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Appendix (30)

William Blake

In England, William Blake, poet, painter, visionary, and prophet (1757-1827), shines like a solitary star in the uncongenial atmosphere of the Georgian age.

The career of Blake provides us with a rare instance of mystical genius, forcing not only rhythm and words, but also colour and form, to express its vision of truth. So individual in his case was this vision, so strange the elements from which his symbolic reconstructions were built up, that he failed in the attempt to convey it to other men. Neither in his prophetic books nor in his beautiful mystical paintings does he contrive to transmit more than great and stimulating suggestions of "things seen" in some higher and more valid state of consciousness. Whilst his visionary symbolism derives to a large extent from Swedenborg, whose works were the great influence of his youth, Blake has learned much from Boehme, and probably from his English interpreters. Almost alone amongst English Protestant mystics, he has also received and assimilated the Catholic tradition of the personal and inward communion of love. In his great vision of "Jerusalem," St. Teresa and Madame Guyon are amongst the "gentle souls" whom he sees guarding that Four-fold Gate which opens towards Beulah - the gate of the contemplative life - and guiding the great "Wine-press of Love" whence mankind, at the hands of its mystics, has received, in every age, the Wine of Life.