Page:William Blake, a critical essay (Swinburne).djvu/176

 160 which indeed it was perhaps hardly fair to transcribe; for take out the one great excerpt already given, and the whole poem is a mass of huddled notes jotted down in a series of hints, on stray sides and corners of leaves, crammed into holes and byways out of sight or reach. So perfect a poet is not to be judged by the scrawls and sketches of his note-book; but as we cannot have his revision of the present piece of work, and are not here to make any revision of our own, we must either let drop the chance of insight thus afforded, or make shift with the rough and ragged remnants allowed us by the sparing fingers of a close-handed fate. And this chance of insight is not to be lightly let go, if we mean to look at all into Blake's creed and mind. "Experiment" to the mystic seems not insufficient merely, but irrational. "Reason says miracle; Newton says doubt;" as Blake in another place expounds to such disciples as he may get. On this point also his "Vision of Christ" is other than the Christian public's.

His Christ cared no more to convince "the blind" by plain speech than to save "the world"—the form or flesh of the world, not that imperishable body or complement of the soul which if a man "keep under and bring into subjection" he transgresses against himself; but the mere "sexual" shell which only exists (as we said) by error and by division and by right of temporal appearance.

Keeping in mind the utter roughness and formal incompletion of these notes—which in effect are the mere broken shell or bruised husk of a poem yet unfledged