Are
they any other than mental studies and performances?
they any other than mental studies and performances?
Yeats
'
Whenever he gave this symbol a habitation in space he set it in the
sun, the father of light and life; and set in the darkness beyond the
stars, where light and life die away, Og and Anak and the giants that
were of old, and the iron throne of Satan.
By thus contrasting Blake and Dante by the light of Blake's
paradoxical wisdom, and as though there was no important truth
hung from Dante's beam of the balance, I but seek to interpret a
little-understood philosophy rather than one incorporate in the thought
and habits of Christendom. Every philosophy has half its truth from
times and generations; and to us one-half of the philosophy of Dante
is less living than his poetry, while the truth Blake preached and
sang and painted is the root of the cultivated life, of the fragile
perfect blossom of the world born in ages of leisure and peace, and
never yet to last more than a little season; the life those Phaeacians,
who told Odysseus that they had set their hearts in nothing but in
'the dance and changes of raiment, and love and sleep,' lived before
Poseidon heaped a mountain above them; the lives of all who, having
eaten of the Tree of Life, love, more than did the barbarous ages when
none had time to live, 'the minute particulars of life,' the little
fragments of space and time, which are wholly flooded by beautiful
emotion because they are so little they are hardly of time and space
at all. 'Every space smaller than a globule of man's blood,' he wrote,
'opens into eternity of which this vegetable earth is but a shadow. '
And again, 'Every time less than a pulsation of the artery is equal'
in its tenor and value 'to six thousand years, for in this period the
poet's work is done, and all the great events of time start forth,
and are conceived: in such a period, within a moment, a pulsation of
the artery. ' Dante, indeed, taught, in the 'Purgatorio,' that sin and
virtue are alike from love, and that love is from God; but this love
he would restrain by a complex eternal law, a complex external Church.
Blake upon the other hand cried scorn upon the whole spectacle of
external things, a vision to pass away in a moment, and preached the
cultivated life, the internal Church which has no laws but beauty,
rapture and labour. 'I know of no other Christianity, and of no other
gospel, than the liberty, both of body and mind, to exercise the
divine arts of imagination, the real and eternal world of which this
vegetable universe is but a faint shadow, and in which we shall live in
our eternal or imaginative bodies when these vegetable mortal bodies
are no more. The Apostles knew of no other gospel. What are all their
spiritual gifts? What is the divine spirit? Is the Holy Ghost any other
than an intellectual fountain? What is the harvest of the gospel and
its labours? What is the talent which it is a curse to hide? What are
the treasures of heaven which we are to lay up for ourselves?
Are
they any other than mental studies and performances? What are all the
gifts of the gospel, are they not all mental gifts? Is God a spirit
who must be worshipped in spirit and truth? Are not the gifts of the
spirit everything to man? O ye religious! discountenance every one
among you who shall pretend to despise art and science. I call upon you
in the name of Jesus! What is the life of man but art and science? Is
it meat and drink? Is not the body more than raiment? What is mortality
but the things relating to the body which dies? What is immortality
but the things relating to the spirit which lives immortally? What is
the joy of Heaven but improvement in the things of the spirit? What
are the pains of Hell but ignorance, idleness, bodily lust, and the
devastation of the things of the spirit? Answer this for yourselves,
and expel from amongst you those who pretend to despise the labours
of art and science, which alone are the labours of the gospel. Is not
this plain and manifest to the thought?
Whenever he gave this symbol a habitation in space he set it in the
sun, the father of light and life; and set in the darkness beyond the
stars, where light and life die away, Og and Anak and the giants that
were of old, and the iron throne of Satan.
By thus contrasting Blake and Dante by the light of Blake's
paradoxical wisdom, and as though there was no important truth
hung from Dante's beam of the balance, I but seek to interpret a
little-understood philosophy rather than one incorporate in the thought
and habits of Christendom. Every philosophy has half its truth from
times and generations; and to us one-half of the philosophy of Dante
is less living than his poetry, while the truth Blake preached and
sang and painted is the root of the cultivated life, of the fragile
perfect blossom of the world born in ages of leisure and peace, and
never yet to last more than a little season; the life those Phaeacians,
who told Odysseus that they had set their hearts in nothing but in
'the dance and changes of raiment, and love and sleep,' lived before
Poseidon heaped a mountain above them; the lives of all who, having
eaten of the Tree of Life, love, more than did the barbarous ages when
none had time to live, 'the minute particulars of life,' the little
fragments of space and time, which are wholly flooded by beautiful
emotion because they are so little they are hardly of time and space
at all. 'Every space smaller than a globule of man's blood,' he wrote,
'opens into eternity of which this vegetable earth is but a shadow. '
And again, 'Every time less than a pulsation of the artery is equal'
in its tenor and value 'to six thousand years, for in this period the
poet's work is done, and all the great events of time start forth,
and are conceived: in such a period, within a moment, a pulsation of
the artery. ' Dante, indeed, taught, in the 'Purgatorio,' that sin and
virtue are alike from love, and that love is from God; but this love
he would restrain by a complex eternal law, a complex external Church.
Blake upon the other hand cried scorn upon the whole spectacle of
external things, a vision to pass away in a moment, and preached the
cultivated life, the internal Church which has no laws but beauty,
rapture and labour. 'I know of no other Christianity, and of no other
gospel, than the liberty, both of body and mind, to exercise the
divine arts of imagination, the real and eternal world of which this
vegetable universe is but a faint shadow, and in which we shall live in
our eternal or imaginative bodies when these vegetable mortal bodies
are no more. The Apostles knew of no other gospel. What are all their
spiritual gifts? What is the divine spirit? Is the Holy Ghost any other
than an intellectual fountain? What is the harvest of the gospel and
its labours? What is the talent which it is a curse to hide? What are
the treasures of heaven which we are to lay up for ourselves?
Are
they any other than mental studies and performances? What are all the
gifts of the gospel, are they not all mental gifts? Is God a spirit
who must be worshipped in spirit and truth? Are not the gifts of the
spirit everything to man? O ye religious! discountenance every one
among you who shall pretend to despise art and science. I call upon you
in the name of Jesus! What is the life of man but art and science? Is
it meat and drink? Is not the body more than raiment? What is mortality
but the things relating to the body which dies? What is immortality
but the things relating to the spirit which lives immortally? What is
the joy of Heaven but improvement in the things of the spirit? What
are the pains of Hell but ignorance, idleness, bodily lust, and the
devastation of the things of the spirit? Answer this for yourselves,
and expel from amongst you those who pretend to despise the labours
of art and science, which alone are the labours of the gospel. Is not
this plain and manifest to the thought?
