CHAPTER V
WESLEY, WHITEFIELD, LAVATER, AND SWEDENBORG
Blake’s manifold nature lacked, so far, a co-ordinating principle. From his earliest years religion had been a reality to him, and so had art, music, literature, but not one of these was so dominant over the rest as to make them subservient. Each lived its separate life and was likely to continue to do so, unless his religion could become forceful and definite enough to penetrate the others and bind them into a higher unity.
His religion had been fed by vision. His visions came to him so naturally that it never occurred to him that others might regard them as symptoms of abnormality or insanity. The thrashing that his father gave him when he told at home what he had seen at Peckham Rye was a memorable occasion, like conversion to some people, only it opened his outer eye and not his inner.
The visions made several things clear to his understanding. He early distinguished between inner and outer vision, supernatural and natural religion. Religion was never a matter of opinion, always of experience. Christ’s language was also his own, “We speak that we do know, and testify that we have seen.” He felt the same mild surprise at hearing religion denied as he would at the denial of the sun by a blind man. But the reason of such blindness was also quite clear to him. Spiritual things are spiritually discerned. The spiritual man sought no other evidence than that of his spiritual discernment. If the natural man were ever to arrive at spiritual vision, it must be by a new birth of the Spirit. Thus Blake knew from the beginning the inward meaning of Christ’s words to Nicodemus, “Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the Kingdom of Heaven.... That which is born of the flesh is flesh, that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.” Blake was never in danger at any time in his life of becoming enmeshed in natural religion. His escape was more instinctive if less effectual than that of his philosophical contemporary who sought to combat his difficulties by working out an elaborate analogy between natural and revealed religion.
The man who knows by experience what it is to be born again knows also how clamorous the new life within is for nourishment. Blake was driven to the mystics for food. We know by his repeated references in his long poems that St Theresa, Madame Guyon, Paracelsus and Jacob Boehme fed his supersensual life. But besides appealing to the past, he looked around to listen to what his contemporaries had to say to him. It is evident that he would listen only to those who were as clear as himself on the experience of the new birth.
It is not surprising that the high church divines of the eighteenth century had little to say for him. They were more eager to show to the leaders of the enthusiastic methodist party that regeneration took place in Holy Baptism than to make sure that they had exhausted its meaning in their experience. Their views might be extremely correct; but anything more dull and uninspiring than their sermons and collected works could hardly be found. Blake had no need to examine them particularly, for the best high churchman of the time was Dr Johnson, and he already had his eye on him.
Dr Johnson to the end was a particular kind of grand schoolmaster. He believed in the Christian revelation fervently, and he believed, also with fervour, in the rod, in Latin, in scholarship, and in the drastic repression of the young. He who declared that he would never disgrace the walls of the Abbey by writing for it an epitaph in English, could hardly have seen anything worth his notice in the ignorant Blake and his still more ignorant wife; and Blake in his turn, unnoticed and unknown, living a severely abstemious life, was too apt to ruminate on Johnson’s gluttony and pension, and to conclude that the latter was a reward for barren learning.
It is as well that Johnson and Blake never met. Neither could have worked through his prejudices. They lived in a different world, and moved from a different centre. Johnson viewed the wreckage of the Old World, and then with undaunted courage and indomitable will set himself to build out of the wreckage a covering for himself and his friends. Blake, conscious that dawn was stirring on the wreckage of the dark night, was straining his vision to catch the outline of the new emerging world. Johnson’s was a superb mind working within too narrow bounds. Blake’s was so far the promise of an unimagined type. We who look backward over the lapse of a hundred years can reverence both men, but it is Blake who is the more inspiring and fruitful.