Page:William Blake in his relation to Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1911).djvu/8

— 8 — The idea that the Bible was a sacred code written by inspiration which only men who were inspired by visions from Heaven like Swedenborg (Arcana Coelestia) and himself ) could interpret, was taken up and adopted by Blake also in regard to the highest utterances of poetry; the only way in which the different degrees of correspondence could be expressed was by means of allegory and symbols, in which every word, or in drawing every design, had a second or perhaps a third hidden meaning. "Allegory addressed to the intellectual powers while it is altogether hidden from the corporeal understanding is my definition of the most sublime poetry", Blake writes in a letter to Thomas Butts, 1803. Such allegory is found in all Blake's poems and fills the Prophetic Books; it forms the greatest attraction of Blake's engravings, though no longer "hidden from all corporeal understanding", since in 1893 a complete edition of Blake's works appeared, edited by E. G. Ellis and W. B. Yeats, who show us in an elaborate treatise that a consistent system underlies Blake's writings, that his message, though very complex, claims to be only a personal statement of universal truth; a system to deliver men from systems. Much has been made clear by their ingenious explanation, but for all that the Prophetic Books remain dim and chaotic as dreams, their imaginative and coherent thought-structure fails in carrying conviction with it.

From Swedenborg ) Blake also took the belief in the angels; the angelic wisdom, the occupations of the angels, their being the exact counterpart of men, and many interesting particulars of the angelic world; here Blake goes beyond Swedenborg in accepting the existence of evil spirits; he says: "Swedenborg received his teaching from angels only, while he ought to have consulted devils also", therefore his teaching shall be "as the linen clothes folded up". For, and here we touch another keynote of Blake's teaching, "without contraries there is no