Thus Godwin was rationalist, altruist, anarchist, and non-resister. It is not probable that Blake ever read Political Justice, his patience not being equal to the task. While ardently desiring political justice and liberty, it was soon plain to him from his personal knowledge of Godwin that all his first principles were false. It was not true that man’s character originates in his external circumstances, although these do act on him. The differences between men are traceable to a fundamental inequality. One man turns everything he touches into dross, another into gold. Why? Blake had no need to argue. Being a mystic, he knew that man’s innate principles, ideas, and instincts differed, that heredity could not be ignored, that beyond the five inlets of the senses which reason alone recognizes, there are a thousand inlets for the man whose spiritual understanding is awakened.
He shivered at the thought of what the world would become if the rationalist had his way; for though he would sweep away superstitions, injustices, cruelties, yet from his invariable lack of discrimination he would crush with these the flowers and fruits of imagination, intuition, and inspiration. Besides, whether State or no State, what sort of life would man’s be when his fundamental instincts and passions were allowed no expression? Blake had not the statesman’s power of looking at men in the mass, but he knew that the individual was of extreme importance in any community, and also that the individual’s value lay in his power of passion, and therefore Godwin’s calm, reasoned, doctrinaire scheme for bringing the Millennium made no appeal to him whatever, and the two men went their separate courses.
It is interesting to note later that Shelley attained to liberty and song just so far as he shook off Godwin. When he talked with exaggerated nonsense about kings and priests, he was but repeating what he imbibed from Godwin in his early undiscriminating youth.
Mary Wollstonecraft was something quite new in the feminine way. Suffering in youth all the torments of a repressed and restricted woman-child, and possessing a full, passionate nature, she rebelled. Everywhere she turned she saw woman set in an utterly false position, and, as a consequence, silly, affected, degraded. Even those who made a bid for some solid knowledge simpered, and too often, like Mrs Piozzi, repeated by rote, and in Johnsonian periods, what they did not understand. Mary never doubted for a moment that woman enfranchised economically would rise to great things. Unerringly, she detected the true cause of woman’s failure. “It is vain to expect virtue from women till they are in some degree independent of men.” “Women must have a civil existence in the State.” Poor Mary was terribly alone, and had to work out her new faith in woman without any human assistance. Fearlessly she exposed the delicate immorality of Dr Gregory’s Legacy to his Daughters, the “most sentimental rant” of Dr George Fordyce, the oriental despotism of Rousseau; and not content with such small game, she entered the lists against the arch-conservator Edmund Burke, for which Walpole named her “a hyena in petticoats,” and Burke himself reckoned her with the viragoes and poissardes. Mary’s wide sympathies were not only for women. Her knowledge of children had convinced her that they too had rights, and she had an irresistible faith that with tyranny put down and political liberty won, the oppressed peoples of the world would prove themselves capable of the highest things. And therefore she flung herself into the cause of the French Revolution, and made that her bone of contention with Burke.
There is no finer contrast than Fanny Burney for bringing into relief the special characteristics of Mary Wollstonecraft as a type of new woman. Fanny welcomed with breathless interest the French emigrants as they arrived one by one at Juniper Hall, and listened with horror as Talleyrand, M. d’Arblay, M. de Narbonne recounted the atrocities of the people. Mary took a room in Paris and watched their progress through her window. Fanny was completely overcome at the news of Louis XVI’s martyrdom. Mary watched him go to his death, and would not allow a momentary pity to make her forget the down-trodden poor.
Fanny was a slave to conventions. Mary followed her own nature. Fanny refused to correspond with Madame de Genlis, and asked Queen Charlotte whether she had not done right, and at her father’s bidding dropped Madame de Staël, to whom she was attracted. Mary consulted no one about her friendships, and in defiance of legal bonds was willing to be the mother of Charles Imlay’s child because she loved him.
Alas! Charles Imlay was faithless; and when Mary returned to England with little Fanny Imlay, alone and broken in spirit, it was bookseller Johnson who befriended her as he had our lonely Blake. Obviously there was much in common between her and Blake. He was with her in her hope for women, and children, and the poor. She had found herself in spite of mistakes, and her character and her works were informed with vital passion. Had Blake been single, and she drawn into friendship with him, she would have become the perfect type of new woman, imaginative, understanding, impassioned, inspired; as it happened, it was into Godwin’s arms she fell, and not Blake’s, and while Godwin took her in like a wandering dove, and gave her shelter and sympathy, yet the slight chill of his marital deportment and reasoned ways would have hindered her, had she lived, from bringing her fine character to full fruition.
Tom Paine presents another type of rebel with whom Blake came into contact. He had already made for himself fast friends and bitter enemies by aiding and abetting the American Rebellion. The thirteen colonies, though irritated by the Stamp Act, were not at once inclined to rebel, and even after Charles Townshend’s proposal of tea-duty, South Carolina, Pennsylvania, New York, and Delaware still held back. Paine could wield a powerful pen, and by this means he kept the flame of discontent alive, and urged the States on till Jefferson composed a Declaration of Independence to which the four backward States were brought reluctantly to agree, and on July 4th, 1776, the American United Colonies declared themselves Free and Independent States.
After this success Paine felt that his pen was equal to any task. Having returned to England and fallen in with the Godwin set, he of course shared with them in their sympathies for the French Revolution, and in addition declared himself a deist, and set himself, in his Age of Reason, to discredit the Bible. It was all very well when he was doing the rough work of fanning rebellion, but he was ludicrously unfit for the fine work of criticizing the Bible. Its poetry and mysticism and manifold wisdom were not even suspected by him. He stolidly read through the sublime chapters of Isaiah, and thought them worse than the production of a schoolboy; and when he came to the stories of the Nativity, which, whether fact or poetry, are marvellously beautiful, he became so grossly indecent that one is bound to relegate him to the vulgarest order of Bible-smashers.
His deism was a symptom of the times. Dr Priestley, who also attended Johnson’s dinners, was a polished ornament of the sect. They persuaded themselves that God, having set the universe agog, remained Himself wholly outside of it. It was well that Blake should come into personal touch with these rebel deists. They could never appeal to him even for a moment, for he was penetrated all his life with the belief that God dwelt inside of His creation; and since all theological rebellion tended more and more in the direction of a mechanical deism, he began to suspect that he must look elsewhere to discover the wisdom that should crown his years.