' 'As the seed waits eagerly watching for its flower
and fruit, anxious its little soul looks out into the clear expanse
to see if hungry winds are abroad with their invisible array, so man
looks out in tree, and herb, and fish, and bird, and beast, collecting
up the fragments of his immortal body into the elemental forms of
everything that grows.
and fruit, anxious its little soul looks out into the clear expanse
to see if hungry winds are abroad with their invisible array, so man
looks out in tree, and herb, and fish, and bird, and beast, collecting
up the fragments of his immortal body into the elemental forms of
everything that grows.
Yeats
The treasures of heaven
are not negations of passion but realities of intellect from which
the passions emanate uncurbed in their eternal glory. The fool shall
not enter into heaven, let him be ever so holy. Holiness is not the
price of entering into heaven. Those who are cast out are all those
who, having no passions of their own, because no intellect, have
spent their lives in curbing and governing other people's lives by
the various arts of poverty and cruelty of all kinds. The modern
Church crucifies Christ with the head downwards. Woe, woe, woe to you
hypocrites. ' After a time man has 'to return to the dark valley whence
he came and begin his labours anew,' but before that return he dwells
in the freedom of imagination, in the peace of the 'divine image,'
'the divine vision,' in the peace that passes understanding and is
the peace of art. 'I have been very near the gates of death,' Blake
wrote in his last letter, 'and have returned very weak and an old man,
feeble and tottering but not in spirit and life, not in the real man,
the imagination which liveth for ever. In that I grow stronger and
stronger as this foolish body decays. . . . Flaxman is gone, and we must
all soon follow, every one to his eternal home, leaving the delusions
of goddess Nature and her laws, to get into freedom from all the laws
of the numbers,' the multiplicity of nature, 'into the mind in which
every one is king and priest in his own house. ' The phrase about the
king and priest is a memory of the crown and mitre set upon Dante's
head before he entered Paradise. Our imaginations are but fragments of
the universal imagination, portions of the universal body of God, and
as we enlarge our imagination by imaginative sympathy, and transform
with the beauty and peace of art, the sorrows and joys of the world, we
put off the limited mortal man more and more and put on the unlimited
'immortal man.
' 'As the seed waits eagerly watching for its flower
and fruit, anxious its little soul looks out into the clear expanse
to see if hungry winds are abroad with their invisible array, so man
looks out in tree, and herb, and fish, and bird, and beast, collecting
up the fragments of his immortal body into the elemental forms of
everything that grows. . . . In pain he sighs, in pain he labours in his
universe, sorrowing in birds over the deep, or howling in the wolf
over the slain, and moaning in the cattle, and in the winds. ' Mere
sympathy for living things is not enough, because we must learn to
separate their 'infected' from their eternal, their satanic from their
divine part; and this can only be done by desiring always beauty, the
one mask through which can be seen the unveiled eyes of eternity. We
must then be artists in all things, and understand that love and old
age and death are first among the arts. In this sense he insists that
'Christ's apostles were artists,' that 'Christianity is Art,' and
that 'the whole business of man is the arts. ' Dante, who deified law,
selected its antagonist, passion, as the most important of sins, and
made the regions where it was punished the largest. Blake, who deified
imaginative freedom, held 'corporeal reason' for the most accursed of
things, because it makes the imagination revolt from the sovereignty
of beauty and pass under the sovereignty of corporeal law, and this
is 'the captivity in Egypt. ' True art is expressive and symbolic,
and makes every form, every sound, every colour, every gesture, a
signature of some unanalyzable imaginative essence. False art is not
expressive, but mimetic, not from experience but from observation, and
is the mother of all evil, persuading us to save our bodies alive at no
matter what cost of rapine and fraud. True art is the flame of the last
day, which begins for every man, when he is first moved by beauty, and
which seeks to burn all things until they become 'infinite and holy. '
III. THE ILLUSTRATIONS OF DANTE.
The late Mr.
are not negations of passion but realities of intellect from which
the passions emanate uncurbed in their eternal glory. The fool shall
not enter into heaven, let him be ever so holy. Holiness is not the
price of entering into heaven. Those who are cast out are all those
who, having no passions of their own, because no intellect, have
spent their lives in curbing and governing other people's lives by
the various arts of poverty and cruelty of all kinds. The modern
Church crucifies Christ with the head downwards. Woe, woe, woe to you
hypocrites. ' After a time man has 'to return to the dark valley whence
he came and begin his labours anew,' but before that return he dwells
in the freedom of imagination, in the peace of the 'divine image,'
'the divine vision,' in the peace that passes understanding and is
the peace of art. 'I have been very near the gates of death,' Blake
wrote in his last letter, 'and have returned very weak and an old man,
feeble and tottering but not in spirit and life, not in the real man,
the imagination which liveth for ever. In that I grow stronger and
stronger as this foolish body decays. . . . Flaxman is gone, and we must
all soon follow, every one to his eternal home, leaving the delusions
of goddess Nature and her laws, to get into freedom from all the laws
of the numbers,' the multiplicity of nature, 'into the mind in which
every one is king and priest in his own house. ' The phrase about the
king and priest is a memory of the crown and mitre set upon Dante's
head before he entered Paradise. Our imaginations are but fragments of
the universal imagination, portions of the universal body of God, and
as we enlarge our imagination by imaginative sympathy, and transform
with the beauty and peace of art, the sorrows and joys of the world, we
put off the limited mortal man more and more and put on the unlimited
'immortal man.
' 'As the seed waits eagerly watching for its flower
and fruit, anxious its little soul looks out into the clear expanse
to see if hungry winds are abroad with their invisible array, so man
looks out in tree, and herb, and fish, and bird, and beast, collecting
up the fragments of his immortal body into the elemental forms of
everything that grows. . . . In pain he sighs, in pain he labours in his
universe, sorrowing in birds over the deep, or howling in the wolf
over the slain, and moaning in the cattle, and in the winds. ' Mere
sympathy for living things is not enough, because we must learn to
separate their 'infected' from their eternal, their satanic from their
divine part; and this can only be done by desiring always beauty, the
one mask through which can be seen the unveiled eyes of eternity. We
must then be artists in all things, and understand that love and old
age and death are first among the arts. In this sense he insists that
'Christ's apostles were artists,' that 'Christianity is Art,' and
that 'the whole business of man is the arts. ' Dante, who deified law,
selected its antagonist, passion, as the most important of sins, and
made the regions where it was punished the largest. Blake, who deified
imaginative freedom, held 'corporeal reason' for the most accursed of
things, because it makes the imagination revolt from the sovereignty
of beauty and pass under the sovereignty of corporeal law, and this
is 'the captivity in Egypt. ' True art is expressive and symbolic,
and makes every form, every sound, every colour, every gesture, a
signature of some unanalyzable imaginative essence. False art is not
expressive, but mimetic, not from experience but from observation, and
is the mother of all evil, persuading us to save our bodies alive at no
matter what cost of rapine and fraud. True art is the flame of the last
day, which begins for every man, when he is first moved by beauty, and
which seeks to burn all things until they become 'infinite and holy. '
III. THE ILLUSTRATIONS OF DANTE.
The late Mr.
