William Blake in his relation to Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Front matter

William Blake

in his Relation to

Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

William Blake in his relation to Dante Gabriel Rossetti

William Blake

in his Relation to

Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

In the memoir on Dante Gabriel Rossetti which precedes the family letters of this poet, William M. Rossetti tells us that his brother had procured a manuscript book with the poems of William Blake from an attendant in the British Museum in the month of April 1847. "He then proceeded", William Rossetti goes on, "to copy-out across a confused tangle of false starts, alternative forms and cancelling all the poetry in the book, and I did the same for the prose. His ownership of this truly precious volume stimulated in some degree his disregard or scorn of some aspects of art held in reverence by dilettante and routine students and thus conduced to the Praeraphaelitic Movement; for he found here the most (and no doubt the most irrational) epigrams and jeers against such painters as Correggio, Titian, Rubens, Rembrandt, Reynolds, and Gainsborough. They were balsam to Dante Gabriel Rossetti's soul and grist to his mill". Thus far William M. Rossetti, and undoubtedly the finding of this little booklet has exercised a great influence on his brother and through him indeed conduced much to the Praeraphaelitic movement. However this influence was exercised not only on account of its sharp criticism on the Venetian and Flemish schools of painting, but more because of its simple and naive poems with their strange metres, through its weird pictures and the daring doctrines it put forth, and most of all through the spirit of mysticism which breathes through the whole and gives it such a wonderful charm. Like German Romanticism the Praeraphaelitic movement was a revolt against the prosaic acceptance, pseudo-classicism, and thoughtless imitation of the foregoing century, and as such, as it were an aftergrowth of the great romantic school in Germany, its distinguishing feature was its mysticism, which can be traced through all the works of the Praeraphaelites, be they literary or artistic. Already in some later works of the German Romantics, e. g. in the second part of Goethe's Faust and in Hoffmann's Erzählungen, mystic ideas are interwoven; but what I may perhaps term "modern mysticism", to distinguish it from the Catholic mysticism of the Middle Ages, found its true development in the literary and artistic productions of the Praeraphaelitic school; and the great fore-runner of this school was William Blake. In the following pages I will try to examine somewhat closer than has been done up to now wherein this influence existed and in how far Blake really conduced to the Praeraphaelitic movement.

Indeed, beyond the mere acknowledgement that such an influence did exist I found nowhere a single effort for a somewhat thorough investigation. I think that it suffices for this purpose when I show the influence Blake has exercised on Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Not because he was the greatest of the Praeraphaelites, for indeed G. F. Watts far excelled him as a painter, creating new myths, whereas Rossetti's genius concentrated itself principally in the reproduction of single female figures; Robert Browning was a greater poet; Holman Hunt remained faithful in all his works to the rules laid down in their first assemblies; Dante Gabriel Rossetti, not even in the religious period of his art, stuck to the rules he himself had laid down with so much ardour. And I think it was J. E. Millais, who showed himself the greater painter with his "Lorenzo and Isabella", at the same time the most typical Praeraphaelitic picture. It has the hard outline and glowing colours of the quattrocento paintings, at the same time the dreadful spiritual love of Isabella hints, though it has an awful ascetic power, at the perversity of E. A. Poe, or perhaps O. Wilde's Salome. For it was that part of the Middle Ages which the Praeraphaelites have tried to render, in which souls were very pale but filled with hot desires, in which the lust of the senses mixed with the prayers of the mystics, and in which the anticipated joys of heaven were not so great as the earthly miseries. It was a dream of the Middle Ages full of melancholy, sensuousness, and glowing colours, and as I said above, it was not Dante Gabriel Rossetti in whose works more than in those of all representatives of this school its most typical qualities were united. Although not the greatest nor the most typical of the Praeraphaelites, yet his influence has been the greatest, because he was by far the strongest personality and the greatest intellectual force. On all the persons who came in contact with him he made a great impression; some of them remained under his influence for the rest of their careers, others were only spell-bound for a short while by the brilliancy of his talk and the power of his strong mind; on all these his influence has had a lasting effect.

William M. Rossetti tells us how already as a mere boy his brother was impetuous and vehement and essentially of a dominant turn in intellect, and a leader in temperament. Ruskin says of Dante Gabriel Rossetti: "I believe Rossetti's name should be placed first on the list of men within my own range of knowledge who have raised and changed the spirit of modern art; raised in absolute attainment, changed in direction of temper." And elsewhere: "Rossetti was the chief intellectual force in the modern romantic school of England". Holman Hunt mentions his power of inspiring enthusiasm and making proselytes, a power which according to H. Hunt he seems to have exercised to an inconvenient extent and to which Hunt himself was compelled to yield in spite of himself. And of Burne-Jones a pretty little anecdote has been told which perhaps brings out more than anything else the fascinating power of Rossetti's genius. It is said that a critic looking at a picture of Burne-Jones remarked that it was merely an imitation of Rossetti. "And if so", the artist answered, "I am quite content to imitate Gabriel". It was this ascendency over others to which were added great capacity for criticism, so rare in artists, an unselfish delight in the work of others, a splendid memory for any poetry which had won his admiration, and "a voice rarely equalled for simple recitations" (Hunt) which made Dante Gabriel Rossetti the soul of the Praeraphaelitic movement and earned for him the name of Father of Praeraphaelitism, bestowed upon him by William Sharp in his "Life of Rossetti", 1883. And it could not be, but that the bend of Rossetti's genius was the dominating power of the Praeraphaelitic movement, and that the influence which exercised its power on Dante Gabriel Rossetti was the influence to which all other Praeraphaelites were subjected.

The influence which William Blake exercised on Dante Gabriel Rossetti was of a three-fold nature. He owes much to him:

a) as a philosopher,

b) as a poet,

c) as a painter.

It was however, as I mentioned above, Blake's mysticism, by which Dante Gabriel Rossetti was mostly impressed, and therefore I shall speak of this influence in the first place. It should, however, be borne in mind that Blake's philosophic doctrines were laid down in a literary and in an artistic form, viz: in his poems and in his pictures, and that therefore it is often very difficult and sometimes impossible to separate Blake the philosopher from Blake the artist or the poet, so that when I make this division for the sake of clearness and discuss successively Blake's influence from a philosophical, literary, and artistic point of view, these influences must not be thought of as existing isolated, but as continually supporting and correcting each other.

5

Influence of W. Blake's Philosophy

Influence of W. Blake's Philosophy.

As a philosopher William Blake is a pupil of Emanuel Swedenborg, the Swedish mystic whose many religious books appeared between the years 1745 and 1771. Already as a child William Blake had adopted many of the doctrines of Swedenborg on mere hearsay. His father, an Irish dissenter, as Alexander Gilchrist (1828—61, Blake's biographer) calls him, and his eldest brother James were both ardent followers of Swedenborg. The principal doctrine which Blake never abandoned, which was more and more approved of by his imagination, which was constantly affirmed by his visions, changed every idea that he otherwise would have found in religion, and affected the standard of his poetry, was Swedenborg's doctrine of universal correspondence. This theory teaches that bodies are the generation and expression of souls; it makes all things into signs as well as powers, and the smallest things as well as the greatest are omens, warnings, and instructions. In his book the "Doctrine of the Sacred Scripture" Swedenborg gives the following explanation about the meaning of correspondences. From the Lord proceed three degrees: the Celestial, the Spiritual, and the Natural, one after another. What proceeds from the divine love is called celestial, what proceeds from the divine wisdom is called spiritual; the natural is from both and is their complex in the ultimate. The divine which comes down from the Lord to men descends through these degrees and contains these three degrees in it; these degrees are entirely distinct from one another like end, cause, and effect and yet make one by correspondence; for the natural corresponds to the spiritual and also to the celestial. The "Word" is written in the style of the Prophets and the Evangelists, which, though it appear common, yet conceals within it all divine and angelic wisdom "Each and all things in nature correspond to spiritual things."

The idea that the Bible was a sacred code written by inspiration which only men who were inspired by visions from Heaven like Swedenborg (Arcana Coelestia) and himself) could interpret, was taken up and adopted by Blake also in regard to the highest utterances of poetry; the only way in which the different degrees of correspondence could be expressed was by means of allegory and symbols, in which every word, or in drawing every design, had a second or perhaps a third hidden meaning. "Allegory addressed to the intellectual powers while it is altogether hidden from the corporeal understanding is my definition of the most sublime poetry", Blake writes in a letter to Thomas Butts, 1803. Such allegory is found in all Blake's poems and fills the Prophetic Books; it forms the greatest attraction of Blake's engravings, though no longer "hidden from all corporeal understanding", since in 1893 a complete edition of Blake's works appeared, edited by E. G. Ellis and W. B. Yeats, who show us in an elaborate treatise that a consistent system underlies Blake's writings, that his message, though very complex, claims to be only a personal statement of universal truth; a system to deliver men from systems. Much has been made clear by their ingenious explanation, but for all that the Prophetic Books remain dim and chaotic as dreams, their imaginative and coherent thought-structure fails in carrying conviction with it.

From Swedenborg) Blake also took the belief in the angels; the angelic wisdom, the occupations of the angels, their being the exact counterpart of men, and many interesting particulars of the angelic world; here Blake goes beyond Swedenborg in accepting the existence of evil spirits; he says: "Swedenborg received his teaching from angels only, while he ought to have consulted devils also", therefore his teaching shall be "as the linen clothes folded up". For, and here we touch another keynote of Blake's teaching, "without contraries there is no pro ". Blake is a passionate preacher of moral and political freedom and repels all the coërcive devices of the formalist as well as the regulative distinction between right and wrong of the moralist. Man is law to himself. "Nor is it possible to thought a greater than itself to know". The divine human body may not be divided into two parts, body and soul, labelling the one as evil the other as good (The voices of the devil. Marriage of Heaven and Hell). In his Books of America and Europe he expands on the triumph of free love and throughout all Blake's works we find, that he preaches free indulgence in all bodily desires, though always with a sub-idea that only in this way the spirit can be made free.

Abstinence sows sand all over The ruddy limbs and flowing hair; But desire gratified Plants fruits of life and beauty there." (Couplets and Fragments.)

He who desires but acts not breeds pestilence." (Marriage of Heaven and Hell.)

Does not the worm erect a pillar in the mouldering churchyard And a palace of Eternity in the jaws of the hungry grave? Over his porch these words are written Take thy bliss, Oh Man!" (Daughters of Albion.)

These can serve as examples for the fore-going and I could find ever so many more, for Blake likes to repeat his favourite doctrines again and again under different forms. Swedenborg does not preach these extreme views, but Blake was not the first mystic, who held the opinion that the desires of the body had a right to be indulged in. There existed a religious sect, who called themselves "Brethren of the free spirit", they were adherents to the principle that unless the lusts of the body be satisfied, the spirit cannot be raised to the heights of its true development. And it is not impossible that Blake in his vast reading had come across this theory and adopted it as his own.

Like Swedenborg, Blake believed in the "Grand Man". Swedenborg says in "Arcana Coelestia", his most famous book (1749-56), "the whole Heaven is a Grand Man (Maximus Homo) and it is called a Grand Man, because it corresponds to the Lord's divine Human; and by so much as an angel or spirit or a man on earth has from the Lord, they also are men… All things in the human body, in general and particular, correspond most exactly to the Grand Man and as it were to so many societies there." The same idea of a composite individual Blake puts forth in the prophetic Book Jerusalem:

We live as one man, for, contracting our infinite senses We behold multitudes, or expanding we behold as one, As one Man all the universal family and that one man We call Jesus the Christ."

Besides this one Man, the Divine Saviour, there were lesser "composites", called "states", these come into existence when imagination in the person of some imaginative man perceives them, as sound comes into existence when we hear it and light when we see it.

We are not individuals but states, Combinations of individuals."

(Milton, Book II.)

"Man passes on, but states remain for ever, he passes through them like the traveller who may as well suppose that the places he has passed through exist no more, as a man may suppose that the states he has passed through exist no more."

(Last Judgment.)

In his youth Blake racked his mind over the riddle of human existence. In the Book of Thel, which forms a transition between his lyrical poems and his prophetic books, he laments the limitations of the flesh. All other animate and inanimate things seem happy in the conscious discharge of their earthly duties; why does man alone suffer from a perversion of the senses by some tyrannical law? Why should he put a restraint upon his natural enjoyments?

Why cannot the ear be closed to its own destruction? Or the glistening eye to the passion of a smile — Why a tongue impressed with honey from every wind; Why a nostril wide inhaling terror trembling and affright? Why a tender curb upon the youthful burning boy?" etc.

Soon however this spirit of doubt is taken from Blake. The immemorial struggle between the body and the soul, the man principle and the woman principle, Satan and the redeeming powers, the cause of all human suffering is the result of the fall of mankind; a fall from a hermaphroditic state into generative life, from the kingdom of Imagination, the celestial, into the natural world, the vegetative. This division of mankind into sexual life tended to a closing up of men into separate selfhoods; each selfhood was guilty of error, and gradually the inlets through which communication with the universal spirit, the eternal imagination, were maintained, were dried up; the senses were mostly used for the natural world only.

One day the world was a Paradise And Imagination was its principal Goddess."

If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to men as it is: infinite. For man has closed himself up until he sees all things through the narrow chinks in his cavern".

(A memorable Fancy.)

It is now his, Blake's mission in life, to lead man back to the golden age in which imagination reigned supreme and the reasoning powers of man were kept in proper subjection. In his prophetic Book "Jerusalem", he calls it his great task "to open the eternal worlds, to open the eternal eyes of Man inwards, into the worlds of thought, into eternity, ever expanding in the bosom of God, the human Imagination." The redeeming powers of mankind are love and imaginative art.

No one knows what the life of man is, unless he knows that it is love."

(Margical notes to Swedenborg's "Angelic Wisdom".)

In nearly all his poems he sings of love in one of its many aspects; in the "Songs of Innocence" the divine love is dwelled upon in The Lamb, The Divine Image, On Another's Sorrow. In the Songs of Experience Love appears in its earthly garb, the temptations and struggles of love are put forth.

For the strife of Love is the abysmal strife, And the word of Love is the word of life."

He likes to dwell on the contrast of divine and human love. In his poem the Clod and the Pebble, or in William Bond, a very mystical poem interpreted in a different way by Edwin J. Ellis, Charles A. Swinburne, and other Blake commentators, the last two stanzas are:

I thought Love lived in the hot sunshine, But oh, he lives in the moony light! I thought Love lived in the heat of day, But sweet Love is the comforter of night.

Seek Love in the pity of others' woe. In the gentle relief of another's care, In the darkness of night and the winter's snow, In the naked and outcast, seek Love there!

And in his Prophetic Books, he, to use his own words, does nothing but

Weaves into dreams the sexual strife And mourns over the web of life."

At Blake's death many unpublished, or rather unknown Mss. were found, but Frederick Tatham, considering these to lessen the fame of his friend by the heretical opinions they expressed, destroyed them, and thus we find Blake's philosophic system incomplete. I think, however, that we know enough of it such as we find it, that in his turbulent evangile, doctrines of the most opposed abstract systems confront each other, and that his beliefs, however positive to himself for the time he entertained them, were fluctuating and shifting, and that the only ideas which pretty constantly show forth in strong relief are the few I singled out in the foregoing pages.

Of these ideas Blake has taken most, as I have shown, from Swedenborg, who had written them in his many books with great care and lucidity earlier in the century. But Blake's thoroughly artistic temperament conceived the notion, that the old truths wanted to be said in a new form to bring them home to mankind, and that the mystic truths should be expressed through the medium of the fine Arts. Up to now, mysticism had laid down her principles dogmatically in the language of the Church. From being theological the language became literary and poetical, and where words could not express the abstractions of the heavenly visions, Blake, in whose mind the most abstract notions crystallised into shapes, made sketches and drawings of these visions, such as he had them before his "mental eyes." That the result of these proceedings was startlingly original can be easily conceived; already by this sole reason Blake's works must have had great attraction for Dante Gabriel Rossetti. For he loved everything out of the Common and had a natural inclination for the supernatural and marvellous. As early as 1843 he wrote a ballad Sir Hugh the Heron, an imitation of W. Scott which, though very unripe and of no value, shows Dante Gabriel Rossetti's love for the mysterious. And in the following pages we will consider in detail the influence in which this attraction resulted. For as Blake was a man of genius both as a poet and as a painter, it could not be but that his works won the lifelong admiration of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and influenced nearly everything he produced. There is, however, a great difference between the mysticism of Blake and Rossetti. This difference lies in the fact, that the religious side of mysticism never affected Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

Always the artistic side of Blake's mysticism appealed to him; in later life he accepted some of its moral-philosophical doctrines; as a religious system it never was of the slightest value to him.

William Blake was a fervent Christian and a man of great faith throughout his life. Never once he despaired of his mission, never he doubted of the heavenly origin of his visions, or of his writings. "I may praise them, since I dare not pretend to be other than the secretary, the authors are in Eternity", Blake writes in a letter to Thomas Butts 1802 about the Prophetic books. And though poverty and want are at his door, he never makes concessions in order to see his books printed and earn a little money. With infinite patience and care he continues writing down his weird fancies and illuminating them with his fantastic drawings. Quite pathetic is the way in which he gives himself some poor bits of consolation for his worldly failure. "I am more famed in Heaven" he writes to Flaxman from his cottage in Felpham, "for my works than I could well conceive. In my brain are studies and chambers filled with books and pictures of old which I wrote and painted in ages of eternity before my mortal life; these are the delight of the archangels. Why then should I be anxious about the riches and fame of mortality?" Valiantly Blake fought on until the end of his life full of faith:

"I will not cease from mental fight, Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand. Till we have built Jerusalem In England's green and pleasant land." (Milton. Preface.)

In the midst of his mental fight death comes to him, and he dies singing in a loud clear voice some mystic snatches of song to a tune of his own; even on his deathbed still receiving evidence of the spiritual world.

Altogether different is the position which Dante Gabriel Rossetti takes up in religious matters. He has been called a sceptic (Benson, Life of Rossetti), but I do not think this term describes in any way his attitude towards religion, which rather has been one of vain longing. His mind dwelt much on the mystery of death, the horror of pain and decay, and he tried, and during some years of his life tried very hard, to believe in a divine power to harmonize the miseries of mankind.

In his youth he writes the mystical story "St Agnes of Intercession." In this story, which had the sub-title "an auto-psychology", Rossetti tells how a painter is struck by the likeness of the portrait of his bride to a portrait of St. Agnes by a painter of the middle-ages. He goes to Italy to see the original picture and discovers that this is a portrait of a lady "deeply attached" to the painter. At the same time he sees his own face in the portrait the painter made of himself. A violent illness is the result of the mental shock of this discovery, and all the weird possibilities which he draws from it. Slowly he recovers, but cannot forget the strange adventure he, or rather his soul, had had. At this point the story is broken off. Dante Gabriel Rossetti tries to believe in it in the pre-existence of the soul, but he cannot, and thus disillusioned breaks the story off in the middle. It is true that we have a poem written in his earlier years in which he adopts the Catholic dogma and reminds us of Dante's Vergine Madre, figlia del tuo Figlio (Divina Commedia, Par., Cant. 33). The poem is called "Ave", but it was undoubtedly the artistic side of Catholicism which had won Rossetti's sympathies, and has nothing or very little to do with his inmost conviction. The same holds good for his two religious pictures "Girlhood of the Virgin Mary" and "Ecce ancilla Domini". And I think, that in the other poems of Rossetti where he expresses religious ideas we must see them in the same light as the foregoing.

"Would God I knew there were a God to thank, When thanks rise in me"

seems to be the true attitude of Rossetti towards religion. However, after the death of his beloved wife, he seems in the yearning after spiritual "consolation to find what he seeks for a while in the doctrines of spiritualism.

Very interesting is his correspondence about this subject, falling in the years 1865—67, and especially the letters of Baron Kirkup who tells of his experiences with different spirits as: Dante, Garibaldi etc., are highly remarkable. They show us that Dante Gabriel Rossetti's "disposition towards believing in the spiritualism was too much rather than too little" (William M. Rossetti) But though we hear of regular spiritual "seances" where Mrs. Marshall and her husband, she a wellknown medium of those days, gave evidence of their connection with the world of spirits, the influence of spiritualism on Rossetti's mind was not of a lasting character. In 1871 he writes:

"The Past is over and fled; Named new, we name it the old, Thereof some tale hath been told. But no word comes from the dead ; Whether at all they be, Or whether as bond or free, Or whether they too were we. Or by what spell they have sped."

(The Cloud Confines.)

Clearly this poem indicates that the consolation Rossetti had found in spiritualism had been temporary, and that he had fallen back into the old disbelief. Still more clearly the same thoughts are expressed in a poem "Soothsay", written a year before his death:

'To God at best, to Chance at worst, Give thanks for good things, last as first"

With Flaubert, Rossetti might have said of himself: "Je suis mystique et je ne crois à rien". This lack of faith which is highly characteristic for the modern mystic in general of course, makes an essential difference between the mysticism of William Blake and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and changes all the doctrines which Rossetti took from the latter. From childhood naturally prone to the marvellous and supernatural, the mysteries of life and death were continually present to the mind of Rossetti, and it could not be but that Blake's theory of "correspondences" made a deep impression upon him. The phenomena in this world are only vague shadows of another, deeper world behind, and what we behold here are tokens and warnings, we are always surrounded by an atmosphere of mystery, but whereas Blake's faith easily solves the problems which lie at the bottom of existence, Rossetti's mind cannot get at the bottom of this mystery, the feelings of tension are present, the feelings of relaxation are wanting. The problems of life and death are not enticing to him, he tries to escape the burthen of their sadness, but he never succeeds in this completely, and the result of this is a subdued sadness which lies overall his works. In this all-pervading sense of sadness and mystery, we have to see Blake's belief in the spiritual cause of natural events. The elements of joy, serenity and happiness are wanting in this belief and in the collection of Rossetti's poems we find none to match Blake's splendid lyrics: Nurse's Song, Spring, the Echoing Green, and so many others display an innocent joy and gladness, which qualities though toned down in Blake's later works, never wholly disappear from them. Also among Blake's drawings we find many that show these qualities e.g. his engravings "Infant Joy", "The Reunion of the Soul and the Body", "Morning or Glad Day". In the drawing "Infant Joy" the innocent light-heartedness of youth has been expressed; in the "Reunion of the Soul and the Body" we see the rapture with which after a long separation a longed-for meeting can fill the heart. But especially expressive of joy in an abstract sense is the drawing "Morning or Glad Day". A male, naked figure descends from above; just alighted, he with one foot touches the earth; a flood of radiance still encircles his head; his arms are outspread, exultingly he brings joy and solace to this lower world, announcing the birth of a new day, full of glory. As said above Dante Gabriel Rossetti has neither poems nor pictures to match these in joyfulness and lightheartedness. We always move in an atmosphere of mystery, the inscrutability of which is never lost sight of, and the melancholy and thoughts without hope which are the result of this mysterious sadness, are apparent in all his poems and pictures. This sense of sadness and mystery is not always very pronounced. Sometimes hardly definable, we merely feel that it is there; sometimes it reveals itself in a weird description of nature as in "The Portrait:"

In painting her I shrined her face Mid mystic trees, where light falls in Hardly at all; a covert place When you might think to find a din Of doubtful talk, and a live flame Wandering, and many a shape whose name Not itself knoweth, and old dew, And your own footsteps meeting you, And all things going as they came."