According to Gilchrist, Mr and Mrs Blake possessed just half-a-crown, with which Mrs Blake went out and bought the necessary materials, returning with eightpence change in her pocket. At once they set to work, the wife proving an apt pupil, and thus, with the exception ofThe French Revolution, Blake engraved and published his own creations, experiencing the rare joy of being at once both the creator and the handicraftsman of his works.
Robert visited William continually to the end of his life, bringing him consolation and encouragement during times of anxiety and stress.
These supernatural happenings in the life of Blake read as simply and naturally as the beautiful stories of St Francis converting brother Wolf or receiving the sacred stigmata. There was nothing of the modern spiritualist’s paraphernalia—no medium, no trance, no tappings. Blake was born with his inner spiritual eye open, his outer bodily eye, contrary to general custom, proving sluggish. Hence he was able to keep a natural simplicity amidst things which are too apt to stir only the thaumaturgic appetite of other people.
Blake’s manifold nature lacked, so far, a co-ordinating principle. From his earliest years religion had been a reality to him, and so had art, music, literature, but not one of these was so dominant over the rest as to make them subservient. Each lived its separate life and was likely to continue to do so, unless his religion could become forceful and definite enough to penetrate the others and bind them into a higher unity.
His religion had been fed by vision. His visions came to him so naturally that it never occurred to him that others might regard them as symptoms of abnormality or insanity. The thrashing that his father gave him when he told at home what he had seen at Peckham Rye was a memorable occasion, like conversion to some people, only it opened his outer eye and not his inner.
The visions made several things clear to his understanding. He early distinguished between inner and outer vision, supernatural and natural religion. Religion was never a matter of opinion, always of experience. Christ’s language was also his own, “We speak that we do know, and testify that we have seen.” He felt the same mild surprise at hearing religion denied as he would at the denial of the sun by a blind man. But the reason of such blindness was also quite clear to him. Spiritual things are spiritually discerned. The spiritual man sought no other evidence thanthat of his spiritual discernment. If the natural man were ever to arrive at spiritual vision, it must be by a new birth of the Spirit. Thus Blake knew from the beginning the inward meaning of Christ’s words to Nicodemus, “Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the Kingdom of Heaven.... That which is born of the flesh is flesh, that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.” Blake was never in danger at any time in his life of becoming enmeshed in natural religion. His escape was more instinctive if less effectual than that of his philosophical contemporary who sought to combat his difficulties by working out an elaborate analogy between natural and revealed religion.
The man who knows by experience what it is to be born again knows also how clamorous the new life within is for nourishment. Blake was driven to the mystics for food. We know by his repeated references in his long poems that St Theresa, Madame Guyon, Paracelsus and Jacob Boehme fed his supersensual life. But besides appealing to the past, he looked around to listen to what his contemporaries had to say to him. It is evident that he would listen only to those who were as clear as himself on the experience of the new birth.
It is not surprising that the high church divines of the eighteenth century had little to say for him. They were more eager to show to the leaders of the enthusiastic methodist party that regeneration took place in Holy Baptism than to make sure that they had exhausted its meaning in their experience. Their views might be extremely correct; but anything more dull and uninspiring than their sermons and collected works could hardly be found. Blake had no need to examine them particularly, for the best high churchman of the time was Dr Johnson, and he already had his eye on him.
Dr Johnson to the end was a particular kind of grand schoolmaster. He believed in the Christian revelation fervently, and he believed, also with fervour, in the rod, in Latin, in scholarship, and in the drastic repression of the young. He who declared that he would never disgrace the walls of the Abbey by writing for it an epitaph in English, could hardly have seen anything worth his notice in the ignorant Blake and his still more ignorant wife; and Blake in his turn, unnoticed and unknown, living a severely abstemious life, was too apt to ruminate on Johnson’s gluttony and pension, and to conclude that the latter was a reward for barren learning.
It is as well that Johnson and Blake never met. Neither could have worked through his prejudices. They lived in a different world, and moved from a different centre. Johnson viewed the wreckage of the Old World, and then with undaunted courage and indomitable will set himself to build out of the wreckage a covering for himself and his friends. Blake, conscious that dawn was stirring on the wreckage of the dark night, was straining his vision to catch the outline of the new emerging world. Johnson’s was a superb mind working within too narrow bounds. Blake’s was so far the promise of an unimagined type. We who look backward over the lapse of a hundred years can reverence both men, but it is Blake who is the more inspiring and fruitful.
One other high church divine, William Law, Blake should have read, but strangely makes no mention of. Law’sSerious Call to a Devout and Holy Lifeand hisChristian Perfectionwere more likely to appeal to Johnson than to Blake, but the later books,The Spirit of PrayerandThe Spirit of Love, written after he had come under the influence of Boehme, while estranging him from Johnson and Wesley, might have brought him andBlake face to face. Both books are more beautiful than anything written by Wesley, Whitefield, or Swedenborg. Perhaps, as Blake already had read something of Boehme, he found that Law had nothing to add to his knowledge.
There is ample evidence that Blake turned his full attention on to Wesley, Whitefield, and Hervey, and watched them with sympathy. These men were proclaiming everywhere the need of being born again. No one met Blake so definitely on what he had always seen clearly, with large, childlike vision. When Samuel Foote, representative of a thousand others, carelessly threw the epithet “hypocrite” at Whitefield’s head, Blake was indignant, and accurately designated the actor as the hypocrite. With perfect justice he pointed out that if Whitefield confessed his sins before all the world, and never pretended to be free from the passions that burn in other men, he was certainly an honest and sincere man. To pounce on a Christian who inadvertently falls, and call him a hypocrite, is as usual now as in Blake’s day, but it comes with astonishing gracelessness from the lips of those who have spent their youthful passions in wanton waste, and, wearied and bored, are bidding for a respectable middle age.
Whitefield had pungent things to say to respectable moralists. He had no milder term than “filthy rags” for their dull moralities. If he sought to cover his nakedness with the garment of Christ’s righteousness, Blake, while using a different phrase, perfectly understood him and sympathized. But then came the divergence. Whitefield’s doctrine of the new birth was inextricably bound up with crude doctrines of Christ’s substitutionary death and imputed righteousness, and Blake, who had experienced the new birth quite apart from faith in these particular Calvinist dogmas, felt no need to cling to what his instinctive feeling rejected; and,what with him was final, he found that Whitefield not only left his æsthetic faculties starved, but actually believed that as the arts came from Tubal and Tubal-cain, and they were descended from Cain, who had been cursed, they must necessarily have their origin from hell.
Hervey carried Blake as far as Whitefield, and no farther. Some years later, when Blake had diverged widely from Whitefield and Hervey, he still remembered them with tenderness and affection; and placing them with Fénelon, Madame Guyon, St Theresa (an odd assortment!), saw them at Los’ South Gate, “with all the gentle souls who guide the great Wine-press of Love.”[2]
Blake found that he could keep company with Wesley for a longer time. Wesley had no rigid Calvinism, and he was not content unless imputed righteousness should pass by a second blessing into imparted holiness. Here also Blake’s language was wholly different from Wesley’s, but the thing he arrived at—the unification of all his powers under the inspiration and creative force of his imagination—led him along a path very like that trodden by Wesley and his methodists as they pressed towards the goal of entire sanctification. It is important to go behind words to things, but it is equally important to come back to a form of sound words. The methodists have been imprisoned by their wordy formulæ, while Blake by his vision of the things behind words not only preserved his freedom, but also, by freeing his imagination, was enabled to create beautiful rhythmic words which invoke instead of imprison.
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JOHN GASPAR LAVATER.Engraved by Blake.
Among his contemporaries Blake discovered a deeper kinship with Lavater than with any of these. Whitefield and Wesleyhad succeeded in reviving in themselves the first glow and enthusiasm of protestantism. Lavater is once removed from his zealous protestant forefathers, and the things that they had repressed were making their reappearance in him. Among these was the feeling for the beautiful, which, as he welcomed and nourished it, deepened his sympathies and enlarged his outlook. What he lost in fiery zeal he gained in geniality. He had a constant perception of the truth that outward things are an index to inner conditions and correspond with them. This prompted him to observe the faces of his fellow-creatures and to attempt a system of physiognomy. His instinctive reading of faces was often astonishingly correct; but his makeshift system has no value. More to the point are his aphorisms, which were read and annotated by Blake, and these are sufficient both to reveal Lavater and bring certain lasting convictions of Blake’s into a clear light. I will take a few of the more important.
Sin and destruction of order are the same.
Blake comments: “A golden sentence.” He had felt for many years that all repression was futile. What is repressed comes out again in the wrong place. The last state of the repressed man is worse than his first. Blake was not yet quite clear about what was the alternative to repression, but he was sure that sin was disorder. How he resolved the disorder we shall see later on.
As the interest of man, so his God. As his God, so he.
Blake: “All gold.”
He preferred the word “will” to “interest.” “Will” is identical with Swedenborg’s “affection” and Boehme’s“desire.” No one has worked out the correspondence of the “heart” with the “will” so effectually as Swedenborg. Blake knew that to discover the will was to discover the man. A man can change only as he changes the object of his will. When his will is towards God, his powers fall into order and he becomes a saint.
The greatest of characters no doubt would be he who, free of all trifling accidental helps, could see objects through one grand immutable medium always at hand and proof against illusion and time, reflecting every object in its true shape and colour, through all the fluctuation of things.
Blake: “This was Christ.”
He knew both as an artist and a mystic that the appearance of objects is according to the state of the beholder. This is true of the objects not only of the outer world but also of the inner, and therefore only the witness of a perfect man is trustworthy. The visions of all others must be corrected by the vision of the Christ.
Who has witnessed one free and unrestrained act of yours has witnessed all.
Underlined by Blake.
Strained action was an abhorrence to Blake. Only those acts are beautiful that are impulsive, and they are they that reveal the man.
Between the best and the worst there are, you say, innumerable degrees—and you are right. But admit that I am right too in saying that the best and the worst differ only in one thing—in the object of their love.
Blake: “Would to God that every one would consider this.”
It was considered and maintained by Swedenborg, Boehme, Fénelon, and constantly by St Catherine of Siena, who to the “God is Love” of St John added “Man is love also.”
Keep him at least three paces distant who hates bread, music, and the laugh of a child.
Blake: “The best in the book.”
He who adores an impersonal God has none, and without guide or rudder launches on an immense abyss that first absorbs his powers and next himself.
Blake: “Most superlatively beautiful, and most affectionately holy and pure. Would to God that all men would consider it.”
His faith in a personal God was his lifelong inspiration in religion and art. This must guard him against the charge of pantheism made against him by the Swedenborgian Garth Wilkinson and our fleshly poet Swinburne. Yet he never thought out his position clear of pantheism. Swedenborg worshipped a personal God and regarded man and nature as emanations from God removed by varying degrees. But no matter how many degrees, continuous or discrete, one removes ultimates from God, yet if they are essentially emanations from Him, they must be of the same substance, and this is pantheism. Catholic theology has grappled far more effectually with this ancient difficulty than either Swedenborg or Blake.
All abstraction is temporary folly.
Blake: “I once thought otherwise, but now I know it is truth.” Let those who confound mysticism with abstraction note this.
Blake perceived in Lavater the innocence of a child, and loved him accordingly; but he had already surpassed him, and thuswas able to criticize him with true discernment. He said that Lavater made “everything originate in its accident.” But a man’s sins are accidents and not a part of his real nature. They are a denial of his real man, and therefore are negative. Hence he says: “Vice is a great negation. Every man’s leading propensity ought to be called his leading Virtue and his good Angel.” This last sentence contains Nietzsche. Every positive act is virtue. Murder, theft, backbiting, undermining, circumventing, are vicious because they are not positive acts, but prevent them in the perpetrator and the victim. He put his finger on Lavater’s other mistake, which was also shared by his contemporaries. “They suppose that Woman’s Love is Sin. In consequence, all the loves and graces, with them, are sins.” Blake not only here outstrips his contemporaries, but at a leap reaches what are the conclusions of the twentieth century. In the nineteenth, men and women racked their brains over the irreconcilable dualism of art and religion, and they chose one or the other, with baneful results. Blake reconciled the two when he saw that the new man in us, unveiled by regeneration, worked by direct vision (religion), and that the new man’s prime quality was imagination (art). Once he grasped this, the problem ceased for him.
Here we get at the reason why Lavater has ever failed to keep his lovers. Moses Mendelssohn, disciplined in the severe scholastic methods of Maimonides, easily vanquished him in religious controversy; but men who were less directly concerned with his religion, like Goethe, began by exaggerating his qualities and ended by quietly dropping him. It is clear to us that Lavater could keep our allegiance only if he had taken a big step forward in the same direction as Blake. This was impossible, and so we find ourselves obliged to follow Goethe’s example.
Swedenborg’s influence was the greatest and most lasting on Blake’s mind.
It is not clear when Blake first took to reading Swedenborg. There is no trace of his influence untilThe Songs of Innocence and Experience. Some of Swedenborg’s early scientific works had been translated into English. But of his theological works only one volume out of twelve of theArcana Celestiawas published in English; and, for the rest, those who could not read Latin had to be content with samples. Since Swedenborg bulked so largely in Blake’s life, it is necessary to give here some details of his mental and spiritual development.
Swedenborg’s father was a Lutheran Bishop. Thus the son, in his most impressionable years, was thrown among Lutherans, who maintained a strenuous protest against the errors of the papacy, and fed or starved their souls with dreary doctrines of justification by faith only, imputed righteousness, and other forensic privileges that came to them through the substitutionary death and merits of Christ. In all these dogmas the young Swedenborg was well drilled. But his first bent was in quite another direction. While still a boy he manifested a scientific mind of immense energy and curiosity that peered searchingly into all the sciences of his time, and won for himself a wonderful knowledge of anatomy, astronomy, mathematics, mechanics, chemistry, mineralogy, and led him to make interesting experiments in invention, such as water-clocks and flying machines. He wrote many books on these subjects, the best known of which in England isThe Animal Kingdom. Here his interest is greatly stirred by things physical and psychological, and he is fired with the ambition to unite the two. Not, however, till he was fifty-four did his first interest pass over to the things of the soul. When this transition tookplace, he peered with the same intense scrutiny into supersensual things, and brought to bear on them a mind formed and informed by science and scientific methods.
He took up the Lutheran tenets precisely where he had left them, but, no longer a child, he was forced to criticize what he had once felt, and he set himself to rationalize Lutheran theology and such elements of catholic theology as had survived through Luther. In this he was not always so successful as he imagined. His doctrine of the Trinity, that Jesus Christ is the One God and that the Trinity is in Him, gets over an arithmetical difficulty, but finally leaves the imagination baffled, trying to make out how Jesus carried on the government of the universe while He lay a helpless infant in the manger or His mother’s arms. His reaction against all outside views of Christ’s death, imputed righteousness, and faith only, was more successful, but not new, since in this the quakers in England and Jacob Boehme were before him. Nor was his contention that love was the supreme good new to those who had read through the New Testament. His doctrine of uses was merely a theological variation of that utilitarianism which is inseparable from rationalism, and which casts over everything a drab veil that only the artist can remove. He is really at his best when he expatiates on love and wisdom. Lovecorrespondswith the heart, wisdom with the lungs. As the heart sends the blood to the lungs, where it is purified by the oxygen, so love feeds the understanding, and is in turn purified by it. Swedenborg’s perception of wisdom begotten of love inspired his best passages and gave them their authentic import.
Swedenborg gazed inwards so intently that after an initial period of unrest, terrors, and nightmares his inner eye opened, and he saw into the realities of the inner world. For the momentI take his word for it, and will question later on. His open eye saw into heaven and hell, gazed into the faces of angels and of God, and his opened ear heard the angels speaking things he could understand and utter. At once he rationalized. He stripped even the celestial angels of all mystery as well as of garments, and traced them back to an earthly pedigree. Angels are men, and when they talk they are no more interesting than the elders of a Lutheran congregation. God also is a man—not, be it observed, the Man of a crude anthropomorphism, but infinite, omnipotent Man, from Whom each man, created in His image (will) and likeness (understanding), draws his real manhood. He carried this doctrine into his rationalized version of the Incarnation. Christ assumed human nature in the womb of the Virgin, and by His conquering life put it off, replacing it by the Divine Humanity. The last phrase has accomplished yeasty work in modern religious thought. How many are aware of its origin?
Swedenborg throws out many suggestive remarks about hell. Certainly it was high time that it was looked into, for the protestant hell was as horrible and revolting as the catholic. He began by lifting himself out of space and time. He was soon brought by necessity to perceive that when these no longer exist, then all appearances depend upon a man’s state, and therefore state governs the perceptions whether of the angels in heaven or the devils in hell. Hell, like heaven, is peopled entirely from earth. No one goes there but by his own choice, and he chooses because he finds there exactly what is congenial to his own condition. Swedenborg eliminated anything arbitrary in man’s destiny. Fitness decides by an inexorable law that God could evade only by ceasing to be God. Swedenborg’s hell is a filthy and insanitary place, but the filthy inhabitants are no more disturbed by thatthan rats in a sewer. He further declared that heaven and hell were born together, and that they are contraries necessary to each other’s existence. Blake underlined and commented on this in his copy of theAngelic Wisdom concerning the Divine Love. How the suggestion worked in him we shall see later on.
Swedenborg’s hell is filthy and his heaven dull. There are further surprises when we through his mediumship glimpse their inhabitants. The angels, of course, are all sound Swedenborgians, and are attractive or repellent according to Swedenborg’s attraction or repulsion for us. But the devils, not being Swedenborgians, can command an audience of the majority of Christians who agree with them in their non-allegiance. What Blake discovered in them was a wonderful energy and exuberance which made them not only more attractive than the angels, but also, except for the stenches, might almost have transformed their hell into heaven.
By this time Swedenborg had explored many kingdoms—mineral, vegetable, animal, human, divine, hellish; and his knowledge of the kingdoms informed him of universal correspondences, the law of which came to him thus freshly from his own observation. It was probably this which made him assert so often that he was announcing something new, for with his culture he must have known that Paracelsus had perceived the same law like hundreds before him, and that Boehme wrote a treatise on theSignaturesof all things.
Perhaps Swedenborg’s most fruitful apprehension was that of the Divine Influx. All creatures live as they receive out of the Divine fullness. They have no inherent or self-existent life of their own. The Lord alone is self-existent, and they live by a derived life. This happens to be catholic theology too, and it kept Swedenborg away from a misty pantheism. Men andangels live, move, and have their being in God. They are immersed in an ocean of life and light which pours forth from the Lord of the Universe. The moment they feel their need and are humble enough to turn to the Lord they become receptive. Filled with the spirit of life and light, they love and understand, and remain full so long as they humbly abide in Him. Perhaps no modern has grasped this truth so completely as Swedenborg. It almost made him a mystic. Almost, yet not quite, for his fundamental desire was to bring all the mysteries of the faith down to the level of man’s understanding. He eschewed a faith that rested on what could not be understood. He did not see that in tearing away veil after veil he turned heaven along with earth into a laboratory. The true mystic loves to know that all things, including his faith, run up into mystery; and if an angel succeeded in laying bare the last mystery, the mystic would find himself in hell.
Swedenborg attempted to bring reason and order into things spiritual, and he believed that he had succeeded; but what really happened was that he confounded the workings of his own subliminal mind with the action of the Lord’s, and in 1775, when he had effected reason and order in the intermediate world of spirits to his own satisfaction, he declared that the last judgment had taken place, that the New Jerusalem had descended down out of Heaven, and that he was the divinely appointed prophet of the New Church.
He was not long publishing the doctrine of the New Church concerning the Sacred Scriptures. He knew as well as any modern critic what are the difficulties in the way of accepting the doctrine of verbal inspiration, yet he affirmed it. There is a further difficulty that we feel more acutely than he in the protestant dogma“the Bible and the Bible only.” If we are cut off from memory or tradition, and are obliged to form our image of the historical Jesus from the Bible only, it is next to impossible to make that image shine forth with clear, sharp outlines. The difficulty is still further increased when protestantism, pushed to its logical extreme, eliminates the supernatural element, and tries to piece together the character of Jesus from the fragments that remain.
The Bible imperiously demands a theory that shall make its heterogeneous contents cohere. The four evangelists presuppose a knowledge of Jesus that they aim at making more perfect. These are difficulties that protestantism was destined to feel acutely from the day it proudly rejected tradition. No doubt, if Providence had so intended, the portrait of Jesus would have been drawn so completely that without the aid of memory we could have gained a knowledge of Him such as we have of no other man that ever lived. But the fact remains that Jesus wrote no book and no letters, and He founded nothing but a handful of illiterate disciples to preach His gospel and perpetuate His memory. These were so confident that Israel would repent and believe the Gospel, and so make possible the immediate return of their Lord, that they never thought of taking to their pens; and it was only when they grew alarmed at the increasing thinness of the apostolic ranks that they committed their memories to wise scribes or to parchment. Thus we owe the Gospel accounts not to the express commands of Jesus, but to the first bitter disappointment of the apostolic band.
The simple truth, of course, is that the New Testament Scriptures cannot be understood apart from the Catholic Faith that gave them birth, and therefore when the faith is not confessed a theory must be found to take its place.
The history of higher criticism is the history of a succession of theories. Dr Paulus, forgotten father of German critics, supplied a rational one, for which he was obliged to make a super-historical use of the Essenes. It has reappeared in George Moore’sBrook Kerith.
Renan, pantheist, artist and sceptic, tried to supply a subjective artistic explanation which soothed the subject, but turned the Object into a Frenchman. Strauss, Keim and Bousset, learned and painstaking, with hardly less success made Him into a dreamy cosmopolitan German of a now obsolete type. Schweitzer, better informed of the apocalyptic and eschatological medium through which the mind of Jesus worked, comes nearer to the apostolic mind that drew the picture of Jesus, yet, for want of the key, portrays Jesus as the tragic victim of the illusory time-spirit.
Swedenborg never gave any serious consideration to the catholic theory, but supplied its place out of the store of his supersensual revelations. Loaded with these, and with a vague memory of the gnostic teaching of the threefold meaning of the Scriptures, he was able to evade every literal difficulty by turning to the spiritual meaning, and if need be to the celestial, which could be reached only through his own specific revelation. It is true that he tried to bring a steadying factor into his subjective interpretation by introducing his doctrine of correspondences; but as he has never been able to convince any but his elect followers that his correspondences, beyond some obvious ones, are other than arbitrary, he has succeeded only in making his commentaries on Genesis, Exodus, and the Apocalypse unreadable to the vast majority of Christians.
I have said enough about Swedenborg to make it clear that there was some affinity between him and Blake.
Blake’s imperfect knowledge of him was much deepened in 1788, when he read hisAngelic Wisdom concerning the Divine Love and concerning the Divine Wisdom. This he marked and annotated, and so we are able to trace the affinity in considerable detail.
On the whole Blake gives almost passionate approval toThe Angelic Wisdom. Only in rare instances does he differ. Swedenborg’s doctrine of state made explicit what Blake had vaguely perceived all his life. It also helped him to formulate a theoretic explanation of his own supersensual vision. This is so important that I must quote an entire paragraph fromThe Angelic Wisdom, for the sake of Blake’s comment and the reader’s understanding.
69.The Divine fills All the Spaces of the Universe Apart from Space.There are two things proper to nature,SpaceandTime.Out of these man in the natural world forms the ideas of his thought and therefore his understanding. If he remains in these ideas and does not raise his mind above them he is nowise able to perceive anything spiritual and Divine, for he involves them in ideas which derive from space and time; and in proportion as he does this, the light—the lumen—of his understanding becomes merely natural. To think from the lumen in reasoning about spiritual and Divine things, is like thinking from the thick darkness of night concerning the things which appear only in the light of day. This is the origin of naturalism. But he who knows how to raise his mind above the ideas of thought which derive from space and time, passes from thick darkness into light, and apprehends spiritual and Divine things, and, at last, sees those things which are in them and from them, and then by virtue of that light he disperses the thick darkness of the natural lumen, andrelegates its fallacies from the middle to the sides. Every man with an understanding is able to think, and actually does think, above those properties of nature; and then he affirms and sees that the Divine, being omnipresent, is not in space. He is also able to affirm and to see those things which have been adduced above. But if he denies the Divine Omnipresence and ascribes all things to nature, then he is not willing to be elevated, although he is able.
In the above Blake changed the wordmiddleintocentre, andsidesintocircumference, commenting: “When the fallacies of darkness are in the circumference they cast a bound about the infinite.” In paragraph 70, Swedenborg adds what is a corollary to the above:Angels do not comprehend when we say that the divine fills spaces, for they do not know what spaces are, but they understand when we say that the divine fills all things.On this Blake makes the comment “Excellent.”
Since the inhabitants of heaven have no idea of space and time, their perceptions and modes of thought are entirely governed by their state. This is true also of the visionary, and it decides what he reports of the other world. Everyone will easily perceive from this of what paramount importance his state is in assigning the right value to his visions. As Swedenborg says: “Spaces and times in spiritual life have relation to states of love and are mutable with these.”
Blake fully approved of Swedenborg’s doctrine that the heart and lungs correspond to the will and understanding. Those who would understand Blake must remember this while reading the prophetic books.
But there are signs of disagreements that deepened with time.
Swedenborg wrote (237):Man at birth comes first into the natural degree, and this increases in him by continuity, according to his various knowledge ... until he reaches the highest point of the understanding which is called the rational. But still the second degree, which is the spiritual, is not opened by this means. This is opened by love towards the neighbour ... the third degree by love towards the Lord.
With all Blake’s devout admiration for Swedenborg this was too much for him. A child born solely into the natural degree! That! after all Blake knew, and all Christ had said about little children! Heaven save us all, especially Swedenborg! Blake’s comment is important. Note that even when he is differing from his teacher, his language is Swedenborgian. He says:
“Study science till you are blind. Study intellectuals until you are cold. Yet science cannot teach intellect. Much less can intellect teach affection. How foolish it is then to assert that man is born in only one degree, when that one degree is receptive of the three degrees: two of which he must destroy or close up or they will descend. If he closes up the two superior, then he is not truly in the third but descends out of it into mere Nature or Hell. Is it not also evident that one degree will not open the other, and that science will not open intellect, but that they are discrete and not continuous so as to explain each other, except by correspondence, which has nothing to do with demonstration, for you cannot demonstrate one degree by the other, for how can science be brought to demonstrate intellect without making them continuous and not discrete?”
There are three comments in which Blake introduces an element lacking in the voluminous writings of Swedenborg. On Swedenborg’s statement: “A spiritual idea does not deriveanything from space, but it derives its all from state,” he remarks: “Poeticidea”; on paragraph 10, Blake comments: “He who loves feels love descend into him, and if he is wise, may perceive it from thePoetic Genius, which is the Lord”; on Swedenborg’s phrase: “The negation of God constitutes hell,” he remarks: “The negation of thePoetic Genius.”
Here we get a hint of a small seed of difference which when fully grown was to sever Blake from Swedenborg for ever.
I must give one more, very pregnant, passage fromThe Angelic Wisdom.
68.Man out of his hereditary evil reacts against God. But if he believes that all his life is from God, and all good of life from the action of God, and all evil of life from the reaction of man, then reaction becomes the offspring of action, and man acts with God as from himself. The equilibrium of all things is from action and joint reaction, and everything must be in equilibrium.
The last sentence makes hell an eternal necessity to preserve the equilibrium of heaven. Strictly it makes also the devil an eternal counterweight to God, and what else follows we may learn by studying Zoroastrian dualism. Blake’s comment was:
“God and evil are here both good, and the two contraries married.”
Blake was early occupied with the marriage of contraries. Swedenborg’s word was a sanguine seed in prepared soil, and when it brought forth fruit a hundredfold, the rich return was not the logical outcome of Swedenborg’s dualism, but a marriage of heaven and hell, of religion and art, which is showing a fertile capacity for endless reproduction.
So far, then, Swedenborg’s attraction for Blake far exceeded his repulsion, and he embraced him with impetuous affection. Here was a teacher who could understand by experience both the new birth and vision. By his help he disentangled himself from the particular explanation and theory of the atonement as given by Whitefield and Wesley. Here was a visionary who could not only understand his own visions, but who could give a reasonable explanation of the working of the visionary faculty. Swedenborg brought order, reason, and system into Blake’s chaotic mind. Isolated from the churches, yet ardently desiring fellowship as the substance of his faith and wisdom, it appeared to him that there was nothing else to do but join the New Church of Swedenborg, and accordingly, in 1788, he and Catherine signed their names in token of membership and assent to the distinctive doctrines of the New Church. The curious may find this reported in the Minutes of the first Seven Sessions of the General Conference of the New Church, published by James Speirs, 36 Bloomsbury Street, 1885.
Let us turn to Blake’s two poems,Tiriel, 1788, andThel, 1789, which have special interest as they were written about this time that he subscribed to the Swedenborgian Church and Swedenborg’s influence was paramount.
Tiriel—old, bald, and blind—is related to Urizen, but Urizen in Blake’s completed mythology is the symbol not only of the law with its prohibitive commandments, but of the reason formed by the five senses, and therefore ever ready to stamp out imagination and inspiration, which derive their source from beyond the senses. Tiriel is the product of the law, and is the antithesis of love. Swedenborg’s natural man was justified and saved by love, Luther’s faith not being sufficient, and so in Blake’s Tiriel thereis besides St Paul’s law the Lutheran’s pharisaism, and just a suggestion of that contempt for the beautiful which was to make Urizen such a terrible figure, and was eventually to lead to Blake’s estrangement from Swedenborg.
Tiriel at the hour of his death realized why his paradise was fallen, and he had found nought but the drear sandy plain. His description of his own upbringing, shocking as it is, is that of the great bulk of mankind. The instant a child is born, the dull, blind father stands ready to form the infant head; and if the child, like Blake, has vision, the father, like Mr Blake, uses the whip to rouse the sluggish senses to act and to scourge off all youthful fancies.
“Then walks the weak infant in sorrow, compelled to number footstepsUpon the sand. And when the drone has reached his crawling length,Black berries appear that poison all round him. Such was TirielCompelled to pray repugnant, and to humble the immortal spirit;Till I am subtle as a serpent in a paradise,Consuming all, both flowers and fruits, insects and warbling birds.”
Blake was thinking of his father and his own early whippings. But really fathers are not absolutely necessary, for the mother, the nurse, the elder sister, and the public school, can do the job a great deal more effectually. The other poem,The Book of Thel, 1789, is Swedenborgian throughout. Thel, youngest daughter of the Seraphim, bewails the transitoriness of life and all beautiful things, herself included. Then thehumbleLily of the Valley, a little Cloud, a Worm, and a Clod of Clay, all in their respective ways preach to her that “Everything that lives, lives not alone nor for itself.” When she has reached the utter selflessness of a Clod of Clay, then only will she be able to beholdsteadfastly the seeming transitoriness of youth and beautiful things; seeming, for like the lowly lily they melt to flourish in eternal vales.
Here Blake endorses the Swedenborgian selflessness, and extols the Swedenborgian lowliness, modesty, and humility. Swedenborg believed in no doctrine of self-realization. To him the self was always an evil till lost in the Lord. It was the remains in him of German mysticism. Blake slowly and surely came to set a high value on the true self. But unlike the more modern preacher of self-realization, he believed that a man found his real self only after he had given himself passionately to Jesus the eternal life and the eternal imagination. Then he was no longer to value the humility and modesty attached to selflessness. Their place was to be taken by a new kind of humility and a new kind of modesty of such flaming quality, that he wished to drop the old names and find others that more nearly described their sovereign reality.
Thel is finally invited by the matron Clay to enter her house, with the assurance that she may return. Immediately the terrific Porter of the Eternal Gates lifted thenorthernbar.
This is a well-known gate, among Swedenborgians, into the unseen world. But it is very terrible. According to Garth Wilkinson it was the only gate that Blake knew, and he accounts by this means for Blake’s apotheosis of the self and the passions. At this time Blake saw through this gate what Swedenborg saw; but later, when he had shaken him off and changed his state, his vision changed accordingly, and the objects were stripped of their horror. He was also to know all the four gates leading into the unseen.
Thel, entering, “wandered in the land of clouds through valleys dark, list’ning dolours and lamentations” till she came even to her own grave-plot. Through such a gate it matters not whether one views this world or the other. Both must appear sad and joyless in the extreme, and enmesh the beholder in blackest pessimism. Thel, hearing a voice wailing like the ecclesiastic dirge of the disillusioned King, shrieked with terror, and fled back unhindered into the vales of Har.
Thelis sweet, even heavenly in the Swedenborgian sense. But its sweetness cloys. Christ, like the Law before Him, made a sparing use of honey, preferring the more indispensable salt, which He enjoined His disciples to have in themselves at all times. Blake was to recover plentiful salt, but not until he had drawn Swedenborg’s line between heaven and hell in a wholly different place.
Swedenborg’s influence is pleasantly found at work in theSongs of Innocence. Innocence was a favourite word, and Swedenborg saw the celestial angels both innocent and naked. There is nothing more innocent than a lamb, and therefore Blake by a sure instinct and in childlike joy piped his song about the lamb, satisfying at once his feeling for the lamb, the child, and the Maker of the lamb who was called the Lamb of God.
The song calledThe Divine Imageshows Swedenborg’s influence at its best. So many men with Blake’s mystic proclivities rush into vague abstractions. To-day we hear of Infinite Love and Infinite Wisdom, Infinite Life, and all personality denied to God. Yet these are mere high-sounding abstractions, and are quite meaningless apart from concrete personality. Swedenborg was clear as day here, and it was he who taught Blake the pure wisdom contained in his verses:
“For Mercy, Pity, Peace, and LoveIs God, our Father dear,And Mercy, Pity, Peace, and LoveIs man, His child and care.For Mercy has a human heart,Pity a human face,And Love, the human form divine,And Peace, the human dress.”
Swedenborg’s teaching continues inThe Songs of Experience, but with a question mark.
Blake sings to the Fly:
“Am not IA fly like thee?Or art not thouA man like me?”
To see humanity in a fly is Swedenborgian; and Blake answered his question in the affirmative.
In the next song there are many questions; and it cannot be doubted that Blake’s answers would have been the exact contrary to Swedenborg’s.
Swedenborg, like his theosophical predecessors, had a way of denying that God created the particular animals that man finds inconvenient. Tigers, wolves, rats, bats, and moths are so obnoxious, that it soothes man’s vanity to suppose that they are embodiments of evil exhaled from hell. They have served as restful homes for vampires and other creations of Old Night. And so Swedenborg, governed by mental habits of reason and use as measured by man, drew a sharp line between animals of a heavenly and hellish origin. When Blake saw the tiger he saw differently.His æsthetic eye instantly marvelled at its “fearful symmetry,” the fire of its eyes, the sinews of its heart; and he cried, “Did He who made the Lamb make thee?” He gives no answer. But there was no need. “In what distantdeepsorskies” the tiger had his origin had no further perplexity for him once he had married hell to heaven.
The Little Vagabond, though hardly within the ken of Swedenborg, contains what every vagabond knows. Blake was able to rescue vagabonds as well as tigers from an exclusively hellish origin.
Blake remained an orthodox Swedenborgian for nearly two years, and then came reaction and rebellion, not without resentment and bitterness. What was the cause of Blake’s permanent repudiation of Swedenborg? Various reasons are given by Swedenborgians to prove that Blake was wholly in the wrong. Mr Morris gives a beautifully simple explanation. Quoting Blake’s saying that he had two different states, one in which he liked Swedenborg’s writings and one in which he disliked them, he says, “The latter was a state of pride in himself, and then they were distasteful to him, but afterwards he knew that he had not been wise and sane.” That is the way that we all at some time in our life account for the obstinacy of those who will not worship at our altar.
Mr Garth Wilkinson, who of Swedenborgians most deserves to be heard, wrote in the preface of his edition ofThe Songs of Innocence and Experience, 1839, that Blake entered the “invisible world through the terrific porter of its northern gate.” Like Shelley, he verged towards pantheism, not a spiritual pantheism, but a “natural spiritualism” or “ego-theism.” His genius “entered into and inhabited the Egyptian and Asiatic perversions of anancient and true religion,” and thus “found a home in the ruins of Ancient and consummated Churches.” Wilkinson discovered a great deal of the ego and of hell in Blake. All of this criticism, which is ingenious, I cannot accept. To begin with the ego. Swedenborg believed that every man in his ownpropriumwas consumed with self-love, and that only love to the Lord could enable him entirely to overcome his love of self. Blake believed that the real self was made in the image of God, and therefore it must be loved, reverenced, and obeyed. The recognition of the same divine principle in others enables one to love one’s neighbour as oneself. All German mystical talk of hatred to self and death to self was repudiated by Blake as artificial and unreal.
It is true that Blake came nearer to pantheism than Swedenborg did. He had come, through his teacher, to regard the universe as an emanation from God, and in working from this doctrine to its logical outcome in pantheism he was more consistent than Swedenborg, who tried to evade the consequences of his own theory.
That Blake found a home in an ancient and consummated Church is true only if Swedenborg’s New Church is really the New Jerusalem predicted by St John! For the rest, we hail with joy the element of “hell” in Blake.
Blake himself makes some short incisive remarks on Swedenborg, which will carry us a little farther to an understanding. “Swedenborg has not written one new truth.” “He has written all the old falsehoods.” Blake had ardently welcomed Swedenborg as a new teacher with a new message. In these sentences he betrays disappointment, anger, and resentment. “Any man of mechanical talents may, from the writings of Paracelsus or Jacob Behmen, produce ten thousand volumes of equal valuewith Swedenborg’s, and from those of Dante or Shakespeare an infinite number.” If Blake had had a wider culture, he would have known this when a boy, and blown off his fumes at the proper season. We shall encounter again and again his lack of grace when dealing with his successful contemporaries.
We see, so far, that Blake reckoned that Swedenborg had failed him, and that anything of value he found in him, he could find in the old masters. But there was something he could find in them—a spirit of beauty and a beauty of form—that was wholly lacking in Swedenborg, and an energy and exuberance that appeared only in Swedenborg’s hell. That this should be the net result of Blake’s expectations and Swedenborg’s pretensions was too much for Blake’s patience; hence the violence of his reaction.
Blake must have felt vaguely all along the lack of the æsthetic faculty in Swedenborg. It was Swedenborg who helped him finally to understand the exact value of his visions and thus to place him.
We have seen that Swedenborg, by abstraction from space and time, arrived at a doctrine of state which takes their place in heaven and hell. From this it follows that man’s vision is wholly dependent on his state, and also that a man’s visions cannot be trusted unless he has a perfect organ of vision resting on a sound state. It is always fatuous for a religious teacher to appeal to his visions to enforce his doctrines, since they depend on the man himself, and we must form our judgment of him apart from his visions. To appeal to a vision for the truth of a doctrine, and to the doctrine for the truth of a vision, is merely to whirl oneself round in a vicious circle; and therefore Swedenborg’s whole make-up—will and understanding—must be laid bare andmeasured by some standard with which we may try the spirits and the prophets before we can begin to approach his visions and gauge their value.
Swedenborg’s state was a state of reason, whether he viewed this world or the other. His early scientific studies, unbalanced by any real appreciation of art, moulded his mind into a rigid state which was impervious to any outside stimulus. When he turned to religion, he made the barren attempt to trim the mysteries of the Faith until they came wholly within the grasp of the understanding. This is a rationalizing process. Swedenborgians may object to hear their master called a rationalist. It is true that that term is usually applied to those who have no supersensual vision, and even deny its existence. Swedenborg is, of course, sharply distinguished from all such, but he has with them the same fundamental trust of reason, which in their case is used to gauge the things of this world, in his the things of the other. Hence when he has raised our expectations to a dizzy height, as he is about to report on things seen and heard in heaven and hell, there is a ludicrous anticlimax when we find that the angels are simply religious and talk theology everlastingly, that heaven is like a well arranged Dutch tulip field, and excepting one or two phases of hell the whole is just as exciting as a problem in Euclid and as dull as a sanitary report. Hell alone stirred some interest because its inmates had energy and blood. And therefore one sympathizes with those spirits who, allowed to peep into heaven, immediately chose to plunge themselves head-first into hell.
Now Blake, being a visionary, knew that vision depended on will, and he learnt further from Swedenborg that it depended also on state, and so, as a man’s state changed, his vision changedalso. Blake’s state was the imagination of the poetic genius (Los), Swedenborg’s the dry logical faculty of the unassisted reason (Urizen), and as Blake looked at Swedenborg’s heaven and hell, he saw them approaching one to the other and finally with an impetuous rush locked in a marital embrace.
This is the most significant vision of modern times, after which it is easy to judge Swedenborg. He had given for life, theology; for beauty, ashes; and instead of emancipating the modern world he condemned it to the appalling tedium of an everlasting Sunday School. The doctrine of the New Jerusalem was not half so beautiful as that of the Old Jerusalem. Christ come again in Glory was stripped of that beauty that men had perceived in His first lowly coming. Blake’s indictment of Swedenborg was severe. It was also an indictment of the whole of protestant theology. The magnificent fruit of Swedenborg’s action and reaction, attraction and repulsion for Blake wasThe Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Blake was fresh from reading Swedenborg’sHeaven and Hell, and this and not the ecclesiastical was continually in his thought as he wrote. At the same time it is necessary to remember that Blake was not merely criticizing Swedenborg. Swedenborg gave a rationalized version of the Lutheran doctrine, and therefore to reject him involved a rejection of much of Luther’s teaching and of the protestantism that has flowed from him.
Heaven, then, consists of the passive obeyers of reason, the religious, the good; hell of the active obeyers of Energy, the irreligious, the evil. Here let it be well marked and remembered that by the religious Blake always meant those who repress their energies or passions until they become passive enough for them to obey reason.
Hell’s prime quality is passion or energy or desire. This in itself is neither good nor evil in the abstract sense in which these words are generally understood, but considered absolutely it is good, for it is the native energy of the man made in God’s image and likeness. Energy works according to the object of desire. If a man’s object is the flesh, he becomes an adulterer; if things of beauty and delight, an artist; if God, a saint. Religious people, frightened and mistrustful of their desires, restrain them until they are passive, and in doing so they are destroying the motive power of their lives. They are wholly successful when they become dead souls, and it is then, strictly speaking, that they are fit, not for heaven, but for hell. The stronger the desire, the greater the man. Once direct the energy by fixing its desire on God, it will drive the man to greatness. Thus the typical restrainer or devil is the priest, the typical man of passion or energy is the artist. Those who restrain their energies in the name of Christ have identified Him with the reason, and they have never caught so much as a glimpse of Him as He is. Swedenborg and Milton worshipped a rational Christ, and therefore in Blake’s eyes, as also in the catholic’s, they were heretics. The Book of Job and Shakespeare see inspiration and imagination working with energy as the highest good. The restrainer in the Book of Job is called Satan. Blake alone in his time saw Christ as the supreme symbol of the passionate-imaginative life.
Those who have followed Blake thus far will at once understand the Proverbs of Hell, and perceive in them the glorification of energy and all things belonging to it. Excess, pride, lust and wrath are evidences of great energy. Therefore “the road ofexcessleads to the palace of wisdom,” “theprideof the peacock is the glory of God,” “thelustof the goat is the bounty of God”“thewrathof the lion is the wisdom of God.” Generosity, prodigality, open-handedness, impulse, show a rich full nature. Prudence, number, measure, weight, betray poverty and are fit “in a year of death.” The animals of abounding energy are the noblest, like the lion, tiger, eagle. The animals lacking great energy take refuge in cunning, like the fox and the crow. (Blake no longer questions who made the tiger.) Blake extols fountains, not cisterns or standing water, courage not cunning, exuberance not reason-broken passion. Even an energetic “damn” braces, while a pious blessing induces a flabby relaxation.
Man’s most valuable gift of God is passion. What a man makes of his life will depend on how he regards his passion, and into what channels he directs its course.
Thus Blake unites contraries. But just as all is going merry as a marriage bell, he suddenly declares that there are some contraries that can never be married. The modern immanentist world is trying to unite good and evil, beauty and ugliness, with baneful results. We are told that there is nothing ugly to the discerning eye, and one wonders why one should take pains to improve ones crude daubs. Blake says that religious people are always trying to make these false matches. He gives as a typical example the prolific and devourer—the active and passive. Each is necessary to the other’s existence. Union destroys both. It is easy to multiply examples. Black and white produce grey, beautiful in art, but depressing in life. Dark and light, twilight, beautiful, but sad and lowering. Cold and heat, lukewarmness, which is hateful. Hard and soft, slush, which abounds in modern thought. Hate and love, unctuousness or slime, which is particularly obnoxious in some religious people.
Blake hated these mashes. He had no faith in the love that could not hate. Just as he seemed on the brink of sweeping away hell like an amiable modern, he discovered that though he had made quick work of the Swedenborgian and protestant hell, yet hell as Christ thought of it remained and must remain. “Note.—Jesus Christ did not wish to unite, but to separate them, as in the Parable of sheep and goats. And He says, ‘I come not to send Peace, but a Sword.’” Thus Blake kept his perception clear and sharp. In following his own mental energy he was able to shake off all pantheistic distortions of good and evil, and to see that though with the majority these are mere abstractions, yet there is ultimately an eternal distinction between them, and therefore heaven and earth may pass away, but Jesus Christ’s word concerning heaven and hell will abide for ever.
Christians have thought of heaven and hell too much as of future places. Blake thought of them primarily as present states. Here a man’s state is obscured by its intermingling with conditions of space and time. Hereafter the state creates the environment. The man in a state of hell, and therefore in hell, is the one whose energy or vital fire is dead. The man in a state of Heaven is the one who lives the more abundant life in which his religion, art, and philosophy have become one. The real hell and the real heaven can never be married, for any attempt to marry them results in moral loss. But a man can pass from a state of hell into a state of heaven, and the way to do it is the old way of repentance and faith—repentance which changes heart and mind by giving them a new object, and faith that takes and receives the glad tidings of the Kingdom of God.
Blake gave a curious illustration of his doctrine of state. A Swedenborgian angel came to him, and condoled with himbecause of the hot, burning dungeon that he was preparing for himself to all eternity. The angel at his request undertook to show him his place in hell. Truly it was horrible, and Blake describes the ideal Swedenborgian hell with a power and vividness to which Swedenborg could never attain. The angel, not enjoying the sight, decamped; but no sooner was Blake alone than the horrible vision vanished, and he found himself “on a pleasant bank beside a river, by moonlight, hearing a harper, who sung to the harp.” The angel had drawn him into his state, and he saw what the angel saw. When he regained his real state, the vision was pleasant enough. Afterwards he rejoined the angel and undertook to show him his lot. An angel is necessarily above the modes of space and time. This one being religious, and therefore repressed to passivity, was shown a timeless, spaceless void, which was an eternal nightmare more unutterably fearful than anything in Swedenborg’s filthy sewer.
Finally Blake overheard a marvellously rich and splendid bit of conversation between a devil in a flame of fire and an angel seated on a cloud.
The devil pointed out how Jesus Christ was obedient to impulse, and how His obedience to His passionate energies—to the Voice of God within Him—made Him the Great Rebel and Law Breaker, mocking the sabbath and the sabbath’s God, guilty of the blood of His martyrs, exonerating the woman taken in adultery, living on the labour and sweat of wage-slaves, acquiescing in a false witness by His silence, coveting the best gifts for His disciples. It was a Pharisee who said, “All these laws have I kept from my youth,” and he became a dead soul. Jesus on the cross looked back on a pathway strewn with the corpses of the religious people He had killed in His fieryimpetuous course, and instead of a death-repentance, He uttered the audacious word, “Father, into Thy Hands I commend My Spirit.”
The angel was converted. Embracing the flame of fire he was consumed, and rose again as Elijah—the prophet of spirit and fire.
And thus Blake took his leave of Swedenborg. He had expected too much of him and was disappointed. It was more than enough to hear his name on the lips of his pious, commonplace brother. He was indignant that he had not fulfilled his high-sounding pretensions, and “the voice of honest indignation,” he wrote, “is the voice of God.” But we who calmly look on can detect the voice of resentment too, which robs his departure of grace. But for SwedenborgThe Marriage of Heaven and Hellhad never been written. Swedenborg was the Goliath, strong in reason, logic, system, science, intellect, slain by the stone from David’s sling. Blake and not Swedenborg was “the true Samson shorn by the Churches.”