Page:Works Of William Blake Volume 1.pdf/7

 XI

PREFACE

even find some of the lost books by Blake, printed and in manuscript. The Society conld also take up the task of interpretation, and work out details, for which space has not been found in this book, large as it is.

Blake's was a complex message—more adapted than any former mystical utterance to a highly complex age. Yet it claims to be but a personal statement of universal truths, “ a system to deliver men from systems.” The only other European mystics worthy to stand by his side, Swedenborg and Boehmen, were to a large extent sectaries, talking the language of the Churches, and delivering a message intended, before all else, for an age of dogma. They brought the Kingdom of the soul nearer to innumerable men; but now their work is nearly done, and they must soon be put away, reverently, and become, as Blake says, “ the linen clothes folded up." As the language of spiritual utterance ceases to be theological and becomes literary and poetical, the great truths have to be spoken afresh; and Blake came into the world to speak them, and to announce the new epoch in which poets and poetic thinkers should be once more, as they were in the days of the Hebrew Prophets, the Spiritual leaders of the race. Such leadership was to be of a kind entirely distinct from the “ temporal power" claimed to this day elsewhere. The false idea that a talent or even a genius for verse tends to give a man a right to make laws for the social conduct of other men is nowhere supported in Blake's works. The world in which he would have the poet, acting as a poet, seek leadership is the poetic world. That of ordinary conduct should be put