Page:William Blake (Chesterton).djvu/219

WILLIAM BLAKE 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.

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. 207