# Biographical and critical studies by James Thomson ("B.V.")/A Strange Book

A STRANGE BOOK
I
In order to make clear how strange is this book, I must cite at considerable length from the Note which concludes it, but really serves as a Preface:—
"The history of this little volume may be told in a few words.
"It is written by a new method, partly explained in the title, Improvisations.
"Last autumn my attention was particularly directed to the phenomena of drawing, speaking, and writing by Impression; and I determined to make an experiment of the kind, in composition, myself. The following poems are the result. Let me now explain more precisely what is meant by Writing by Impression, so far as my own personal experience is concerned; for I cannot refer to any other.}}
​"A theme is chosen and written down. So soon as this is done, the first impression upon the mind which succeeds the act of writing the title is the beginning of the evolution of that theme, no matter how strange or alien the word or phrase may seem. That impression is written down: and then another, and another, until the piece is concluded. An Act of Faith is signalised in accepting the first mental movement, the first word that comes, as the response to the mind's desire for the unfolding of the subject.
"However odd the introduction may be, I have always found it lead by an infallible instinct into the subject.
"The depth of treatment is in strict proportion to the warmth of heart, elevation of mind, and purity of feeling existing at the time—in other words, in proportion to the conditions of Love and Faith.
"Reason and will are not primary powers in this process, but secondary; not directive, but regulative: and imagination, instead of conceiving and constructing, only supplies words and phrases piecemeal; or however much it receives, it is as a disc on which the subject is projected, not as an active concipient organ. Another power flows in; and all the known faculties lend their aid to make way for it. Those faculties are indeed employed in laissez faire in its inward intensity; which is another name for Faith.
"Laissez faire in the present state of the world, is so active a vortex, and so fiery, that few persons dare to see its consequences. All men will see them though, because Providence comes in with marvels wherever self succumbs itself.
"In placing reason and will in the second place, it is indispensable for man, whose highest present faculties these are, to be well assured what is put in the first place. Hence, writing from an Influx which is really out of your self, or so far within your self, as to amount to the same thing, is either a religion or a madness. I know of no third possibilty. In allowing your faculties to be directed to ends they know not of, there is only one Being to whom you dare entrust them—only the Lord. Of consequence, before writing by influx, your prayer must be to Him, for His guidance, influx, and protection. And you must have faith that that prayer is answered, according to your worthiness, in that which flows in. The Faith is the acknowledgment of the gift, which becomes an ever-enlarging cup for receiving fresh gifts or fresh Influx. . . .
​"This little volume, which I neither value nor undervalue, is one man's earliest essay to receive with upstretched palms some of these long- travelling, most-unnoticed, and yet unchangeable and immortal rays. It was given just as the reader reads it—with no hesitation, without the correction of one word from beginning to end; and how much it differs from other similar collections in process it were difficult to convey to the reader; suffice it to say that every piece was produced without premeditation or preconception: had these processes stolen in, such production would have been impossible. The longest pieces in the volume occupied from thirty to forty-five minutes.
"Altogether about fifty hours of recreation, after days not unlaborious, are here put in print. The production was attended by no feeling and by no fervour, but only by an anxiety of all the circumstant faculties, to observe the unlooked-for evolution, and to know what would come of it. For the most part, the full import of what was written was not obvious until one or more days had elapsed: the process of production seemed to put that of appreciation in abeyance.
"Many of the poems are written by Correspondences, as Swedenborg terms the relations which natural objects bear to spiritual life; or to the varieties of Love, which is the grand object of all. Hence it is the readers of Swedenborg who will best understand this class of poems."
There are three important things left vague in this otherwise admirably clear account of the genesis of these poems. Dr. Wilkinson writes: "A theme is chosen and written down," but does not state whether chosen by himself or another. There are certain cases in which lines of introduction to the pieces appear to indicate that the theme was not really chosen, but was passively accepted from the "Spirit," in the same way as the piece itself. Thus, p. 20:—
"Lord, is there special theme this eve, That spirit-muse were well to weave?
"The birth of Adam is the first, That hath within the day been nursed: Take it unto thee; let it burst Its spirit-bud, and watch the flower That riseth in the gauzy hour."
Where the second section is the direct answer of "the Lord" to the inquiry of the first two lines. Again p. 24:—
"Q. Lord, shall I other song achieve? A. Yea: the next song is Birth of Eve."
And again, p. 37:—
"Lord, give me spirit-song to-night. And give the theme I should indite.
"Thou shalt sing well, if faith be true, And Life the theme is given you."
Certain other themes appear to be really chosen, but whether or not by the writer himself is left indefinite. Thus, p. 8:—
"Lord, shew me Patience from the spirit ground: That I may know its holy temper's round."
Where the petition is for Divine inspiration on a specified subject. Again, p. 312:—
"The Birthday of the Human Soul.
"Can it be given In stanzas seven?
Yea, in seven stanzas it shall roll."
By far the greater number of the pieces have no such introduction; several have for motto a Bible ​text; while in many cases the themes appear to be the choice of the writer, being concerned with his family and friends, or such as would be naturally suggested by his studies. Thus we have "W. M. W.," beginning, "Brownness of autumn is around thee, brother;" "A little message for my wife" (to whom the volume is dedicated); "M. J. W.: her tenth birthday;" "E. M. N.;" "William S.;" "Mary S.;" and of the latter class, "Hahnemann;" "Mesmer;" "Turner: Painter: His State;" "Turner: Painter: His Art;" "Thorvaldsen;" "Tegnér;" "Immanuel Kant;" "Charles Fourier;" "Dalton;" "Berzelius: his Laboratory;" "Chatterton;" "Edgar Allan Poe;" "Charlotte Brontë;" "John Flaxman;" "The tears of Swedenborg." In connection with this last title it may be remarked that several of the pieces, though not entitled "Tears," have verses affixed so specifying them. Thus, at the end of "Patience":—
"Herbert's sphere Beareth here Patience tear," &c.
At the end of "Sand-Eating":—
"It is the sphere Of Cowper's tear."
At the end of "The Proud hath said in his heart, There is no God" (Mark, The Proud; not The Fool):—
"It is the sphere Of Shelley's tear, That wanders by In fruitless sigh, And asks the wind To ease his mind."
​Secondly, we are not told over what period of time the "about fifty hours" of these writings from dictation of "the spirit" were scattered. The Note, which serves as Preface, is dated June 3, 1857, and states that the writer (he would not consent to be termed the author) determined to make the experiment "last autumn;" but we are not informed when the poems were finished, how long before the date of the Note. This point is of importance in relation to the question, Does "the spirit" require intervals of repose, like a mere human author, between the efforts of composition?—though if such intervals were required, it would be quite open to the amanuensis to attribute the need of them to his own weakness and exhaustion, and not to any weariness or fluctuation of power in the dictating "Spirit" itself.
Thirdly, the Note does not tell whether the pieces are printed in the order in which they were written. This point also is of importance, as bearing upon the questions, Does the dictation of "the spirit" tend to more and more sweetness and light, or to more and more wildness and gloom, or does it continue equable? But here again, supposing manifest a lack of progress, or even a steadily progressive deterioration, it is quite competent to the medium to allege his own frailty and fatigue, while refusing to admit either in "the spirit;" though in this case he is exposed to the fair inference that the longer a man practises self-abnegation and openness to the "Divine influx," the more lucid and lovely and beautiful should become his expression or communication thereof. It appears to me that most of the best pieces, the most ​limpid and spontaneous, are in the earlier part of the book, and I incline to think that they were also among the earliest written.
Before proceeding to discuss the writer's account of the genesis of these poems, it may be well, in vindication of my serious and respectful treatment of this volume, to cite the verdict of an eminent and unprejudiced living poet and painter (his poems I can speak of as having read them; his pictures I must take on trust, as unfortunately he will not exhibit). In his supplementary chapter to the then late Alexander Gilchrist's "Life of William Blake" (1863), Mr. Dante Gabriel Rossetti writes thus (vol. i. p. 382):—
"A very singular example of the closest and most absolute resemblance to Blake's poetry may be met with (if only one could meet with it), in a phantasmal sort of little book, published, or perhaps not published but only printed [I learn at the office of the Swedenborg Society, 36 Bloomsbury Street, London, that it really was published, as the title-page and the price, 5s., stamped on the back indicate], some years since, and entitled 'Improvisations of [from] the Spirit.' It bears no author's name, but was written by Dr. J. J. Garth Wilkinson, the highly gifted editor of Swedenborg's writings, and author of a 'Life' of him, to whom, as has been before mentioned, we owe a reprint of the poems in Blake's 'Songs of Innocence and Experience.' These improvisations profess to be written under precisely the same kind of spiritual guidance, amounting to abnegation of personal effort in the writer, which Blake supposed to have presided over the production of his 'Jerusalem,' &c. The little book has passed into the general (and in all other cases richly deserved) limbo of the modern 'spiritualist' muse. It is a very thick little book, however unsubstantial its origin, and contains, amid much that is disjointed or hopelessly obscure (but then why be the polisher of poems for which a ghost, and not even your own ghost, is alone responsible?), many passages of a remote and charming beauty, or sometimes of a grotesque ​figurative relation to things of another sphere, which are startlingly akin to Blake's writings—could pass, in fact, for no one's but his. Professing, as they do, the same new kind of authorship, they might afford plenty of material for comparison and bewildered speculation, if such were in any request."
With regard to the last parenthesis in the above passage, it should be observed that both Blake and Wilkinson would scornfully reject the term ghosts in connection with the sources of their inspiration, both holding steadfastly that the spiritual body is as real and in its own sphere as substantial as the natural body, that the spiritual life is far more intensely and profoundly (or supernally) real than the natural. Blake, with all his profusion of visions, saw but one "ghost" in his life (the famous "ghost of a flea," drawn for John Varley, water-colour painter and astrologer, was the visionary personification of the creature); and he, who was more familiar with "angels" and "spirits" than with his fellow-men, found this one "ghost" so horrible that he fairly fled out of the house from it; and Dr. Wilkinson, as the title of his book and the account of its origin show, claims to be the medium of the Spirit or the Lord; though, indeed, as in "E. B.," "A Wife's Message," "Teddy's Flower," he sometimes believes himself the transmittor of communications from human spirits; but, as I have said, ​these are in no sense "ghostly" to him, but intensely living spirits, with bodies of spiritual or supereminent reality.
In connection with the "most absolute resemblance," amounting almost to identity, of these poems and Blake's ("startlingly akin to Blake's writings—could pass, in fact, for no one's but his"), as read by so competent a student as Mr. Rossetti, it is interesting to consider certain passages in Dr. Wilkinson's Preface to his edition [the first printed one, as the poor Blake had to engrave his text as well as his designs] of the "Songs of Innocence and Experience:" though, as this was published so far back as 1839, when the editor was but twenty-seven years old, his estimate of Blake may have become very different by the time the "Improvisations" were issued in 1857, and may be yet more different now, especially after the publication of the "Life and Selections," the "Essay" by Mr. Swinburne, and the Aldine edition of the Poems, with Prefatory Memoir, by Mr. W. M. Rossetti. Dr. Wilkinson, forty years back, fully appreciated the beauty of the poems he edited: why else should he have edited them? But in my judgment he should have included several more in the praise he lavished on these. He writes:—
"The present volume contains nearly all that is excellent in Blake's poetry; and great, rare, and manifest is the excellence that is here. The faults are equally conspicuous, and he who runs may read them. They amount to an utter want of elaboration, and even, in many cases, to an inattention to the ordinary rules of grammar. Yet the 'Songs of Innocence,' at least, are quite free from the dark becloudment which rolled and billowed over Blake in his later days. He here transcended Self, and escaped from the isolation which Self involves; and, as it then ​ever is, his expanding affections embraced universal man, and, without violating, beautified and hallowed even his individual peculiarities. Accordingly, many of these delicious lays belong to the Era as well as to the Author. They are remarkable for the transparent depth of thought which constitutes true simplicity—they give us glimpses of all that is holiest in the childhood of the world and the individual—they abound with the sweetest touches of that pastoral life, by which the Golden Age may be still visibly represented to the Iron one—they delineate full-orbed age, ripe with the seeds of a second infancy, which is 'the Kingdom of Heaven.' The latter half of the volume, comprising the 'Songs of Experience,' consists, it is true, of darker themes; but they, too, are well and wonderfully sung, and ought to be preserved, because, in contrastive connection with the 'Songs of Innocence,' they do convey a powerful impression of 'The Two Contrary States of the Human Soul.'"
But what of the later illustrated works, the colossal or monstrous chaotic "Prophetic Books," which yet contain germs of such noble grandeur and beauty that so fervid a lover and consummate a master of pure classical form as Mr. Swinburne dedicates a large portion of a volume to their exposition? Dr. Wilkinson says that Blake "naturalised the spiritual, instead of spiritualising the natural;" that he preferred "seeing truth under the loose garments of typical or even mythologic representation, rather than in the Divine-Human Embodiment of Christianity;" and continues in a very powerful, though in my judgment too vehement, passage, which I must cite at full length, the slender book being so little known and so scarce:—
"And, accordingly, his Imagination, self-divorced from a Reason which might have elevated and chastened it, and necessarily spurning the scientific daylight and material realism of ​the nineteenth century, found a home in the ruins of ancient and consummated Churches, and imbued itself with the superficial obscurity and ghastliness, far more than with the inward grandeur of primeval times. For the true Inward is one and identical, and if Blake had been disposed to see it, he would have found that it was still (though doubtless under a multitude of wrappages) extant in the present age. On the contrary, copying the outward form of the past, he has delivered to us a multitude of new hieroglyphics, which contain no presumable reconditeness of meaning, and which we are obliged to account for, simply by the artist's having yielded himself up, more thoroughly than other men will do, to those fantastic impulses which are common to all mankind, and which saner men subjugate, but cannot exterminate. In so yielding himself, the Artist, not less than the man, was a loser, though it unquestionably gave him a certain power, as all unscrupulous passion must, of wildness and fierce vagary. This power is possessed, in different degrees, by every human being, if he will but give loose and free vent to the hell that is in him; and hence the madness, even of the meanest, is terrific. But no madness can long be considered either really Poetic or Artistical. Of the worst aspect of Blake's genius it is painful to speak. In his 'Prophecies of America,' his 'Visions of the Daughters of Albion,' and a host of unpublished drawings [the "Prophetic Books" have words as well as designs], earth-born might has banished the heavenlier elements of Art, and exists combined with all that is monstrous and diabolical. In the domain of Terror he here entered, the characteristic of his genius is fearful Reality. He embodies no Byronisms—none of the sentimentalities of civilised vice—but delights to draw evil things and evil beings in their naked and final state. The effect of these delineations is greatly heightened by the antiquity which is engraven on the faces of those who do and suffer in them. We have the impression that we are looking down into the hells of the ancient people, the Anakim, the Nephilim, and the Rephaim. Their human forms are gigantic petrifactions, from which the fires of ​lust and intense selfish passion have long dissipated what was animal and vital, leaving stony limbs and countenances expressive of despair and stupid cruelty.
"In many of the characters of his mind, Blake resembled Shelley. From the opposite extremes of Christianity and materialism, they both seem, at length, to have converged towards Pantheism, or natural-spiritualism; and it is probable that a somewhat similar self-intelligence, or Ego-theism, possessed them both. They agreed in mistaking the forms of truth for the truth itself, and consequently, drew the materials of their works from the ages of type and shadow which preceded the ​Christian Revelation. The beauty, chasteness, and clear polish of Shelley's mind, as well as his metaphysical irreligion, took him, naturally enough, to the philosophy and theology of the Greeks, where he could at once enjoy the loose dogma of an Impersonal Creator, and have liberty to distribute Personality at will to the beautiful unliving forms of the visible creation. We appeal to the 'Prometheus Unbound,' his consummating work, in proof of this assertion, The visionary tendencies and mysticism of Blake, developing themselves as they did, under the shelter of a religious parentage and education, carried him, on the contrary, to the mythic fountains of an elder time, and his genius, which was too expansive to dwell in classic formalisms, entered into and inhabited the Egyptian and Asiatic perversions of an ancient and true religion. In consequence of these allied deformities, the works of both are sadly deficient in vital heat, and in substantial or practical truth, and fail, therefore, to satisfy the common wants, or to appeal to the universal instincts of Humanity. Self-will in each was the centre of the individual, and self-intelligence the anima mundi of the philosopher, and they both imagined that they could chop and change the universe, even to the confounding of life with death, to suit their own creative fancies."
I shall have something to say in the sequel about this passage, which I have not cited as concurring with its judgments. Here I will but quote as a set-off, so far as regards Blake, a couple of preceding sentences:—
"They who would form a just estimate of Blake's powers as an artist have abundance of opportunities of doing so, from his exquisite illustrations to the 'Songs of Innocence,' from his designs to Blair's 'Grave,' Young's 'Night Thoughts,' and the 'Book of Job,' in all of which there are 'glorious shapes, expressing God-like sentiments.' These works, in the main, are ​not more remarkable for high original genius than they are for sane self-possession, and show the occasional sovereignty of the inner man over the fantasies which obsessed the outer."
The young editor, who so absolutely and violently denounced the visions and prophetic books of Blake, as to speak of ghastliness, hell, madness, monstrous and diabolical, was already an ardent votary of Swedenborg, whom he termed in this same preface, "our great modern luminary." Others have discerned, or thought they discerned, a wonderful similitude between the thus condemned and the thus exalted. For example ("Life," 15, 16), Mr. Gilchrist says:—
"Another still more memorable figure, and a genius singularly german to Blake's own order of mind, the 'singular boy of fourteen,' during the commencement of his apprenticeship, may, 'any day have met unwittingly in London streets, or walked beside a placid, venerable, thin man of eighty-four, of erect figure and abstracted air, wearing a full-bottomed wig, a pair of long ruffles, and a curious-hilted sword, and carrying a gold-headed cane—no Vision, still flesh and blood, but himself the greatest of modern Vision-seers—Emanuel Swedenborg by name, who came from Amsterdam to London in August, 1771, and died at No. 26 Great Bath Street, Coldbath Fields, on 29th of March, 1772.' This Mr. Allingham pleasantly suggests, in a note to his ​delightful collection of lyrical poems, 'Nightingvale Valley (1860), in which (at last) occur a specimen or two of Blake's verse. The coincidence is not a trivial one. Of all modern men, the engraver's apprentice [Blake] was to grow up the likest to Emanuel Swedenborg; already by constitutional endowment and temperament was so; in faculty for theosophic dreaming, for the seeing of visions while broad awake, and in matter-of-fact hold of spiritual things. To savan and to artist alike, while yet on earth, the heavens were opened. By Swedenborg's theological writings, the first English editions of which appeared during Blake's manhood, the latter was considerably influenced, but in no slavish spirit. These writings, in common with those of Jacob Boehmen, and of the other select mystics of the world, had natural affinities to Blake's mind, and were eagerly assimilated. But he hardly became a proselyte or 'Swedenborgian' proper [hardly!), though his friend Flaxman did."
Now let us see what Blake writes of Swedenborg, to whom he was "the likest of all modern men." When thirty-three he brought forth an engraved volume, illustrated in colour, of which Mr. Swinburne thus speaks ("William Blake: A Critical Essay," 1868, p. 204):—
"In 1790 Blake produced the greatest of all his books, a work indeed which we rank as about the greatest produced by the eighteenth century in the line of high poetry and spiritual speculation. The 'Marriage of Heaven and Hell' gives us the high-water mark of his intellect. None of his lyrical writings show the same sustained strength and radiance of mind; none of his other works in verse or prose give more than a hint here and a trace there of the same harmonious and humorous power, of the same choice of eloquent words, the same noble command and liberal music of thought; small things he could do perfectly, and great things often imperfectly; here for once he has written a book as perfect as his most faultless song, as great as his most imperfect rhapsody. His fire of spirit fills it from end to end, but never deforms the body, never singes the surface of the work, as too often in the still noble books of his later life. . . . The ​variety and audacity of thoughts and words are incomparable, not less so their fervour and beauty. 'No bird soars too high if he soars with his own wings.' This proverb might serve as motto to the book; it is one of many 'Proverbs of Hell,' as forcible and as finished."
In the great work thus greatly praised, Blake incidentally delivers his soul on Swedenborg; but in fairness to Dr. Wilkinson, it must be remarked that he was probably unacquainted with it when he wrote the above-cited preface, as it is not mentioned therein. In one of the "Memorable Fancies" of the book, and in the chapter of Comments succeeding it ("Life," i. 85, 86; more fully, Swinburne, 219, 221), Blake, wishing for such an alacrity in sinking as Falstaff attributed to his size (the which, by the way, we should have thought tended to buoyancy), desiring indeed to sink to about the depth indicated by the illustrious Sir John's, "if the bottom were as deep as hell, I should down"; what enormous dead weight, what irresistible plummet of myriadfold leaden ponderosity, did he take to ensure his descent? Read:—
". . . then I flung myself with him directly into the body of the sun; here I clothed myself in white, and taking in my hand [it must have been a large one!] Swedenborg's volumes, sunk from the glorious clime, and passed all the planets till we came to Saturn: here I stayed to rest, and then leaped into the void between Saturn and the fixed stars."
So much for Swedenborg in the Fancy; now for him in the Comments:—
"I have always found that angels have the vanity to speak of themselves as the only wise; this they do with a confident insolence sprouting from systematic reasoning.
​"Thus Swedenborg boasts that what he writes is new, though it is only the contents or index of already published books. . . .
"Now hear a plain fact: Swedenborg has not written one new truth.
"Now hear another: He has written all the old falsehoods.
"And now hear another: He conversed with angels, who are all religious, and conversed not with devils, who all hate religion [angels are really devils, God is the devil, and vice versâ; popular religions are blasphemous and atheistic; here and elsewhere in Blake]; for he was incapable, through his conceited notions.
"Thus Swedenborg's writings are a recapitulation of all superficial opinions, and an analysis of the more sublime, but no further.
"Hear now another plain fact: Any man of mechanical talents may, from the writings of Paracelsus or Jacob Behmen, produce ten thousand volumes of equal value with Swedenborg's; and from those of Dante or Shakespeare, an infinite number. But when he has done this, let him not say that he knows better than his master, for he only holds a candle in sunshine."
This is mild and sweet with a vengeance. In the "Life" are some extracts from the Reminiscences of Mr. Crabb Robinson (based on his Journals), who was introduced to Blake at the close of 1825. One of these notes of Blake's conversation (1. 340) modifies the passages just cited:—
"Incidentally, Swedenborg was mentioned: he declared him to be a divine teacher; he had done, and would do much good; yet he did wrong in endeavouring to explain to the reason what it could not comprehend. He seemed to consider—but that was not clear—the visions of Swedenborg and Dante as of the same kind. Dante was the greater poet [rather!]"
The student must elect between these verdicts of the visionary poet-artist, between the judgment of the noblest work of his prime, and the conversation when he was close upon threescore and ten.
​Lastly, to complete this interesting little circle of estimates and comparisons, let us hear Mr. Swinburne. He agrees with Dr. Wilkinson, as we learn from several passages in the "Essay," that there are points of strong resemblance in Blake and Shelley. But in the conclusion of his volume (p. 300, et seq.), it is not Shelley whom he fixes as the nearest of kin to Blake. Unfortunately space lacks for full quotation:—
"I can remember one poet only whose work seems to me the same or similar in kind—a poet as vast in aim, as daring in detail, as unlike others, as coherent to himself, as strange without and as sane within. The points of contact and sides of likeness between William Blake and Walt Whitman are so many and so grave as to afford some ground of reason to those who preach the transition of souls or transfusion of spirits. The great American is not a more passionate preacher of sexual or political freedom than the English artist. To each the imperishable form of a possible and universal Republic is equally requisite and adorable as the temporal and spiritual queen of ages as of men. To each all sides and shapes of life are alike acceptable or endurable. . . . Both are spiritual, both democratic; both by their works recall, even to so untaught and tentative a student as I am, the fragments vouchsafed to us of the Pantheistic poetry of the East. Their casual audacities of expression or speculation are in effect well nigh identical. Their outlooks and theories are evidently the same on all points of intellectual and social life. The divine devotion and selfless love which make men martyrs and prophets are alike visible and palpable in each. It is no secret now, but a matter of public knowledge, that both these men, being poor in the sight and the sense of the world, have given what they had of time or of money, of labour or of love, to comfort and support all the suffering and sick, all the afflicted and misused, whom they had the chance or the right to succour and to serve. And in externals and details the work of these two constantly and inevitably coheres and coincides. . . . Whitman has seldom struck a note of thought and speech so just and so profound as Blake has now and then touched upon; but his work is generally more frank and fresh, smelling of ​sweeter air, and readier to expound or expose its message, than this of the prophetic books. Nor is there among these any poem or passage of equal length so faultless and so noble as his 'Voice out of the Sea,' or his dirge over President Lincoln—the most sweet and sonorous nocturn ever chanted in the church of the world. But in breadth of outline and charm of colour these poems recall the work of Blake; and to neither poet can a higher tribute of honest praise be paid than this."
II
The foregoing extracts, which I certainly should not have made at such length had the books from which they are taken been more generally known or more easily accessible, exhibit one of those complicated disagreements among the doctors over which laymen are wont to chuckle, as feeling the burden of their ignorance very much lightened thereby. In this case, the doctors are the poets and mystics; the laymen, we common prosy readers. Rossetti discovers affinity, verging on identity, of Blake and Wilkinson; Wilkinson repudiates his twin-brother Blake, whom he pairs off with atheistic-pantheistic Shelley; Blake expresses the utmost contempt for Swedenborg, whom his unfraternal twin-brother idolises; Gilchrist pronounces Blake likest of all modern men to the Swedenborg he disdains; Swinburne can almost believe in transmigration of soul from Blake to Walt Whitman, the two are so wonderfully alike. As for Blake and Shelley, although Shelley's thirty years began with the latter half of Blake's seventy, I remember nothing in their memoirs or works to show that either knew aught of the other. It is not for poor me to decide when the doctors ​thus disagree; I can but hazard, in all humility, the suggestion that there is much truth if not all the truth, much truth with perchance a little error, in the judgment delivered by each of these learned adepts. With Mr. Rossetti, I find many of Wilkinson's poems, or verses thereof, startingly akin to some of Blake's, and can often fancy in reading them that I am verily reading Blake; but in many more, especially those due to Wilkinson's scientific and other studies, and those confined in the strait-waistcoat of Swedenborg's arbitrary, dogmatic, rigid, and frigid symbolisms or "Correspondences," I can discover very few hints of Blake: but more on this in the sequel. With Wilkinson I perceive much likeness between Blake and Shelley, and only wonder that he does not note (as Swinburne does in several places) certain rare and conspicuous identical traits: their dauntless devotion to political and religious liberty; their impassioned and yet more daring advocacy of sexual freedom; their reanimation and ardent propagation of the great doctrine, in its essence so profoundly true, that in the appalling unintermitted struggle between the spirits of good and evil, the evil has hitherto prevailed, that the God ​3l8 CRITICAL STUDIES of the popular worship is the real devil, and the devil of the populai: abhorrence the real Divine Saviour of humanity ; that Ormuzd shall ultimately conquer and annihilate or absorb Ahriman, as in the apocalyptic vision of the " Prometheus Unbound." But it is time to return to our strange book, to consider the process of its production, and then try to appraise its worth. Here let me state, once for all, that I have perfect confidence in Dr. Wilkin- son's veracity. I have not indeed the honour of his personal acquaintance (I use the conventional phrase in no conventional sense), have indeed seen and heard him but once, when he was upon a public platform, and myself (attracted solely by his name) in the body of the hall ; but I do not believe that any one, being neither dishonest nor stupid, can study his great and noble works* without deriving from them the absolute conviction that their author is quite incapable of falsehood or equivocation. Err he may and must, being human ; but we may be sure that his errors are genuine, that he is not conscious of them. Moreover, he is a man of science, a philo- sopher, and was a doctor of long practice, even in 1857, and thus a trained and experienced observer, specially fitted for discriminating and recording the phenomena of his own being, whether physical or mental. Lastly, he is a man of subtlest insight, of far-reaching vision, of massive and magnificent genius ; a man of whom Emerson wrote, not more generously
and the introduction to " Swedenborg's Economy of the Animal Kingdom," 1846. ​than justly, some years before the publication of these Poems:—
" Swedenborg printed these scientific books in the ten years from 1734 to 1744, and theyy remained from that time neglected; now after their century is complete, he has at last found a pupil in Mr. Wilkinson, of London, a philosophic critic, with a coequal vigour of understanding and imagination comparable only to Lord Bacon's. . . . The admirable preliminary discourses with which Mr. Wilkinson has enriched these volumes, throw all the contemporary philosophy of England into shade, and leave me nothing to say on their proper grounds."—Representative Men: "Swedenborg, or the Mystic."
"Wilkinson, the editor of Swedenborg, the annotator of Fourier, and the champion of Hahnemann, has brought to metaphysics and to physiology a native vigour, with a catholic perception of relations, equal to the highest attempts, and a rhetoric like the armoury of the invincible knights of old. There is in the action of his mind a long Atlantic roll not known except in deepest waters, and only lacking what ought to accompany such powers, a manifest centrality. If his mind does not rest in immovable biases, perhaps the orbit is larger, and the return is not yet: but a master should inspire a confidence that he will adhere to his convictions, and give his present studies always the same high place."—English Traits: chap. xiv. "Literature."
Now, most of my readers have probably seen and heard, in common with myself, a bad deal about "Inspirational Discourses," and many may have heard one or more of such effusions (I have heard but one, from a woman who seemed a cleverish actress); and many also have probably seen scraps and screeds of rhyme and the blankest of blank verse, claiming to be improvisations dictated by eminent spirits, Byron, Poe, Cowper, Shelley, and so forth. One has glanced at such things now and then as they happened to come in his way, but never as expecting ​320 CRITICAL STUDIES to find in them any sane and genuine worth, only with languid contemptuous curiosity, wondering to what depths of nervous disease, idiocy, lunacy, or swindling charlatanism human beings could sink in countries calling themselves civilised, without being committed to the hospital, the asylum, or the gaol : it was so evident that the mediums (this appears to be the approved "spiritist" plural) ranged from dis- eased and hysterical dupes to deep and damnable deceivers. The spirits of the noblest poets usually dictated such senseless and measureless balderdash (their metre being a gas-metre) that it was clear they had decayed into drivelling imbecile Strulbrugs in the other world. When, very rarely, a very small oasis in a very vast desert, a piece of any merit and melody was discovered, it was not beyond the achieve- ment of a person of ordinary intelligence and educa- tion, with a nervous temperament and the "fatal facility" in rhyming. So notoriously silly or worse are the vast majority of such alleged communications, that even Professor Wallace, during the Slade inquiry, said that he was interested only in the question of how the message was written, the message itself being very seldom of any value or significance. And in the exceedingly rare cases where the alleged com- munications and dictations are not contemptibly worthless or worse than worthless, what assurance have we of the honesty of the medium? The so- called improvisation may have been carefully com- posed beforehand, by the medium or some other knave cleverer at rhymes ; wherefore the saner or less mad world very promptly and properly commits such inspired productions to what Mr. Rossetti calls ​A STRANGE BOOK 32I " the general and richly deserved limbo of the modem ' spiritualist ' Muse." But while we thus reject with pity or spurn with dis- gust and disdain the mass of the ignorant, the morbid, the deranged, the cunning, the unscrupulous, the dupes and the deceivers who compose the " Devil's Own " of equivocal private secretaries attached to the post- mortem spirits, we must not forget that among them, not of them, are two or three genuine seers — genuine whether their visions be of realities or not ; genuinely inspired, whether their utterances be of truth or error, and whether they attribute their inspiration to its real source or not. We must not confound a Swedenborg with a Home, a Blake with a Slade, a Wilkinson with a " Revd." Mr. Monk. When we have the good for- tune to meet in life, or history, or literature with a great and noble man, let us do our best to study and understand him and his work, however eccentric his life-orbit may be deemed by the world, however startling its aberrations may at first appear to our- selves; nor let us ever fear, rather let us ever be forward to praise, as publicly as we can, all that we find praiseworthy in the man and his work ; though our voice calls forth no responsive echo, but a storm of jeers and howls and curses, because the one half of the world has decreed him guilty as a blasphe- mous infidel, and the other half, more charitable, pronounced him insane. In carefully and respectfully studying these " Impro- visations," I have but adhered to a rule which I stated in some notes on the poems of William Blake (written in 1864, and published at the beginning of 1866, be- fore the appearance of Mr. Swinburne's elaborate and X ​322 CRITICAL STUDIES admirable essay) ; and which, with its corollaries, I may be allowed to repeat here, as I consider it not less applicable to Garth Wilkinson than to William Blake :— "... we ought not to be kept from studying these writings [the turbid and turbulent prophetic books] by any apparent obscurity and ludicrousness, if we have found in the easily comprehended vernacular writings of the same man (as in Blake's we certainly have found) sincerity, and wisdom, and beauty. Nor is it pro- bable that even the most mysterious works of Blake would prove more difficult to genuine lovers of poetry than many works of the highest renown prove to nine-tenths [rather ninety-nine hundredths] of the reading public. " ' Sie haben dich, heiliger Hafis, Die mystische Zunge genannt ; Und haben, die Wortgelehrten, Den Werth des Worts nicht erkannt.' " For many intelligent persons, Carlyle at his best is almost or quite as unintelligible as if he was using an unknown language ; and the same may be asserted of Shelley and Robert Browning. (I do not select lofty old names, because in their cases the decisions of authoritative judges, accumulating throughout cen- turies, overawe our common jurymen into verdicts wise without understanding ; so that a dullard can speak securely of the sublimity of Milton, for example, though we are pretty certain that he never got through the first book of the ' Paradise Lost,' and that he would find himself in a Slough of Despond, when twenty lines deep in the opening passage of Samson Agonistes.) Indeed, I doubt whether it would be an exaggeration to assert that, for a very large majority of those who arc accounted edu- cated and intelligent people, poetry in itself is essentially an unknown tongue. They admire and remember a verse or a passage for its wit, its cleverness, its wisdom, its clear and brief statement of some fact, its sentiment, its applicability to some circumstance of their own life, its mention of some classic name, its allusion to some historical event ; in short, for its associations, and not for its poetry, per se. Yet, assuredly, here are still men in England with an infallil)le sense for ​A STRANGE BOOK 323 poetry, however disguised, and however far removed from ordinary associations ; men who know Shakespeare in despite of the commentators, and understand Browning in contempt of the critics, and laugh quietly at the current censures and rap- tures of the reviews : and these men would scarcely consider it a waste of time to search into the meaning of the darkest oracles of William Blake." And before that last sentence was written, and until after it was printed (as we learn from dates in his volume), one of the youngest and most brilliant of "these men," Mr. Swinburne, was patiently and reverently preparing, " in the intervals of his natural work," that luminous exposition and interpretation of those " darkest oracles," entitled, " William Blake : a Critical Essay." And now for Dr. Wilkinson's note to these " Improvisations," which has been cited at such length in the opening of the first section of this article. He says : " How much it differs from other similar collections [books of verse] in process it were difficult to convey to the reader; suffice it to say, that every piece was produced without premeditation or preconception. Had these processes stolen in, such production would have been impossible." But this does not so sharply distinguish his volume from other volumes of poetry as the doctor appears to imply. Long poems, indeed, are usually premeditated and planned in their general outline ; * but the first con- ception of the subject, in its most general outline, yet most essential living individuality, must be as unpremeditated, as real a lightning-flash of inspiration
only the genuine, whatever their rank ; and in such a discussion as this, these terms include all art, works of art, and artists. ​324 CRITICAL STUDIES as ever suddenly illumined mystic or seer. Moreover, many of the details, whether of episode or organic development, many of the noblest passages, whether for beauty or energy, must be just as unpremeditated, just as unexpectedly inspired. And beyond doubt, many of the loveliest lyrics and brief poems have been poured forth in a single sudden jet, like metal at a white heat in the intolerable fire of inspiration, swift as lightning to smite and fuse, an unforeseen thunderbolt from a quiet sky — without even so much premeditation and preconception as must be implied in Dr. Wilkinson's sitting down with pen in hand and paper before him, and theme chosen, "determined to make an experiment " himself, awaiting the influx of the Spirit. But without precise premeditation and precon- ception of any particular poem, there must have been much general premeditation, many more or less vague preconceptions on the part of the poet ; there must have been great gathering of fuel for the altar, of fuel and myrrh and frankincense and all sweet spices, awaiting the descent of the fire from heaven — whose descent is certain, though no man can foretell the hour thereof; nor can the sacrificial high-priest himself, perchance worn out with long vain watching, and sick with hope deferred, have the faintest surmise of the time of its coming, until, ere he can perceive it, the heavens are opened, the altar fire is burning, the savours of the incense are floating up the air. Now, so much of general premeditation and preconception, or preparation, as is here asserted to be necessary for the production of every genuine work of art, be it poem, sonata, statue, picture, or ​A STRANGE BOOK 325 cathedral, Dr. Wilkinson not only admits in himself and in the domain of art, but extends the assertion of its necessity to all mankind and the whole world of human occupations, in a passage of the note now to be cited : — " In any walk of life, however humble or however high, there are two general requisites for a heavenly development. The first is an unremitting assiduity in all that naturally concerns the subject, the entire knowledge and manipulation and progress of the thing, as far as industry can attain them. This gives the human materials. The second is the heart's prayer to the Lord for His aid, and the mind's faith that that prayer is answered in the asking. The resulting actions of the man who l:)rings these materials, and receives by acknowledgment these spirituals, will form a part of the ever-progressive heaven of the special branch, which it is that man's privilege to be employed to portray." Being simply an elaboration of the legendary Cromwellian prescription, "Trust in God, and keep your powder dry." Coleridge said of Wordsworth's prose didactic on poetry, " What is true in it is not new, and what is new in it is not true ; " and I think the same may be fairly said of Dr. Wilkinson's theory of Divine inspiration, of the renunciation of self, the subjection of reason and will, the passive faith-full openness to influx; as he expounds it in the note, in the paragraph just cited, and in various others quoted in the last section, as that beginning : " Reason and will are not primary powers in this process, but secondary; not directive, but regulative; and imagination . . . however much it receives is as a disc on which the subject is projected, not as an active concipient organ. Another power flows in, and all the known faculties lend their aid to make ​326 CRITICAL STUDIES way for it." And this ; " Hence, writing from an influx which is really out of your Self, or so within your Self so as to amount to the same thing [this pregnant identical alternative is very noteworthy], is either a religion or a madness. I know of no third possibility. [The ancients, we shall see, did ; they re- cognised it as both a religion and a madness, a sacred frenzy; and moderns, Christian and non-Christian, have thus recognised it also.] * In allowing your faculties to be directed to ends they know not of, there is only One Being to whom you dare entrust them — only the Lord." Now, what does all this mean other than the re-assertion of the fundamental principle of all mysticism, in all times and climes? — from the most ancient Indian gymnosophists to the Hebrew prophets and poets, to Christian apostles, as Paul and John, to Plato and Plotinus, to Mohammed and the Sufis, to early and mediaeval Christian eremites and saints with their trances and ecstasies, to George Fox and his Quakers, walking by the interior light and waiting to be moved by the Spirit, to Behmen and Law, to Swedenborg and Blake, to Shelley with his opening of " Alastor," his " Hymn to Intellectual Beauty," his "Defence of Poetry," his "Ode to
wrote the " Improvisations." Thus, in his " Emanuel Swedenborg : A Biography" (1849), he writes, p. 234 : " Swedenborg's case may be studied like any other ol>ject of science. . . . Nay, were it sure that he was stark mad, it would not dispossess us of one truth or vision in his writings ; these would survive the grave of his personal reputation, and bring us Ixick to the ancient faith, that madness too has a Divine side, and in its natural heedlessness, sparkles with wisdom and prophecy, or even sometimes is interpolated with the directer oracles of God." ​A STRANGE BOOK 327 Liberty." The names and phrases may vary; the essential faith and doctrine is ever the same in all. Let us consider a few instances relating specially to poetry. First, Plato. Ion, the short dialogue between Socrates and the Homeric rhapsodist (or rhapsode, as Professor Jowett prefers) is devoted to insistence on this doctrine of the Divine madness of poetic inspiration, the " fine frenzy " of Shakespeare.* Here is the central exposition, as it were the keystone of the arch. I use Jowett's version ; but Shelley also Englished it, Mrs. Shelley strangely avowing, " I do not know why Shelley selected the Ion to translate." '■'■ Soc. The gift which you possess of speaking excellently about Homer is not an art, but an inspiration ; there is a divinity, moving you, like that in the stone which Euripides calls a magnet, but which is commonly known as the stone of Ileraclea. For that stone not only attracts iron rings, but also imparts to them a similar power of attracting other rings ; and sometimes you may see a number of pieces of iron and rings suspended from one another, so as to form quite a long chain ; and all of them derive their power of suspension from the original stone. Now this, like the Muse, who first of all inspires man herself, and from these inspired persons a chain of other persons is suspended, who take the inspiration from them. For all good poets, epic as well as lyric, compose their beautiful poems, not as works of art, but because they arc inspired and possessed. And as the Corybantian revellers, when they dance, arc not in their right mind, so the lyric poets are not in their right
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven ; And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothings A local habitation and a name." ​328 CRITICAL STUDIES mind when they are composing their beautiful strains ; but when falling under the power of music and metre, they are inspired and possessed — like Bacchic maidens, who draw milk and honey from the rivers, when they are under the influence of Dionysus, but not when they are in their right mind. . . . For the poet is a light and winged and holy thing, and there is no invention in him until he has been inspired, and is out of his senses, and the mind is no longer in him ; when he has not attained to this state, he is powerless, and is unable to utter his oracles. . . . Had he learned by rules of art, he would have known how to speak, not of one theme only, but of all ; and, therefore, God takes away the mind of poets, and uses them as His ministers, as He also uses diviners and holy prophets, in order that we who hear them may know that they speak not of themselves, who utter these priceless words in a state of unconsciousness, but that God is the speaker, and that through them He is conversing with us." So in the Meno : — " Soc. Then we shall also be right in calling those divine whom we were just now speaking of as diviners and prophets, including the whole tribe of poets. Yes, and Statesmen above all may be said to be divine and illumined, being inspired and possessed of God, in which condition they say many good things, not knowing what they say." Again, in the " Apology of Socrates " : — " I went to the poets — tragic, dithyrambic, and all sorts ! . . . Will you believe me? I am almost ashamed to confess the truth, but I must say, that there is hardly a person present who would not have talked better alx)Ut their poetry than they did themselves. Then I know, without going further, that not by wisdom do poets write poetry, but by a sort of genius and inspiration ; they are diviners or soothsayers, who also say many fine things, but do not understand the meaning of them." And, again, in the Phadrus : — ^^ Soc. But there is also a madness which is the gift of heaven, and the source of the choicest blessings among men. ​A STRANGE BOOK 329 For prophecy is a madness, and the prophetess at Delphi and the priestesses at Dadona, when out of their sense, have conferred great benefits on Hellas, both in public and private life ; but when in their senses, few or none. . . . There is also a third kind of madness, of those who are possessed by the Muses ; which enters into a delicate and virgin soul, and there inspiring frenzy, awakens lyrical and all other numbers, with these adorning the myriad actions of ancient heroes for the instruction of posterity. But he who, having no touch of the Muses' mad- ness in his soul, and comes to the door, and thinks that he will get into the temple by the help of art — he, I say, and his poetry, are not admitted ; the sane man is nowhere at all, when he enters into the rivalry with madmen. I might tell of many other deeds which have sprung from inspired madness," &c. In harmony with this Platonic doctrine are the serious invocations of Divine aid by the loftiest earlier and later poets, though the appeal to the Muses became in the course of centuries so thoroughly senseless a matter of routine with mediocre and clever versifiers, that Byron did well to prick the bubble with the frank impertinence of his " Hail, Muse ! et cetera. — We left Juan sleeping." Homer, surely in devout earnestness, calls upon the heavenly Muses to sing. Lucretius, the most inspired of Latin poets, serious enough in his opening prayer to Venus Genetrix, "symbol of the all-pervading living force of nature, legendary mother of the Romans," as is made manifest by " the intense earnestness of the language, the words plain and simple in themselves, yet instinct with life and passion " (Munro's second edition, 1866 ; Book i, note 2, vol. i. p. 341, 342). So Dante, in the first canto of the " Purgatory," invokes the sacred Muses, and in the first of the "Paradise," Apollo ; and in the second grandly declares, warning off those unworthy to accompany him, that his barque ​330 CRITICAL STUDIES takes now to waters never sailed, that Minerva breathes the breeze, Apollo pilots, and the nine Muses are as his compass to point out the north, using indeed the antique names, with that profound and uncritical reverence for the classics which long survived the Renaissance, but evidently meaning, in all earnestness (as commentators have pointed out) by Apollo and the Muses, God and His Holy Spirit, or gifts of grace. So Spenser, when beginning his " P'aerie Queene," he supplicates : " Help then, O ! holy virgin, chiefe of nyne ; " and in the introduction to the last book we have complete : " Ye sacred imps, that on Parnasso dwell." So Milton, opening his " Paradise Lost " and " Paradise Regained," and living at a time when he could shadow the old names ; though in his poems the classical and Biblical mythologies are often very confused, calls upon the heavenly Muse and the Holy Spirit. Finally, let us gather a few sentences from Shelley's noble unfinished " Defence of Poetry," which is per- vaded throughout with this doctrine of inspiration, and which suffers cruelly, as all high and harmonious work must in being sampled by fragments.* " Language, colour, form, and religious and civil habits of action, are all the instruments and materials of poetry ; they may • One rejoices in the association of Sir Philip Sidney and Shelley. Their families became allied by the (second) marriage of Shelley's paternal grandfather, Sir Bysshe, to the heiress of Penshurst, their eldest son assuming the name of Shelley-Sidney, and being ancestor of the present master of Penshurst, Lord De L'Isle and Dudley. But Sidney and Shelley were much more closely allied in their supremacy of magnanimous and chivalrous character ; and two centuries and a quarter before Shelley wrote the " Defence," Sidney had written "An Apologie for Poetry" (1595; reprinted by Mr. Arber, cost sixpence). ​A STRANGE BOOK 33I be called poetry by that figure of speech which considers the effect as a synonyme of the cause. But poetry, in a more re- stricted sense, expresses those arrangements of language, and especially metrical language, which are created by that imperial faculty, whose throne is curtained within the invisible nature of man.* "A poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth. . . . " In the infancy of the world, neither poets themselves or their auditors are fully aware of the excellence of poetry ; for it acts in a divine and unapprehended manner, beyond and above con- sciousness ; and it is reserved for future generations, to ccmtem- plate and measure the mighty cause and effect in all the splendour and strength of their union. . . . " Poetry, and the principle of self, of which money is the visible incarnation, are the God and Mammon of the world. . . . " Poetry is, indeed, something divine. . . . What were virtue, love, patriotism, friendship ; what were the scenery of this beau- tiful universe which we inhaint ; what were our consolations on this side of the grave ; and what were our aspirations beyond it, if poetry did not ascend to bring light and fire from those eternal regions where the owl-winged faculty of calculation dare not ever soar ? Poetry is not like reasoning, a power to be exerted according to the determination of the will. A man cannot say, I will compose poetry ! The greatest poet even cannot say it, for the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some in- visible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness ; this power arises from within, like the colour of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the con- scious portions of our natures are unprophetic, either of its approach or its departure. Could this influence be dural)le in its original purity and force, it is impossible to predict the great- ness of the results ; but when composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline, and the most glorious poetry that has ever been communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conceptions of the poet. I appeal to the greatest poet of the present day, whether it is not an error to assert that the finest passages of poetry are produced by labour
your Self, or so far within your Self as to amount to the same thing. " ​332 CRITICAL STUDIES and study. . . . This instinct and intuition of the poetical faculty is still more observable in the plastic and pictorial arts ; a great statue or picture grows under the power of the artist, as a child in the mother's womb ; and the very mind which directs the hand in formation is incapable of accounting to itself for the origin, the gradations, or the media of the process. . . . " It is as it were the interpenetration of a diviner nature through our own. . . . Poetry redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in man, ... " Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration ; the mirrors of gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present ; the words which express what they understand not ; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire ; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the un- acknowledged legislators of the world." So clear and perfect is the unequalled lyrist's response to the ideal philosopher, athwart the abyss of two thousand years. Ill Thus far we have not found Dr. Wilkinson's process so essentially different from that of the greatest of poets as it appeared to him. We now reach the point where he diverges from the broad high-road leading to the Temple of Fame, and wanders in search of some loftier goal (which may prove but a castle in the air or Fata Morgana^ by narrow and difficult and seldom-trodden ways. This volume "was given just as the reader reads it; with no hesitation; without the correction of one word from beginning to end. . . . The longest pieces in the volume occupied from thirty to forty-five minutes. [With the exception of "The Second Vol uspa," specified in a note, which adds, ​A STRANGE BOOK 333 " As a rule, it requires twice as long to copy a poem as to write one."] Altogether about fifty hours of recreation, after days not unlaborious, are here put in print. The production was attended by no feeling and no fervour, but only by an anxiety of all the cir- cumstant faculties [reason and imagination, as well as will being held in subjection or passivity during the process], to observe the unlooked for [unfore- seen ?] evolution, and to know what would come of it." " The Second Voluspa," done in 50 or 60 minutes, contains 332 lines, in addition to 17 of rhymed in- vocations and answers. It is not indeed rhymed (nearly all the rest are), but it is modelled on the old bardic alliterative structure, perhaps less easy than rhymed verses for a modern Englishman to impro- vise. The next longest pieces, done in from 30 to 45 minutes, contain 128, 136 (two), 144, 152 (four), 156, and 160 lines respectively; some of them rather difficult in construction, abounding in double rhymes, or composed in octaves whose first four lines are rhymed to by the corresponding lines in the second four. The whole body of verse, which occupied "about fifty hours of recreation, after days not un- laborious," fills 395 pages, averaging, I estimate, rather over than under 20 lines a page — say 8000 lines in all, giving an average of about 160 an hour. Such rapidity of writing, without special premedi- tation or preconception, is beyond doubt improvisa- tion. Blake would not revise his Prophetic Books, but we know not at what rate they were produced ; probably the production was comparatively slow, as the text was engraved with the designs. Shelley, the ​334 CRITICAL STUDIES most spontaneous and inspired of modern poets, wrote the "Witch of Atlas," 624 lines in the not facile ottava rima, in three days ; but that was only about as much in a day as Dr. Wilkinson (/. /. the Spirit) wrote in an hour. Shelley, interested by the vnprovvisatore Sgricci, tried improvisation himself, dictating the blank verse fragment ** Orpheus " to Mrs. Shelley, as we learn from a note of hers on the MS. But however spontaneously Shelley conceived, and however rapidly he wrote the first draught, he, in common with the greatest and most enduring poets (with perhaps the exception of Shakespeare, of whom the players boasted that he never blotted a line ; stout Ben Jonson retorting, surely with excellent judg- ment, " I wish he had blotted a thousand "), carefully revised and corrected, afterwards.* The Will and Reason and Imagination were held in abeyance, passive to the Divine influx ; the writing was attended by no fervour, no feeling beyond curiosity as to the result of the experiment. Poetry, inspiration, without fervour or feeling, is what I can no more conceive than music without vibration of the instrument and the surrounding air. Why, Sweden-
the lovely lines, " To a Lady, with a Guitar" : " It was a frightful scrawl : words smeared out with his finger, and one upon the other, over and over in tiers, and all run together, ' in most admired dis- order.' It might have been taken for a sketch of a marsh overgrown with bulrushes, and the blots for wild ducks, such a dashed-off daub as self-conceited artists mistake for a manifestation of genius. On my observing this to him, he answered : ' When my brain gets heated with thought, it soon boils, and throws off images and words faster than I can skim them off. In the morning, when cooled down, out of the rough sketch (as you justly call it) I shall attempt a drawing.'" ​A STRANGE BOOK 335 borg himself, the rigid and frigid, who perambulated Heaven and Hell most placidly, self-complacent, with his full-bottomed wig and his gold-headed cane, like a cold-blooded bailiff taking an inventory — even he fell into trances, sometimes of several days' duration, when in the world of spirits, and at other times his eyes shone like fire,* or he was discovered trembling and ejaculating, and in a great perspiration. And this cold impassibility of Dr. Wilkinson, while possessed by the Spirit, appears the more astonishing, because he is not like his master, an unimpassioned man, with milk or milk and water for blood in his veins; but is, on the contrary, most vehement and fervid, alike in championing his own and in assaulting hostile doctrines. Huxley himself does not strike out harder straight from the shoulder. In suppressing as much as possible his chief natural faculties, he was surely playing an unnatural as well as an illogical part ; and with the loss of nature we expect to find
for several days together, when enjoying his spiritual trances. He desired Shearsmith [his landlord at 26 Great Bath Street, Coldbath Fields, where he died] never to disturb him at such times, an in- junction which was necessary, for the look of his face was so pecu- liar on these occasions that Shearsmith sometimes feared he was dead." — Wilkinson's "Biography," p. 239. ' ' One day after dinner the same domestic [his gardener's wife and his housekeeper when he lived near Stockholm] went into his room, and saw his eyes shining with an appearance as of clear fire. She started back, and exclaimed : ' For God's sake what is the matter? You look fearfully!' — 'How then do I look?' said he. She told him what she saw. ' Well, well,' said he, ' fear not ! The Lord has opened my bodily eyes, so that spirits see through them into the world. I shall soon be out of this state, which will not hurt me.' In about half-an-hour the shining appeixrance left his eyes." Ibid, pp. 226, 227. For the trembling and great perspiration, see Ibid. 152, 153. ​336 CRITICAL STUDIES loss of power, and with the loss of logical consistency loss of insight and lucidity. If, as he so forcibly lays down, we must do all that industry can do to prepare the human materials for the operation of the Spirit, say the altar and the fuel and the incense for the kindling by the spark from heaven, why should our co-operation cease with the first kindling ? why should we not still give all our powers to the fanning of the spark into broad clear flame? Descended into the world of flesh, the spirit is so far subject to worldly conditions that its work can be furthered or hindered, its manifestation be made more or less clear, by the human being through which it works and shines.* Abdicating voluntarily his crown of humanity. Dr. Wilkinson reduces himself to a mere registering machine, with no overseer to keep it in order ; to a mere dead channel for the waters of life, with no one to clear away impediments and impurities; a mere dead conduit for the metal fused by the fire of the
arguing on the doctor's own premises ; but not implying my accept ance of these. Divine inspiration, influx of the Spirit, and such phrases, are convenient for conveying a person's consciousness of being in ecstasy, lifted beyond his ordinary self, as they are conse- crated by long usage ; but I disavow any theological or mytholo- gical dogmas which others may conceive involved in them. To myself, ecstasy, trance, inspiration, vision, revelation, are no less simply human and natural, though so much less common, than sleep and waking ; are just as susceptible of scientific explanation^ though our science is not yet subtile and comprehensive enough to pervade them, as spring-tides or summer flowering and fruitage or the aurora borealis. If a man be eight feet high, or only four feet, he is of very uncommon stature, but in the one case he is not above, and in the other he is not below the limits of humanity. You must prove the insufficiency of nature for any effect, before you can fairly clnim our attention to assertions of the supernatural. ​A STRANGE BOOK 337 spirit, with none to detect flaws or gas-bubbles and separate the slag. He does his utmost to prepare his house for munificent reception of the Spirit, and then as the Divine guest enters by one door he walks out by another. Is this a cordial welcome? Is it not unworthy both of visitor and host? Abraham in the old legend knew better how to receive heavenly guests. When the Lord and the two men or angels came to him, he did not abandon his tent and leave them to shift how they could for themselves ; no, he had water fetched that they might wash their feet, and cakes of the finest flour baked, and a calf, tender and good, killed and dressed, and this he himself served to them with butter and milk and the cakes — and what was the consequence ? Why, when the two men or angels had departed for Sodom, the Lord blessed Abraham with the renewal of the promise of a son in his old age and the old age of Sarah, and held much gracious conversation with him, as friend with friend, and even relented for his sake to spare Sodom could but ten righteous persons be found therein. Ah, Dr. Wilkinson, why did not you at least bring water to wash your Lord's feet? — even the feet of many of these verses, which are exposed, sorely blistered and bruised and dirty, through your studied neglect of the plainest duties of hospitality ? As if abnegation of reason, torrential speed, and total abstinence from correction were not burdens heavy enough for these poor poems to stagger under, another grievous load is inflicted, many of them being written by Swedenborgian correspondences. For myself, I frankly avow that this rigid and frigid system of minutely detailed symbolism does not Y ​338 CRITICAL STUDIES interest me in the least ; that so much as I have seen of it in what works of Swedenborg I have read, has appeared to me mainly elaborate pedagogic trifling, not at all tempting me to study of the whole. I am Emerson's impatient reader who asks : — "What have I to do with jasper and sardonyx, beryl and chalcedony ; what with arks and passovers, ephas and ephods ; what with lepers and emerods ; what with heave-offerings and unleavened bread ; chariots of fire, dragons crowned and horned ; behemoth and unicorn ? Good for Orientals, these are nothing to me. The more learning you bring to explain them, the more glaring the impertinence. The more coherent and elaborate the system, the less I like it. I say, with the Spartan : ' Why do you speak so much to the purpose, of that which is nothing to the purpose ? ' " Again, I thoroughly agree with the spirit of Emerson's judgment when he writes : — " His perception of nature is not human and universal, but is mystical and Hebraic. He fastens each natural object to a theologic notion — a horse signifies carnal understanding [Wilkinson differs in rendering: "he says that the ass corre- sponds to scientific truth ; the horse, to intellectual truth." — " Biography," p. 99] ; a free, perception ; the moon, faith ; a cat means this ; an ostrich, that ; an artichoke, this other ; and poorly tethers every symbol to a several ecclesiastical sense. The slippery Proteus is not so easily caught. In nature, each individual symbol plays innumerable parts, as each particle of matter circulates in turn through every system. The central identity enables any one symbol to express successively all the qualities and shades of real being." The great symbolisms and analogies, as of warmth and love, light and intelligence, and their operations and effects, are universal and obvious to all, being wide as nature, including human nature ; the petty, ​A STRANGE BOOK 339 stark, minutely detailed symbolisms and analogies are merely arbitrary, fanciful, ingenious, personal, and their elaboration a mere trifling and waste of precious time, like the ivory carving and puzale-boxes of the Chinese, the tattooing of savages^ — they are to the genuine and general what concetti or conceits are to real imaginative poetry. And no one I am acquainted with would have more clearly perceived this than such a splendid master of true analogy (the magic- wand of analogy, Der Zauberstab der Analogic^ as Novalis well terms it) as Dr. Wilkinson, had he not been from an early age over-dominated by Sweden- borg, whose teachings and suggestions, which certainly enlarged his youth, have as certainly cramped his manhood. As for the coherency and self-consistency whereon Wilkinson insists as substantiating the solidity of this vast labyrinthine structure of correspondences, I reply that any castle in the air, whether Swedenborgian, Spinozistic, or Ptolemaic, may be as coherent and consistent in itself 2^% the most massy mountain-range; only the former has its baseless base in the air, and the latter is deep-rooted in the firm earth. Other systems of differing correspondences could be wrought just as consistently from the Bible (did not several of the old Fathers dabble a good deal in this sort of speculation?), and others equally from any compre- hensive book ; as Blake said in his vehement way : " Any man of mechanical talents may, from the writings of Paracelsus or Jacob Behmen, produce ten thousand volumes of equal value with Swedenborg's, and from those of Dante or Shakespeare an infinite number." ​340 CRITICAL STUDIES Sometimes I contemplate this huge ambitious edi- fice of the Swedenborgian doctrine of Correspond- ence, compiled grade above grade in series and order and degrees, and growing ever thinner as it ascends toward the culmination of a vanishing-point, as a gloomy pyramid in a vast desert, reared through- out long years by the kiUing toil of a multitudinous slavery ; wasted learning, scourged ingenuity making bricks without straw, fettered science, maimed and mutilated genius, starved humanities — and all to what end ? To be the tomb of death and oblivion, not the home of life and remembrance ; to be the silent and solitary sepulchre of its royal rearer, wherein he shall lie deep hidden, thick-swathed, made mummy, prisoned in the heavy sarcophagus, which for him is also a psychophagus : a desolate pyramid slowly crumbling away in the desolate desert, the sternest mockery of a monument, an enormous heap of blocks so enormous that it will not even repay quarrying for materials for homely structures of living use ; visited now and then as a mere curiosity by idle and vagrant sightseers, explored rarely by intrepid explorers, who risk their own lives in the exploration ; and when at length some Belzoni-Wilkinson plucks out the very heart of its mystery, he but disinters a musty eventerated corpse, which, if it does not wither into dust at the breath of the vital natural air, will be consigned to some museum to be stared at by the multitude with rather less of intelligent interest than is excited by its neighbour, the stuffed chimpanzee. Vanity of vanities ! all is vanity ! When an ephemeris shall reveal to its kind the genesis, history, nature, meaning, purpose, and future destiny of every tree, and plant, and ​A STRANGE BOOK 34I animal, and drop of water in the forest and river it enjoys for its day, then may some little human prophet or seer reveal to his little fellow- men all the mysteries of the universe. But perhaps the strangest thing to note in such truly devout and wise men as Swedenborg and Wilkinson, who so bitterly denounce and ruthlessly punish lack of faith in others, however splendid their genius, however beneficent their lives, and who so ardently proclaim their own faith in ever-flowing, all- vivifying Divine Influx through every world and order of the Universe, is their utter want of faith in be- lieving that their God's last word is locked up in a series of obscure and incongruous pamphlets, written no one knows when or by whom, coherent solely by aid of the bookbinder ; containing doubtless many noble and wise things, as all antique literatures do, but containing also things (not the less sacred) most absurd, most vile, most detestable. In direct oppo- sition to their Lord's own warning, these seraphic doctors of the New Church insist on constructing it out of the broken and rotten ruins of the Old Church, on putting new wine into the old worn leathern bottles, in making the white garments of the saints in glory out of tattered and dirty " Hebrew old clo's." We have seen that this volume fully deserves its title of " Improvisations ; " but what of the " from the Spirit," meaning " from the Lord ? " Some of the pieces, as shown by the quotations in Section I., were obtained in answer to direct invocation of the Lord. But in a large number of cases, it is not the Spirit of the Lord who dictates; it is not even the writer himself, who may be supposed but the medium of the ​342 CRITICAL STUDIES Spirit ; the spirits of those whose names are the titles of the poems, speak in the first person ; and in these cases, so far as I can see. Dr. Wilkinson sinks to the level of the ordinary mediums (save that we can absolutely confide in his sincerity, however much he may be mistaken), who allege communications from the spirits of the departed. Such communications assert no claims to divine inspiration ; these human spirits, by the admission of the Spiritists themselves, are like their human counterparts, good and bad, truthful and false; a large proportion of those who do communicate being those who are handiest as nearest to the earth-plane, are in fact much below the average, very gross, very deceitful, rather simious than human. Most of the initial and name titles quoted in my last, with some others, belong to pieces thus dictated by mere human spirits, as W. S. and M. S. (apparently uncle and aunt of the writer), Hahne- mann, Mesmer, Sir Robert Peel, England (Cromwell's spirit speaks), Berzelius, Kant, Tears of Swedenborg. I lay no particular stress on the point that all his speakers speak one speech, that is in the same style ; as Emerson says of his master : " All his interlocutors Swedenborgenise ; " for the medium might fairly answer : " Each instrument must render the music in its own way ; a violin, a violoncello, a piano, and a cornet, would not utter identical sounds in giving the same air, their key-notes and timbres must vary ; but if they are accurately tuned the air will be the same from all. But I do lay stress upon the fact that each of these spirits expresses such an estimate of himself as is very probably (I might even venture to say, assuredly) Wilkinson's, and very improbably ​A STRANGE BOOK 343 the spirit's own. Here our musical analogy must be changed. We ask Dr. Wilkinson, How is it that, many spirits as you allege breathing very different tunes through you, they all come out your own one favourite tune? And if he should reply (for your spiritist, dealing with the unsubstantial and unpro- duceable, can never be at a loss for an explanation beyond disproof as it is beyond proof; though, fortu- nately for our general sanity, such as it is, the onus of proof lies on him, not the onus of disproof on us), that the Spirit constrained these spirits to reveal themselves in their naked verity, we should merely felicitate the doctor on the remarkable fact that the verdicts of the Spirit of the Lord always coincide with his own. However, it seems clear to me that the volume ought to have been entitled, " Improvisations from the Spirits," or "from the Spirit and certain human spirits," or in some such style marking variety of dictation. And, now, what of the poems themselves, thus strangely produced? Perhaps the first thing that strikes one is what so struck Mr. Rossetti, their remarkable resemblance to Blake's; not in themes, not in doctrine, yet in essence. None indeed are quite so lovely as Blake's best lyrics ; none so turbid and turbulent as his Titanic wildest in the prophetic books ; none approach in depth and original daring the " Marriage of Heaven and Hell." But the more limpid are very like Blake's, in style and cadence, in artlessness and occasional laxity, in primitive sim- plicity, as of the historical or legendary childhood of our race, though with Wilkinson the childlike some- times becomes childish. I find the pieces "of a ​344 CRITICAL STUDIES remote and charming beauty" indicated by Mr. Rossetti, and those "of a grotesque figurative rela- tion to things of another sphere;" I scarcely find with him "much that is disjointed and hopelessly obscure;" for it appears to me that, in spite of the headlong rush of the writing, the continuity pf thought is wonderfully well kept up, and that there is little or no obscurity as to the general scope and purpose, however much there may be in certain of the details, and in queer puzzling, random, stumbling phrases, due to the imperious exigences of speed, or the heavy burden of unprecious Swedenborgian Corre- spondences.* There are strange alternations and
corroborate all I have urged in dispraise of its minutiae. In " Eng- land," a really vigorous summons to arouse from lethargy, dictated by Oliver Cromwell, the said dictator, among other queer words, utters this (p. 70): "This is my present nose." Similarly, Immanuel Kant, in the piece so entitled, declares (p. 248): — " I shall purge off my sloth. And have a new woj^. " Similarly again, in " Edgar Allan Poe," pp. 180, 182. The reader at once divines that more is meant than meets the ear. But what could have debased a writer with a real sensibility to poetic beauty, and a remarkable facility and even felicity of versification, to the absurd ugliness of these noses ? Alas, it is an heroic but fatally insensate sacrifice at the shrine of Swcdenborg, an abject submis- sion to the cold-blooded tyranny of the master. Study that diabo- lical dictionary of deliration, the Arcana Coclestia (it is only a dozen volumes, or 10,837 paragraphs), together with that light and entertaining work " The True Christian Religion," the "Apocalypse Explained" and the "Heaven and Hell," &c., &c., &a, and you may hope to master by some seven years' penal servitude the whole stupendous system of symbolism sclf-stultified. Or if you are, like myself, infinitely too frivolous even to attempt such a task, consult as I have done a "Dictionary of Correspondences, &c., from the writings of Swedenborg" (the one I have got hold of w.as published by Otis Clapp, School Street, Boston, in 1841), and if ​A STRANGE BOOK 345 confusions of grandeur and littleness. The satire and invective also are closely akin to Blake's in their uncouth strength, their furious, awkward hard-hitting ; though here again the younger poet never equals some of the happy decisive strokes of the elder. In- deed, much of Wilkinson's early severe criticism on Blake, cited in the first section, is juster criticism on Wilkinson's later self and on his too-revered master, Swedenborg. In this volume are conspicuous the " utter want of elaboration, and even, in many cases, inattention to the ordinary rules of grammar." Here also the writer's " Imagination, self-divorced from a Reason which might have elevated and chastened it," has "found a home in the ruins of ancient and con- summated Churches, and imbued itself with the super- ficial obscurity and ghastliness, far more than with the inward grandeur of primeval times." Here also the you value your small share of reason consult not long. Behold the heart, I mean the nose, of the mystery : " NoSE (the) sig. [signifies] the life of good, on account of the respiration which has place, which, in the internal sense, is life, and likewise on account of odour, which is the grateful principle of love, whereof good is. A. C. 3103. Nose, or nostrils, sig. perception. A. C. 3577, 10,292. Those in the pro- vince of the nose are in various degrees of the perception of truth, but the more interior, the more perfect. H. H. 96. . . . "Nostrils. See "Blast of the Breath of the Nostrils." (Ps. xvii. 16) sig. the east wind, which destroys by drying up, and overthrows all by its penetration. Ap. Ex. 741." So now the good reader is as wise as myself, and knows all about this bewildering nose. In dismissing this dreary subject, I may just remark that Swedenborg discreetly secures for himself a most convenient latitude of interpretation by attributing in a very large number of cases a good and a bad sense to the internal or spiritual meanings of the words and phrases of the Word. Thus if in certain texts the while signification would revolt your intellect or conscience, you have only to adopt the black, and vice versd. A truly admir- able hermeneutic device ! ​34^ CRITICAL STUDIES writer "has delivered to us a multitude of new hieroglyphics, which contain no presumable recon- diteness of meaning, and which we are obliged to account for, simply by the artist's having yielded himself up, more thoroughly than other men will do, to those fantastic impulses which are common to all mankind, and which saner men subjugate, but can- not exterminate." Here, also, " earth-born might has banished the heavenlier elements of art, and exists combined with all that is monstrous and diabolical." Here, also, " we have the impression that we are looking down into the hells," not indeed of the ancient people, but of the cold insanity of dogmatism fused in hot frenzies of fantasy. In short, "of the worst aspect of [Wilkinson's] genius it is painful to speak." But of the monstrous and diabolical hells, a few words must be spoken. All students must have frequently remarked, at first with very painful as- tonishment, the inexorable cruelty in dogma of the most placid and gentle and sweet-hearted innocents. We find it in good Jeremy Taylor, we find it in angelic Archbishop Leighton. As for Swedenborg, as Emer- son well puts it : — "There is an air of infinite grief, and the sound of wailing all over and through this lurid universe. A vampire sits in the scat of the prophet, and turns with gloomy appetite to the images of pain. Indeed, a bird does not more readily weave its nest, or a mole bore into the ground, than this seer of souls substructs a new hell and pit, each more abominable than the last, round every new crew of offenders. . . . He saw the hell of jugglers, the hell of assassins, the hell of the lascivious ; the hell of robbers who kill and boil men ; the infernal tun of the deceitful ; the excrementilious hells ; the hell of the revengeful, whose ​A STRANGE BOOK 347 faces resembled a round broad cake, and their arms rotate like a wheel. Except Rabelais and Dean Swift, nobody ever had such science of filth and corruption." Is this summary by an outsider too hideous ? Take some shreds of Wilkinson's exposition of his master's doctrine : — " Infidelity denies God most in spirit and the spiritual world ; nay, staked on death it ignores eternity in the eternal state with gnashing teeth and hideous clenches ; and the proof of spirit and immortal life is farther off than ever. The rSgime of the work- house, the hospital, and the madhouse is erected into a remorse- less universe, self-fitted with steel fingers and awful chirurgery ; and no hope lies either in sorrow or poverty, but only in one divine religion, which hell excludes with all its might. Human nature quails before such tremendous moralities. ... A new phase appears in the final state ; the memory of the skies is lost ; baseness accepts its lot, and falsehood becomes self-evident ; wasting ensues to compressed limb and faculty, and the evil spirit descends to his mineral estate, a living atom of the second death. He is still associated with his like in male and female company, and he and his, in the charry light of hell, which is the very falsity of evil, are not unhandsome to themselves. Such is the illusive varnish which in mercy [! I] drapes the bareness of the ugly skeletons of devils and Satans." — " Biography," 147 ; see also pp. 113 and 115, 1 16 for more about hell, and a defensive exposition (marvellously lame for such a swift genius as Wilkin- son) of Swedenborg's doctrine of eternal punishment. And to balance this truly diabolical hell, a mere spider-web heaven, frigid, colourless, joyless, loveless, lifeless, abstract, a paradise of geometrical diagrams and algebraic formulae ! Blake has his fiery denunciations and condemna- tions, but with him these are merely explosions of temper; they are as different from the systematic, coldblooded mercilessness of Swedenborg as the expletive "Hell and damnation!" of a burly coal​348 CRITICAL STUDIES heaver, from the same words in the mouth of a bilious Calvinistic preacher ; the former means simply, I am puzzled or put out, the latter means. Our blessed Lord has pre-ordained nearly the whole of mankind to everlasting torture by the worm that dieth not, in the fire that is not quenched : the saints are so in- finitely more powerful in damning than the sinners ! Blake's fundamental conviction is of universal salva- tion, not of nearly universal damnation, as we may read in many places ; nay, with some of the certainly deepest and purest of sages and mystics both of the East and the West, he will not allow the real essen- tial existence of evil. Thus in the opening of " The Gates of Paradise " : — " Mutual forgiveness of each vice, Such are the Gates of Paradise, Against the Accuser's chief desire, Who walked among the stones of fire. Jehovah's fingers wrote The Law : He wept ! then rose in zeal and awe, And in the midst of Sinai's heat, Hid it beneath His Mercy Seat. O Christians ! Christians ! tell me why You rear it on your Altars high ? " And again, in " The Everlasting Gospel," with the text of the woman taken in adultery : — "Jesus was sitting in Moses' chair ; They brought the trembling woman there. Moses commands she be stoned to death : What was the sound of Jesus' breath ? He laid His hand on Moses' law ; The ancient heavens, in silent awe. Writ with curses from pole to pole. All away began to roll ; ​A STRANGE BOOK 349 And she heard the breath of God As she heard by Eden's flood : ' Good and Evil are no more ; Sinai's trumpets, cease to roar ; To be good only, is to be A God, or else a Pharisee,' " &c. Well might he say to the ordinary Christian in this same poem : — " Both read the Bible day and night, But thou read'st black where I read while." Dr. Wilkinson, more's the pity, with all his genial genius has followed his implacable master into his loathsome and horrible hells. Such pieces as "Atheism" ("Shelley's tear"), "Turner: Painter. His State," " Edgar Allan Poe," " Immanuel Kant," " Chatterton," if inspired at all were surely inspired by some obscene and insane imp of the Pit, not by "the Spirit;" the "wildness and fierce vagary" charged against Blake are here, only the vagary is cold-blooded even in its fierceness; and too appo- sitely we may continue the quotation : " This power is possessed in different degrees by every human being, if he will but give loose and free vent to the hell that is in him ; and hence, the madness even of the meanest, is terrific." How much more terrific the madness of one of the noblest, in subjection to infernal inspiration ! As for Dr. Wilkinson's heaven, as revealed in these poems, it is certainly more human or less inhuman than Swedenborg's ; but the humanity to my sense is rather childish. In fact, and I grieve to say so, it sometimes seems very like ​350 CRITICAL STUDIES the popular (and idiotic) Moody and Sankey heaven, an infinite and inexhaustible sweetstuff shop, where all the big and little Christian babies shall suck and crunch to their heart's content for ever and evermore. IV My readers will have gathered from the previous sections that the writer considers Dr. Wilkinson's faith in a peculiar Divine inspiration of his poems not only a delusion but a delusion very noxious to them and to himself. A delusion, because in essence it is that claimed in common by all the loftiest poets, and con- ceded by the loftiest philosophers ; a noxious delusion, because it has prevented him from using his natural faculties to correct and perfect conception and expres- sion, and because it has impelled him to yield his natural sanity to the absolute sway of uncontrolled fantasy, following this flitting marsh meteor as if it were the lode-star of truth. His gain from the Spirit or spirits is a heavy loss. I find nothing in this book comparable for scope and depth and solid grandeur to the great passages of the " Remarks on the Economy of the Animal Kingdom " or " The Human Body." Nor can this inferiority be fairly attributed to a want of the gift of verse, a gift which many great writers have lacked ; for, as I have said, the poems not only mani- fest marvellous facility but likewise uncommon felicity (despite headlong haste) in the use of metre ; and if he had taken time to correct and condense, co-ope- rating with his inspiration, I have no doubt that his ​A STRANGE BOOK 35I poems would have been far more shapely and luminous and valuable. But he was simply " experimenting " on himself in " hours of recreation ; " as if any truly celestial influx could pour into a man thus trifling to gratify his curiosity; so he comes to the feast of the bridegroom without the wedding garment on, the caprice of his fantasy forbidding purifica- tion and improvement of dress, and he incurs the Gospel doom. We have had wonderful improvisa- tions, but surely never as the result of experimental pastime. "Art has not wrote here, neither was there any time to consider how to set it punctually down, according to the right understanding of the letters, but all was ordered according to the direction of the Spirit, which often went in haste ; so that in many words, letters may be wanting, and in some places a capital letter for a word ; so that the penman's hand, by reason he was not accustomed to it, did often shake. And though I could have wrote in a more accurate, fair, and plain manner, yet the reason was this, that the burning fire, often forced for- ward with speed, and the hand and pen must hasten directly after it ; for it comes and goes as a sudden shower. ... I can write nothing of myself, but as a child which neither knows nor understands anything, which neither has ever been learnt, but only that which the Lord vouchsafes to know in me, according to the measure as Himself manifests in me." This is part of the account which the poor ignorant shoemaker Jacob Boehme or Behmen gives us of his inspiration and improvisation : he was not making experiments in hours of recreation when " the burning fire forced forward with speed, and the hand and pen must hasten directly after it." But enough of this part of the subject. Dr. Wilkinson himself may soon have become aware of the failure of an experiment so ​352 CRITICAL STUDIES planned and carried out ; for though twenty-two years have elapsed since this volume was written, we believe no more such Improvisations have been published by him : — "Then Old Age and Experience, hand in hand, Lead him to Death ; and make him understand, After a search so painful and so long. That all his life he has been in the wrong." But in however deplorable a condition of serfdom to another and of self-illusion or self-delusion, a man of the vast acquirements, the severe scientific training, the luminous intellect, the magnificent genius, the noble moral and spiritual nature and experience of Garth Wilkinson, could not write a worthless volume ; planned he ever so subtly to stultify himself, it was certain to contain much characteristic truth and beauty. Passing over the pieces inspired, if inspired at all, by Blake's evil and malignant " Accuser," and stanzas wherein the stress of precipitance has driven him to catch at the most grotesque rhymes and phrases (though much less frequently than was to be expected) ; for it is not wholesome to dwell on the defects of a truly good and great man, save in so far as they may be noted for the benefit of others ; let us consider some of his most simple and spontaneous and quotable poems, I say quotable, because many worth citation are too long ; headlong haste running into difTuseness as it nearly always does, deep and concentrated writing being slow and painful. In quoting I adhere strictly to the rather peculiar punc- tuation of the original. ​A STRANGE BOOK 353 Take, first, " Sleep." " For my Wife : " p. 3 :— " Sleep is a field, most level : Softness doth roam and revel In wind with velvet finger Over its grass, where linger Down of all birds of heaven Stillness of dawn and even. And level 'tis, because In its most smoothest pause, 'Tis canvass for intention Of heaven's most kind invention : For dreams more sweet than life Bears in day's coarser strife. Its levelness is kept By all Health's gardeners : swept By cleanness of all kinds. And by Strength's ruddy hinds : And molehills of old care Have on its lawn no share. But loving virtue's roller Is of that ground controller ; And conscience plucketh weeds When first they leave their seeds : Religion soweth grass Brighter than ever was. Then when the plane's complete, And when the night-times meet. Spirits of dream-land troop. Lay down the golden hoop, And in its limits fine Pour spiritual wine. Straightway the beds of slumbers Heave with plant-music's numbers, Z ​354 CRITICAL STUDIES And drama of live forms Bursts from the teeming swarms : And sleep is revelation, Life's inward preparation. And thou mayst know thy waking, By light from sleepland breaking, Thy marriage and thy house, If golden are thy vows : And what shall be the power That rules the next day's hour." Almost equally beautiful, though somewhat more quaint and less limpid, is " Patience," p. 8 : — ' ' Wander, and see how far Star is away from star ; Mysteriously they live, Far from each other thrive, And when their evening comes. The light of prayer outblooms. And so thy course of being. Is far from others seeing : [others'] All men are far from all, Distance doth round them fall : 'Tis the star-mantle still : The gulf of heavenly will. Moreover breadth of line Doth around being twine : To show that out of order Springeth each being's border, And that the vine of God Bears all things on its rod. And then again the way That doth round being play, Is blended with the'form That wraps all nature's swarm. And multifold and free. Stands the immensity. ​A STRANGE BOOK 355 And thus from out of life, Rolleth the river rife, That hath the mission swift To bear all things their gift. And to confine to man The circle of his scan. So that the web and woof Which is all beings' proof, Standeth in the intent That God hath with it blent. And the fixed palm of Him Keepeth His seraphim. And from the whole of things, And from all eyes of wings, And from all thoughts of hearts. And from all error's smarts, And from all sins forgiven. Works forth the patient heaven. It is the ass Christ rode Into the state of God : And 'tis the vaulted back That never yet was slack. And did sustain intense The work of Providence. And under it doth lie The penitence on high : The angels walk its bridge : And mortals on the ridge That it presents to hurry Drop over in their flurry. But 'tis the deepest ground That God hath planted round : And 'tis the largest thing That God hath made a king : And it holds time and space Rebuked by its face. ​35^ CRITICAL STUDIES And in it all things root, And heaven doth from out it shoot ; For tissue 'lis of love, That makes it solid prove : And angels' bodies fine Have patience in their wine. What more : that patience is The Lord of life and bliss : It is the haste to wait For bettering of state ; The quickness to forgive, And readiness to live. Weave it into thy soul ; Make of one web the whole : Bearing thy burden's sorrow ; Leaving thy soul's to-morrow. Sufficient is each day When patience is its ray." I regret that there is not space here to quote " Solitude " in full, while quotation in part would miss complete development of its central thought. Per- haps some stanzas from "The Birth of Eve," p. 24, will bear citation without their context : — "It is not meet to say What love God bears to man : He spread the tent of day, As portal of his plan : He made the heavenly arch, As gable of his door, He made the sky for march Of humble souls and poor. And he made love for man, Helpmeet for man to have ; And Paradise began With love's primeval wave : ​A STRANGE BOOK 357 The mystery of all things Sailed chanting up to him : And inmost of all rings, His life alone was dim. And on a night he dreamed (Archangels knew his dream), That God above had beamed Upon his hearty's stream : And in his blood a car Had sailed away from him : And had become a star, Twinkling in distance dim. And then he clasp'd his hands, And sighed unto the star ; And from the golden sands Where loves primeval are. He sent a breath of hope Of such aspiring size, That the fair star did ope. E'en in those distant skies. And from its golden rim, A red rain trickled down, That spilt dear red on him. And mantled all his crown : And he fell on his knees, In ecstasy of heart : And he prayed God would please To give him starry part. So straightway down it came, Down, down, in dream was long ; And left behind it flame, And shed before it song : And as its hair came near, And as its voice was heard, The sound of nature's cheer, Through all her dells was stirred. ​358 CRITICAL STUDIES And Adam knew the sign : And started from his couch : And Eve was there divine, Her blessing to avouch : And in the bower of Eden They wed the earth with sky, And marriage so was laden With loves' eternity. " And she shall have her rights, Born new from age to age : And she shall miss her plights, And she shall fire the sage, And blood and bone is man, That wars for woman's side : And in Redemption's Plan She is Redemption's Bride." The " Horse of Flesh," p. 34, is thus introduced : — " This night the song that doth belong, Is state of man, when he doth plan To sing for pride, and high to ride." I quote a portion of it, as his own vindication for departing from the ordinary process of poetic com- position : — " The globe of poets then, The choir of angel-men, Each sing a different song, That doth to each belong. Yet the songs one and all, Are of a single call. And make one body free, Doth with itself agree. Then in society. Rises an anthem high, 'Tis as a perfume cast From all flowers far and fast ; ​A STRANGE BOOK 359 And every fibre heaves With perfume in its leaves, And every part doth thrill With perfume from its will. But when men sing on earth, Song hath no heavenly birth. 'Tis bred and born alone Within the bosom's stone ; Comes from the lyre of one, And not from unison ; And on the horse of pride. With vizor down doth ride. This is the horse of flesh ; Its hoof is in a mesh Of swampy wants and wishes : It hath the tail of fishes : * Cold in reality ; Hot in mere fantasy : It dreams of heavens of singing : But hell is in it springing. Now then choose well the choir That hath the numerous lyre ; The song with fellows mated, By others' songs completed : And let the horse of flesh Be lifted from the mesh ; For heaven is melody, And is society." It will be observed that the didactics do not
" Fish sig. sensual affections which are the ultimate affections of the natural man. Also, those who are in common truths, which are also ultimates of the natural man. Also those who are in external falses. A.R. 405. . . , Fishes sig. scientifics. A.C. 42; 991. Fishes (Hab. i. 14-16) sig. those who are in faith separate from charity. A. R. 405. To make as the fishes of the sea, sig. to make altogether sensual. A, R. 991. " — A pretty kettle of fish for the reader's digestion. ​360 CRITICAL STUDIES improve the poetry. Passing over some interesting but rather long pieces, we come to " E. B.," p. 75 : — "A solemn lay comes slowly, It peals from earth to heaven, Grand is the strain and holy, That now to thee is given. Thou art a bride of spirit, A sister of our skies, The house thou shall inherit Four square before thee lies. Its portico is marble, Its stairs are ruby red. The birds of gladness warble Their gushings overhead. Among the golden globes * Of fruit that hang around ; The house is clad in robes Of beauty and of sound, That float about festooning All things with beauty here ; The melodies are crooning Round land and field and mere. And in that house a jewel Set fitly for thy breast : Ah ! spirit was not cruel That gave him such a rest. • " He hangs in shades the orange bright Like golden stars in a green night." — Andrew Marvell. "... and bright golden globes Of fruit, suspended in their own green heaven." — Shelley. Was "the Spirit " reminiscent of these "stony-bosomed " singers, or merely accordant with them ? ​A STRANGE BOOK 36I Then walk up to the casket, Thy life is near the door, 'Twill open if you ask it, And o'er thee, spirit pour. Thou art not far from heaven, Thou art not far from love ; Thy dower is sevenfold seven, Thy hopes are fixed above. Yet earth does well to keep thee. For thy good deeds are needed : We only yet would steep thee In spirit-powers : unheeded. Thy husband oft is with thee, dear, And he has led thee on : One day thou shalt see all things clear, For home will then be won, And separation's day be done." "The Birth of Aconite," p. 77, is very powerful, both in conception and execution ; of a somewhat similar strain, though in blank verse, to Part iii. of Shelley's "Sensitive Plant." But how the doctor reconciles it with his science and theology I cannot understand. I presume he believes that God created the aconite no less than He created the olive, the palm, and the vine ; yet he writes as if it were created by the devil. This sort of loose undefined Maniche- ism, which Plato, by-the-bye, explicitly sets forth in the TinKzus, is very common among Christians, in spite of the great monotheistic text (Isa. xlv. 5-7): " I am the Lord ; and there is none else, there is no god beside Me. ... I form the light and create dark- ness : I make peace, and create evil : I the Lord do ​362 CRITICAL STUDIES all these things." They love to symbolise their Lord and the Holy Spirit by the lamb and the dove, which are among the most silly and cowardly and helpless of animals ; they are dreadfully affronted if you consider the vulture, the ape, the toad equally symbolic of their God; yet nothing can be more evident than that every thing and being created (not excluding their devil) must faithfully represent or express some portion or characteristic of the Creator. If "I am the vine " is a true text, equally true must be " I am the aconite ; " nay, our total-abstinence friends would maintain that the former has been and is far more extensively fatal to our race than the latter. So much for theology : as for science, it surely scorns the idea of classing things as in origin and essence good or evil, according as they seem beneficial or noxious to man. Spinoza is here incomparably more enlightened than this nineteenth -century man of science. We now reach "W. M. W.," p. 89, a poem ad- dressed to the writer's brother (author, I presume, of "Spirit Drawings, a Personal Narrative," 1858), followed by another to " E. W." his wife, on the death of their Httle son, who in a third poem, "Teddy's Flower," sends them a message of good cheer from the world of spirits, as the close informs us : — "Teddy through Hood, Who has walked through Teddy's wood, And seen his garden wall, Because Hood loves the small." I am bound to add that though the message is delivered by Hood, its style and character are of ​A STRANGE BOOK 363 Wilkinson. I quote the "W. M. W.," as very solemn and beautiful, especially for an improvisation : — '* Brownness of autumn is around thee, Brother, Darkness of life has fallen on thy path ; Sadness hath been unto thee as a mother. Sadness is not another name for wrath. God gave, God takes away : His hand is on thee : Heavy its print hath been upon thy brow. Yet even that stroke a second heart hath won thee, And warmer thoughts within thy bosom glow. Thy little Teddy, like a shaft of lightning. Shears through the gloom of worldliness around ; And from his early gloomy grave a brightening Shoots forth its pillar : pierces the profound. Thy night is dying, and thy day is nearing, Wrap round thee then the mantle of the light. Leave troubling, shun dull care and duller fearing : Thy day is strong : arise : assert thy might. The spirit, strong in love to thee and thine. Commits these verses to a brother's hand. They come to earth : mixed with her bitter wine, They glow with sparklings from the heavenly strand." We are here in the heart's holy of holies, the in- most sanctuary of love and sorrow, "sorrow more beautiful than beauty's self;" where criticism the most just and righteous bows its head and is silent, feeling that this is also the inviolable sanctuary, the inexpugnable fortress, of all the fond frail super- stitions that are born of love and grief and hope, feeling that here even spiritism is sacred, though it has been prostituted by the vilest of the vile. ​364 CRITICAL STUDIES Our next piece is " Saturday Night," p. 96, ending with a reminiscence of Goethe : — " Week's curtain, folded round Time with a solemn sound, Life sleeps within thy folds, The past like dreams it holds. Surely 'tis God's intent That life should well be blent With sleep, when every tread Has memory overhead. So may we pass each glance, That the whole's countenance, When met on shore of heaven, May be good, true, and even." I cite a Uttle of "The Fairies' Welcome," p. 99, because of the structure of its eight-lined stanza ; it was a wonderful tour de force to rush out sixteen such stanzas in " from thirty to forty-five minutes." " Pour forth the bells In odorous notes Of lovely light Upon the sky : Hark ! how it swells : Hark 1 how it floats. In colours bright Of minstrelsy. My South is Truth, Mine East is Love, My West is Joy, My North is Light : And thus my youth Doth stand above Mine aged cloy Of former night. ​A STRANGE BOOK 365 All hail again Ye bands of life, Ye sons of God From fairy climes : Ye unmade men, Unknown to strife, Whose feet are shod With heavenly rhymes." Here are the first and the last stanza of "The Dance of Life," p. 105 : — " 'Tis not in round of commonplace Life keepeth measure : But rhythmical her atoms trace The turf of pleasure. There is no lazy-footed tread In all creation ; But being doth with being thread Congratulation. " God weaveth, in a word, In circles fine : And His bright love is stirred Through rounded line : For this is e'en completion. And this is new beginning : And swiftness urgeth mission. And dance is mood of winning." Song, "Its Divine Birth," p. 135, is unfortunately too long for quotation here. Let us have a short piece in a very different mood, " Napoleon to Napo- leon," p. 193; remembering that it was written about fourteen years before Sedan : — "Weird sisters set thee where thou art : Thou shalt not stand : Thou seest already the fell dart — Thou seest the hand. ​366 CRITICAL STUDIES The hand is freedom's in a glove of sin, Peace tipped with steel : Thou feel'st its point moving within, Thy strength doth reel. Thou art a gamester where thou sittest ; Thy dice, men's bones : Thou candleman ; ne'er yet thou littest The light of thrones I I see thy funeral procession all, White chanting priests ; Thou art an ox within the priestly stall, — No king of beasts Destruction fattens thee for morrow's dinner, Bastes thee with money ; The meat upon thy bones to many a sinner Shall yet be honey. Great arbiter of elegancies fine, Lord of the fashion, Within thy veins runneth no better wine Than Ego^s passion. France, when full drest for her next party. Shall brush her boots of thee : And have a ruler fatter and more hearty, And with some human glee." In much the same strain of uncouth, but keen and vigorous invective, Blake-Uke, Orsonic, are "The Pope," "Napoleon I.: What of him?" and "The Lawyers : What of them ? " I select the last, p. 215, for citation ; just observing that " Men of the Time" informs us that Dr. Wilkinson's father was a special pleader, and author of several well-known law-books. ​A STRANGE BOOK 367 " Ranged on stools, there they sit, Bench of fools, full of wit : Bench of zanies keen as knives, Free of tongue, on all archives. There they sit from age to age : Leathern socs of the world's st^e : And for every hour they sit, They do spoil the nation's wit. And on all sides lo ! they look With a vision like a cook, When she bastes a venison haunch. Fatly for a monarch's paunch. And the beauty of their dream, As upon their bench they seem, Is old justice, fat and flavoured, Carved for them, and by them savoured. Lo I the logic skeletons Serve them for their meat with stones, And for reasonings they try How the logic-stones will fry. They have ghosts of actors poor For their guardian angels sure, And their brains like dresses worn. Are sieves held for public corn. Lord, how long shall these offend ? And what is their latter end ? — They shall live on bench of glee. Long as human cruelty. They shall date with quarrel, years : Time, with hypocritic tears : Long as luxury hath tether, They shall warm their arid leather. ​368 CRITICAL STUDIES And as long as grasping man Tears down others' walls that ban Passage to another's goods, Lawyers shall dwell in their woods. Blame them not, but blame thyself : They are but thy dolls of pelf: Thou didst put on their fine wigs : Thou dost feed all thine own pigs." How pungent in their truth are some of these lines ! As in the first, the fourth and fifth, and the last four stanzas. We have space for but two more very short pieces. The first is "Harebells," p. 221 : — "Wills that lie in coverts dim, Shaking from their bells a hymn That is meant for ears of wind alone : For the belfry of the spirit-world, Is most chiefly in the flowerets curled, And in heavenly stillness lies its tone. And the fairies only dream they hear, Voices those, with winds most thinnest ear. Which they put on for that express desire. But 'tis only in heavens very high That the sounds of flowers and the dews sigh, Are heard in waking certainty of fire." The Other is called "Two Verses for E.," p. 2 2 2 : — " Late in the evening, gold diffused To all the sky is given : East, West, North, South, none is refused The last good gold of heaven. ​A STRANGE BOOK 369 And so when death gives gold of good, From his dear bed away, More hearts than those around that stood, Feel light from death's new day." As before observed, I have cited only from the more spontaneous poems, springing directly from the native genius and mother wit, leaving aside the longer compositions whose materials were quarried by laborious studies, such as the " Hahnemann," "Fourier," "Tegndr," " Dalton," " Swedenborg," though these likewise contain many noteworthy things I have gone upon the principle well expressed by Blake (whether correct or not in his application of it) in his " Descriptive Catalogue " : " The Greek Muses are daughters of Mnemosyne or Memory, and not of Inspiration or Imagination, therefore not authors of such sublime conceptions." And now, in conclusion, I may confess that pon- dering once more how much that is pure and wise and beautiful is contained in this almost unknown book, notwithstanding all the wilful disadvantages under which it was written, I half repent me of the severity of certain of the strictures I have passed upon portions of it; though the sharpest of these strictures were but the very same which Wilkinson had previously passed upon a genius as great, a visionary as genuine as his own over-idolised master ; upon one who had nobler fire in his spirit, a more genial heart in his breast, than the ever -placid dogmatic Swede; upon one who soared in lyric raptures of which the other was as unsusceptible as a stone; upon one who was free from that dreary, monstrous, methodic madness which kept piecing and 2 A ​370 CRITICAL STUDIES patching away, year after year, for a whole generation all the shreds and tatters of Hebrew old clo's, in the desperate delusion of thus making a sufficient and everlasting garment for the illimitable Universe of Life. And, moreover, can we help being angry, do we not well to be angry when, our poor race pining for illumination, some of the most fulgent spirits obstinately refuse to be effulgent ; will not let their light shine forth before men, but carefully hide it under a bushel ? The supreme warmth and light of genius and intellect are so rare, so sorely needed, yet so unaccountably wasted ! I mean not in such instances as those of Swedenborg and Comte, where the long chronic monomania of the decadence followed an acute attack of mental disease in the prime ; I think of a Maurice scourging himself with those "forty stripes save one," the Thirty -nine Articles, and burying his genius in the deathly vaults of the mouldering English Church ; of a Newman dis- membering himself of intellect and will, and perishing in the labyrinths of the Roman Catacombs ; of a Wilkinson immolating his splendid powers on the altar built of dead men's bones, of a demented dogma- tism more implacable than the old heathen altars of merely bodily human sacrifice. When I first read in the great preface to the "Human Body" (185 1), that he hoped never again to come forth with the pen, a mournful verse from a place of most mournful frustrate life arose in my memory, and recurs now as I ponder these lives, so frustrate of their full develop- ment and happiness in usefulness, a verse of Matthew Arnold's stanzas from that sepulchre of Death-in-life,
"Achilles ponders in his tent, The kings of modern thought are dumb; Silent they are though not content; They wait to see the future come: They have the griefs men had of yore, But they contend and cry no more."
* ↑ "Improvisations from the Spirit" [by James John Garth Wilkinson]: 1857. Now long out of print; only to be got, when it can be got, second-hand.[It gives me great pleasure to reprint this essay, partly because I presented the author with the copy of the "Strange Book" which he used while writing the article—but chiefly because it will henceforth be impossible for any one making any pretensions to literary culture to inquire, as the critic of a high-class periodical actually did, when reviewing a former work of Thomson's, "Who is Garth Wilkinson?" This gentleman actually cited Thomson's admiration for Wilkinson as a proof of his critical incompetence! I fancy that henceforth any one who displays his ignorance of Wilkinson's writings will hardly be accepted as a competent critic of English literature.— Editor.]
* ↑ The poem called "The Second Völuspá" (pronounced Völyspou), the longest in the book, occupied from fifty to sixty minutes. As a rule it requires twice as long to copy a poem as to write one.—Author's Note.
* ↑ Life, i. 128. "When talking on the subject of ghosts, he was wont to say they did not appear much to imaginative men, but only to common minds, who did not see the finer spirits. A ghost was a thing seen by the gross bodily eye, a vision by the mental" {Ibid.). His one ghost appeared thus: "Standing one evening at his garden door in Lambeth, and chancing to look up, he saw a horrible grim figure, 'scaly, speckled, very awful,' stalking downstairs towards him. More frightened than ever before or after, he took to his heels and ran out of the house."
* ↑ Blake was born 28th (20th, according to Mr. Swinburne) November, 1757, and died 12th August, 1827. But the mass of his "Prophetic Books" were produced in the close of the eighteenth century, and "Milton" and "Jerusalem" as early as 1804.
* ↑ Writing in 1839, Dr. Wilkinson had to trust for his biographical statements to the sketch in Allan Cunningham's 'Lives of British Painters." In Gilchrist's Life (1863) there are many passages counter to this opinion of the Doctor's, "Thus the accounts of Blake's death (i. 361, 362): "On the day of his death," writes Smith [J. T., the biographer of Nollekens, and a very old friend of Blake], who had his account from the widow, "he composed and uttered songs to his Maker, so sweetly to the ear of his Catherine [his wife—they had no children], that when she stood to hear him, he, looking upon her most affectionately, said, 'My beloved, they are not mine. No! they are not mine!' He told her they would not be parted; he should always be about her to take care of her. . . . As 'father, mother, aunt, and brother were buried in Bunhill Row, perhaps it would be better to lie there. As to service, he should wish for that of the Church of England.'. . . He lay chanting songs to melodies, both the inspiration of the moment, but no longer as of old to be noted down. To the pious songs followed, about six in the summer evening [it was a Sunday], a calm and painless withdrawal of breath, the exact moment almost unperceived by his wife, who sat by his side. A humble female neighbour, her only other companion, said afterwards: 'I have been at the death, not of a man, but of a blessed angel.' . . . On the Wednesday evening one of the small band of his enthusiastic young disciples, in a letter asking another to the funeral, writes: 'He died on Sunday night at six o'clock, in a most glorious manner. He said he was going to that country he had all his life wished to see, and expressed himself happy, hoping for salvation through Jesus Christ. Just before he died his countenance became fair [he was on the verge of the threescore and ten], his eyes brightened, and he burst out into singing of the things he saw in heaven. In truth, he died like a saint, as a person who was standing by him observed.'"
* ↑ "Were I to love money, I should lose all power of thought; desire of gain deadens the genius of man. My business is not to gather gold, but to make glorious shapes, expressing God-like sentiments "—Blake's own words. So, speaking of Lawrence and other
* ↑ Each supremely in his supreme work—Blake in "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell," Shelley in the "Prometheus Unbound," though both elsewhere in their writings, as in the splendid opening of "Laon and Cythna" ("Revolt of Islam"), and Blake's "Everlasting Gospel"— "Both read the Bible day and night, But thou read'st black where I read white." As Mr. Swinburne says, p. 190: Blake "believed in redemption by Christ, and in the incarnation of Satan as Jehovah." For Christ read Prometheus, for Jehovah read Jupiter, and you have the same belief in Shelley, expressed in classical instead of biblical names.
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