IN THE TEETH OF THE TIGER

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 399, 6 July 1928, Page 14

IN THE TEETH OF THE TIGER

(Written for THE SUN) To come face to face with Truth is like looking into the jaws of a tiger; its mercilessness is much more apparent than its beauty. Yet Truth is beautiful, despite its eternal menace, and its wild ferocity merely adds to its charm for the adventurous spirit. It is no tame cat. It does not sleep in front of the drawing-room fire, nor lick out the saucers of boudoir philosophers. Truth is a tiger, and the only beings that can look with equanimity into the jaws of a tiger are the intrepid and well-armed hunter and—another tiger. “Tiger, tiger, burning bright, in the forest of the night!” . . . This brings me by an easy and graceful sequence of thought (as Mark Twain would say) to William Blake. William Blake was a poet who knew Truth, not as a hunter of the tiger, but as another tiger. He was truth; truth abode in his mind as the per-

fume in the rose, and every thought that emanated from him was accurate because It was inspirational. And because so few people are inspired with truth it seems when it appears not only strange but dreadful. Blake was said to be mad. “His ‘visionary’ works,” declares the Everyman Encyclopaedia, “almost suggest a form of insanity.” But I think it is an established fact nowadays that everyone has a kink and nobody is quite normal, and when I compare the dull sterilities of the said encyclopaedia with the pregnant beauties of Blake, I am fain to believe that it is the encyclopaedist who is not quite “all there.” It takes, too, I think, not an encyclopaedist, but a poet to judge a poet, and here is what Swinburne said about the most visionary of Blake’s visionary works; “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell!” “It ranks as the greatest work produced by the 18th century in the line of high poetry and spiritual speculation.” Of course, this encomium will but lead the encyclopaedic school of thinkers to declare that Swinburne also was insane. But sanity, I think, is a much overrated quality. A "Defence of Sanity” was contributed to The Sun some little time ago by lan D. Coster, who, to my mind, utterly damned it in his opening sentence by saying “Sanity is the bubble in the spirit level of existence.” Heavens, what a bubble! Choose ye, O my reader, between Coster's bubble and Blake’s bubble. On the one hand we have a bubble in a box. the colourless bubble of carpenters and logicians, the bubble of socalled sanity. Now gaze on Blake’s bubble, floating, iridescent, everchanging, elusive and magical—the bubble of so-called insanity. It will be admitted, however grudgingly, that Blake's bubble is the more beautiful. And Beauty is truth, truth beauty, that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need know. So sang Keats —but perhaps he was a bit touched, too. Let me, however, return to my tiger. To read Blake is to confront truth, and to confront truth is, alas! for many minds, to be repelled, shocked, and frightened- When Blake was four years old he saw God looking in at the window, and because he saw God it naturally follows that the God of Blake is very different from the God of the Sunday school teachers who have not seen him. Seeing God is like writing plays—“those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.” Blake, for instance, quite definitely states that God is the origin of good and evil alike. He believes that Heaven and hell, good and evil, God and the devil, are but two aspects of the same power, like the two sides of a coin. Progress depends on opposition. This can be proved by a very simple test. What causes the progress, I ask you, of a train on the rails? Why do the wheels go on, instead of merely buzzing round and round? The progress is caused by friction, by the opposition of the rail to the wheel. When you jack up the wheel of your car and run the engine, the wheel simply spins; the rough road is what makes the car go forward. Opposition is necessary for spiritual progress also. Sin is necessary, pain is necessary, disease is necessary. They are all from God. This is one of the tigertruths that are so very hard to face. And. because sin is from God, it ill becomes anyone to adopt a superior or intolerant attitude toward it. Blake has no time for Sunday school virtues. He believes that God is love, and that love is the virtue which will perfect all human relationships. Puritan austerities are anathema to him, but Imagination and Sympathy are the loveliest attributes of the soul. Experience that produces a harsh rectitude is experience wasted; understanding and responsiveness are the supreme qualities of the beautiful spirit. “Men are admitted into Heaven,” he says, “not because they have curbed and governed their passions, or have no passions, but because they have cultivated their understandings.” And as the advocates of conventional sanity and reason attack Blake, so also does he attack them. Reason is a terrible shape, which appears in demoniac majesty in his visions. Reason means, to him, materialism, literalism, opaqueness; it is an ogre which blinds the spirit and starves the senses, and keeps the soul a prisoner within the four walls of self. To escape from self is man’s only salvation. Of the inspirational quality of

Blake’s work there can be no doubt. Before he was fourteen he had written the beatific song beginning, “How sweet I roamed from field to field,” and all his life he had the passionate love of a creator for his work. He engraved his own poems on copper, and they were then printed in colour with exquisite illustrations. To study his works in facsimile is to get an extraordinarily beautiful glimpse of the visions which were to him more real than this very improbable world. Hadow says; “His exquisite sensitive genius is too delicate for the hand of criticism; you must take it and be enriched or leave it and be impoverished. , . . His inspiration is at the centre, it comes white-hot from the celestial flame, it burns to ashes all cavil and all censure.” Blake speaks in the most primitive of all the world's languages, the language of symbolism, which is, according to psycho-analysis, the language of dreams. Many of his thoughts are stated with a child-like simplicity, but they have a dual, sometimes a treble or quadruple, meaning. What to others a trifle appears Fills me full of smiles or tears; Fo'h double the vision my eyes do see, And a double vision is always with me/ ... May God us keep. From single vision and Newton’s sleep, “Newton’s sleep” is of course the state of mind that sees no more than a physical fact, and is blind to all meanings that lie below the surface. No physical fact was unmeaning to him, none was unimportant, none was feared. Tiger-truth was his essential nature. He sang, not bravely, but quite simply, in the tiger’s lair. His mind was not brave, it was fearless. And even when death came he retained that fearlessness in the face of the last and largest of the tiger-truths, for he welcomed the approach of death by “singing songs of joy which made the rafters ring.” MARGARET MACPHERSON. Kaitaia.