William Blake Part 3

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 Fenelon, Madame Guyon, St Theresa (an odd a.s.sortment!), 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 pa.s.s 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 formulae, 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: JOHN GASPAR LAVATER.

_Engraved by Blake._]

Among his contemporaries Blake discovered a deeper kinship with Lavater than with any of these. Whitefield and Wesley had 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 G.o.d. As his G.o.d, 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 G.o.d, 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 G.o.d that every one would consider this."

It was considered and maintained by Swedenborg, Boehme, Fenelon, and constantly by St Catherine of Siena, who to the "G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d that all men would consider it."

His faith in a personal G.o.d 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 G.o.d and regarded man and nature as emanations from G.o.d removed by varying degrees. But no matter how many degrees, continuous or discrete, one removes ultimates from G.o.d, 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 surpa.s.sed him, and thus was 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, circ.u.mventing, 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 until _The 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 the _Arcana Celestia_ was 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 subst.i.tutionary 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 is _The 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 pa.s.s over to the things of the soul. When this transition took place, 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 G.o.d 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. Love corresponds with 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 pa.s.sages 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 moment I take his word for it, and will question later on. His open eye saw into heaven and h.e.l.l, gazed into the faces of angels and of G.o.d, 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. G.o.d 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 a.s.sumed 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 h.e.l.l. Certainly it was high time that it was looked into, for the protestant h.e.l.l was as horrible and revolting as the catholic. He began by lifting himself out of s.p.a.ce 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 h.e.l.l. h.e.l.l, 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 G.o.d could evade only by ceasing to be G.o.d.

Swedenborg's h.e.l.l is a filthy and insanitary place, but the filthy inhabitants are no more disturbed by that than rats in a sewer. He further declared that heaven and h.e.l.l were born together, and that they are contraries necessary to each other's existence. Blake underlined and commented on this in his copy of the _Angelic Wisdom concerning the Divine Love_. How the suggestion worked in him we shall see later on.

Swedenborg's h.e.l.l 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 h.e.l.l into heaven.

By this time Swedenborg had explored many kingdoms--mineral, vegetable, animal, human, divine, h.e.l.lish; 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 a.s.sert 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 the _Signatures_ of 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 and angels live, move, and have their being in G.o.d. 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 h.e.l.l.

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.