WILLIAM BLAKE AND MR. ALAN PORTER.
[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.] SIR;=-Mr. Porter takes the occasion of a new book on William Blake to give his own interpretation of the mystic. No One finds Blake easy, but Mr. Porter adds to the difficulties . by taking up the tangled skein at the wrong end. Blake, he says, had taken his conception from the Gnostic teaching.
There was no need to hark back to Gnosticism for a key. The key was much nearer at hand in Swedenborg. Sweden- borg's was the hand, as Mr. Porter admits, that fed him. SO much was this the case that for two years Blake and his wife were subscribed members of the New Church of Swedenborg. Then came his revolt. Why ? On our under- standing of Blake's attitude to Swedenborg depends our -understanding of hirrself. Blake was studying Swedenborg's Heaven and Hell,. and he found to his astonishment that the devils with their fiery energies were much more attractive than the pale angels. It suddenly occurred to him that a combination of the two would give a splendid result. Hence, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
Pondering further on the secret of the attraction of Sweden- borg's devils, he discovered that Swedenborg saw heaven and hell and their inhabitants differently from what he did. He concluded that one's vision of the other worlds depended on one's state. Swedenborg was in the state of reason or Urizen, Blake in the state of imagination or Los. One was a rational mystic, the other a poetic mystic. Swedenborg had no aesthetic faculty at all. Blake was consumed by a love of the beautiful. The moment Blake saw what was Swedenborg's capital deficiency, he rebelled with ample justification, but expressed himself in exaggerated and too violent language.
Blake proceeded with Milton's heaven and hell, and found that he, too, drew the line in the wrong. place between them. Only when he came to Christ's heaven and hell with the sheep and the goats did he find that the sheep absolutely refused to marry the goats. Jesus Christ stood for the supreme poetic genius, and therefore He alone had rightly divided heaven and hell. Blake's familiarity with the devils was witt Swedenborgian and Miltonic devils, and had nothing to do with the Gnostic devils. He used Gnostic terms which had come to him through Jakob Boehme and Paracelsus. Notably Boehme had called the imagination an aeon." Blake elaborated the idea, and made imagination the supreme divine faculty of the Real Man. Imagination became the driving force of his religious faculty ; hence he was freed once for all from Pharisaism, and his religion became what Mr. Porter denies, the passion of his life.—I am, Sir, &c., CHARLES GARDNER.
Previous page
