Blake could not afford to indulge these idiosyncrasies. Like all mystics, he found it difficult to adjust the inner things that were real to him to the outer that were but a shadow. Since most people find the outer things are the substantial reality, they are not only moving in a different world from that of the mystic, but they are puzzled to know when the letter of his statements is to be taken.
Ezekiel says that he ate his meat baked with cow's dung; Blake, that Hayley, when he could not act upon his wife, hired a villain to bereave his life. We know sufficient of Blake's relation to Hayley to understand that Hayley's murderous purpose was towards Blake's spiritual life, not his corporeal, and that he tried to prevail on Blake through his wife. We may hope also that Ezekiel did not really eat "abominable flesh," or lie for a preposterously long time on his left side. We mention the mystic's hazy treatment of external actions, to explain Blake; but we hope the mystic of the future will be more considerate of what his words are likely to convey to others, and then clear them of all ambiguity.
Blake should have guarded himself perpetually here, but was too proud or wilful to do so. Hence with his merging of inward and outward things, and using the same language for both, added to his private symbolism, what should have been his greatest poems have become submerged continents in which you may discover endless treasures only if you dare to dive, and can hold your breath under water.
Let us dive for the sake of understanding the growth of Blake's mind.
I will take _Milton_ separately, and _The Four Zoas_ and _Jerusalem_ together.
Blake's feelings towards Milton had always been divided. He saw in him the highest order of poetic genius, but also, ominously present, the spirit of reason (Urizen) enthroned in the wrong place, and a servile love of the classics that placed him under the heel of the Daughters of Memory. To change the metaphor, Milton's Pegasus was ridden by Urizen.
Blake's final criticism of Swedenborg was that he drew the line in the wrong place between heaven and hell; and his amendment was to take his two contraries and marry them. From that time forward his first question in trying a man's religion was, Where do you draw the line? Popular religion always draws it in the wrong place. Good things are reckoned evil and evil things good. But as Blake continued to put his question to the world's great spirits, he counted twenty-seven different answers that had produced twenty-seven different churches, each church having its own particular heaven and corresponding hell. He had hoped to unite all these contraries as successfully as he had Swedenborg's; but when he came to Christ's division, finding that nothing would unite His sheep and goats, and His wheat and tares, he henceforth took Christ's dividing line as absolute, and the line of any other as right only when it coincided with Christ's.