But it is Crashaw who, of these three, shares in fullest measure the passion of the great Catholic mystics, and more especially of St Teresa, whom he seems almost to have worshipped. His hymn to her "name and honor" is one of the great English poems; it burns with spiritual flame, it soars with noble desire. Near the beginning of it, Crashaw has, in six simple lines, pictured the essential mystic attitude of action, not necessarily or consciously accompanied by either a philosophy or a theology. He is speaking of Teresa's childish attempt to run away and become a martyr among the Moors.
She never undertook to know
What death with love should have to doe;
Nor has she e're yet understood
Why to shew love, she should shed blood
Yet though she cannot tell you why,
She can LOVE, and she can DY.
Spiritual love has never been more rapturously sung than in this marvellous hymn. Little wonder that it haunted Coleridge's memory, and that its deep emotion and rich melody stimulated his poet's ear and imagination to write Christabel.[71] Crashaw's influence also on Patmore, more especially on the Sponsa Dei, as well as later on Francis Thompson, is unmistakable.
William Blake is one of the great mystics of the world; and he is by far the greatest and most profound who has spoken in English. Like Henry More and Wordsworth, he lived in a world of glory, of spirit and of vision, which, for him, was the only real world. At the age of four he saw God looking in at the window, and from that time until he welcomed the approach of death by singing songs of joy which made the rafters ring, he lived in an atmosphere of divine illumination. The material facts of his career were simple and uneventful. He was an engraver by profession, poet and painter by choice, mystic and seer by nature. From the outer point of view his life was a failure. He was always crippled by poverty, almost wholly unappreciated in the world of art and letters of his day, consistently misunderstood even by his best friends, and pronounced mad by those who most admired his work. Yet, like all true mystics, he was radiantly happy and serene; rich in the midst of poverty. For he lived and worked in a world, and amongst a company, little known of ordinary men:—
With a blue sky spread over with wings,
And a mild Sun that mounts & sings;
With trees & fields full of Fairy elves,
And little devils who fight for themselves—
With Angels planted in Hawthorn bowers,
And God Himself in the passing hours.[72]
It is not surprising that he said, in speaking of Lawrence and other popular artists who sometimes patronisingly visited him, "They pity me, but 'tis they are the just objects of pity, I possess my visions and peace. They have bartered their birthright for a mess of pottage." The strength of his illumination at times intoxicated him with joy, as he writes to Hayley (October 23, 1804) after a recurrence of vision which had lapsed for some years, "Dear Sir, excuse my enthusiasm or rather madness, for I am really drunk with intellectual vision whenever I take a pencil or graver into my hand." This is the "divine madness" of which Plato speaks, the "inebriation of Reality," the ecstasy which makes the poet "drunk with life."[73]
In common with other mystics, with Boehme, St Teresa, and Madame Guyon, Blake claimed that much of his work was written under direct inspiration, that it was an automatic composition, which, whatever its source, did not come from the writer's normal consciousness. In speaking of the prophetic book Milton, he says—
I have written this poem from immediate dictation, twelve or sometimes twenty or thirty lines at a time, without pre-meditation and even against my will. The time it has taken in writing was thus rendered non-existent, and an immense poem exists which seems to be the labour of a long life, all produced without labour or study.
Whatever may be their source, all Blake's writings are deeply mystical in thought, and symbolic in expression, and this is true of the (apparently) simple little Songs of Innocence, no less than of the great, and only partially intelligible, prophetic books. To deal at all adequately with these works, with the thought and teaching they contain, and the method of clothing it, would necessitate a volume, if not a small library, devoted to that purpose. It is possible, however, to indicate certain fundamental beliefs and assertions which lie at the base of Blake's thought and of his very unusual attitude towards life, and which, once grasped, make clear a large part of his work. It must be remembered that these assertions were for him not matters of belief, but of passionate knowledge—he was as sure of them as of his own existence.
Blake founds his great myth on his perception of unity at the heart of things expressing itself in endless diversity. "God is in the lowest effects as [in] the highest causes. He is become a worm that he may nourish the weak.... Everything on earth is the word of God, and in its essence is God."[74]