My favourite track from the 2006 Dylan album, Modern Times, is the song When The Deal Goes Down. The video casts a different angle on the song, and features current it-girl Scarlett Johansson in a nostalgia-drenched American dreamscape. Not too sure what the relevance to the song is, but it’s worth a look if you want to warm your heart up on valentine’s day, or any other day for that matter. Watch out for Woody Guthrie’s Bound For Glory.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNv02iE_9rU

GK Chesterton put it like this:

And now, after a due pause, someone will ask and we must answer a popular question which, like many popular questions, is really a somewhat deep and subtle one. To put the matter quite simply, as the popular instinct would put it, ‘Was William Blake mad?’

Alexander Gilchrist, Blake’s first biographer, dedicated an entire chapter of his book Life of William Blake to the subject, a chapter entitled ‘Mad or Not Mad’. On reading Gilchrist, it seems that the principle evidence for Blake’s madness was his habit of speaking matter-of-factly about spiritual visitors. He would casually drop into conversation that he had been speaking to Milton, or any other dead poets or kings that might occur to him, and elaborate on precisely what they had discussed. He also proclaimed he saw romantic visions, such as sculptures of sheep in the middle of a field where there were none. WC Dandy in his book The Philosophy of Mystery (1841) summed up the 19th century view of this behaviour thus:

The difference between Shakespeare and Blake is antipodean. Blake was a visionary and thought his fancies real – he was mad. Shakespeare was a philosopher, and knew all his fancy was but imagination, however real might be the facts he wrought from them.

But Gilchrist describes these visions of Blake’s as the peculiar power of a creative artist of genius – a power that was fully under his own control:

According to his own explanation, Blake saw spiritual appearances by the exercise of a special faculty – that of imagination – using the word in the then unusual, but true sense, of a faculty which busies itself with the subtler realities, not with fictions. He, on this ground, objected even to Shakespeare’s expression:

And gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name

He said the things imagination saw were as much realities as were gross and tangible facts. He would tell his artist friends: ‘You have the same faculty as I (the visionary), only you do not trust or cultivate it. You can see what I do, if you choose.’ In a similar spirit was his advice to a young painter: ‘You have only to work up imagination to the state of vision, and the thing is done.’ After all, he did but use the word vision in precisely the same sense in which Wordsworth uses it to designate the poet’s special endowment.

Whatever the truth of this, many of Blake’s contemporaries remarked on the appearance of his madness. Robert Southey, in a letter to Caroline Boules (1830) said:

Much as he is to be admired, he was at that time so evidently insane, that the predominant feeling in conversing with him, or even looking at him, could only be sorrow and compassion… You could not have delighted in him – his madness was too evident, too fearful. It gave his eyes an expression such as you would expect to see in one who was possessed.

But other contemporaries held contrary opinions. James Ward, who had often met Blake in society and talked with him, would never hear him called mad. Likewise, his fellow artist Edward Calvert said: ‘I saw nothing but sanity. Saw nothing mad in his conduct, actions or character.’ And another contemporary, one Mr Finch, summed up his recollections thus: ‘He was not mad, but perverse and willful.’

Judging by Seymour Kirkup’s reflections, it was never an easy case to settle:

I was with him from 1810 to 1816, when I came abroad… His high qualities I did not prize at that time; besides I thought him mad. I do not think so now!

GK Chesterton, who denies that the stories of visions were enough to prove him mad, paints a fascinating picture of Blake’s extraordinary mind:

Originally his mind was not only strong, but strongly rational – one might almost say strongly sceptical. His mind was like a ruined Roman arch; it has been broken by barbarians; but what there is of it is Roman. In his art criticism he never said anything that was not strictly consistent with his first principles. In his controversies, in the many matters which he argued angrily or venomously, he never lost the thread of the argument. But something, when all is said and done, had eaten away whole parts of that powerful brain, leaving parts of it standing like great Greek pillars in a desert.

Where he does locate a kind of madness in Blake, is in an ‘actual and abrupt irrelevance’ in his poetry.

He had in his poetry one very peculiar habit, a habit which cannot be considered quite sane. It was the habit of being haunted, one may say hag-ridden by a fixed phrase, which gets itself written in ten separate poems on quite different subjects, when it had no apparent connection with any of them. The harmless Hayley [one of Blake's patrons]… provoked Blake’s indignation by giving him a commission for miniatures when he wanted to do something else, probably frescoes as big as the house. Blake wrote the epigram –

If Hayley knows the thing you cannot do,
That is the very thing he’ll set you to.

And then, feeling that there was a lack of colour and warmth in the portrait, he lightly added, for no reason in particular, the lines –

And when he could not act upon my wife,
Hired a villain to bereave my life.

There is, apparently, no trace here of any allusion to fact. Hayley never tried to bereave anybody’s life. He lacked even the adequate energy. But now turn to another poem of Blake’s, a merely romantic and narrative poem called Fair Eleanor, which is all about somebody acting on somebody else’s wife. Here we find the same line repeated word for word in quite another connection –

Hired a villain to bereave my life.

It is not a musical line; it does not resemble English grammar to any great extent. Yet Blake is somehow forced to put it into an utterly different poem about a fictitious person. There seems no particular reason for writing it even once; but he has to write it again and again. This is what I do call a mad spot on the mind…

In four or five different poems, without any apparent connection with those poems, occur these two extraordinary lines –

The caterpillar on the leaf
Repeats to thee thy mother’s grief

In the abstract this might perhaps mean something, though it would, I think, take most people some time to see what it could mean. In the abstract it may perhaps involve some allusion to a universal law of sacrifice in nature. In the concrete – that is, in the context – it involves no allusion to anything in heaven or earth. Here is another couplet that constantly recurs –

The red blood ran from the grey monk’s side,
His hands and his feet were wounded wide.

This is worse still; for this cannot be merely abstract. The ordinary rational reader will naturally exclaim at last, with a not unnatural explosion, ‘Who the devil is the grey monk? And why should he be always bleeding in places where he has no business?’ Now to say that this sort of thing is not insanity of some kind is simply to play the fool with the words. A madman who writes this may be higher than ordinary humanity; so may any madman in Hanwell. But he is a madman in every sense that the word has among men.

Whatever our view on Blake’s madness, we must surely concur with Wordsworth:

There was no doubt that this poor man was mad, but there is something in the madness of this man which interests me more than the sanity of Lord Byron and Walter Scott.

I was fascinated (and entertained) by this discussion of a picture of William Blake’s in Chesterton’s short biography of Blake. It’s not only a highly entertaining read, and a valuable insight into the picture under discussion, but I think it reveals a lot about the artist William Blake, both as painter and poet. As it’s also a picture on a supernatural theme, and the supernatural is the overall theme of this month’s Culture Club, I’ve reproduced the commentary below.

The first thing that any ordinary person will notice about it is that it is called ‘The Ghost of a Flea’; and the ordinary person will be very justifiably amused. This is the first fact about William Blake – that he is a joke; and it is a fact by no means to be despised. Simply considered as a puzzle or parlour game, Blake is extraordinarily entertaining… It is as if we had a highly eccentric neighbour in the next garden. Long before we like him we like gossiping about him. And the mere title, ‘The Ghost of a Flea’, represents all that makes Blake a centre of literary gossip.

And now, having enjoyed the oddity of the title, let us look at the picture. Let us attempt to describe, so far as it can be done in words instead of lines, what Blake thought that the ghost of a flea would be like. The scence suggests a high and cheerless corridor, as in some silent castle of giants. Through this a figure, naked and gigantic, is walking with a high-shouldered and somewhat stealthy stride. In one hand the creature has a peculiar curved knife of a cruel shape; in the other he has a sort of stone basin. The most striking line in the composition is the hard long curve of the spine, which goes up without a single flicker to the back of the brutal head, as if the whole back view were built like a tower of stone. The face is in no sense human. It has something that is acquiline and also something that is swinish; its eyes are alive with a moony glitter that is entirely akin to madness. The thing seems to be passing a curtain and entering a room.

With this we may mark the second fact about Blake – that if his only object is to make our flesh creep, he does it well. His bogeys are good reliable bogeys. There is really something that appeals to the imagination about this notion of the ghost of a flea being a tall vampire stalking through tall corridors at night…

The third thing to note about this picture is that for Blake the ghost of a flea means the idea or principle of a flea. The principle of a flea (so far as we can see it) is bloodthirstiness, the feeding on the life of another, the fury of the parasite… This is the next point to be remarked in his makeup as a mystic; he is interested in the ideas for which such things stand. For him the tiger means an awful elegance; for him the tree means a silent strength.

If it be granted that Blake was interested, not in the flea, but in the idea of the flea, we can proceed to the next step, which is a particularly important one. Every great mystic goes about with a magnifying glass. He sees every flea as a giant – perhaps rather as an ogre. I have spoken of the tall castle in which these giants dwell; but indeed, that tall tower is a microscope. It will not be denied that Blake shows the best part of a mystic’s attitude in seeing that the soul of a flea is ten thousand times larger than a flea. But the really interesting point is much more striking. It is the essential point upon which all primary understanding of the art of Blake really turns. The point is this: that the ghost of a flea is actually more solid than a flea. The flea himself is hazy and fantastic compared to the hard and massive actuality of his ghost. When we have understood this, we have understood the second of the great ideas in Blake – the idea of ideas.

More posts on William Blake at Culture Club:

• William Blake and the Romantic Conception of the Individual
• William Wordsworth and William Blake: Nature and Anti Nature
• William Blake Invents Free Verse in the Marriage of Heaven and Hell
• G.K. Chesterton on William Blake and Mysticism
• Was William Blake Mad?
• William Blake and the Tradition of Antinomianism
• Terry Eagleton on William Blake: Sex, Art and Transformation
• The Argument Between Law and Love – A Common Theme

Terry Teachout, the drama critic of the Wall Street Journal, has effectively created a cultural video-on-demand site from material uploaded on YouTube. Read his article about it at WhoseTube? ArtsTube – WSJ.com. Quote:

YouTube, like the other new Web-based media, is a common carrier, a means to whatever ends its millions of users choose, be they good, bad, dumb or ugly. You can use it to watch mindless junk — or some of the greatest classical and jazz musicians of the 20th century. . .

Seeing these artists, most of whom are now known to us only through their recordings, is an awe-inspiring experience. To watch Art Tatum rippling through a bristlingly virtuosic version of Jerome Kern’s “Yesterdays,” or Richard Strauss conducting his tone poem “Till Eulenspiegel” with a cool detachment that borders on the blasé, is to learn something about the essence of their art that no verbal description, however insightful or evocative, can supply.

By posting this list of links, I have, in effect, created a Web-based fine-arts video-on-demand site. The irony is that I did so just as network TV was getting out of the culture business. Not only have PBS and its affiliates cut back sharply on classical music, jazz and dance, but cable channels like A&E and Bravo that used to specialize in the fine arts are now opting instead to show “Dog the Bounty Hunter” and “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.” This abdication of cultural responsibility has created an opening for entrepreneurs who grasp the new media’s unrivaled capacity for niche marketing.

This post on his blog explains how to access the list of videos he’s aggregated – scroll down to the ‘Video’ links on the right hand bar. The ‘Audio’ links below this are also great for those interested in literature and poetry.

My contribution to the nightcap at our first session was an oil painting by Jack B. Yeats (brother to WB Yeats), called ‘O’Connell Bridge’ (1927). According to the book I was referencing, this is currently in the collection at the Pyms Gallery in London:

Jack B. Yeats, O’Connell Bridge, 1927

I discovered the work of Jack B. Yeats purely by chance – the week before our first session I was staying with a friend in Devon (the composer James Barrett), and I happened upon a book on his shelf that featured the paintings of Jack B. Yeats. James is also a painter, and he proceeded to enthuse about the artist, which was great inspiration. I was immediately struck by his work, especially the interiors and the circus-themed paintings. It’s hard to find any books or information about the artist – in the end I managed to get my hands on a book from the library on his Late Paintings (ISBN 0 85488 091 7), which is available from the Whitechapel Art Gallery website (scroll down the page to find it listed), and chose this painting to show to the Culture Club because of its Irish theme (it’s a scene from Dublin street life). It seems to tie in with his brother’s view of Ireland to me – I’m reminded of the lines from Easter 1916:

I have met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses

Jack B. Yeats’s work is well worth exploring further. I’ve done a search on the internet, but could only find a few books showcasing his work, the best probably being The Art Of Jack B. Yeats. Perhaps he’s due a re-assessment.

KC’s ‘nightcap’ during the first Culture Club meeting was Edward Calvert’s ‘The Chamber Idyll’. Here is a reproduction of the engraving from the Tate site:

Edward Calvert, The Chamber Idyll, 1831

The Tate says:

‘”The Chamber Idyll” is a truly original image, and is usually regarded as Calvert’s masterpiece. It is a sensuous vision of a bucolic honeymoon. The cottage stands open to the warm night, apples litter the floor, and a plough is silhouetted on the far right-hand horizon emphasising the end of the day’s labours. The print, with its fine engraved lines, is an astonishing technical achievement for an artist who had been making prints for only four years. Yet after this work Calvert abandoned printmaking altogether.’

He only made eleven engravings, and you can see them all at the Tate site.