Blake makes no disciples, and no school can claim him, but he speaks to all who have any mental equipment. His vision of Christ, if we can make it our own and fill out its defects, will put us beyond the modern worship of the superman, and take us out of that sectarianism which gains ascendancy for a little while because of its lightness and fragmentariness.
The confusion in Blake's mental life affects his art. He declared consistently in times of clear vision that outline, form, and foundation are the essence of spiritual things. This is beyond anything to be found in Sir Joshua's _Discourses_, and anticipates Benedetto Croce when he says that art is an ultimate, that "form is constant and is spiritual activity," while "matter is changeable," yet he accomplished many designs that Reynolds could have taught him to correct.
His later poems suffer still more. The energy in them is terrific, and they are filled with flashes of inspiration; but their atmosphere is murky, and never clears for more than fifty lines at a time. They are storehouses, but the one who would get anything out of them must bring his taper with him.
The early short poems, on the contrary, shine with their own light. _The Tiger_ and _The Emmet_ are written before his mind has time to plunge into the penumbra of his disorderly system.
Blake was still young in spirit when he died. One feels with him, as with Tolstoi, that he had far from come to the end of his tether. He was one of the few to whose years another threescore might have been added with advantage. Where would he have arrived? I think when we remember that for more than twenty years before his death he was on the voyage of rediscovery, we may hazard the guess that he would have reached the catholic form of Christianity, having thrown overboard his private symbolism on the way; and that then he would have produced great, long poems of crystalline clearness, which would have placed him by the side of the master-poets of the ages.
Yet it is idle work guessing at what might have been. We blame a man's times, or birth, or church, or what not for his failures, when we should look for some fundamental lack in his own equipment. That Blake was not quite one of our conquerors, then, we will not attribute to the eighteenth century or to Swedenborg's predominant influence in his early life, but simply to the fact that he lacked the strong, virile reason that could keep pace with the on-rush of his visions. He was all Los: Urizen, whom he repudiated with such scorn, alone could have balanced his nature and led him to the supreme achievement.