England’s boast of colonies was to him a vain boast, and her watchword “Empire” had no magic for him. While the thirteen States of North America were possessions of England, and were ruled by thirteen governors of England’s choosing, he believed that America must remain enslaved and unfruitful, and therefore Earth must lose another portion of the Infinite. To lose a portion, however small, of the Infinite is unutterable loss, and so Blake’s fiery impetuous sympathies burned towards those men—Washington, Franklin, Paine, Warren—who had stirred the States to insurrection and revolt. His imagination leapt to an ensuing liberty in which social evils should be left far behind.
“Let the enchainèd soul, shut up in darkness and in sighing,
Whose face has never seen a smile in thirty weary years,
Rise and look out; his chains are loose, his dungeon doors are open;
And let his wife and children return from the oppressor’s scourge.
They look behind at every step, and believe it is a dream,
Singing: ‘The sun has left his blackness, and has found a fresher morning,
And the fair moon rejoices in the clear and cloudless night;
For Empire is no more, and now the Lion and Wolf shall cease.’”
Then all the things that religion has repressed spring up and flourish. The pristine fiery joy, once perverted to ten commands, burns through all obstructions, and, as a flame of life, leaps to life, rejoicing in all living things, even in the harlot who remains undefiled, “though ravished in her cradle night and morn.” And man walks amidst the lustful fires unconsumed. The fires serve to make his feet “become like brass, his knees and thighs like silver, and his breast and head like gold.”
Blake exulted in his vision and proclaimed it in unfaltering tones because he knew that “the soul of sweet delight can never be defiled.” Here he adds a touch or two to his vision of sex in The Vision of the Daughters of Albion, and he reaches its heart. The soul of sweet delight is eternally clean. Once a man has grasped this truth, and it may cost him much mental fight to reach it, then he is able to think and speak cleanly of the passion of love, he can go naked, like Adam in Eden, and the angels of the highest heaven, and know no touch of shame.
There is much in modern literature and art that Blake would have detested, but he would have loved the soul of Sonia the undefiled harlot that Dostoieffski has revealed with such wonderful power in his Crime and Punishment.
Blake followed the American conflict until “the British soldiers through the Thirteen States sent up a howl of anguish” and threw their swords and muskets to the earth. They were unable to stand before the flames of Orc; and since those flames had now reached to France, Blake dreamed that nothing could withstand their hungry course till the regeneration of the world should come.
All this and much more is said in Blake’s symbolical way. Here, as in The French Revolution, there are no portraits. The rebels of the States, and even Paine, are mere names, and much less real than the angels of the States who carry on the real business. These angels lived in an ancient palace built on the Atlantean hills between America and England. It is interesting to note these things, because the angels of the States are suggested by the angels of the Kingdoms in the apocalyptic book of Daniel, which Blake loved and instinctively understood, and the Atlanteans have always had an irresistible attraction for men of a theosophical turn of mind. Blake was a close student of the apocalyptic books of the Bible all his life; his knowledge of the Atlanteans probably came to him through his Rosicrucian readings.
America lets us see the profound admiration Blake felt towards Paine for his action in the American War. Later on we shall find him criticizing with some asperity the deism that his friend confessed.
I must pass over Blake’s other writings of this year, and merely recount that he again changed his residence, and went to live in Lambeth at 13 Hercules Buildings. Dr Samson says that it is now numbered 23, but authorities cannot agree whether it was this house or the next.
In 1794 Blake engraved his Europe: A Prophecy, which is the last of his poems dealing with contemporaneous political events.