(in theory at least) man's impulses ought to govern his moral life, so his imagination ought to be the sole ruler of his intellectual life. Both are parts of the poetic genius : they are the breath of the Infinite, the very soul of God. It is the poetic genius, the imagination, which alone keeps alive in us the remembrance of Eden and the vision of Eternity, and brings us back once more to the Eternals. It is the particle of God which still exists in man, the essence of humanity, the God-Man, the body of Christ. Deification cannot be carried further. Thus, step by step, the poet's creed comes to be united with the faith of the mystic: the worship of God is the worship of poetry, in the widest sense of the word. All imagination is inspiration every work of art is divine: there is only one religion, and that religion is Art.

These theories, of course, are not peculiar to Blake. They have been enunciated by the Romantic schools in England, Germany and France, and, for a whole century, the high moral and religious influence of the artist was everywhere insisted upon. Men's minds were full of these ideas even when Blake was writing.1 But never had they been expressed in words so daring or with such absolute conviction. It is in this respect especially that Blake goes beyond all other writers. And here we can clearly see the spirit of the artist forming the mind and the ideas of the mystic, as the scientific spirit had formed those of Swedenborg, and as no other mystic's mind has ever been formed before or after him.

Finally, even though his theories and his conceptions may not be all original, his manner of expressing them places him in a sphere in which he reigns supreme. No one has ever written a symbolic Bible like his. The universe born of his brain is entirely his own. Nowhere else can we find such creations as the Zoas, as Los and Enitharmon, Albion, his sons and their descendants, their worlds and their innumerable struggles. His spiritual universe, his cosmogony, his epic histories, have no existence save in his own imagination. Even if we deny any originality of thought to the mystic and the preacher-and

1 We find reference to the divinity of Inspiration as early as 1797, about which date the account of the building of Golgonooza by Los was written in Vala; and the idea is more fully developed in Jerusalem (1804-1820), where such typical expressions as "Human Imagination: Divine Body" (p. 60, 57) are frequent; and also in Milton, composed between 1800 and 1804. The characteristic sentence: "The Eternal Body of Man is The Imagination, that is God himself, The Divine body, Jesus," appears on the margin of the undated Laocoon engraving, together with many other aphorisms on the subject of Art, written in a style closely resembling that of the Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790).

it is very difficult to do this-we cannot turn to the poet without being struck by the intensely powerful individuality and the extraordinary originality which he derives from the mystic, and which mark his work as something apart, something altogether different from the work of any other writer.

XIV: THE INFLUENCE OF MYSTICISM UPON POETRY

I

-DESTRUCTION OF THE POETRY OF

LOGIC AND REASON

F Blake had written only as a mystic or a visionary, like Boehme, Martin de Villeneuve, Swedenborg, and so many others, he would have been completely forgotten, and his

work would now be of as little importance in the world of literature as the Pistis Sophia or the Arcana Cœlestia. Perhaps it would be even more neglected. It is doubtful whether the mystics of the future will set any great store by his writings, the obscurity of which will always prevent the foundation of any "Blake School." The reason of this, strange as it may appear, is to be found in his extraordinary poetic faculty. If he had been a man capable of thinking otherwise than in symbols and images, and of mastering the disordered enthusiasm which swayed his soul, he might perhaps have given the world a clear and logical exposition of his doctrines, and so secured some readers and disciples. But he was a poet first of all ; and he wrote with no regard for order, just as the inspiration came to him, using strange metaphors and unknown symbols which he very rarely took the trouble to explain. Further, his reverence for the spirit that breathed in him and dictated his words forbade him ever to correct what he had written. His different visions were connected only in the vaguest fashion, and he was at no pains to make them coherent in his writings. The mere arrangement of the pages in his great books, where he had not done it himself, has proved as hard a task as that of arranging the manuscript of Pascal's Thoughts, without the aid of such a close logical sequence as Pascal's editor had to direct him. Thus, in Blake, the poet has spoiled the prophet, causing him to rank as a mystical writer of secondary importance, when he might have been one of the first.

But this same characteristic has kept his name alive in the world of letters, where so few mystics have found a place. He is, in England at any rate, the only real mystic among the poets; and it is by his poetry that he has become famous. This prepotency of the poetic element in his visions, and the charm of their setting, have led even the least mystically-minded to study them with sympathetic interest,