Let me not, however, be misunderstood. It would be a grievous and ludicrous mistake to associate the child-cult which runs like a thread of filmy star-light through the work of William Blake with the somewhat strained and fantastic attitude of child-worship which inspires such poetry as Francis Thompson's "Love in Dian's Lap," and gives a ridiculous and affected air to so many of our little ones themselves. The child of Blake's imagination is the immortal and undying child to be found in the heart of every man and every woman. It is the child spoken of in some of his most beautiful passages, by Nietzsche himself—the child who will come at the last, when the days of the Camel and the days of the Lion are over, and inaugurate the beginning of the "Great Noon."
"And there the lion's ruddy eyes
Shall flow with tears of gold
And pitying the tender cries
And walking round the fold,
Saying, 'Wrath by his weakness
And by his health sickness
Are driven away
From our immortal day.'"
Using boldly and freely, and with far more genuine worship than many orthodox believers, the figure and idea of Christ; it is not exactly the Christ we know in traditional Catholic piety, to whom in association with this image of the man-child, Blake's mind is constantly turning.
With a noble blasphemy—dearer, one may hope, to God, than the slavishness of many evangelical pietists—he treats the Christian legend with the same sort of freedom that the old Greek poets used in dealing with the gods of Nature.
The figure of Christ becomes under his hands, as we feel sometimes it does under the hands of the great painters of the Renaissance, a god among other gods; a power among other powers, but one possessed of a secret drawn from the hidden depths of the universe, which in the end is destined to prevail. So far does Blake stray from the barriers of traditional reverence, that we find him boldly associating this Christ of his—this man-child who is to redeem the race—with a temper the very opposite of an ascetic one.
What makes his philosophy so interesting and original is the fact that he entirely disentangles the phenomena of sexual love from any notion or idea of sin or shame. The man-child whose pitiful heart and whose tenderness toward the weak and unhappy are drawn from the Christ-Story, takes almost the form of a Pagan Eros—the full-grown, soft-limbed Eros of later Greek fancy—when the question of restraint or renunciation or ascetic chastity is brought forward.
What Blake has really done, be it said with all reverence, and far from profane ears—is to steal the Christ-child out of his cradle in the church of his worshippers and carry him into the chambers of the East, the chambers of the Sun, into the "Green fields and happy groves" of primitive Arcadian innocence, where the feet of the dancers are light upon the dew of the morning, and where the children of passion and of pleasure sport and play, as they did in the Golden Age.
In that wonderful picture of his representing the sons of God "shouting together" in the primal joy of creation, one has a vision of the large and noble harmony he strove after between an emancipated flesh and a free spirit. William Blake, in his Adamic innocence of "sin," has something in him that suggests Walt Whitman, but unlike Whitman he prefers to use the figure of Christ rather than any vague "ensemble" of nature-forces to symbolise the triumphant nuptials of soul and body.
Sometimes in his strange verses one has the impression that one is reading the fragmentary and broken utterances of some great ancient poet-philosopher—some Pythagoras or Empedocles—through whose gnomic oracles runs the rhythm of the winds and tides, and for whose ears the stars in their courses have a far-flung harmony.
He often seems to make use of the Bible and Biblical usages, very much as the ancient poets made use of Hesiod or of Homer, treating such writings with reverence, but subordinating what is borrowed from them to new and original purpose.