William Blake: Philosopher of Childhood

Aristotle, in his Nicomachean Ethics, tells us that ethics is for adults. (9, 1100a) This is because it deals with virtue, and virtue is an adult attainment. Children, he tells us, may be promising but not good. It is not hard to see why he thinks this: virtue is a habit developed over a lifetime of moral choices. Before one’s character is ‘fixed’ into habit, one does not have a confirmed moral nature; one cannot be depended upon to make the right choice. A child, we may say, is ‘good-natured’, but virtue is not nature but choice: it is volitional, not dispositional. This is not our current view of the child. Our view of the child is as someone whose intrinsic virtue and imaginative freedom remain unspoiled. The child, for instance, is a natural artist, a gifted poet brimful of ‘natural compassion.’ The child is unsullied by lies and cruelty until warped by the hypocrisy and compromises of adult society. This, in general, is a legacy of Romanticism, and it was in the 19^th century that we first found the notion of children’s literature: a literature that appeals to and cultivates the special ‘imagination’ of children. Part of this vogue, which has continued unabated in our century, was the popular reception of Blake’s Songs of Innocence, the only work of his to have achieved any success in his lifetime and the only Blake of which Wordsworth and Coleridge knew. These writers sensed correctly that Blake had achieved something remarkable if they were not exactly sure what this something was. In tight, sometimes fiendishly difficult stanza forms, Blake had conveyed a striking freshness and ‘innocence’. He had brilliantly evoked the world of the child in the new sense of that term. This is partly true but only partly. Blake had, in fact, intended his work as satire: a satire of the treacly children’s songs of Isaac Watts in particular and of the emerging cult of childhood more generally. Not that Blake had a problem with childhood per se or was insensitive to the gross impositions of adults on those supposedly under their care. He was though a follower of St. Paul who counselled us to put away childish things, and it might pay to consider the Songs of Innocence in this respect.^[1]          

Children, of course, cannot be objects of satire in the usual sense (the neo-classical sense of Pope, Swift, and Dryden say) because they are not worthy targets. The strategy of Blakean satire, though, is not so much to ridicule the ridiculous or to castigate vice as to diagnose forms of ‘bad faith’, to show the evasions and self-deceits by which false forms of consciousness are constructed and maintained. One of these is ‘childhood’, as certain of Blake’s contemporaries understood it. Blake grants there is strength in innocence, in its guilelessness, its implicit faith in the world’s beneficence, and its immediate conviction of divine presence. Each song, however, is a demonstration of the limits of this strength when unredeemed by an adult consciousness (or, to use a more Blakean term, ‘organized innocence’). Innocence is easily deceived because innocence trusts too much in itself and too readily deceives itself. This may be one reason why we are so eager as adults to keep children ‘innocent.’ Thus, each song of innocence presents a flaw (whether the speaker is a child or adult- an adult can be innocent too) that the speaker of the poem either masks from him or herself or compensates for by some substitute gratification. Thus, the speaker of ‘Little Boy Lost’ projects a ‘father in heaven’ to compensate for the (unredeemed) loss of his earthly father (as if ‘supernatural’ good were some substitute for a more primary lost earthly good). The speaker in ‘The Shepherd’ fails to notice that it is the shepherd who is supposed to be leading the sheep and not vice versa. The Shepherd is only raising the sheep to shear and eat them. The sacrificial lamb of ‘The Lamb’ (a figure who recurs many times in Blake’s songs) is oblivious to being in the divine image (as he is of everything else) even though his (unstated) crucifixion will be all too real. In each case, the speaker papers over some crack or flaw in the vision of innocence that he or she cannot face so that innocence becomes an evasion.

That this has crippling consequences is nowhere more evident than in the case of the speaker in ‘The Little Black Boy.’ The mother of the poem certainly offers a powerful vision of the inclusiveness of divine love, one with a Blakean twist: the experience of embodiment, which causes so much mischief in the poem (as people have black and white bodies), also has the positive side of filtering or limiting the divine love till the soul has grown sufficiently to be receptive of it.^[2] A mere ‘child’ cannot bear the vision of God, which in Blake’s mystical doctrine includes the vision of negativity and darkness. Yet the black boy cannot realize the full implications of this vision because innocence is passive: he can only imagine a heaven in which souls are as black and white as bodies and in which he will win the white boy’s love by serving him as an umbrella. In other words, his mind is colonized, and he is incapable of questioning his worldly status, which he thinks will be retained in the afterlife. At the same time, as he is given a vision of universal love, he is inoculated from revolt. Ironically, the black boy cannot receive the beams of love in their aspect of the fires of rebellion because he cannot free himself from the “mind-forged manacles” imposed on him by his condition. In this respect, he is like any of us who limit the divine vision to what our narrow categories can encompass. Things are similar with the hapless chimney sweep. His liberation occurs in dreams, the warm after-glow of which serves to get him through his day. His rationalization of the shearing of the sacrificial Tom Dacre is the most desperate imaginable: his precious white hair would only be sullied by the dirt of this world. The conclusion of the poem is that the sweepers go back to work, which is, in fact, all they can do. They do their duty in the vain hope that they will be kept thereby from harm.

All of these points become clear in the subsequent Songs of Experience, which present the exact same world viewed through a different lens. Blake tells us that the eye-altering alters all, and what we see in Blake’s sequel is the world of innocence disenchanted. It is a world of economic oppression, sexual puritanism, cruelty, jealous fear, and selfishness. We must remember, however, that it, too, is satire. If innocence lacks the clear-eyed vision of experience, it has to be admitted that experience cannot see past the same dull round. It has no imaginative freedom from the empirically given: the disenchanted world it sees is the only world it recognizes. At this point, we must evoke innocence in a positive sense and reread the poems discussed above in a different light. The duty sarcastically invoked in our first interpretation of the Chimney Sweep is now our duty to our spiritual liberation. The passivity of the black boy is now an active Christ-like condescension (for it is the incarnate Christ who mediates God to our limited vision as the black boy shades the white). The lamb is now a powerful image of God’s humility in the incarnation. The Shepherd becomes the good shepherd of the Gospels, seeking his lost sheep. Innocence admits the necessity of imaginative transcendence so that even the chimney sweeper’s dreams become a prelude to liberation. As the vision of innocence is cracked and flawed when seen from the standpoint of experience, so the vision of experience is cramped and despairing when seen from the point of view of innocence. Each state is a satire on the other. Each cries out to be read in a special double sense when the two books are taken as a whole.^[3] Blake’s model here may be Milton’s pairing of L’Allegro and Il Peneroso or, more remotely, the dyadic structure of Spenser’s Shepherd’s Calendar. His demand for a ‘double reading’ of his opposed collections, however, seems far more systematically worked out than in either of his predecessors.

The reader who has attained the capacity to read in this doubled way has attained the standpoint of an adult, which is neither naiveté nor cynicism. Doubled or perhaps dialectical vision has the imaginative strength of innocence and the hard honesty of experience. It can encompass both poles of the deity, the light and dark, in a single/double vision. This higher vision is sometimes associated with childhood in the Gospels, but it is childhood purged of passivity and ignorance. It is innocence as an active achieved virtue to return to our Aristotelian beginning. Thus, Blake is not a proponent of any sentimentalized vision of childhood: his is a vision that honors not the child but what the child can become, and in this sense, his view is quite traditional. The limitations of the innocent contain the seeds of their own overcoming: the admittedly false consciousness of the Black Boy has within it the possibility of becoming a Christ-like vision. However, Blake’s qualified praise of childhood is that this is not true of experience. Innocence signifies something higher than itself, whereas experience signifies only the things that are: to become more than a child, I must become a child again in the sense of reclaiming the imagination of childhood from its alienated forms (one of which is the sentimental contemporary construction of ‘the child’!).^[4] This is Blake’s gloss on Matthew 18,3: “Verily I say onto you, except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter the kingdom of heaven.”                 

 

 

 

 

References

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics trans. R. McKeon (Random House, New York, 1941)

KJV Bible (BEAMS, Gulfport, 1078)

Damon, S. Foster.  William Blake: his Philosophy and Symbols (Kessinger Publishing, Whitefish, 2010)

Blake, William The Complete Poems ed. Alicia Ostriker (Penguin Books, London, 1973)

Ostriker, Alicia Vision and Verse in William Blake (University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, 1965)

[1]When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” (1Corinthians 13,11) As Alicia Ostriker puts it: Whoever wished to babble over the natural sweetness and happiness of childhood would be reminded (by Blake) that childhood was by no means always sweet and that happiness was against nature.” (47)

[2] Powerful but still limited to the displaced discourse of ‘religion’. The mother is still speaking of a projected realm outside of or alongside this world which thereby retains its monstrous injustice intact. This fact is indicated by her sitting beneath a tree: never a positive symbol in Blake.

[3] In this essay I have read the Songs of Innocence in their negative sense and used the Songs of Experience to recuperate what was positive in them. I could have pursued the opposite course and read the first set of poems ‘innocently’ and used the second set to diagnose their limitations. There is doubtless no Archimedean point from which to read the entire set rather than in the back and forth fashion we have employed here. There is however the trajectory of Blake’s canon taken as a whole for which both innocence and experience take their place in a total spiritual anagogy. This is well laid out by Foster Damon (William Blake: His Philosophy and Symbols, 12-13).

 

[4] As Alicia Ostriker notes we are reminded by the Songs of Innocence that: “…human perfection never arises from material well-being, but only and always from spiritual strength. The rationalist, materialist outlook was no less sentimental, because no less limited, than blind adoration of the child or savage.” (48).  It is the imaginative power contained (in nucleo) in innocence that frees us from the solipsistic self-enclosure of sense experience and reflection (finite ego) as understood by Locke. We should note in this respect the satiric thrust of Blake’s use of that very Lockean word ‘experience’.