LIST OF BOOKS CONSULTED
1. Life of William Blake. By ALEXANDER GILCHRIST. Two volumes. Macmillan, 1863. New and enlarged edition, 1880.
2. William Blake: A Critical Essay. By ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE. John Camden Hotten, 1868. New edition, Chatto&Windus, 1906.
3. The Poetical Works of William Blake. Edited by W. M. ROSSETTI. Aldine Edition. Bell&Sons, 1874.
4. The Life and Letters of Samuel Palmer. By A. H. Palmer. Seeley&Co., 1892.
5. The Life of John Linnell. By ALFRED T. STORY. Two volumes. Bentley, 1892.
6. A Memoir of Edward Calvert. By his third son [SAMUEL CALVERT]. S. LOW&Co., 1893.
7. The Works of William Blake: Poetic, Symbolic, and Critical. Edited, with lithographs of the illustrated Prophetic Books, and a Memoir and Interpretation, by EDWIN JOHN ELLIS and WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS. Three volumes. Quaritch, 1893.
8. The Poems of William Blake. Edited by W. B. YEATS. 'The Muses' Library.' Lawrence&Bullen, 1893.
9. William Blake: his Life, Character, and Genius. By ALFRED T. STORY. Sonnenschein&Co., 1893.
10. William Blake: Painter and Poet. By RICHARD GARNETT. 'Portfolio,' 1895.
11. Ideas of Good and Evil. By W. B. YEATS. (William Blake and the Imagination, William Blake and his Illustrations to the Divine Comedy.) A. H. Bullen, 1903.
12. The Rossetti Papers (1862 to 1870); a Compilation by W. M. ROSSETTI. Sands&Co., 1903.
13. The Prophetic Books of William Blake: Jerusalem. Edited by E. R. D. MACLAGAN and A. G. B. RUSSELL. Bullen, 1904.
14. The Poetical Works of William Blake. Edited by JOHN SAMPSON. Oxford, 1905.
15. The Letters of William Blake; together with a Life by FREDERICK TATHAM. Edited by ARCHIBALD G. B. RUSSELL. Methuen, 1906.
16. The Poetical Works of William Blake. Edited and annotated by EDWIN J. ELLIS. Two volumes. Chatto&Windus, 1906. (The only edition containing the Prophetic Books.)
17. William Blake. Vol. I. Illustrations of the Book of Job, with a general Introduction by LAURENCE BINYON. Methuen, 1906.
18. The Real Blake. A Portrait Biography. By EDWIN J. ELLIS. Chatto&Windus, 1907.
[PART I ]
[INTRODUCTION]
I
When Blake spoke the first word of the nineteenth century there was no one to hear it, and now that his message, the message of emancipation from reality through the 'shaping spirit of imagination,' has penetrated the world, and is slowly remaking it, few are conscious of the first utterer, in modern times, of the message with which all are familiar. Thought to-day, wherever it is most individual, owes either force or direction to Nietzsche, and thus we see, on our topmost towers, the Philistine armed and winged, and without the love or fear of God or man in his heart, doing battle in Nietzsche's name against the ideas of Nietzsche. No one can think, and escape Nietzsche; but Nietzsche has come after Blake, and will pass before Blake passes.
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell anticipates Nietzsche in his most significant paradoxes, and, before his time, exalts energy above reason, and Evil, 'the active springing from energy' above Good, 'the passive that obeys reason.' Did not Blake astonish Crabb Robinson by declaring that 'there was nothing in good and evil, the virtues and vices'; that 'vices in the natural world were the highest sublimities in the spiritual world'? 'Man must become better and wickeder,' says Nietzsche in Zarathustra; and, elsewhere; 'Every man must find his own virtue.' Sin, to Blake, is negation, is nothing; 'everything is good in God's eyes'; it is the eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil that has brought sin into the world: education, that is, by which we are taught to distinguish between things that do not differ. When Nietzsche says: 'Let us rid the world of the notion of sin, and banish with it the idea of punishment,' he expresses one of Blake's central doctrines, and he realizes the corollary, which, however, he does not add. 'The Christian's soul,' he says, 'which has freed itself from sin is in most cases ruined by the hatred against sin. Look at the faces of great Christians. They are the faces of great haters.' Blake sums up all Christianity as forgiveness of sin:
'Mutual forgiveness of each vice,
Such are the gates of Paradise.'
The doctrine of the Atonement was to him a 'horrible doctrine,' because it seemed to make God a hard creditor, from whom pity could be bought for a price. 'Doth Jehovah forgive a debt only on condition that it shall be paid? ... That debt is not forgiven!' he says in Jerusalem. To Nietzsche, far as he goes on the same road, pity is 'a weakness, which increases the world's suffering'; but to Blake, in the spirit of the French proverb, forgiveness is understanding. 'This forgiveness,' says Mr. Yeats, 'was not the forgiveness of the theologian who has received a commandment from afar off, but of the poet and artist, who believes he has been taught, in a mystical vision, "that the imagination is the man himself," and believes he has discovered in the practice of his art that without a perfect sympathy there is no perfect imagination, and therefore no perfect life.' He trusted the passions, because they were alive; and, like Nietzsche, hated asceticism, because:
'Abstinence sows sand all over
The ruddy limbs and flaming hair,
But desire gratified
Plants fruits of life and beauty there.'
'Put off holiness,' he said, 'and put on intellect,' And 'the fool shall not enter into heaven, let him be ever so holy.' Is not this a heaven after the heart of Nietzsche?
Nietzsche is a Spinoza à rebours. The essence of the individual, says Spinoza, 'is the effort by which it endeavors to persevere in its own being.' 'Will and understanding are one and the same.' 'By virtue and power I understand the same thing.' 'The effort to understand is the first and sole basis of virtue.' So far it might be Nietzsche who is speaking. Only, in Spinoza, this affirmation of will, persistent egoism, power, hard understanding, leads to a conclusion which is far enough from the conclusion of Nietzsche. 'The absolute virtue of the mind is to understand; its highest virtue, therefore, to understand or know God.' That, to Nietzsche, is one of 'the beautiful words by which the conscience is lulled to sleep.' 'Virtue is power,' Spinoza leads us to think, because it is virtue; 'power is virtue,' affirms Nietzsche, because it is power. And in Spinoza's profound heroism of the mind, really a great humility, 'he who loves God does not desire that God should love him in return.' Nietzsche would find the material for a kind of desperate heroism, made up wholly of pride and defiance.
To Blake, 'God-intoxicated' more than Spinoza, 'God only acts and is, in existing beings and men,' as Spinoza might also have said; to him, as to Spinoza, all moral virtue is identical with understanding, and 'men are admitted into heaven, not because they have curbed and governed their passions, but because they have cultivated their understandings.' Yet to Blake Spinoza's mathematical approach to truth would have been a kind of negation. Even an argument from reason seemed to him atheistical: to one who had truth, as he was assured, within him, reason was only 'the bound or outward circumference of energy,' but 'energy is the only life,' and, as to Nietzsche, is 'eternal delight.'
Yet, to Nietzsche, with his strange, scientific distrust of the imagination, of those who so 'suspiciously' say 'We see what others do not see,' there comes distrust, hesitation, a kind of despair, precisely at the point where Blake enters into his liberty. 'The habits of our senses,' says Nietzsche, 'have plunged us into the lies and deceptions of feeling.' 'Whoever believes in nature,' says Blake, 'disbelieves in God; for nature is the work of the Devil.' 'These again,' Nietzsche goes on, 'are the foundations of all our judgments and "knowledge," there is no escape whatever, no back-way or by-way into the real world.' But the real world, to Blake, into which he can escape at every moment, is the world of imagination, from which messengers come to him, daily and nightly.
Blake said 'The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction,' and it is partly in what they helped to destroy that Blake and Nietzsche are at one; but destruction, with Blake, was the gesture of a hand which brushes aside needless hindrances, while to Nietzsche it was 'an intellectual thing,' the outer militant part of 'the silent, self-sufficient man in the midst of a general enslavement, who practices self-defense against the outside world, and is constantly living in a state of supreme fortitude.' Blake rejoins Nietzsche as he had rejoined Spinoza, by a different road, having fewer devils to cast out, and no difficulty at all in maintaining his spiritual isolation, his mental liberty, under all circumstances. And to Blake, to be 'myself alone, shut up in myself,' was to be in no merely individual but in a universal world, that world of imagination whose gates seemed to him to be open to every human being. No less than Nietzsche he says to every man: Be yourself, nothing else matters or exists; but to be myself, to him, was to enter by the imagination into eternity.
The philosophy of Nietzsche was made out of his nerves and was suffering, but to Blake it entered like sunlight into the eyes. Nietzsche's mind is the most sleepless of minds; with him every sensation turns instantly into the stuff of thought; he is terribly alert, the more so because he never stops to systematize; he must be for ever apprehending. He darts out feelers in every direction, relentlessly touching the whole substance of the world. His apprehension is minute rather than broad; he is content to seize one thing at a time, and he is content if each separate thing remains separate; no theory ties together or limits his individual intuitions. What we call his philosophy is really no more than the aggregate of these intuitions coming to us through the medium of a remarkable personality. His personality stands to him in the place of a system. Speaking of Kant and Schopenhauer, he says: 'Their thoughts do not constitute a passionate history of the soul.' His thoughts are the passionate history of his soul. It is for this reason that he is an artist among philosophers rather than a pure philosopher. And remember that he is also not, in the absolute sense, the poet, but the artist. He saw and dreaded the weaknesses of the artist, his side-issues in the pursuit of truth. But in so doing he dreaded one of his own weaknesses.
Blake, on the other hand, receives nothing through his sensations, suffers nothing through his nerves. 'I know of no other Christianity,' he says, 'and of no other Gospel than the liberty both of body and mind to exercise the divine arts of Imagination: Imagination, the real and eternal world of which this vegetable universe is but a faint shadow, and in which we shall live in our eternal or imaginative bodies, when these vegetable mortal bodies are no more.' To Nietzsche the sense of a divine haunting became too heavy a burden for his somewhat inhuman solitude, the solitude of Alpine regions, with their steadfast glitter, their thin, high, intoxicating air. 'Is this obtrusiveness of heaven,' he cries, 'this inevitable superhuman neighbor, not enough to drive one mad?' But Blake, when he says, 'I am under the direction of messengers from heaven, daily and nightly,' speaks out of natural joy, which is wholly humility, and it is only 'if we fear to do the dictates of our angels, and tremble at the tasks set before us,' it is only then that he dreads, as the one punishment, that 'every one in eternity will leave him.'