Page:William Blake in his relation to Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1911).djvu/13

— 13 — expressed, destroyed them, and thus we find Blake's philosophic system incomplete. I think, however, that we know enough of it such as we find it, that in his turbulent evangile, doctrines of the most opposed abstract systems confront each other, and that his beliefs, however positive to himself for the time he entertained them, were fluctuating and shifting, and that the only ideas which pretty constantly show forth in strong relief are the few I singled out in the foregoing pages.

Of these ideas Blake has taken most, as I have shown, from Swedenborg, who had written them in his many books with great care and lucidity earlier in the century. But Blake's thoroughly artistic temperament conceived the notion, that the old truths wanted to be said in a new form to bring them home to mankind, and that the mystic truths should be expressed through the medium of the fine Arts. Up to now, mysticism had laid down her principles dogmatically in the language of the Church. From being theological the language became literary and poetical, and where words could not express the abstractions of the heavenly visions, Blake, in whose mind the most abstract notions crystallised into shapes, made sketches and drawings of these visions, such as he had them before his "mental eyes." That the result of these proceedings was startlingly original can be easily conceived; already by this sole reason Blake's works must have had great attraction for Dante Gabriel Rossetti. For he loved everything out of the Common and had a natural inclination for the supernatural and marvellous. As early as 1843 he wrote a ballad Sir Hugh the Heron, an imitation of W. Scott which, though very unripe and of no value, shows Dante Gabriel Rossetti's love for the mysterious. And in the following pages we will consider in detail the influence in which this attraction resulted. For as Blake was a man of genius both as a poet and as a painter, it could not be but that his works won the lifelong admiration of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and influenced nearly