In 1793 was published a small book of engravings For Children, The Gates of Paradise. Blake re-issued this in 1810, changing the For Children to For the Sexes. The changes do not throw fresh light on Blake. Rather, what is important to know, we see, in spite of the changes, that Blake’s deepest thoughts were the same in 1795 and 1810. I will quote only the first two lines:
“Mutual Forgiveness of each vice,
Such are the Gates of Paradise.”
Forgiveness of sins, so impossible for the Pharisee, so easy for the artist, is the heart of Christ’s gospel. Blake leaned to that form of Christianity which best understood forgiveness. At this time he was inclined to think that the Church of Rome came nearest to Christ.
Blake reprinted The Prologue and Characters of Chaucer’s Pilgrims in 1812. Then followed five years of indefatigable production, but the works are lost for this world, though Blake would probably say that they were published in the other, and read, and remembered.
About 1817 he engraved leaflets, Laocoon, and On Homer’s Poetry, and On Virgil.
The first is covered with small writing, fresh proverbs of hell, which are the same in substance as the earlier proverbs, but less provocative. The Laocoon perfectly expressed his own experience during years of obscure struggle. He found the same mighty conflict described from cover to cover of the Bible. Christians have been accustomed to see there the history of their sin, conviction, struggle, and victory. Blake had nothing to say against all this, but he named that which was striving for the victory the spirit of art, and all the things that accompany the conflict—prayer, praise, fasting—he explained in terms of art. Protestantism had made necessary such a vehement vindication of the beautiful. To-day, I suppose, we accept naturally Blake’s aphorisms, but need to rediscover some of those other things that protestantism and catholicism alike have insisted on so uncompromisingly in the past.
From On Homer’s Poetry I quote the following:
“Unity and Morality are secondary considerations and belong to Philosophy and not to Poetry, to Exception and not to Rule, to Accident and not to Substance. The Ancients called it eating of the Tree of Good and Evil.”
In other words, poetry, like life and love and other instinctive things, goes deeper and before our fine-spun distinctions of number and morality. Philosophers have sprung up since Blake’s day who are wonderfully agreed with him.
This on the cause of European wars is striking: “The Classics! it is the Classics, and not Goths nor Monks, that desolate Europe with Wars.”