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 Coelestia. 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, and to overlook all their strangeness. Even sceptics can read his works, as they read certain chapters of the Bible, for the splendour of their language and the ideas they evoke. But if, on the one hand, his poetic gifts have thus influenced his mysticism, and made his philosophy that of a dreamer and not that of a thinker, on the other hand his poetry, in its turn, has been profoundly affected by his mysticism, with the result that it is a thing unique in English literature, no less for its striking beauties than for its many faults. What sort of poetry was to be expected from a mystic like Blake, with his theories and his mental eccentricities? I have already referred on several occasions to the strange disordered impression that his work leaves on the mind, to the dense obscurity which alternates in it with flashes of blinding light, and to the effect which it produces, in spite of all, of immense power hidden beneath its very imperfections, a great fire never extinguished, though at times it may disappear. This mystic light, which our eyes could not long endure to look upon, informs and colours all Blake's visions: and this it is which alters or destroys in him everything that we are accustomed to find in poetry. There is no single poetic element in either his mind or his work that has not been touched by it. It transforms some, disfigures others; and some it entirely demolishes. A reading of his poems in their chronological order shows us not only this change, but the stages by which it progressed, the disappearance of the ordinary qualities of poetry, one after another, as new elements came to take their places. Blake, in fact, began by living in the world of visible things, and it was only little by little that he passed out of it. His earliest writings, though they dazzle us here and there by flashes of the unknown, leave us at any rate with our feet still upon firm ground. But as page accumulates upon page, his "double vision" makes him forget the common way of seeing. His eye, accustomed to regard the world as a series of empty pictures, gazes over it without noticing its form : his soul, more and more lost in the infinite, goes further and further from ours, and flies before us, out of the range of our sight, into the unexplorable regions whither he would lead us. His visions become more frequent: the number of his celestial visitants grows into a crowd. And now ordinary speech can no longer express what he sees: he must use a special language. His pencil must come to help him explain and complete his written message, and often even the pencil has to confess its powerlessness to reproduce the artist's visions of the ideal. His mysticism, which at first was only an adjunct to his art, transforms and, in the end, submerges it. We can see the beginnings of this influence in the Poetical Sketches: it grows in the Songs of Innocence, dominates the Songs of Experience, and is almost the sole inspiring force of the Prophetic Books. A rapid survey of these various works will show us the course of this progressive movement, and lead us to our final judgment of Blake as a poet. But it will not be unprofitable to examine first the general character of the influence exercised by mysticism in changing and destroying the three chief elements of his poetry: namely, the expression of his ideas, the depth and extent of his feelings, and the strength and special tendency of his imagination. DESTRUCTION OF THE POETRY OF LOGIC AND REASON One of the first effects of Blake's mysticism was the eradication from his mind of all faith in reason and science, poisonous growths which ordinary people believed to be healthful and nourishing, and the substitution for them of the tree of true knowledge, which could only thrive in the light of Revelation, and which any logic or reasoning would blight for ever. This simple fact has grave literary consequences. It destroys by one stroke all the sources from which sprang the logical and didactic poetry of the eighteenth century. Very little would remain of Pope's work, if we eliminated from it all the writer's literary, moral and philosophical dissertations, all, that is to say, that springs from reason. The descriptive poetry of Thomson and his school is also didactic: it paints things seen by the eye: it argues and it instructs. Even the works of the most genuinely lyrical poets-Young, Cowper and Blair-are full of logical and philosophical reasoning. Blake never wrote in this way. He hated Pope and Dryden, and despised the subjects-always connected with man and the world as man sees it-which they chose for treatment. He rebelled against their theories and their principles of criticism, which he regarded as a murdering of Art and Inspiration, as the destruction of Los by the leprous hand of Urizen. He asserts that Pope's "poetic jargon " is not art. And he goes back, for his own models, to Milton's epical conceptions, and above all to the great creations of Dante and Shakespeare, who saw everything intuitively and never relied on reason for their poetic discoveries. Logic, then, has no place in his poetry, any more than in the |