THE JUDGMENT DAY (1806)
Whether, however, these conclusions can be accepted by the reader as true, they can at least be accepted as typifying the kind of thing which William Blake believed to be true. He would have felt the sea not as a waste but as a wall. Nature had no outline, but imagination had. And it was imagination that was trustworthy.
This definition explains other things. Blake was enthusiastically in favour of the French Revolution; yet he enthusiastically hated that school of sceptics which, in the opinion of many, made the Revolution possible. He did not mind Marat; but he detested Voltaire. The reason is obvious in the light of his views on Nature and Imagination. The Republican Idealists he liked because they were Idealists, because their abstract doctrines about justice and human equality were abstract doctrines. But the school of Voltaire was naturalistic; it loved to remind man of his earthly origin and even of his earthly degradation. The war, which Blake loved, was a war of the invisible against the visible. Valmy and Arcola were part of such a war; it was a war between the visible kings and the invisible Republic. But Voltaire’s war was exactly the opposite; it was a discrediting of the invisible Church by the indecent exhibition of the real Church, with its fat friars or its foolish old women. Blake had no sympathy with this mere flinging of facts at a great conception. In a really powerful and exact metaphor he describes the powerlessness of this earthly and fragmentary sceptical attack.
Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau,
Mock on, mock on, ’tis all in vain,
You throw the sand against the wind
And the wind blows it back again.
An excellent image for a mere attack by masses of detail.
There were some of Blake’s intellectual conceptions which I have not professed either to admire or to defend. Some of his views were really what the old mediæval world called heresies and what the modern world (with an equally healthy instinct but with less scientific clarity) calls fads. In either case the definition of the fad or heresy is not so very difficult. A fad or heresy is the exaltation of something which, even if true, is secondary or temporary in its nature against those things which are essential and eternal, those things which always prove themselves true in the long run. In short, it is the setting up of the mood against the mind. For instance: it is a mood, a beautiful and lawful mood, to wonder how oysters really feel. But it is a fad, an ugly and unlawful fad, to starve human beings because you will not let them eat oysters. It is a beautiful mood to feel impelled to assassinate Mr Carnegie; but it is a fad to maintain seriously that any private person has a right to do it. We all have emotional moments in which we should like to be indecent in a drawing-room; but it is faddist to turn all drawing-rooms into places in which one is indecent. We all have at times an almost holy temptation suddenly to scream out very loud; but it is heretical and pedantic really to go on screaming for the remainder of your natural life. If you throw one bomb you are only a murderer; but if you keep on persistently throwing bombs you are in awful danger of at last becoming a prig. It has been this trouble that has partly poisoned the people from which William Blake inherited, if not his blood, at least his civilization. The real trouble with Puritanism was not that it was a senseless prejudice nor yet altogether (as would seem superficially obvious) that it was a mere form of devil-worship. It was none of these things in its first and freshest motive.