THE JUST UPRIGHT MAN (1825)
Nevertheless, I do not accept this dull definition by locality; I think it is a spirit in Asia, and even a spirit that can be named. It is approximately described as an insane simplicity. In all these cases we find people attempting to perfect a thing solely by simplification; by obliterating special features: this cosmos is full of wingless birds, of hornless cattle, of hairless women, and colourless wine, all fading into a formless background. There is a Christian simplicity, of course, opposed to this pessimist simplicity. Both the western and eastern mystic may be called children; but the eastern child treads the sand-castle back into sand, and enjoys seeing the silver snow man melt back into muddy water. This return to chaos and a comfortless simplicity is the only intelligent meaning of the words reaction and reactionary. In this sense much of modern science is reaction, and most modern scientists are reactionaries. But where this reversion to the void can be seen most clearly is in all the semi-oriental sects to which I have referred. Teetotalism is a simplification; its objection to beer is not really that beer makes a man like a beast. On the contrary, its real objection is that beer most unmistakably separates a man from a beast. Vegetarianism is a simplification; the herb-eating Hindoo saint does not really dislike the carnivorous habit because it destroys an animal. Rather, he dislikes it because it creates an animal; renews the special aims and appetites of the separate animal, man. Agnosticism, the ancient creed of Confucius, is a simplification; it is a shutting out of all the shadowy splendours and terrors; an Arcadian exclusiveness; il faut cultiver son jardin. Japanese patriotism, the blind collectivism of the tribe, is a simplification; it is an attempt to turn our turbulent and varied humanity into one enormous animal, with twenty million legs, but only one head. There is an utterly opposite kind of simplicity that springs from joy; but this kind of simplicity certainly is rooted in despair.
Now, for practical purposes, there is an antagonistic order of mysticism; that which celebrates personality, positive variety, and special emphasis: just as in broad fact the mystery of dissolution is emphasized and typified in the East, so in practice the mystery of concentration and identity is manifest in the historic churches of Christendom. Even the foes of Christianity would readily agree that Christianity is “personal” in the sense that a vulgar joke is “personal”: that is corporeal, vivid, perhaps ugly. This being so, it has been broadly true that any mystic who broke with the Christian tradition tended to drift towards the eastern and pessimist tradition. In the Albigensian and other heresies the East crawled in with its serpentine combination of glitter and abasement, of pessimism and pleasure. Every dreamer who strayed outside the Christian order strayed towards the Hindu order, and every such dreamer found his dream turning to a nightmare. If a man wandered far from Christ he was drawn into the orbit of Buddha, the other great magnet of mankind—the negative magnet. The thing is true down to the latest and the most lovable visionaries of our own time; if they do not climb up into Christendom, they slide down into Thibet. The greatest poet now writing in the English language (and it is surely unnecessary to say that I mean Mr Yeats) has written a whole play round the statement, “Where there is nothing there is God.” In this he sharply and purposely cuts himself off from the real Christian position, that where there is anything there is God.
FOR HIS EYES ARE UPON THE WAYS OF MAN (1825)
But though, by an almost political accident, Oriental pessimism has been the practical alternative to the Christian type of transcendentalism, there is, and always has been, a third thing that was neither Christian in an orthodox sense nor Buddhistic in any sense. Before Christianity existed there was a European school of optimist mystics; among whom the great name is Plato. And ever since there have been movements and appearances in Europe of this healthier heathen mysticism, which did not shrink from the shapes of things or the emphatic colours of existence. Something of the sort was in the Nature worship of Renaissance philosophers; something of the sort may even have been behind the strange mixture of ecstacy and animality in the isolated episode of Luther. This solid and joyful occultism appears at its best in Swedenborg; but perhaps at its boldest and most brilliant in William Blake.
The present writer will not, in so important a matter, pretend to the absurd thing called impartiality; he is personally quite convinced that if every human being lived a thousand years, every human being would end up either in utter pessimistic scepticism or in the Catholic creed. William Blake, in his rationalist and highly Protestant age, was frequently reproached for his tenderness towards Catholicism; but it would have surprised him very much to be told that he would join it. But he would have joined it—if he had lived a thousand years, or even perhaps a hundred. He was on the side of historic Christianity on the fundamental question on which it confronts the East; the idea that personality is the glory of the universe and not its shame; that creation is higher than evolution, because it is more personal; that pardon is higher than Nemesis, because it is more personal; that the forgiveness of sins is essential to the communion of saints; and the resurrection of the body to the life everlasting. It was a mark of the old eastern initiations, it is still a mark of the grades and planes of our theosophical thinkers, that as a man climbs higher and higher, God becomes to him more and more formless, ethereal, and even thin. And in many of these temples, both ancient and modern, the final reward of serving the god through vigils and purifications, is that one is at last worthy to be told that the god doesn’t exist.
Against all this emasculate mysticism Blake like a Titan rears his colossal figure and his earthquake voice. Through all the cloud and chaos of his stubborn symbolism and his perverse theories, through the tempest of exaggeration and the full midnight of madness, he reiterates with passionate precision that only that which is lovable can be adorable, that deity is either a person or a puff of wind, that the more we know of higher things the more palpable and incarnate we shall find them; that the form filling the heavens is the likeness of the appearance of a man. Much of what Blake thus wildly thundered has been put quietly and quaintly by Coventry Patmore, especially in that delicate and daring passage in which he speaks of the bonds, the simpleness and even the narrowness of God. The wise man will follow a star, low and large and fierce in the heavens; but the nearer he comes to it the smaller and smaller it will grow, till he finds it the humble lantern over some little inn or stable. Not till we know the high things shall we know how lowly they are. Meanwhile, the modern superior transcendentalist will find the facts of eternity incredible because they are so solid; he will not recognise heaven because it is so like the earth.