Swedenborg’s teaching continues in The Songs of Experience, but with a question mark.
Blake sings to the Fly:
“Am not I
A fly like thee?
Or art not thou
A man like me?”
To see humanity in a fly is Swedenborgian; and Blake answered his question in the affirmative.
In the next song there are many questions; and it cannot be doubted that Blake’s answers would have been the exact contrary to Swedenborg’s.
Swedenborg, like his theosophical predecessors, had a way of denying that God created the particular animals that man finds inconvenient. Tigers, wolves, rats, bats, and moths are so obnoxious, that it soothes man’s vanity to suppose that they are embodiments of evil exhaled from hell. They have served as restful homes for vampires and other creations of Old Night. And so Swedenborg, governed by mental habits of reason and use as measured by man, drew a sharp line between animals of a heavenly and hellish origin. When Blake saw the tiger he saw differently. His æsthetic eye instantly marvelled at its “fearful symmetry,” the fire of its eyes, the sinews of its heart; and he cried, “Did He who made the Lamb make thee?” He gives no answer. But there was no need. “In what distant deeps or skies” the tiger had his origin had no further perplexity for him once he had married hell to heaven.
The Little Vagabond, though hardly within the ken of Swedenborg, contains what every vagabond knows. Blake was able to rescue vagabonds as well as tigers from an exclusively hellish origin.
Blake remained an orthodox Swedenborgian for nearly two years, and then came reaction and rebellion, not without resentment and bitterness. What was the cause of Blake’s permanent repudiation of Swedenborg? Various reasons are given by Swedenborgians to prove that Blake was wholly in the wrong. Mr Morris gives a beautifully simple explanation. Quoting Blake’s saying that he had two different states, one in which he liked Swedenborg’s writings and one in which he disliked them, he says, “The latter was a state of pride in himself, and then they were distasteful to him, but afterwards he knew that he had not been wise and sane.” That is the way that we all at some time in our life account for the obstinacy of those who will not worship at our altar.
Mr Garth Wilkinson, who of Swedenborgians most deserves to be heard, wrote in the preface of his edition of The Songs of Innocence and Experience, 1839, that Blake entered the “invisible world through the terrific porter of its northern gate.” Like Shelley, he verged towards pantheism, not a spiritual pantheism, but a “natural spiritualism” or “ego-theism.” His genius “entered into and inhabited the Egyptian and Asiatic perversions of an ancient and true religion,” and thus “found a home in the ruins of Ancient and consummated Churches.” Wilkinson discovered a great deal of the ego and of hell in Blake. All of this criticism, which is ingenious, I cannot accept. To begin with the ego. Swedenborg believed that every man in his own proprium was consumed with self-love, and that only love to the Lord could enable him entirely to overcome his love of self. Blake believed that the real self was made in the image of God, and therefore it must be loved, reverenced, and obeyed. The recognition of the same divine principle in others enables one to love one’s neighbour as oneself. All German mystical talk of hatred to self and death to self was repudiated by Blake as artificial and unreal.
It is true that Blake came nearer to pantheism than Swedenborg did. He had come, through his teacher, to regard the universe as an emanation from God, and in working from this doctrine to its logical outcome in pantheism he was more consistent than Swedenborg, who tried to evade the consequences of his own theory.