Page:Biographical and critical studies by James Thomson ("B.V.").djvu/355

A STRANGE BOOK 339 stark, minutely detailed symbolisms and analogies are merely arbitrary, fanciful, ingenious, personal, and their elaboration a mere trifling and waste of precious time, like the ivory carving and puzale-boxes of the Chinese, the tattooing of savages^ — they are to the genuine and general what concetti or conceits are to real imaginative poetry. And no one I am acquainted with would have more clearly perceived this than such a splendid master of true analogy (the magic- wand of analogy, Der Zauberstab der Analogic^ as Novalis well terms it) as Dr. Wilkinson, had he not been from an early age over-dominated by Sweden- borg, whose teachings and suggestions, which certainly enlarged his youth, have as certainly cramped his manhood. As for the coherency and self-consistency whereon Wilkinson insists as substantiating the solidity of this vast labyrinthine structure of correspondences, I reply that any castle in the air, whether Swedenborgian, Spinozistic, or Ptolemaic, may be as coherent and consistent in itself 2^% the most massy mountain-range; only the former has its baseless base in the air, and the latter is deep-rooted in the firm earth. Other systems of differing correspondences could be wrought just as consistently from the Bible (did not several of the old Fathers dabble a good deal in this sort of speculation?), and others equally from any compre- hensive book ; as Blake said in his vehement way : " Any man of mechanical talents may, from the writings of Paracelsus or Jacob Behmen, produce ten thousand volumes of equal value with Swedenborg's, and from those of Dante or Shakespeare an infinite number."