Finally the voice of the people is heard rising from valley and hill. What though “the husbandman weeps at blights of the fife, and blastings of trumpets consume the souls of mild France, and the pale mother nourishes her child to deadly slaughter, yet when the will of the people is accomplished, then shall the soldier throw down his sword and musket and run and embrace the meek peasant ... the saw and the hammer, the chisel, the pencil, the pen, and the instruments of heavenly song sound in the wilds once forbidden ... and the happy earth sing in its course, the mild peaceable nations be opened to heaven, and men walk with their fathers in bliss.”
This and much more is what the capture of the Bastille symbolized for Blake. We see that his hopes ran high. The Revolution was to rectify no temporary disorder. It was to set the people free for the first time in the world’s history, and so effect a Kingdom of God on earth which had been the passionate yearning of imprisoned souls in all ages. The Kingdom was to come by passion and not intellect, by fire and not snow. And so to cold doctrinaire Godwin and such-like, he would have said as Orleans to the Archbishop in the poem: “Go, thou cold recluse, into the fires of another’s high flaming rich bosom.” Godwin was to go, as we know, into Mary’s flaming rich bosom, and to warm as he chilled her; but even Mary could not bring him to the flaming point which burned in the bosom of William Blake as it had in the bosom of Jesus Christ.
Blake’s obscurity protected him from the persecution that was pursuing its victims in the Johnson circle.
On July 14th, 1790, Dr Priestley had arranged a dinner party in Birmingham to commemorate the capture of the Bastille, for which he was mobbed, and his house, containing a fine library, philosophical instruments, and laborious manuscripts, was destroyed. In 1792 Tom Paine was marked out by the Home Office as another victim; but while he was reporting at Johnson’s his public speech of the preceding evening, Blake advised him to decamp at once to France or he was a dead man; and he, taking the hint, escaped safely to Calais, and was ready to take his part in the National Convention, to which the Department of Calais had appointed him. Paine never returned to England, but he was to encounter many perils during the Reign of Terror, and to write the Age of Reason, in which he attacked at once the Bible and French atheism.
Blake, still fired by liberty, wrote his Song of Liberty according to Dr Sampson about 1792.
Liberty was the new-born terror, fire, and wonder, brought forth by the eternal Female. Under its inspiration England was to be healed, America renewed, Spain to burst the barriers of old Rome, and Rome herself to cast her keys deep down into eternity. But liberty has a dire conflict with Urizen, here called the jealous King and the gloomy King, who with his grey-browed counsellors, thunderous warriors, curled veterans, and ten commands, makes a fight for life. Liberty stamps the stony law to dust till Empire is no more, and is confident that the lion and wolf shall cease. The sons of liberty are sons of joy, and counting that everything that lives is holy, proceed to act whenever they will.
Thus Blake stumbles again on the vexed subject of sex, and it was to remain something of an obsession with him for many years.
His main thoughts can be gathered from The Visions of the Daughters of Albion, which he engraved and printed in 1793. The heroine Oothoon, a Blakean Tess, loves and is beloved by Theotormon. But Bromion, forcibly conveying her to his stormy bed, tears her virgin mantle in twain. Satiated, he cries to Theotormon: “Now thou mayst marry Bromion’s harlot, and protect the child of Bromion’s rage, that Oothoon shall put forth in nine moons’ time.”
Theotormon refused. Consumed with jealousy, and reckoning Oothoon a defiled thing, he cannot receive her, and the two, loving, remain apart, consuming their days in misery and tears.
Oothoon calls on Theotormon’s eagles to rend away her defiled bosom, that she may reflect the image of Theotormon on her pure transparent breast. The eagles rend their bleeding prey, at which Theotormon, considering that Oothoon suffers what she deserves, severely smiles. She, with no touch of resentment at his self-righteous cruelty, which in truth she is too self-effacing to perceive, reflects the smile, “and as the clear spring, muddied with feet of beasts, grows pure and smiles.” It is plain that, whatever her past acts, she is a pure living soul, and Theotormon with his conventional morality is neither clean nor alive. She is “a new-washed lamb tinged with the village smoke,” or “a bright swan by the red earth of our immortal river,” but she has only to bathe her wings, and she is white and pure to hover round Theotormon’s breast.