ying Christ
with the head downwards.

Besides its unreasonableness, there is an even more serious objection to
Blake's mysticism--and indeed to all mysticism: its lack of humanity.
The mystic's creed--even when arrayed in the wondrous and ecstatic
beauty of Blake's verse--comes upon the ordinary man, in the rigidity of
its uncompromising elevation, with a shock which is terrible, and
almost cruel. The sacrifices which it demands are too vast, in spite of
the divinity of what it has to offer. What shall it profit a man, one is
tempted to exclaim, if he gain his own soul, and lose the whole world?
The mystic ideal is the highest of all; but it has no breadth. The
following lines express, with a simplicity and an intensity of
inspiration which he never surpassed, Blake's conception of that ideal:

And throughout all Eternity
I forgive you, you forgive me.
As our dear Redeemer said:
'This the Wine, & this the Bread.'

It is easy to imagine the sort of comments to which Voltaire, for
instance, with his 'wracking wheel' of sarcasm and common-sense, would
have subjected such lines as these. His criticism would have been
irrelevant, because it would never have reached the heart of the matter
at issue; it would have been based upon no true understanding of Blake's
words. But that they do admit of a real, an unanswerable criticism, it
is difficult to doubt. Charles Lamb, perhaps, might have made it;
incidentally, indeed, he has. 'Sun, and sky, and breeze, and solitary
walks, and summer holidays, and the greenness of fields, and the
delicious juices of meats and fishes, and society, and the cheerful
glass, and candle-light, and fire-side conversations, and innocent
vanities, and jests, and _irony itself_'--do these things form no part
of your Eternity?

The truth is plain: Blake was an intellectual drunkard. His words come
down to us in a rapture of broken fluency from impossible intoxicated
heights. His spirit soared above the empyrean; and, even as it soared,
it stumbled in the gutter of Felpham. His lips brought forth, in the
same breath, in the same inspired utterance, the _Auguries of Innocence_
and the epigrams on Sir Joshua Reynolds. He was in no condition to chop
logic, or to take heed of the existing forms of things. In the imaginary
portrait of himself, prefixed to Sir Walter Raleigh's volume, we can see
him, as he appeared to his own 'inward eye,' staggering between the
abyss and the star of Heaven