Blake's vision, then, ranging freely among the planes of consciousness, gives him access to the great Memory which is within the cosmos; and at rare moments he goes beyond the cosmos, and then his words proceed from the highest inspiration.
In appraising the value of Blake's defamation of the Greeks' inspiration, one must remember that he was not a profound Grecian. His studies with Hayley cannot have carried him into the heart of the Greek genius. When he limits its inspiration to Memory, there is no scholar, I imagine, that would agree with him. The Greeks did make an invaluable contribution to the world's memory; and while one source of their inspiration came from the past, we must further admit that it was the past wedded to the present which actually produced something new, that is, of the creative order.
Blake's own inspiration when it came from his spiritual guides is not of such a high order as the Greek's at his highest. The so-called guides, if we may trust St Paul, are inside of the cosmos, like the great Memory, and their source of wisdom is from this world, which is the arena of the Church in her militant course. It is only by watching her that they are able to get glimpses of the manifold wisdom of God. Hence to place oneself under their guidance is a hindrance to receiving that highest inspiration that comes direct from the Spirit of God.
Blake was wrong, too, in his efforts to shut off Memory. Of course he could not succeed. Every page of _Jerusalem_ shows that Memory was at work though shackled. Memory alone could have made it coherent and a luminous whole, as it had made _Paradise Lost_; but it was not free enough to keep its different scenes, often very beautiful, from flying far apart, and the imagination grows weary in trying to capture the complete picture.
The one thing in these poems that we can positively affirm to be new is their symbolism, and that cannot be defended. Symbolism is beautiful only as it is universal, or can become so. It should be one language against many tongues. But Blake's is not even the tongue of a nation or a tribe. It is his own private invention, and, incidentally, uncouth, forbidding, unintelligible, and in actual fact a little insane. It is true that we can learn his symbolism after much labour; but a beautiful and catholic symbolism is the one thing that we have a right to understand, without learning, through the imagination, which Blake always affirmed to be divine.