Mysticism in English Literature Part 9

Each outcry of the hunted Hare A fibre from the Brain does tear A Skylark wounded in the wing A Cherubim does cease to sing.

_Auguries of Innocence._

When we feel like this, we will go forth to help, not because we are prompted by duty or religion or reason, but because the cry of the weak and ignorant so wrings our heart that we cannot leave it unanswered.

Cultivate love and understanding then, and all else will follow. Energy, desire, intellect; dangerous and deadly forces in the selfish and impure, become in the pure in heart the greatest forces for good. What mattered to Blake, and the only thing that mattered, was the purity of his soul, the direction of his will or desire, as Law and Boehme would have put it. Once a man's desire is in the right direction, the more he gratifies it the better;

Abstinence sows sand all over The ruddy limbs & flaming hair, But Desire Gratified Plants fruits of life & beauty there.[76]

Only an extraordinarily pure nature or a singularly abandoned one could confidently proclaim such a dangerous doctrine. But in Blake's creed, as Swinburne has said, "the one thing unclean is the belief in uncleanness."

It is easy to see that this faculty which Blake calls "Imagination"

entails of itself naturally and inevitably the Christian doctrine of self-sacrifice. It is in _Milton_ that Blake most fully develops his great dogma of the eternity of sacrifice. "One must die for another through all eternity"; only thus can the bonds of "selfhood" be broken.

Milton, just before his renunciation, cries--

I will go down to self-annihilation and eternal death Lest the Last Judgment come and find me unannihilate, And I be seiz'd and giv'n into the hands of my own Selfhood.

For, according to Blake, personal love or selfishness is the one sin which defies redemption. This whole pa.s.sage in _Milton_ (Book i., pp.

12, 13) well repays study, for one feels it to be alive with meaning, holding symbol within symbol. Blake's symbolism, and his fourfold view of nature and of man, is a fascinating if sometimes a despairing study.

Blake has explained very carefully the way in which the visionary faculty worked in him:--

What to others a trifle appears Fills me full of smiles or tears; For double the vision my Eyes do see, And a double vision is always with me.

With my inward Eye, 'tis an old Man grey, With my outward, a Thistle across my way.

Now I a fourfold vision see, And a fourfold vision is given to me; 'Tis fourfold in my supreme delight, And threefold in soft Beulah's night, And twofold Always. May G.o.d us keep From Single vision & Newton's sleep![77]

He says twofold always, for everything was of value to Blake as a symbol, as a medium for expressing a still greater thing behind it. It was in this way that he looked at the human body, physical beauty, splendour of colour, insects, animate, states, and emotions, male and female, contraction and expansion, division and reunion, heaven and h.e.l.l.

When his imagination was at its strongest, his vision was fourfold, corresponding to the fourfold division of the Divine Nature, Father, Son, Spirit, and the fourth Principle, which may be described as the Imagination of G.o.d, without which manifestation would not be possible.[78] These principles, when condensed and limited so as to be seen by us, may take the form of Reason, Emotion, Energy and Sensation, or, to give them Boehme's names, Contraction, Expansion, Rotation, and Vegetative life. These, in turn, are a.s.sociated with the four states of humanity or "atmospheres," the four elements, the four points of the compa.s.s, the four senses (taste and touch counting as one), and so on.

Blake seemed, as it were, to hold his vision in his mind in solution, and to be able to condense it into gaseous, liquid, or solid elements at whatever point he willed. Thus we feel that the prophetic books contain meaning within meaning, bearing interpretation from many points of view; and to arrive at their full value, we should need to be able--as Blake was--to apprehend all simultaneously,[79] instead of being forced laboriously to trace them out one by one in succession. It is this very faculty of "fourfold vision" which gives to these books their ever-changing atmosphere of suggestion, elusive and magical as the clouds and colours in a sunset sky, which escape our grasp in the very effort to study them. Hence, for the majority even of imaginative people, who possess at the utmost "double vision," they are difficult and often wearisome to read. They are so, because the inner, living, vibrating ray or thread of connection which evokes these forms and beings in Blake's imagination, is to the ordinary man invisible and unfelt; so that the quick leap of the seer's mind from figure to figure, and from picture to picture, seems irrational and obscure.

To this difficulty on the side of the reader, there must in fairness be added certain undeniable limitations on the part of the seer. These are princ.i.p.ally owing to lack of training, and possibly to lack of patience, sometimes also it would seem to defective vision. So that his symbols are at times no longer true and living, but artificial and confused.

Blake has visions, though clouded and imperfect, of the clas.h.i.+ng of systems, the birth and death of universes, the origin and meaning of good and evil, the function and secret correspondences of spirits, of states, of emotions, of pa.s.sions, and of senses, as well as of all forms in earth and sky and sea. This, and much more, he attempts to clothe in concrete forms or symbols, and if he fails at times to be explicit, it is conceivable that the fault may lie as much with our density as with his obscurity. Indeed, when we speak of Blake's obscurity, we are uncomfortably reminded of Crabb Robinson's naive remark when recording Blake's admiration for Wordsworth's _Immortality Ode_: "The parts ...

which Blake most enjoyed were the most obscure--at all events, those which I least like and comprehend."

Blake's view of good and evil is the characteristically mystical one, in his case much emphasised. The really profound mystical thinker has no fear of evil, for he cannot exclude it from the one divine origin, else the world would be no longer a unity but a duality. This difficulty of "good" and "evil," the crux of all philosophy, has been approached by mystical thinkers in various ways (such as that evil is illusion, which seems to be Browning's view), but the boldest of them, and notably Blake and Boehme, have attacked the problem directly, and carrying mystical thought to its logical conclusion, have unhesitatingly a.s.serted that G.o.d is the origin of Good and Evil alike, that G.o.d and the devil, in short, are but two sides of the same Force. We have seen how this is worked out by Boehme, and that the central point of his philosophy is that all manifestation necessitates opposition. In like manner, Blake's statement, "Without Contraries is no progression," is, in truth, the keynote to all his vision and mythology.

Attraction and Repulsion, Benson and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence.

From these contraries spring what the religious call Good and Evil.

Good is the pa.s.sive that obeys Reason. Evil is the active springing from Energy. Good is Heaven. Evil is h.e.l.l.

With these startling remarks Blake opens what is the most intelligible and concise of all the prophetic books, _The Marriage of Heaven and h.e.l.l_. Swinburne calls it the greatest of Blake's books, and ranks it as about the greatest work "produced by the eighteenth century in the line of high poetry and spiritual speculation." We may think Swinburne's praise excessive, but at any rate it is well worth reading (_Essay on Blake_, 1906 edn., pp. 226-252). Certainly, if one work had to be selected as representative of Blake, as containing his most characteristic doctrines clothed in striking form, this is the book to be chosen. Place a copy of _The Marriage of Heaven and h.e.l.l_ in the hands of any would-be Blake student (an original or facsimile copy, needless to say, containing Blake's exquisite designs, else the book is shorn of half its force and beauty); let him ponder it closely, and he will either be repelled and shocked, in which case he had better read no more Blake, or he will be strangely stirred and thrilled, he will be touched with a spark of the fire from Blake's spirit which quickens its words as the leaping tongues of flame illuminate its pages. The kernel of the book, and indeed of all Blake's message, is contained in the following statements on p. 4, headed "The Voice of the Devil."

All Bibles or sacred codes have been the causes of the following Errors:--

1. That man has two real existing principles, viz. a Body and a Soul.

2. That Energy, called Evil, is alone from the Body; and that reason, called Good, is alone from the Soul.

3. That G.o.d will torment Man in Eternity for following his Energies.

But the following Contraries to these are True:--

1. Man has no Body distinct from his Soul, for that called Body is a portion of Soul discerned by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age.

2. Energy is the only life and is from the Body, and Reason is the bound or outward circ.u.mference of Energy.

3. Energy is Eternal Delight.

Blake goes on to write down some of the Proverbs which he collected while walking among the fires of h.e.l.l. These "Proverbs of h.e.l.l" fill four pages of the book, and they are among the most wonderful things Blake has written. Finished in expression, often little jewels of pure poetry, they are afire with thought and meaning, and inexhaustible in suggestion. Taken all together they express in epigrammatic form every important doctrine of Blake's. Some of them, to be fully understood, must be read in the light of his other work. Thus, "The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom," or, "If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise," are expressions of the idea constantly recurrent with Blake that evil must be embodied or experienced before it can be rejected.[80] But the greater number of them are quite clear and present no difficulty, as for instance the following:--

A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees.

He whose face gives no light shall never become a star.

No bird soars too high, if he soars with his own wings.

What is now proved was once only imagined.

As the air to a bird or the sea to a fish, so is contempt to the contemptible.

Exuberance is Beauty.

Everything possible to be believed is an image of truth.

There are two tendencies of Blake's mind, both mystical--that is, rooted in unity--the understanding of which helps, on the one hand, to clear much in his writing that seems strange and difficult; and, on the other, reveals a deep meaning in remarks apparently simple to the point of silliness. These are his view of the solidarity of mental and spiritual as compared with physical things, and his habit of concentrating a universal truth into some one small fact.

For Blake, mental and spiritual things are the only real things. Thought is more real than action, and spiritual att.i.tude is more real than thought. It is the most real thing about us, and it is the only thing that is of any importance. The difference between Blake's att.i.tude and that of the ordinary practical man of the world is summed up in his characteristic pencil comment in his copy of Bacon's _Essays_ on the remark, "Good thoughts are little better than good dreams," in the Essay on Virtue. Blake writes beside this, "Thought _is_ act." This view is well exemplified in the Job ill.u.s.trations, where Blake makes quite clear his view of the worthlessness, spiritually, of Job's gift to the beggar of part of his last meal, because of the consciously meritorious att.i.tude of Job's mind.[81]

If this att.i.tude be remembered it explains a good many of the most startling and revolutionary views of Blake. For instance, in the poems called "Holy Thursday" in the _Songs of Innocence and Experience_, he paints first of all with infinite grace and tenderness the picture of the orphan charity children going to church, as it would appear to the ordinary onlooker.

The hum of mult.i.tudes was there but mult.i.tudes of lambs, Thousands of little boys & girls raising their innocent hands.

Beneath them sit the aged men, wise guardians of the poor; Then cherish pity, lest you drive an angel from your door.

But in short, scathing words and significant change of metre he reverses the picture to show his view of it, when, in the companion song of "Experience," he asks--

Is this a holy thing to see In a rich and fruitful land, Babes reduc'd to misery, Fed with cold and usurous hand?

It is owing to a false idea that we can bear to see this so-called "charity" at all, for we--

reduce the man to want a gift, and then give with pomp.