going down and down. Suddenly Grendel’s mother fastened her claws on him and dragged him into the cave, a sort of huge bubble enclosed by rock and lit by a fire. He soon found that the sword Hrunting made no impression on her. He attempted a wrestling hold as he had with her son, but stumbled and fell, and she broke free and attacked him with a knife. His chain mail saved him. Springing to his feet again, he caught sight of another sword, a gigantic one, taken in some earlier combat. Against this weapon the ogress had no defence, and he snatched it and cut her head off. Exploring the cavern in the firelight, he found the corpse of Grendel and cut the head off that too, to take back to Hrothgar. The blade of the sword melted in the venomous blood and he returned with the hilt only.


Most of the group at the lakeside had despaired of seeing him again, but he surfaced at last. Amid renewed Danish acclaim he took his leave and went home. Time passed. Beowulf became king of the Geats, and reigned prosperously for half a century. When he was not far short of a hundred years old he perished with glory, defending his people against another monster. This was a winged dragon that lived in the chamber under a burial-mould, guarding treasure stowed there by the last of the family possessing it. A runaway serving-man had crept into the chamber while the dragon lay sleeping and stolen a cup. The dragon began making forays and devastating the country with its fiery breath.


Guided by the thief, Beowulf traced it to its lair and approached behind a specially made iron shield. He had eleven warriors with him. When the dragon emerged, however, they all fled except for a youth, Wiglaf. With his aid the old king managed to kill the beast, but he was fatally wounded, and, having no son to succeed him, presented Wiglaf with his own armour and weapons and a gold necklace. Wiglaf brought some of the treasure out of the mound, and Beowulf1ooked at it, but died a moment later. The young man decided that it had been won at too high a price and no one deserved to have it. When the cowards returned he upbraided them scathingly. Under his direction the king’s body was laid on a funeral pyre and cremated, and the treasure was buried with his ashes under a tumulus called Beowulf’s Barrow, visible from far out to sea. So ends the tale.


Unlike Finn [MacCool], Beowulf was never acclimatised in Britain. A transfer of his Grendel exploit to Hartlepool, in County Durham, did not find favour.


Beowulf survives in a manuscript of about 1000 AD. Its date of composition is a matter of controversy. The Anglo-Saxon poet, like the Welsh author of the Pryderi tales, shows a personal Christianity in various touches and asides. He cites Genesis and even makes out that Grendel was descended from Cain. But his subject is pagan, and if his descriptions of artefacts are compared with items at Sutton Hoo and elsewhere, it is clear that knowledge of pre-Christian craftsmanship, as of the early seventh century, has gone into the poem’s making. King Hygelac can be dated after a fashion and puts the action earlier still. He is one among a number of named persons who occur in other contexts, though Beowulf himself does not. They include (not as a contemporary) a certain Hengest, possibly the Hengist with whom Vortigern made his fatal deal. Scandinavian parallels confirm the authenticity of the background. It is by no means certain, however, who the Geats are. They are generally located in southern Sweden, but they are not Swedes.


Heorot means ‘stag’. The derived English word is ‘hart’. Its explanation here may lie in royal symbolism. The abortive Hartlepool transfer was prompted by the first syllable of the place-name itself, basically heorot, with an allusion to stages on the headland.


So far as documentary evidence goes, Beowulf stands alone. The Anglo-Saxons in Britain never developed a real mythology. When the eighth-century poet Cynewulf composed narratives he turned to Christian themes, such as St Helen and the True Cross. Even such borrowing was restricted in scope. No Anglo-Saxon took the slightest notice of Arthur or anyone else in Welsh tradition. It was not till after the Normans turned Anglo-Saxondom into a different realm, in a new relation to the continent, that the island’s heritage began flowing together in England.


The Anglo-Saxons did make a contribution to Arthurian folklore. This was the Wild Hunt. Originally a gallop among the clouds by Woden and his Nordic companions, it became, in Britain, a more elaborate affair. Among the new huntsmen were Gwyn ap Nudd with his white, red-eared hounds, and Arthur himself in some spectral guise. The Wild Hunt spread to the continent as the Chasse Artu. The huntsmen summoned ghosts of the dead and the souls of unbaptised infants. Their visitations, especially with hounds (Gwyn’s or others), could be portentous of doom.


While the substance of Arthur’s literary legend owed the Anglo-Saxons nothing, several of the poets who enlarged it in English did adopt the alliterative verse-form, as in Beowulf. Though modified, this is the essential metre of three masterpieces: Layamon’s Brut, his epic rehandling of Geoffrey of Monmouth; the marvellous fairy tale, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; and a pre-Malory Morte Arthure. England’s annexation of the Celtic hero did not, after all, involve a total setting-aside of ancestral Englishness. That was still a presence in format if not in matter. Moreover it was Malory, not any French or German romancer, who gave the legend a definitive form and handed it on to future generations.

Geoffrey Ashe: Woden’s Brood

Geoffrey Ashe, Mythology of the British Isles (Methuen Publishing Ltd., 2002)


The English Inheritance: Woden’s Brood [pp.291-293]

As British resistance weakened, the chiefs of Anglo-Saxondom consolidated their hold and pressed forward. Seven regional kingdoms took shape, so that incipient England has been spoken of as a Heptarchy. Nearest the continent was Kent, founded by Hengist under Vortigern’s auspices, a realm of Saxons and Jutes. Westward from it was Sussex, and west of that was Wessex. North-east of London was Essex. Those three names denoted the domains of the South Saxons, West Saxons and East Saxons. Beyond Essex was the kingdom of the East Angles. In the midlands was Mercia, and all the Anglian north was Northumbria.


Since the first rulers were heathen, they could claim loftier antecedents than their British counterparts, who, being Christian, could no longer say that their reputed ancestors were gods, even when they were. Saxon royal pedigrees, with a single exception, were traced to the head god Woden, whom Scandinavians knew as Odin. The exception was the East Saxon dynasty, and that was descended from another God, Seaxnot. Woden gave his name to Wednesday, and to several places where his worshippers settled before their Christianisation, such as Wednesbury and Wednesfield. A famous British earthwork is called the Wansdyke, Woden’s Ditch, because, when the Saxons reached it, they believed it to be superhuman.


Folk-memory did not reach far back. The royal pedigrees had few generations, and put Woden himself in the third or fourth century AD, with almost no history for the years between. However, while the kingdoms’ creators lacked a cohesive tradition or common purpose, they recognised a unity in the Roman-formed country they had come to, and expressed this in a title. Whichever Anglo-Saxon king was respected as paramount was the Bretwalda, the Britain-ruler. That distinction passed from kingdom to kingdom - from the South Saxon ruler to the West Saxon, from him to the king of Kent, from Kent to East Anglia, and then to Northumbria and Mercia and finally to Wessex again. At first the Bretwaldaship was hardly more than honorary, but with the passage of time it became a focus of power. Wessex, when it emerged as supreme, made England politically one. Present royalty is descended from the West Saxon house, and thus from its founder, whose name was Cerdic.


****


On the face of it, Woden in the genealogies is an ancestor-deity, as the Welsh Beli originally was. Yet they make him so recent that a real person may be involved, perhaps a patriarchal chief named after the God, like Brennus. All these kings claimed divine descent to assert a god-given right to whatever they had acquired in Britain. Most of the founders had been self-made, not the heirs of kings before the migration.Only the Mercian dynasty had an ancestor, Icel, who can be traced on the continent as a person of authority in the fifth century.


The Heptarchy is an approximation. Smaller kingdoms came into being and disappeared, taken over or merged with others. While there is no evidence anywhere for a mass genocide of Britons, the ethnic mix varied. Kent was more solidly ‘English’ than most areas. Northumbria, at the other extreme, was created by dominance of the new stock over a population not vastly altered. Wessex absorbed many Britons as it expanded, and gave them a recognised status in its laws, though not an equal one. But whatever the differences, the Anglo-Saxons’ ascendancy was a constant. Their language became the norm everywhere - Cornwall was the only part of England where another vernacular survived - and it evolved into English with very little assimilation of British words, though the old language persisted in geographical names, notably the names of rivers.


The Bretwaldaship, an unusual institution, had a touch of mystique. Its movement from one holder to another depended for many years on consent rather than force. The third Bretwalda, Aethelbert of Kent, was by no means the strongest of the kings. His contemporary Aethelfrith of Northumbria was a major conqueror, yet was never Bretwalda. This may have been because the Bretwaldaship did not at first extend past the Humber, but an implication remains of some sort of agreement, some hazy notion of proprieties and spheres of influence: Aethelfrith could not break into the system. Aethelbert’s Bretwaldaship may have been due to his reigning over the most civilised part of the country, with continental contacts lending prestige. The next Bretwalda was Raedwald of East Anglia, and in his case the wealth and foreign connections of his court, spectacularly revealed by the Sutton Hoo ship-burial, may have been decisive. The point is that power alone was not.


After Raedwald, however, the Bretwaldaship changed. Supremacy was confined to the three largest kingdoms, first Northumbria, then Mercia, then Wessex. The Bretwalda became more of an overlord, and the lesser kingdoms were absorbed. The final triumph of Wessex, and the descent of its dynastic title right through to the House of Windsor, give that dynasty’s origin a special interest. Its beginning was on Southampton Water, where the founder Cerdic is said to have planted himself late in the fifth century. His settlers and their immediate heirs, though attested archaeologically, seem to have been few. However, they pushed north and asserted control over larger Saxon bodies, forming a kingdom that grew swiftly from the 560s onward.


The early West Saxon annals are most confused, and almost nothing is known of Cerdic himself. Some writers have made him an opponent of Arthur, and involved him in the battle of Badon. This is fancy. But there is one intriguing fact, which no Saxon chronicler or genealogist would have invented. His name is not Saxon but British, and several Britons are on record who bore it. While he is given a Woden pedigree as a matter of course, the name hints at a family connection with Britons. An early term for the West Saxons was ‘Gewisse’, which meant ‘allies’ or ‘confederates’, but was taken to mean ‘Gewis’s people’; Cerdic therefore has a Gewis in his pedigree. Geoffrey of Monmouth, however, transfers the word to Wales and says Vortigern was the ruler of the Gewissei. He does not mention Cerdic, yet there are indications, as we have seen, that in using this word he is trying to handle a tradition about a title Vortigern held, and it may now appear that it was supposed to have passed from him to the West Saxon dynasty, perhaps through an unmentioned offspring of his Saxon marriage.


Quite seriously, Cerdic could have been a noble of mixed blood, with a foot in both camps. He might have recruited a following in Gaul. Emigrant Britons on the lower Loire were in contact with more-or-less subdued Saxon settlers. Cerdic, let us say, assembled a combined British-Saxon band in that area, and returned to Britain to carve out a domain based on his British status. Tiny at first, it grew into Wessex, and eventually into England and the United Kingdom. Modern royalty may be descended not only from the West Saxon sovereigns but, farther back, from Britons of the ‘Arthurian’ world.

Kathleen Raine on William Blake

This essay was published in book form with the title ‘William Blake’ under the auspices of the British Council, by Longmans, Green & Co., London, in 1951.

William Blake

by Kathleen Raine

When Alexander Gilchrist published, in 1863, thirty-six years after the death of that great man, his Life of William Blake, he found it necessary to justify himself, in the very first paragraph, for writing of a painter and poet ignored by biographical dictionaries, and passed over in silence by critics of poetry and painting alike. Gilchrist, in quoting the opinions of Fuseli and Flaxman that ‘the time would come when the finest of Blake’s designs would be as much sought after and treasured . . . as those of Michael Angelo now’ was exposing the critical reputations of these two distinguished artists to a grave risk -- a risk, as it happens, that they have triumphantly survived; for during the first half of this century, Blake’s reputation both as poet and painter has so risen, that it is doubtful whether the discovery of a new drawing by Michaelangelo could have caused more widespread delight, than the discovery, in 1949, of a new Blake painting, among the lumber of an English country house in Devonshire. (Many of Blake’s finest paintings have lain as lumber for a hundred years, and many are irretrievably lost.) The name of Michaelangelo, indeed, seems to recur in connexion with Blake in an odd way; for Blake himself once described a mystical diagram by Jacob Boehme as equal to Michaelangelo, the painter he himself chose as his measure of supreme greatness; and if to-day the name of William Blake stands with those of Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton among English poets; and occupies a place altogether unique among English painters, it remains as difficult to explain why this should be so, as why Boehme’s diagram should be as great as Michaelangelo. Blake, as a painter, is clearly no more the equal of the depictor of Adam, than as a master of language, he can be compared with Chaucer or Milton, still less with Shakespeare; and yet, all these strange comparisons remain just. The genius of William Blake remains one of the most remarkable and potent that England has ever produced. One might go so far as to say that Blake is one of the half-dozen greatest men of genius of the modern world. But, if one were asked to point to one single example of his work that could be compared to the paintings in the Sistine Chapel, or to King Lear, one could scarcely name the Job engravings, exquisite as these are, or the Songs of Innocence and Experience, trifles, fragile as bubbles on a running stream, that flash off visionary wisdom as radium gives off electrons. It is, in some indescribable way, the total phenomenon of William Blake, the vision behind the poems, the engravings, the aphorisms and the life of that obscure and saintly man, that somehow conveys a whole imaginative world whose dimensions seem almost boundless. It is a question of human stature; Blake was one of those spiritual presences that are felt in the world, let them immure themselves within Carmelite walls, hide themselves in beggar’s rags, or leave behind them, like the creator of the Book of Job, not even a name.

William Blake was born on 28 November 1757, the second son of a respectable hosier in Broad Street. A Londoner of Londoners, he spent his childhood in the very heart of the city where, but for two or three years spent in the country, he lived his entire life. From his boyhood, he knew the pulse of the great city that he called ‘a human awful wonder of God’. He lived the greater part of his life in or near Soho. Blake’s poor rooms, once described by Samuel Palmer as ‘more attractive than the abode of princes’, were in Fountain Court, an alley between the Strand and the river, near the Coal Hole Tavern, that still remains; Fountain Court itself has been long since demolished.

Blake lived and died close to the beating heart of London. He loved to be near the river, at Lambeth, or Battersea, or the Strand. Friendship took him out as far as Hampstead, where, as an old man, he used to visit Linnell the painter, to be met by the Linnell children, or seen back to the coach by them, through the country lanes, by the light of a hurricane lamp; but even at Hampstead he felt himself on alien ground, so far from the Thames, that great artery of London, visible manifestation of the River of Life that so often appears in his poems and in his designs.

London was to Blake both home and school, both Pandemonium and Celestial City. Golgonooza, the ‘spiritual fourfold London’ is the theme and the setting of his prophetic visions of the spiritual destiny of ‘the Giant Albion’, the English race. The blood of human suffering ran down its walls; and heaven was so near at hand that the old visionary once touched it, so he said, with his walking-stick. Blake knew every pulsation of the great heart of the city, the vital centre of England -- England in the years of her still growing power, and the years of the more terrible growing power of the machine, whose cancer was to fasten so fatally upon the body and soul of the Giant Albion as the nineteenth century advanced.

To those who know London to-day, it is hard to realize that a London boy might have found green fields, elm-trees, lanes and footpaths and ponds within walking distance of Soho; the great cancerous proliferation of bricks and mortar that extends now for so many miles round a city, many of whose features remain much as Blake knew them, has utterly obliterated the trees and cornfields of Peckham Rye, where, as a young boy, Blake saw angels walking among the harvesters. Dulwich Village, Camberwell, Newington Butts, Sydenham, and Blackheath, to Croydon and beyond, rural haunts of Blake’s early youth, have been submerged in Greater London; Battersea, where he courted his wife, the illiterate daughter of a market-gardener, is a densely populated working-class district; only the church, where William Blake was married to one of the exemplary wives of literary history, still stands, as it did then, on a little muddy promontory on the south bank of the river. Looking upstream from Battersea Church you see an industrial landscape, across the silver or sombre river, on which the traditional swans still float, among tugs and barges, or paddle in the mud of the Battersea or Chelsea banks; but in the church itself, there remains a window on which is painted a lamb, the work of the vicar who married William and Catherine Blake -- a piece of symbolic coincidence significant enough for those familiar with the depth of meaning that Blake attached to the symbol of the Lamb of God.

It is often those who live between town and country, or for whom country scenes are a memory of childhood, a symbol of the lost Eden, who have the keenest and most poignant sense of pastoral beauty. It was after leaving for the first time his lakes and mountains that Wordsworth realized the intensity of his relationship with them; D. H. Lawrence, living in an industrial town, but on the fringe of the country, wrote of bluebell-woods, lapwings, and hayfields with an intensity of sensation never surpassed. Gerard Manley Hopkins had almost, so it seems, to banish himself from the natural world in order to write about it with the passion of a lover separated for ever from his beloved. And so it is that Blake’s pastoral world, of the Songs of Innocence, The Book of Thel, the woodcuts illustrating Thornton’s translation of Virgil Pastorals, has the double intensity of the natural world, seen and known and loved in every detail, and of a Lost Paradise, radiant in the golden visionary distance of memory in which Traherne saw his fields of orient and immortal wheat, and Wordsworth the tree loved in boyhood. Blake, from his very childhood, knew two worlds, city and country: the innocence of green fields, and the experience of industrial revolution; a pastoral heaven, and a hell of ‘dark satanic mills’. It is characteristic of his whole philosophy that he took both into account. A less courageous soul might well have hated the city and loved the fields, or, like Dr. Johnson, loved the coffeehouses and shrunk from the solitudes of nature. Blake felt with full intensity the martyrdom of the toiling, suffering humanity of London, and he loved fields, green mountains, summer trees; but he saw the human spirit at work alike amid the furnaces of hell and the fountains of paradise. He desired to see a ‘marriage’ of heaven and hell, and, for him, the innocence of pastoral man did not seem lost in the satanic mills; the hell of experience is, for Blake, only the turning of the Wheel of Life; the indestructible purity of the human spirit returns, at the end of the circle of destiny, to its original innocence again; the furnaces of the fallen world become once more the fountains of Eden. It seems likely that much of Blake’s vision of a reconciliation of two contraries -- of good and evil, innocence and experience, arose out of his own early memories of city squalor and suffering, side by side with the world of hay-fields and harvesters under the hedgerow elms of Kent, on the south bank of the Thames.

Blake’s father the hosier must have been a kindly and sensible man, for he appears to have done everything in his power to enable his remarkable son to follow his bent. Blake, at his own request, never went to school; instead, he used to spend hours in the print-shops, where he spent his pocket-money on engravings of the Italian masters; or wandering off into the outlying country lanes. It is a great thing for a boy to have his freedom, as Wordsworth also had his, during those years in which poets gather the impressions and sensations upon which they draw, to the end of their lives. When the time came for Blake to decide upon his career, it was the son’s wish, it seems, to save his father expense; Blake himself chose to be apprenticed as an engraver, rather than enter upon the more precarious career of a pure artist. He was accordingly apprenticed to Basire, with whom he learned one of those skilled crafts that, before the Industrial Revolution, lent a dignity to manual work that the machine has largely destroyed. The engraver’s skill formed a bridge between craftsmanship and the higher branches of art, that has since been removed by the mechanization of so many processes once performed by engravers.


Blake never lost his link with the common people, or the men who work with their hands; and however high the flights of his imagination, he remained, all his life, a humble engraver working for his bread, with the skill of his hands. It is recorded that, when no money remained to pay their simple household expenses, Mrs. Blake used to set an empty plate before her husband at dinner-time and that he would then turn (with the remark ‘Damn the money!’) from his prophecies and visions of other worlds, and take up his graver to work on some humble task. Drawing tureens and tea-services for the Wedgwoods’ catalogue of the Etruria pottery was one such humble piece of hack-work that Blake performed (the drawings he made still survive). We may regret that Blake was not able to devote himself entirely to his creative genius as painter and poet -- and he himself felt bitterly enough on this question, and suffered both sorrow and indignation on account of the frustration of his genius by poverty and the neglect of his contemporaries; but it may be that the gain is as great as the loss. Blake lived, both geographically and socially, in the very heart of England; a poor Londoner and a man of the people, he was, besides, the friend of many of the greatest artists of his day -- Fuseli and Flaxman, and, later, Varley, Linnell, and Samuel Palmer; he met Sir Joshua Reynolds, visited Lady Caroline Lamb, where he met Coleridge; and knew Wordsworth’s friend Crabb Robinson the diarist. There were few aspects of London life, high or low, that were entirely unknown to him; as a young man he was an ardent revolutionary, and is said to have helped Tom Paine to escape from England with his life. In what better situation could a self-elected prophet of England, whose special role in our imaginative history was to read the signs of the times, have found himself, than between the worlds of artists and the world of artisans, between city and fields, and, historically, between the rural England of the eighteenth century, and the industrialized England of the nineteenth? Blake was a prophet not by inspiration alone, but by direct knowledge, and personal experience, of the most significant happenings in the social history of his country, and of his century.

As Basire’s apprentice, it fell to Blake’s task to make drawings of many of the monuments of kings and queens in Westminster Abbey, and these Gothic tombs and effigies deeply influenced his style as an artist. The Gothic stress on line was all-important to Blake, who insisted always on linear design, on clear outline, as against the chiaroscuro school favoured by Sir Joshua Reynolds. ‘Nature has no outline, but imagination has’, he wrote. Line, for Blake, is the hallmark of imagination; and it is remarkable that stress on line is a characteristic of religious art, from the cave-drawings of the stone age to the Gothic, from Buddhist Chinese art to El Greco. ‘Line is essence’, according to a contemporary artist, Cecil Collins -- essence as against appearance, or accident, which is the subject-matter of, say, the French impressionists, an essentially secular school; and it is remarkable that Blake, the greatest religious artist that England has produced, should have gone back, to find his next-of-kin, to medieval art, the product of a Christianity still irrational and imaginative. For Blake, the secular and the spiritual were undivided and in Westminster Abbey he recognized the work of artist-craftsmen, like himself, for whom ‘everything that lives is holy’ -- a world still unsecularized, and dominated by a single hierarchy of values that included, as Blake’s did, both heaven and earth in a single vision -- a religious conception not separate from, but underlying, the whole of life.

Blake’s earliest, and to this day his most widely known, and best loved, poems -- the Poetical Sketches, and the Songs of Innocence and Experience -- were written during his late boyhood, and the years of his early married life. The Poetical Sketches, most of them written in his teens, were published with the help of friends, the Rev. Mathew, a fashionable preacher, and his wife, ‘the accomplished Mrs. Mathew’, who for a while took Blake up, and whose literary salon no doubt inspired the poet to write, in an irreverent mood, his satire A Voyage to the Moon. It was Flaxman who took Blake to the Mathews’ salon in Rathbone Place, where it is on record that he recited, and also sang, his songs -- for, besides illustrating them with designs, the poet composed music to them which, unfortunately, was never written down, and so has been for ever lost. Blake’s imagination could express itself, with almost equal facility, in two arts, and perhaps a third; a fact not, perhaps, surprising, when we consider the specific nature of his genius, of which more will later be said.

Blake was married in 1782, when he was twenty-five, and went to live at 23 Green Street, near the Strand, where he was the humble neighbour of Reynolds and Hogarth, and of his own friend, Flaxman; but two years later, finding life in Green Street too expensive, he returned to Broad Street, where he lived next door to the family hosiery business that was carried on, after their father’s death, by Blake’s elder brother James. A younger brother, Robert, joined the young couple at this time, as William’s pupil in draughtsmanship -- indeed Robert was a promising artist, and several of his designs were for a long time mistaken for his brother William’s work. To his brother’s great grief, Robert died a year or two later. Blake, who had nursed him constantly during his illness, saw his spirit ‘ascending heavenwards, through the matter-of-fact ceiling, “clapping its hands for joy” -- a truly Blake-like detail’, as Gilchrist remarks. This much-loved brother, so Blake believed, often visited him, in spirit, throughout his life; and it was Robert’s spirit who gave Blake the secret of the process by which he produced those miraculously beautiful illuminated pages of his poems, printed and coloured by hand by the poet and his wife, and sold to the few purchasers who wanted to possess those most beautiful books, in which poems, lettering, and design are all the work of a single mind and a single vision. The illuminated copies of the Songs are the most remarkable books made in England, perhaps, since the illuminated missals of the Middle Ages, and belong to the earlier tradition of craftsmanship that rises to the level of imaginative art (or an imaginative art that includes craftsmanship), that Caxton’s printing-press virtually brought to an end. In vision and in technique alike, Blake was close to the Gothic middle ages; but what saves Blake’s books from the charge of preciosity that invalidates most modern hand-made hand-painted books is that he published his poems in that way not from choice but from necessity: no publisher would print them!

After Robert’s death Blake left Broad Street for neighbouring Poland Street, where he lived for five years. There he wrote and illustrated the Book of Thel and the Marriage of Heaven and Hell -- works of the purest genius, strangely alien, one might now think, from the spirit of the disreputable Soho street that has gone steadily down in the world since Blake’s day; and in 1793, the poet and his wife moved to Lambeth, to a little pleasant one-storied house, with a vine growing in its garden. All lovers of Blake’s designs must have noticed how often the free-flowing linear vine appears, with its tendrils and leaves, bordering a page, or filling a vacant line of the Prophetic Books. It is said by Gilchrist that the poet would never allow his own vine to be pruned -- one of those symbolic stories, like the tradition that Shakespeare never blotted a line, that has served as a text for critics of Blake’s unconfined and prolific genius. The other story -- of Blake and his wife reading Paradise Lost together under that same vine, in the undress of Eden -- might be true, and will always be repeated, for it is entirely in keeping with the poet’s intransigent innocence, and his wife’s literal willingness to follow her husband wherever his visions might lead him -- as she did, for better and for worse, throughout his life. What is certain is that the years at Lambeth were happy ones -- ‘lovely Lambeth’ is a recurring phrase in the Prophetic Books; ‘There is a grain of sand in Lambeth that Satan cannot find’ -- a refuge of love and peace where the poet and his wife, a childless but devoted pair, happy in their work and in their companionship -- could live in peace untroubled, as yet, by the shadow of deepening poverty and neglect that was to overcast Blake’s later years. In Lambeth Blake wrote and engraved the Visions of the Daughters of Albion -- a great plea for sexual freedom, soon to be followed by America, an even more fundamental defence of liberty and revolution, whose theme is derived from the American War of Independence. In these two books we first meet some of the personages of Blake’s pantheon, ‘Red Orc’, the spirit of enchained passion; the ‘shadowy female’, Vala, cruel goddess of nature; Urthona, or Los, the spirit of prophecy and of history; Oothoon, and the daughters of Albion, those nymphs, not of springs and forests, but of looms and mills, suffering and toiling at the cruel machines of the Industrial Revolution. In each successive book -- Ahania, Urizen, The Four Zoas, Milton, and Jerusalem -- the characterization of the figures of his pantheon -- some dozen major deities, and various ‘sons’ and ‘daughters’ who reduplicate certain of the leading figures -- become ever more distinct in character and potency, and, in the accompanying designs, their features are drawn with unforgettable clearness; the chained puer eternus, Orc; Los, that proletarian Apollo, god of prophecy and poetry, and ‘lord of the furnaces’; Urizen, the elderly, bearded, anxious god of rational knowledge, with his heavy, brass-bound books and iron pen; Enitharmon, the poetic muse, who gives aesthetic form to the poetic conceptions of Los; Tharmas, the ‘rough demon of the waters’, deity of sensory life and the forms of nature; and Enion the earth-mother, now age-bent, wandering among the graves, now a child in the garden of love. It has long been customary to dismiss these visionary beings with their uncouth names, as mere figments of Blake’s fancy; but as we become more and more familiar with their potencies and natures, with their place in the total myth that, year by year, Blake built up, so do they come -- for those, at any rate, who find it natural to think in symbolic terms -- to seem the most viable symbolism available to us. They are unmistakably English; gods and goddesses, they yet belong to the modern world; they include in their range the rationalism of Bacon, Newton, and Locke, the Industrial Revolution, and they are rooted, besides, in the tradition of Christianity. Once familiar with these figures, they come to seem as native as Hamlet, King Lear, or Milton’s Satan.

As Blake became ever more deeply immersed in the visions that he describes in the Prophetic Books, so he moved, as poet and as artist, into a poetic world that was to remain incomprehensible to the general public for a hundred years and more. His prophecies were, in his own day, closed books, to which the present generation, with our modern science of psychology, is the first to possess any key.

As Blake matured in his genius, so he outgrew his contemporaries; he was never to have any book of his prophecies published, greatly to his own grief, for these, he knew, concerned England and her spiritual well-being. His designs were likewise considered wild, and mad, by all but a small circle. Blake could never reconcile himself to his isolation, or understand why things that for him were clear, should, to the general public, seem incomprehensible. ‘Truth cannot be so spoken as to be understood and not be believed’, he wrote; and in the long run the truths that he spoke have come to be understood and believed. Blake to-day is rapidly becoming what Bunyan was before him, a household prophet in England. The lyric that prefaces his last Prophet Book, Jerusalem, is sung in Women’s Institutes up and down what remains of England’s green and pleasant land; his Prophecies, once thought unintelligible even by those who admired him most, are the subject of an ever-increasing literature of critical books, as a newly discovered continent in our literature, a territory of untold wealth and vast extent, yielding already rich harvests of wisdom for those who have persisted in their study of them. But, so far were these great works on which Blake was engaged from enabling him to earn a living, or a literary reputation, that by 1800 he found himself in some perplexity as to how he could live. Often he found himself forced to engrave the designs of artists far inferior to himself in invention, whose more insipid and conventional work was acceptable to their contemporaries. It is hard now to realize that Flaxman was ranked, in his own day, far higher than Blake; and that engraving Stothard’s pedestrian work, that now seems scarcely worth a glance, except for the interest of his being a contemporary of Blake, should have provided Blake, during the years of his early creative energy, with the means of earning a living. Many men of genius have been poor and obscure, but surely no man of equal genius has ever suffered, as Blake suffered, the daily and explicit humiliation of working in the service of artists inferior to himself. Blake learned a deep humility; but one is glad to know that his patience was not always exemplary, and that his outraged genius was apt to burst out in violent protest. Even Blake’s one patron was blind to the genius of the man whom he wished to help, and no doubt considered himself a far better poet than Blake. The laughable, humiliating, and yet, after all, not unkindly story of Blake’s relationship with Hayley must be told, if only because it was through Hayley that Blake spent the only years of his life that he lived outside London, at Felpham, on the Sussex coast.

Hayley, the biographer of Cowper, was a country squire with literary leanings. On Flaxman’s kindly suggestion, he proposed to employ Blake to engrave a portrait of Cowper for his biography, to design and engrave illustrations to his (Hayley’s) poems, to be sold as broadsheets for Blake’s benefit, and in various other tasks. He also, apparently, set himself to make up for Blake’s want of education, by reading him Pope Homer and other improving works, of an evening. (Blake’s scathing comments were confided to his notebooks, and his lifelong dislike of the Greeks may be in no small measure the result of these sessions with his patron.) So it was that during the years spent by Blake at Felpham -- the years when he was engaged on the great visionary poems Milton, and Jerusalem, later engraved and printed by hand, with their accompanying designs -- the great poet was busy illustrating Hayley’s worthless verses, listening to his views on poetry, and, so it seems, putting up with what patience he could summon with Hayley’s good advice on his own work. What seems particularly to have angered Blake was Hayley’s attempts to persuade the loyal Mrs. Blake that her husband must be made to see reason. ‘Natural friends are spiritual enemies’, Blake concluded with some bitterness and much truth -- for Hayley’s good will towards Blake, and wish to help him, is as certain as his utter inability to understand, or gauge the stature of this great man of genius whom chance had brought to his door. The relationship between artist and patron demands a measure of greatness and of humility on both sides. It is unfortunate that Hayley’s petty vanity about his own poems should have blinded him to the genius of Blake, who finally found the relationship insupportable, and returned to London, and to years of deepening neglect.

Those three years in the pretty cottage that Hayley lent him were not, even so, unhappy ones; for Blake saw angels descending on a ladder from heaven to his cottage, and the visions that came to him by the sea were among the most radiantly beautiful that he ever had. In his leafy garden he saw fairies among the leaves, and his description of a fairy’s funeral is a piece of rural lore that might have come from Shakespeare’s England. In that same garden occurred a very different incident, belonging to a more modern, and grimmer world. Blake, coming one day into his enchanted garden, innocent haunt of fairies and angels, found there a cruder figure from the World of Experience, a soldier -- ugly symbol of this world’s tyranny and brutality -- whom the gardener had asked to come in as his assistant. Blake asked the soldier to leave; the man refused. Blake’s poetic rage became inflamed, and he turned the soldier out of the garden by main force. The soldier retaliated by charging Blake with sedition, in particular with having spoken the words, ‘Damn the King; damn all his subjects, damn his soldiers, they are all slaves’ -- words that might have cost Blake his life. Blake denied having spoken them; and at the Quarter Sessions, at his trial, one old man, years later, remembered his flashing eye, as he denied the false charge. Hayley, the spiritual enemy, was on this occasion a valuable natural friend -- the squire may have cut a small figure in the eyes of the angels, but he was influential enough in the county of Sussex, perhaps, to save Blake’s natural life.

It is likely, since he denied it, that Blake did not speak the seditious words attributed to him; but there is seldom smoke without fire, and the prophet’s burning revolutionary zeal, his ardent spiritual presence must have been felt at Felpham; the mere look in his flashing eye must have struck consternation into the villagers and local soldiery, and brought down upon him one of those petty village persecutions, like that which befell D. H. Lawrence and his wife during the 1914 war. (Lawrence and his wife were falsely charged with signalling to the enemy from their cottage on the Cornish coast.) There is a certain poetic justice in both these false charges, brought against two prophets whose fiery zeal was directed against so much that was corrupt in English society; and the yokels who dimly sensed their power and the revolutionary trend of their very thoughts -- in Blake’s flashing eye, or in Lawrence’s red beard -- were right, as the scribes and pharisees are always right, in detecting the spiritual presence of the inspired enemy of false values. Neither were guilty of the actions with which they were charged, but both were guilty (if that is the word) of treason, not against England, but against the Lord of this World, more fundamental than their accusers could have known.

Blake returned to London in 1804 and for the next seventeen years he lived at No. 17 South Moulton Street, only a few yards from Oxford Street, within a mile of the house where he was born. Again he set to work, as an engraver, to earn his living, while he worked, in his spare hours, on the printing of his Prophetic Books, by the laborious process of engraving each plate, with its writing and designs, by hand. He painted many pictures, both in tempora, a medium that he preferred to oils, and water-colour, and sold some to a few constant buyers, Butts and Cumberland being chief among them at that time. In 1808, Blake, then at the height of his powers, impatient at the neglect of his genius, goaded into action by the theft by Stothard of his idea for a painting of the Canterbury Pilgrims, made one last attempt to appeal to ‘the public’, who would, he felt, be less blind to his message than the intellectuals of the day. The same mistake has been made by artists both before and since; but what could have been more understandable, in a prophet who knew that his work was of deep concern to the Sons and Daughters of Albion, the English nation? The one exhibition of Blake’s paintings, including the Canterbury Pilgrims, and a number of other important works, many of them now lost, was held in his brother the hosier’s house in Broad Street, and although few members of the public seem to have visited it, there remains, from that famous exhibition, Blake Descriptive Catalogue, the finest and longest of Blake’s prose writings, a work full of penetrating and profound criticism, psychological subtlety, visionary wisdom, and poetic eloquence. Crabb Robinson, the diarist, bought four copies when he visited the exhibition, one of which he gave to Charles Lamb. He must have been one of the very few purchasers for that famous work was already extremely rare by the time Gilchrist came to write his Life. The exhibition was, of course, a financial failure, and did nothing to arrest Blake’s decline into obscurity. Curiosity took a few -- like Crabb Robinson -- to see the works of the eccentric visionary, but no disciple stayed to listen, or attempted to understand his wisdom. Blake was to have no disciples, as painter or as poet, until the last years of his life, when the sun of his greatness came, as it were, from behind a cloud. Blake, as an old man, was the much-loved master of a group of distinguished young painters and Linnell, Calvert, Richmond, Tatham, Samuel Palmer, and Varley were his friends. To these younger painters, Blake’s poor room in Fountain Court -- to which he had moved from South Moulton Street a few years before his death -- was known as ‘the Interpreter’s House’, after the character in A Pilgrim’s Progress. George Richmond -- one of the youngest of this group -- afterwards used to say that being with Blake was ‘as if he were talking to the Prophet Isaiah’. Blake, like Job, emerged, at the end of his life, into a period of creative fruitfulness and radiant peace. It was Linnell who commissioned him to work on the finest completed work of his life -- the Job engravings, followed by the illustrations to Dante, on which he was at work when he died, in 1827, a few months before his seventieth birthday.

Describing Blake as an old man, Samuel Palmer wrote, ‘In him you saw at once the Maker, the Inventor; one of the few in any age: a fitting companion for Dante. He was energy itself, and shed around him a kindling influence; an atmosphere of life, full of the ideal. To walk with him in the country was to perceive the soul of beauty through the forms of matter; and the high, gloomy buildings between which, from his study window, a glimpse was caught of the Thames and the Surrey shore, assumed a kind of grandeur from the man dwelling near them. Those may laugh at this who never knew such a one as Blake; but of him it is the simple truth.

‘He was a man without a mask, his aim single, his path straight forwards, and his wants few; so he was free, noble, and happy.’

Blake was buried in Bunhill Fields -- the burial place of Bunyan and Defoe -- in a common grave, that can no longer be traced, for there was no headstone to mark the spot where so great a man was buried. Nor, indeed, would the omission greatly have troubled Blake, for whom the mortal body was only ‘an excrementitious husk or covering over my immortal’. It was not until long after the resting-place of his mortal body had been forgotten, that Blake’s greatness began to be recognized by the public to whom, in his Descriptive Catalogue, he had appealed in vain.

In what, then, does Blake’s peculiar greatness consist? Among English artists his place is unique. His work is on a small scale; the Job engravings, his most perfect work, in his mature style, measure but a few inches; and yet in energy and beauty the human forms that he has depicted in them can without absurdity be compared with those of Michaelangelo. There is always, in the human form as Blake conceives it, a vitality more than sensual, that seems to lift the human body from the ground, free it from the limitations of gravity. His human bodies are not like the aspiring figures of Baroque art, that seem to be pulled upwards by the force of heavenly gravitation acting against the downward pull of earth; they seem, rather not subject to any stresses and strains at all, freely-moving spiritual beings, passing through air and fire unhindered. Blake was, as a young man, a Swedenborgian; and to Blake, as to the Swedish visionary, the material body of man is not his real body. According to Swedenborg, the Resurrection of the Body is a resurrection from, and not a resurrection of, the material body. Blake saw the soul of his brother Robert rising through the ceiling when he died; he saw, in his imagination, the clean bodies of the London chimneysweeps, who wash in the river of life and play in the sun. It is the imaginative immortal body of man that Blake represents. To occultists, like Yeats, or A.E., as to Swedenborg, the existence of such a body is a matter of faith. Blake himself says that (earthly) ‘body is that portion of Soul perceived by the five senses’; and he represents, in his designs to his Prophetic Books, in the Job and Dante illustrations, in every human form that he ever drew, the soul of man, bounded within that magic line drawn by imagination, but not to be found in nature. The ‘visionary forms’ of Pitt, and of Nelson, are the themes of two of his more ambitious compositions; but in truth all his forms of lamb or lion, flower or tendril, child or man, are visionary. When we look at Blake’s drawings, we look at the forms of spiritual beings; and the most voluptuous nudes, painted in satin texture, seem lifeless in comparison with these figures whose very essence is their imaginative immortality.

As a colourist, Blake is the father of the water-colour school of Samuel Palmer and his friends. The pages of the Songs of Innocence and Experience that Blake used to colour by hand for the few purchasers of the book, are even smaller than the Job designs; but they are of a delicacy and lyricism of colour quite unlike anything else. The colour-washed pages of the Book of Thel or the Marriage of Heaven and Hell, with their gold and silver illuminated lettering, delicate tendril and leaf, create the illusion of a world fit for spirits to inhabit. Even the tiny woodcuts that illustrate Virgil Pastorals have that quality of belonging to eternity and not to time, a world wholly conceived by the imagination, and in which the senses but play the part of instruments. Not that Blake imagines an ‘other world’, or spiritual forms unrelated to the bodies they inhabit; on the contrary, his genius lay in his ability to see the body as an expression of soul, the natural forms of the temporal world as expressions of eternal archetypes. ‘Eternity is in love with the productions of time’, he wrote; and no artist more disliked the vague and the abstract. Minute particulars he always insisted, were all important. A spirit, or a vision, is not ‘a cloudy vapour, or a nothing’ and ‘he who does not imagine in stronger and better lineaments, and in stronger and better light, than his perishing and mortal eye can see does not imagine at all’. It is precisely because his forms are imaginary that they have clear and distinct outline; for the senses, so Blake believed, have not the power of revealing form; like Coleridge, he realized the esemplastic’ power belongs to the imagination alone -- ‘Nature has no outline, but imagination has. Nature has no tune, but imagination has’. Describing his elaborate symbolic painting entitled ‘A Vision of the Last Judgment’, Blake wrote: ‘I assert for My Self that I do not behold the outward Creation and that to me it is hindrance and not Action; it is as the dirt upon my feet, No part of Me. “What”, it will be Question’d, “When the Sun rises, do you not see a round disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea?” Oh no, no, I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host, crying “Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty”. I question not my Corporeal or Vegetative Eye any more than I would Question a Window concerning a Sight. I look thro’ it and not with it!’ The ‘I’ who looks through, and not with, the organ of sense is the Self of the Upanishads, known to mystics both Platonic and Christian as existing beyond the conscious self; Blake himself called it the Divine Humanity. The imagination is, for Blake, as for Coleridge, the divine presence in man; and his theory of the imagination is thus one that makes him, in the only significant sense, a religious artist -- probably the only English religious artist of significance since the anonymous craftsmen of the Middle Ages, whom Blake in so many respects resembled.

As a poet Blake is perhaps greater than he is as an artist. The small scale and technical limitations of his work as an artist must always make him seem provincial -- not in vision, but in achievement -- in comparison with the great masters of Italy or France or Spain; but as a poet, in the tradition of Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Milton, he was working in a poetic medium that helped, rather than hindered, his genius. Blake, as a lyrical poet, is unsurpassed. His Songs have often been compared to those of Shakespeare; and one might say that lyrical form poetry is what outline is in drawing, or melody in music -- the contour drawn by imagination, the trace of spiritual life. His vocabulary is as simple as that of a child, and his symbols -- rose, sunflower, lion, lamb, beetle, ant, little girl, or little boy -- are few, and universal. It is (as with his woodcuts, one inch by two inches, or the colour-washed pages that illustrate his poems) a question of transparency. Every lyric is a window into the imaginative world, and even in these early poems his roses and lambs are more than metaphorical, they are archetypal, symbols that focus multiple meanings, soundings into the unconscious, into the universal source of myth and oracle; hence their power. Simple as nursery-rhymes, they are as profound as the Gospels, whose symbolism of corn, bread, wine, and fishes was firm enough foundation for an enduring civilization. Indeed the symbols upon which great religious and enduring civilizations are founded are always of Blake-like simplicity and universality, as common as the sun and stars, comprehensible to the unlearned, but for ever incomprehensible to the unwise.

Of Blake’s later poems, little can be said within the compass of this essay. For long they were considered the inchoate ramblings of a disordered mind; they lack, indeed, the lyrical felicity of the Songs, and in order to read them with understanding we must lay aside the poetic habits of two thousand years, and rediscover a part of the poetic art that has gradually been lost, as our Western civilization has advanced and perfected its one-sided mode of thought, and discarded the mythological for the rational. One might say that there are two levels of symbolism employed, simultaneously, in all the greatest poetry: an upper, linguistic layer, whose symbolic counters are words -- words, the perfected instruments of conscious thought. The metaphysical poets excelled in the extracting of multiple meanings from words placed and held in complex intellectual tensions as elaborate as magnetic fields. The mere ‘beauty’ of words has been exploited by the Victorian poets -- Tennyson and his contemporaries excelled in this relatively trivial, but still delightful art, which to-day still passes for the be-all and end-all of poetry among many persons who (rightly if this were so) hold poetry in some contempt. But there is, besides the texture of words, whether intellectual or sensual, a lower, symbolic layer in the greatest imaginative poetry that has little to do with words at all. Freud and Jung have convinced us, clearly enough, that there are regions of the mind that think, not in terms of words at all, but in a picture language of symbols. The unconscious is innocent of words, but it formulates its desires and fears, its primordial but profound statements of living experience, in those symbolic forms that haunt our dreams. For the most part such symbolism is fragmentary, for the art of using symbols to their full potency has, with our long-established habits of verbal thought, been largely lost. Yet the myths of primitive races, and of our own antiquity, move far more in this non-linguistic, symbolic layer of poetry than in the verbal. Ballad and legend and fairy-tale deal almost wholly in this non-linguistic symbolism, irreducibly poetic, and independent of the words in which the symbols are described. Talking animals like the Black Bull of Norroway; the sleeping princess, or king, in the underground palace; the grail, the magic child, dragon, and holy tree, are counters in the pre-verbal poetic language of which myths are made, and which we ourselves still speak, though without understanding or control, in our dreams. Such symbols may be painted, put into dance or mime, told in prose or verse, and always they remain magical.

The greatest achievement of the first half of the twentieth century will perhaps prove to have been the first elucidation given by Freud and his successors of regions of the human mind that had remained closed since antiquity -- the discovery of the extent, and significance, of the unconscious, or what is so-called; for it is not unconscious at all times -- in dreams, for instance -- or to all men. What in most men is latent, is consciously experienced by visionaries and imaginative poets of the stature of Shakespeare, Coleridge, or Blake. As we learn more of the nature of the unconscious, its laws and contents, so we are beginning to relearn the dead language of symbolism, spoken with such moving and poetic power by the framers of myths, the inventors of gods and goddesses. The languages of myth and poetry spring from a single source, at the level at which these symbols are created, and they express not rational concepts, but resonant potencies that sound the very depths of our souls, stirring overtones of meaning that extend beyond the narrow spectrum of conscious thought. This is the language that Blake speaks in his Prophetic Books. Blake had the gift, apparently artless, of making any medium a transparent lens, or window, through which his vision shines. His poems, woodcuts, engravings, or water-colour drawings all reveal the same imaginative world, peopled by beings that seem to have an existence in their own right, as have the Homeric gods or the Christian Holy Family. As the Greeks wrote about the gods, so Blake wrote about, or drew, or engraved, the real existing figures of his imaginative world; and we recognize them, as we do Apollo or the Blessed Virgin, as if they had an actual existence, independent of art, independent, almost, of Blake himself. Perhaps they are our own lost Pantheon, the ancient gods and goddesses of England, rediscovered by Blake in South Molton Street, Lambeth, Battersea, and Hampstead, and restored to us (unlike some members of the Irish pantheon, who refused baptism at the hands of St. Patrick), Christianized one and all. Blake combined the symbolic imaginative genius of antiquity, and the psychological insight of modern man. In the latter respect, he was a hundred years in advance of his time; his reasonable and calm attitude to his visions is more akin to the intellectual honesty of a twentieth-century scientist than to the pious obscurantism of the devout; and yet his visions retain the quality of holiness, that has at all times characterized the religions of mankind, and that fulfils an irreducible need of the human soul. Never, I suppose, in human history, has mythology been so meagre, symbolic thought so little understood, as at the turn of the century into which Blake was born. The indigenous gods of Celt and Saxon had long since been forgotten -- perhaps to our permanent imaginative impoverishment; and the rationalized and denaturized version of Christianity that remained at the beginning of the nineteenth century was all but devoid of symbolism and useless as a medium of imaginative thought. It is indeed astonishing that at such a time, Blake should have created, from his own visionary imagination, a pantheon as rich, varied, and complex as that of any primitive race; created some dozen gods and goddesses, defined their potencies, set the whole pantheon in motion, with all the subtle relation and interrelation of these imaginative forces set forth with all the penetration of a psychologist of the school of Freud or Jung. These beings that he has created have arisen from the depths of the poet’s unconscious, in all the energy and beauty of life, violent, shape-shifting forms of the eternal powers that mould man, the impulses that determine and control our life, from beyond the little world known to our reason.

It is not possible to read the Prophetic Books merely as exercises in the use of language; on the linguistic level, except for some fine passages, they are disappointing, as compared with the early lyrics; they must be read as myth. As such they are among the greatest poetry in any modern language, and stand beside the works of Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, or James Joyce. The art of reading myth, as myth, must be re-learned if we are fully to understand such figures as Shakespeare’s Caliban, Ariel, or Lear, Joyce’s Anna Livia, or Blake’s Four Zoas; but, that taste once formed, we come to look, in poetry, for the gods and their symbols, and if we do not find them, the finest verse seems insipid, as if lacking a necessary dimension. Once we become accustomed to this pre-verbal interplay of symbol and the personified potencies of the eternal human archetypes, we come to find it a necessary part of any art, and in its absence, poetry of words alone, however felicitous, can no longer satisfy us.

It is now, perhaps, clear why Blake should have worked with equal facility in two media. The poetic process in which he excelled was neither verbal nor visual; it was symbolic and mythological. He was a creator not of pictures, not of verbal rhetoric, but of symbols, whose potency does not depend solely on the medium through which they are expressed. We recognize Urizen, or Los, or Vala, in Blake’s designs, or in his descriptions; a phrase, or a line, becomes enough, when we have learned Blake’s symbolic vocabulary, to evoke the archetype -- just as, for Christians, two crossed sticks tell the whole story of their religion. That such an uprushing fountain of spiritual energy should have broken through the crust of eighteenth-century rationalism, in the works of Coleridge, Shelley, Goethe, and, above all, of Blake, is a fact whose great significance has not, even now, been fully realized. There remains, in the closed books of Blake -- books first published only in this century and still in process of de-coding -- ‘a great world of delight, closed to your senses five’. Its very dimensions have, so far, blinded us to it; for it is easier to appreciate a single metaphor, than to encompass a whole pantheon of gods and the world they inhabit.

There is still another respect in which we must consider Blake; he is perhaps the greatest Christian prophet of the modern world. Blake, so far as we know, attended services in the Church of England only three times in his life -- on the occasions of his baptism, his marriage, and his burial; for he held organized religion in low esteem. As a young man he was a follower of Swedenborg, and a member of his New Church. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is a commentary on, and criticism of, Swedenborg; Jacob Boehme, St. Teresa, and the Kabbala were other principal sources of Blake’s religious thought, and he appears to have known something of Gnosticism and of the Hindoo religion. Just as, in art, he went back to the Gothic tradition, so, in religious thought, he swept aside all that was reputable and established in his day, and, with his unfailing grasp of essentials, saw the whole edifice of Western rationalism, theist and atheist alike, as so much dust in the balance, in the matter of religious truth. His religious wisdom he drew from the same source as his painting and his poetry -- the human imagination, which he called, indifferently, the Bosom of God, the Saviour, the Divine Humanity, and Jesus. Imagination was, for Blake, the divine presence in man. Like contemporary psychologists, he distinguished clearly between the selfhood (the ego as we should say) and the ‘humanity’, the real man of which the ego is only a part. Like mystics of all times and places, and like contemporary psychologists, Blake’s spiritual aim was a widening of consciousness, a destruction of the selfhood, that would enable the real humanity to come into being. In this religious empiricism he was more akin to a Buddhist, or a contemporary psychologist, than to the devout and the moralistic of his own day or of ours. To anyone, mystic or psychologist, who has realized the extent of the human soul, the partial and superficial nature of the ego, conventional morality must seem to be almost entirely unrelated to the true nature of man. Good and evil, as we conceive them, have little meaning in the world of the gods and goddesses, of the unconscious regions of the psyche, that obey laws unknown to reason and convention. Blake, therefore, became, as Swedenborg had never become, the courageous prophet of a new morality, a ‘Marriage’ of Heaven and Hell, of ‘reason’ and ‘energy’, one might say of the conscious and the unconscious halves of man’s original wholeness. A wholly new conception of the nature of man implies a new morality -- as modern psychologists have likewise discovered. Current ideals of sexual chastity, for example, Blake saw -- as Freud was later to see them -- as a hypocritical pretence, and the repression of the energies of body or mind as a violence done to the ‘divine humanity’. Legalistic morality is, for Blake, the greatest of spiritual evils. His Jesus is the Divine Humanity -- the potential human Self that lies beyond the conscious ego and its moral formulations, ruler of the Kingdom of Heaven whose order is latent in every soul, and whose realization in life is the task and toil of man.

Blake’s spiritual technique, or discipline, is no less modern than his view of the nature of man. Painting, music, and poetry, were, for him, three ways of ‘conversing with paradise’ -- of awakening, and bringing into consciousness and reality, the latent contours of the Divine Humanity. It was the function, after all, of the symbolism of old religious myths, to reach those hidden springs, and poetry, as Blake understood it, is the real mythology, the real spiritual language, of modern man. Blake’s religious teaching, at once too simple and too revolutionary for the orthodox, appeals to our particular kind of honesty, and stands the test alike of experience and of our present scientific knowledge. There are many who are prepared to accept Blake’s imaginative interpretation of Christianity in an age when theology, a rational formulation, has become discredited in the light of our humbler modern conception of the scope of the human reason, and of the processes of thought. ‘Everything that lives is holy’ is Blake’s creed; and in his fundamental criticism of orthodox Christianity, made in the fragments called The Everlasting Gospel, he constantly affirms that the unique contribution of Christianity to morality is the idea of the forgiveness of sins. What is most remarkable is the psychological soundness of Blake’s intuitive conclusions about the nature of the human soul, and its redemption. Combining as he did the intellectual honesty of a scientist with a saint’s sense of the holy, Blake stands as a bridge between the religious intuitions of the past, and the psychological science of the present day. Take him as one will -- as artist, poet, or religious revolutionary, Blake is a figure whose stature overtops all but the greatest men of genius that England -- or for that matter, the Western world -- has known.

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