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to believe in the angels and spirits seen by Blake or Swedenborg than to believe in those evoked by modern mediums or preached about by the Churches.

Besides, what matters it if all these visions are simply dreams, dreamed in full daylight? To quote a well-known saying of one of these dreamers:

They who dream by day are cognisant of many things which escape those who dream only by night. In their grey visions they obtain glimpses of eternity and thrill, in waking, to find that they have been upon the verge of the great secret. In snatches, they learn something of the wisdom which is of good, and more of the mere knowledge, which is of evil. They penetrate however rudderless or compassless, into the vast ocean of the "light ineffable" and again, like the adventurers of the Nubian geographer, agressi sunt mare tenebrarum, quid in eo esset exploraturi.1

They at any rate believed in the reality of their visions; and it is well for us that they did so, because such faith has been the great moving force of all mystics, in the domain of art as well as in that of action. If the prophets and the apostles had doubted for an instant, they would never have revolutionised the world. If Blake had not believed in his visions, we should never have had his pictures or his poems.

The critic may therefore leave this question of reality unanswered, and regard the visions in the light of actual facts, as the hagiographer does when he describes and studies the visions of the saints. Examined thus, they present certain very striking features which at once differentiate them entirely from the religious visions recognised by the Church, and which clearly distinguish Blake's mysticism from the mysticism familiar to us in the lives of the saints.

If the Church were to examine these visions, it would say, with Tatham and his friends who burned Blake's manuscripts, "These things come from the devil, and not from God." And indeed, these visions had none of the accepted characteristics of a heaven-sent apparition, either in the spiritual nature of the man who saw them, or in the manner of their appearance, or in the physical and spiritual effects they produced upon him.

Blake was no saint. He had never renounced the world, its passions or its pleasures. He had never mortified his body by ascetic practices; on the contrary, he always delighted in his robust health. He knew nothing of the flagellations and fastings endured by the visionaries

Poe: Eleonora.

of the Church, and had never experienced that intense longing to behold their God which had filled the souls of the saints, nor such periods of despair as those which accompanied the withdrawal of their visions, and caused St. Teresa to utter so many cries of anguish. He never prepared himself, by prayers and meditations, for his celestial visitors, nor, when they came, did he remain in a state of ecstasy as long as their visit lasted. He moved among them without showing any bodily sign of their presence. Finally, he lacked what the theologians have always regarded as the most essential mark of the Christian visionary-humility. In their eyes, all visions that did not inspire humility must come of the devil. Blake, on the contrary, was proud of his visions; and unlike the saints, who kept theirs secret, and only revealed them to their confessors, he proclaimed them openly, and gloried in them. Even in their presence he had no fear. Like Faust before the Earth-Spirit, he felt himself to be their equal. He hated humility, as belonging only to the soul that doubted, and he regarded himself as equal or even superior to any created being. He would not humble himself even before God.

Thou also dwellst in Eternity.

Thou art a Man. God is no more.1

He cannot therefore be called a religious mystic, in the ordinary sense of the term. He himself would have classed himself rather among the old Hebrew prophets, or the great poets of all time, compelled to proclaim to all men the way of escape from eternal death, and to open their eyes to the divine light, which, at the appointed hour, will reveal itself and shine forth in full splendour upon all.

His pride and his confidence in himself were only the consciousness of his poetic mission, as his visions were the source of it, a source perpetually renewed, and his works its accomplishment. We have now to see what was the special and mysterious message he was thus charged to deliver, and to study the yet more mysterious language in which he conveyed it.

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1 The Everlasting Gospel.

PART II

THE MYSTIC: HIS DOCTRINES

B

V: GENERAL CHARACTER OF HIS WORKS

AND HIS SYSTEM

LAKE'S ideas and his message to the age he lived in can scarcely be called a doctrine. He never troubled to give any complete exposition of his creed, which we have to gather for ourselves from the general tendencies of his poetry, from fragments of his conversation, or from the maxims which he scattered among his poems or inscribed as mottoes to his pictures. It is indisputable, however, that he had a doctrine to preach. On this he always insisted. If he does not repeat all through his work, as at the beginning of Milton "Mark well my words: they are of your eternal Salvation," nor always write such formal appeals to his readers as we find in the preface to Jerusalem, still his dogmatic tone, his bold assertions, his innumerable exhortations reveal, almost invariably, the apostle underlying the poet.

But, like the prophets of old, he spoke chiefly in parables, and did not always supply the interpretation.

I give you the end of a golden string,

Only wind it into a ball;

It will lead you in at Heaven's gate
Built in Jerusalem's wall. 2

So far, the task has never been successfully attempted. One can certainly wind the thread into a sort of ball, and collect some kind of doctrine from scattered passages; but the thread is so entangled, so confused, so full of knots that one must be perpetually cutting it and starting afresh. And so none of his critics and interpreters have ever been able to give more than a fragmentary account of his teachings: no one can be sure that he has not cut the knots instead of disentangling them. And even if it were possible to expound all Blake's theories as a logical whole, and explain every part of his work clearly and satisfactorily, some lost manuscript might still be discovered which would add new and essential details and alter conclusions seemingly indisputable.

And even if we leave his unknown writings out of the question, 1 Milton, p. 3, 25.

2 Jerusalem, chap. IV. Preface.

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