William Blake: A Study of His Life and Art WorkLangridge, Irene
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William Blake: A Study of His Life and Art Work
Langridge, Irene
Blake, William, 1757-1827
As he states in a glorious passage in his prose essay of the Last
Judgement: "Mental things are alone real: what is called corporeal nobody
knows of; its dwelling-place is a fallacy, and its existence an imposture.
Where is the existence out of mind, or thought? where is it but in the
mind of a fool? Some people flatter themselves that there will be no
Last Judgement, and that bad art will be adopted, and mixed with good
art--that error or experiment will make a part of truth--and they boast
that it is its foundation. These people flatter themselves; I will not
flatter them. Error is created, truth is eternal. Error or creation will
be burnt up, and then, and not till then, truth or eternity will appear.
It is burned up the moment men cease to behold it." (This is a mystical
utterance, a spiritual discernment which will repay thoughtful
consideration. It gives the Last Judgement--hitherto conceived of by the
orthodox as a terribly material and mundane affair--an imaginative and
esoteric significance very grateful and welcome to the spiritually
sensitive.) "I assert for myself, that I do not behold the outward
creation, and that to me it is hindrance and not action. 'What!' it will
be questioned, 'when the sun rises, do you not see a round disc of fire,
somewhat like a guinea?' Oh! no! no! I see an innumerable company of the
heavenly host, crying: 'Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty.' I
question not my corporeal eye, any more than I would question a window
concerning a sight. I look through it, and not with it."
One of Blake's most beautiful conceptions of God is as the universal
"Poetic Genius," and he was very fond of asserting that Art is Religion,
which indeed it is when, like his own, it represents the forms of this
world as the transparent media through which pulses the light of the
universal Poetic Genius. Another belief of Blake's must be quoted before I
leave this part of our subject: "Men are admitted into heaven, not because
they have curbed and governed their passions, or have no passions, but
because they have cultivated their understandings. The treasures of heaven
are not negations of passion, but realities of intellect, from which all
the passions emanate, uncurbed in their eternal glory.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
William Blake: A Study of His Life and Art Work — John Shaqi
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