It was to the imagination, and the imagination alone, that Blake yielded the allegiance of his spirit.  His attitude towards reason was the attitude of the mystic; and it involved an inevitable dilemma.  He never could, in truth, quite shake himself free of his ‘Spectre’; struggle as he would, he could not escape altogether from the employment of the ordinary forms of thought and speech; he is constantly arguing, as if argument were really a means of approaching the truth; he was subdued to what he worked in.  As in his own poem, he had, somehow or other, been locked into a crystal cabinet—­the world of the senses and of reason—­a gilded, artificial, gimcrack dwelling, after ‘the wild’ where he had danced so merrily before.

    I strove to seize the inmost Form
    With ardour fierce and hands of flame,
    But burst the Crystal Cabinet,
    And like a Weeping Babe became—­

    A weeping Babe upon the wild....

To be able to lay hands upon ‘the inmost form,’ one must achieve the impossible; one must be inside and outside the crystal cabinet at the same time.  But Blake was not to be turned aside by such considerations.  He would have it both ways; and whoever demurred was crucifying 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?