CHAPTER VI
THE REBELS
Blake was thirty-three when in 1790 he wrote The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
It marked a crisis in his life. Hitherto, with all the generous exuberance of youth, he was striving to leave the past behind, and reach forth to something new that by sheer glory and beauty should sweep up in its course the youth of the ages to come.
For a time he believed that Swedenborg could supply him with the fire to fashion and direct his own genius; but after poring long over his pages, he began reluctantly to discover that the fire of his imagination had either never been kindled or it was long since extinct. Whatever else remained in Swedenborg—and there were undeniably many good things—was impotent for the supreme task of supplying the creative spark.
Blake was disappointed and disillusioned. Never again did he make an impetuous rush to embrace any man, however dazzling his gifts. But not yet had he learnt the vital value of the past. If no new prophet arrived, there was still himself, and if he trusted himself with passionate faith, he might yet accomplish the desired thing.
In 1791 the outer events of his life ran a new course. Some time previously, Fuseli had introduced him to a bookseller and publisher named Johnson, living at 72 St Paul’s Churchyard.
This Johnson was a remarkable man. His sympathies were with rebels, whom he detected, welcomed, and encouraged. But he had none of the hard narrowness of advanced liberals, and his eye and heart were quick also to discover and cheer such a shy, diffident, conservative genius as Cowper. He was a friend to the authors whose works he published; and in a little upper chamber he gave weekly dinner parties, to which were bidden William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, Tom Paine, Dr Price and Dr Priestley, and now Blake himself. In the ’eighties Blake had moved among elegant Blue-stockings who were above all things anxious to show themselves true daughters of Sarah: now in the ’nineties he was one of a party of rebels who despised the past, and were hailing the French Revolution, believing that after a few more of such upheavals a millennium would surely come in which man would be perfected.