session of priceless worth. In short, Art and Religion are the same to him, because both give, what there is nothing else that can give, a complete expression to the spirit of life itself."1

With such an identification of art and religion it is clear that the mystic way, the method by which Blake strives to achieve his goal, will at many points be very different from the mystic way of orthodox Christianity. The expansion of the imagination will play a much larger part in it than the discipline of the will. In contrast to the rigorous discipline of the will and the mind and the feeling outlined in the Imitation of Christ of Thomas à Kempis, Blake's method "seeks Christ-likeness by a new life process. Starting with the new birth of the Spirit, it seeks to develop the Spirit of Life, by yielding to it and allowing it to transform it into the Christ-image. This is the real method for training Saints, the Saint produced being essentially a life product."72 Practically the same process is outlined by Mr. William Butler Yeats when he says:

Instead of seeking God in the deserts of time and space, in exterior immensities, in what he called "the abstract void,” he believed that the further he dropped behind him memory of time and space, reason builded upon sensation, morality founded for the ordering of the world; and the more he was absorbed in emotion; and above all, in emotion escaped from the impulse of bodily longing and the restraints of bodily reason, in artistic emotion; the nearer did he come to Eden's "breathing garden," to use his beautiful phrase, and to the unveiled face of God."

Such, in brief, is the revelation that has led a small but distinguished group of critics of considerable potency of literary expression to acclaim Blake one of the major prophets of modern times and one of the great mystics of all time.

71 Basil De Sélincourt, "The Parallelism of Religion and Art: A Comment on William Blake," Hibbert Journal, V (January, 1907), 397–406.

72 Gardner, Vision and Vesture, p. 209. Most writers in this field stress the fact that "Blake maintained that true Christianity is only understood and enjoyed by the imagination and heart, and that therefore only the imaginative man could be a real Christian," as S. E. Keeble points out in "Imagination and William Blake," London Quarterly Review, CXXVII (April, 1917), 215-26.

73 Yeats, op. cit., p. 206.

CHAPTER II

WHAT IS MYSTICISM?

If one thing stands out more clearly than another from this sketch of what sympathetic critics have made of Blake's mysticism, it is the lack of any common or clear understanding of what we mean when we say that a man is a mystic, great or small. As we have seen, very few of these writers have had any very precise sense of what the word itself means, even when applied to Blake. And still fewer have had any background of acquaintance with other mystics who might afford opportunity for illuminating comparisons with the subject of their study. Where a few critics have had for this purpose a more or less extensive acquaintance among the mystics of history, their findings have been amazingly discrepant. On the one hand M. Berger, while very sure that Blake is a genuine mystic, has not hesitated to point out how entirely different from the mystics of the orthodox Christian tradition this heretic is. The English poet's writings, says M. Berger,

....

present certain very striking features . . . . which clearly distinguish Blake's mysticism from the mysticism familiar to us in the lives of the saints. . . Blake was no saint. He had never renounced the world, its passions or its pleasures. He had never mortified his body by ascetic practices . . . . had never experienced that intense longing to behold their God which had filled the souls of the saints. . . . . He never prepared himself, by prayers and meditations, for his celestial visitors. . . . . Finally, he lacked what the theologians have always regarded as the most essential mark of the Christian visionary-humility. . . . . He would not humble himself even before God. ... . He cannot therefore be called a religious mystic, in the ordinary sense of the term.1

On the other hand, Mr. S. Foster Damon, who is quite as well informed in general about the saints as M. Berger, not only believes that Blake is a great mystic, to be counted among the great mystics of the world, but that he is a great mystic in the traditional sense, recapitulating in the history of his inner life as well as in the teachings of his books the conventional stages of orthodox mystical de1 Berger, op. cit., pp. 59 f.

velopment. Here Mr. Damon accepts Miss Evelyn Underhill's five divisions of the mystic way-the Awakening, the Purgation, the "enhanced return of the sense of the divine order, after the Self has achieved its detachment from the world," the "Dark Night of the Soul," and "the complete union with Truth"-as a literal description of Blake's experience.2 Indeed, Miss Underhill herself, whose definition of mysticism is largely derived from an unusually wide study of the lives and writings of the saints, had already anticipated Mr. Damon's position when she closed her monumental An Introduction to Mysticism with a brief but enthusiastic note on Blake as "one of the greatest mystics of all time."

But as has been said before, the majority of Blake students have used the term so vaguely, with so little sense of historic implications, that in most of them a definite issue like this above is hardly to be found. Consequently the average discussion of Blake's mysticism seldom comes to grips with any discrimination of real importance, or effects any analysis of sufficient precision to be even fully descriptive.

The Blake critics, however, are scarcely to be blamed for this vagueness of use, since it reflects quite fairly the general state of public opinion about mysticism today. Probably never before has there been so much or such sympathetic interest in mysticism as there is at the present time; never, certainly, since the latter days of the Roman Empire has there been so much curiosity as now when materialism and rationalism and pseudo-paganism are bringing about the inevitable reaction. And yet—and here one is reminded of the latter days of the Roman Empire again—it is hard to imagine a state of greater confusion or looseness of usage than that which exists today. Verily, mysticism has come to mean so many things that it has ceased to mean much of anything. Nine-tenths of the people who use the word today mean little more than a vague emotional reaction in which awe and the sense of strangeness play almost equal parts.

With a tool so blunted as this popular notion of mysticism it is

2 Damon, op. cit., p. 2.

Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Man's Spiritual Consciousness (London, 1912), p. 562.

impossible to think, to say nothing of criticizing. Some sort of definition is needed, logically exclusive and discriminating enough to mean something, flexible and broad enough to be descriptive, and, for want of a better word, pragmatic enough to meet the contingencies of life fully and realistically. Ordinarily, such a definition is arrived at by one of three ways: by authority, by a sifting and a criticism of common use, or by a fresh study of the field under discussion with all the helps which authority and common use can afford.

There have been times, and there still are fields even now, in which the appeal to authority has been fruitful. But if there ever was a time when anybody felt competent to determine once for all what was meant when a man was called a mystic, that time is passed. If the world was ever agreed on matters so fundamental to man's spiritual life, it was at a time less devoted to variety of opinion than the present. Nowhere have toleration and equalitarianism triumphed more completely than in this field.

Common use is still in many cases a fruitful source of definition. Of course, most definitions derived from a sifting of what we mean, say, when we praise a man for his common sense, are more or less determined by the maker's own predilections, but if one takes a great many definitions, even though they are arrived at from very different points of view, he can usually find certain common elements which may be taken as suggestive for the class, if not final for the individual. But in the case of mysticism it is hard to arrive at even that modicum of agreement.

One may, for instance, hear a very discriminating logician of a naturalistic persuasion dismiss a discussion of literary values by the most thoroughly rationalistic humanist of his acquaintance as mystic because the humanist has discussed human conduct in terms of something besides purely physiological determinism. In certain groups the possession of any sort of general idea is apt to expose one to the reproach of mystic. It is not difficult to see how this arose out of a common epistemological use of the term "mystic" for anyone who attempts to arrive at knowledge of truth by intuitive, as opposed to ordinary rational, processes of thought. But when such an extension of meaning takes place that the most ground-keeping

of rationalists is lumped with the airiest of transcendentalists, clearly the term has ceased not only to be definitive, but even to be descriptive.

In contexts where thought counts for less than feeling, the same confusion prevails, with similar results. Not only are the medium and the holder of hands at the séance called mystics, but any poet or artist who can blur natural objects in such a fashion as to release them from the bounds of their normal appearance and normal meanings is given the same name as the masters of the spiritual life. Indeed, for half the human race obscurity is perhaps the readiest password to mysticism in any field. The formless, the vague, the nerveless, the will-less, the meaningless, are given the same name as the most heroic, the most dynamic, the most meaningful of spiritual activities. Phantasy and hallucination, dream and myth, take their places side by side with the most profoundly matured and richly invested thought and feeling and imagination of the race. Consequently no definition of mysticism arrived at from common use can be anything but a paradox.

The difficulty, after all, is in the field itself quite as much as in the lazy habits of the human mind in an age that is rich in substitutes and short-cuts for thinking. For mysticism, being a field of human experience that involves all the elements of man's nature, physiological and psychological, intellectual, and emotional, and aesthetic, as well as what is vaguely called spiritual, labors under the complexity and uncertainty of human life itself. That is what makes it so perennially interesting. Even while it defies definition, it challenges it.

First of all, mysticism, as the term is used with a thousand different varieties and shades of meaning, does include so many different elements: the rigorous self-discipline of a St. Paul, the joyous play of a St. Francis, the scarlet woman and the wondrous beasts of the Apocalypse, the voiceless and imageless openings of George Fox, the Nirvana of the Buddha, the ecstasy of fire of Pascal, the transfiguration of the everyday world for the successful lover, the fading away of all things of sense for the victorious ascetic, the transcendent intellectual vision of Spinoza, the drunken sense of power in the aboriginal who has eaten of the sacred weed