As Blake sat bent over the great drawing-book, in which he made his
designs to _The Divine Comedy_, he was very certain that he and Dante
represented spiritual states which face one another in an eternal enmity.
Dante, because a great poet, was 'inspired by the Holy Ghost'; but his
inspiration was mingled with a certain philosophy, blown up out of his
age, which Blake held for mortal and the enemy of immortal things, and
which from the earliest times has sat in high places and ruled the world.
This philosophy was the philosophy of soldiers, of men of the world, of
priests busy with government, of all who, because of the absorption in
active life, have been persuaded to judge and to punish, and partly also,
he admitted, the philosophy of Christ, who in descending into the world
had to take on the world; who, in being born of Mary, a symbol of the law
in Blake's symbolic language, had to 'take after his mother,' and drive
the money-changers out of the Temple. Opposed to this was another
philosophy, not made by men of action, drudges of time and space, but by
Christ when wrapped in the divine essence, and by artists and poets, who
are taught by the nature of their craft to sympathize with all living
things, and who, the more pure and fragrant is their lamp, pass the
further from all limitations, to come at last to forget good and evil in
an absorbing vision of the happy and the unhappy. The one philosophy was
worldly, and established for the ordering of the body and the fallen will,
and so long as it did not call its 'laws of prudence' 'the laws of God,'
was a necessity, because 'you cannot have liberty in this world without
what you call moral virtue'; the other was divine, and established for the
peace of the imagination and the unfallen will, and, even when obeyed with
a too literal reverence, could make men sin against no higher principality
than prudence. He called the followers of the first philosophy pagans, no
matter by what name they knew themselves, because the pagans, as he
understood the word pagan, believed more in the outward life, and in what
he called 'war, princedom, and victory,' than in the secret life of the
spirit; and the followers of the second philosophy Christians, because
only those whose sympathies had been enlarged and instructed by art and
poetry could obey the Christian command of unlimited forgiveness. Blake
had already found this 'pagan' philosophy in Swedenborg, in Milton, in
Wordsworth, in Sir Joshua Reynolds, in many persons, and it had roused him
so constantly and to such angry paradox that its overthrow became the
signal passion of his life, and filled all he did and thought with the
excitement of a supreme issue. Its kingdom was bound to grow weaker so
soon as life began to lose a little in crude passion and naïve tumult, but
Blake was the first to announce its successor, and he did this, as must
needs be with revolutionists who have 'the law' for 'mother,' with a firm
conviction that the things his opponents held white were indeed black, and
that the things they held black, white; with a strong persuasion that all
busy with government are men darkness and 'something other than human
life'; one is reminded of Shelley, who was the next to take up the cry,
though with a less abundant philosophic faculty, but still more of
Nietzsche, whose thought flows always, though with an even more violent
current, in the bed Blake's thought has worn.
The kingdom that was passing was, he held, the kingdom of the Tree of
Knowledge; the kingdom that was coming was the kingdom of the Tree of
Life: men who ate from the Tree of Knowledge wasted their days in anger
against one another, and in taking one another captive in great nets; men
who sought their food among the green leaves of the Tree of Life condemned
none but the unimaginative and the idle, and those who forget that even
love and death and old age are an imaginative art.
In these opposing kingdoms is the explanation of the petulant sayings he
wrote on the margins of the great sketch-book, and of those others, still
more petulant, which Crabb Robinson has recorded in his diary. The sayings
about the forgiveness of sins have no need for further explanation, and
are in contrast with the attitude of that excellent commentator, Herr
Hettinger, who, though Dante swooned from pity at the tale of Francesca,
will only 'sympathize' with her 'to a certain extent,' being taken in a
theological net. 'It seems as if Dante,' Blake wrote, 'supposes God was
something superior to the Father of Jesus; for if He gives rain to the
evil and the good, and His sun to the just and the unjust, He can never
have builded Dante's Hell, nor the Hell of the Bible, as our parsons
explain it. It must have been framed by the dark spirit itself, and so I
understand it.' And again, 'Whatever task is of vengeance and whatever is
against forgiveness of sin is not of the Father but of Satan, the accuser,
the father of Hell.' And again, and this time to Crabb Robinson, 'Dante
saw devils where I saw none. I see good only.' 'I have never known a very
bad man who had not something very good about him.' This forgiveness was
not the forgiveness of the theologian who has received a commandment from
afar off, but of the poet and artist, who believes he has been taught, in
a mystical vision, 'that the imagination is the man himself,' and believes
he has discovered in the practice of his art that without a perfect
sympathy there is no perfect imagination, and therefore no perfect life.
At another moment he called Dante 'an atheist, a mere politician busied
about this world, as Milton was, till, in his old age, returned to God
whom he had had in his childhood.' 'Everything is atheism,' he has already
explained, 'which assumed the reality of the natural and unspiritual
world.' Dante, he held, assumed its reality when he made obedience to its
laws a condition of man's happiness hereafter, and he set Swedenborg
beside Dante in misbelief for calling Nature 'the ultimate of Heaven,' a
lowest rung, as it were, of Jacob's ladder, instead of a net woven by
Satan to entangle our wandering joys and bring our hearts into captivity.
There are certain curious unfinished diagrams scattered here and there
among the now separated pages of the sketch-book, and of these there is
one which, had it had all its concentric rings filled with names, would
have been a systematic exposition of his animosities and of their various
intensity. It represents Paradise, and in the midst, where Dante emerges
from the earthly Paradise, is written 'Homer,' and in the next circle
'Swedenborg,' and on the margin these words: 'Everything in Dante's
Paradise shows that he has made the earth the foundation of all, and its
goddess Nature, memory,' memory of sensations, 'not the Holy Ghost....
Round Purgatory is Paradise, and round Paradise vacuum. Homer is the
centre of all, I mean the poetry of the heathen.' The statement that round
Paradise is vacuum is a proof of the persistence of his ideas, and of his
curiously literal understanding of his own symbols; for it is but another
form of the charge made against Milton many years before in _The Marriage
of Heaven and Hell_. 'In Milton the Father is destiny, the son a ratio of
the five senses,' Blake's definition of the reason which is the enemy of
the imagination, 'and the Holy Ghost vacuum.' Dante, like other medieval
mystics, symbolized the highest order of created beings by the fixed
stars, and God by the darkness beyond them, the _Primum Mobile_. Blake,
absorbed in his very different vision, in which God took always a human
shape, believed that to think of God under a symbol drawn from the outer
world was in itself idolatry, but that to imagine Him as an unpeopled
immensity was to think of Him under the one symbol furthest from His
essence--it being a creation of the ruining reason, 'generalizing' away
'the minute particulars of life.' Instead of seeking God in the deserts of
time and space, in exterior immensities, in what he called 'the abstract
void,' he believed that the further he dropped behind him memory of time
and space, reason builded upon sensation, morality founded for the
ordering of the world; and the more he was absorbed in emotion; and, above
all, in emotion escaped from the impulse of bodily longing and the
restraints of bodily reason, in artistic emotion; the nearer did he come
to Eden's 'breathing garden,' to use his beautiful phrase, and to the
unveiled face of God. No worthy symbol of God existed but the inner world,
the true humanity, to whose various aspects he gave many names,
'Jerusalem,' 'Liberty,' 'Eden,' 'The Divine Vision,' 'The Body of God,'
'The Human Form Divine,' 'The Divine Members,' and whose most intimate
expression was art and poetry. He always sang of God under this symbol:
'For Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love
Is God Our Father dear;
And Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love
Is man, His child and care.
For Mercy has a human heart;
Pity a human face;
And Love the human form divine;
And Peace, the human dress.
Then every man of every clime,
That prays in his distress,
Prays to the human form divine--
Love, Mercy, Pity, Peace.'
Whenever he gave this symbol a habitation in space he set it in the sun,
the father of light and life; and set in the darkness beyond the stars,
where light and life die away, Og and Anak and the giants that were of
old, and the iron throne of Satan.
By thus contrasting Blake and Dante by the light of Blake's paradoxical
wisdom, and as though there was no important truth hung from Dante's beam
of the balance, I but seek to interpret a little-understood philosophy
rather than one incorporate in the thought and habits of Christendom.
Every philosophy has half its truth from times and generations; and to us
one-half of the philosophy of Dante is less living than his poetry, while
the truth Blake preached and sang and painted is the root of the
cultivated life, of the fragile perfect blossom of the world born in ages
of leisure and peace, and never yet to last more than a little season; the
life those Phæacians, who told Odysseus that they had set their hearts in
nothing but in 'the dance and changes of raiment, and love and sleep,'
lived before Poseidon heaped a mountain above them; the lives of all who,
having eaten of the Tree of Life, love, more than did the barbarous ages
when none had time to live, 'the minute particulars of life,' the little
fragments of space and time, which are wholly flooded by beautiful emotion
because they are so little they are hardly of time and space at all.
'Every space smaller than a globule of man's blood,' he wrote, 'opens into
eternity of which this vegetable earth is but a shadow.' And again, 'Every
time less than a pulsation of the artery is equal' in its tenor and value
'to six thousand years, for in this period the poet's work is done, and
all the great events of time start forth, and are conceived: in such a
period, within a moment, a pulsation of the artery.' Dante, indeed,
taught, in the 'Purgatorio,' that sin and virtue are alike from love, and
that love is from God; but this love he would restrain by a complex
eternal law, a complex external Church. Blake upon the other hand cried
scorn upon the whole spectacle of external things, a vision to pass away
in a moment, and preached the cultivated life, the internal Church which
has no laws but beauty, rapture and labour. 'I know of no other
Christianity, and of no other gospel, than the liberty, both of body and
mind, to exercise the divine arts of imagination, the real and eternal
world of which this vegetable universe is but a faint shadow, and in which
we shall live in our eternal or imaginative bodies when these vegetable
mortal bodies are no more. The Apostles knew of no other gospel. What are
all their spiritual gifts? What is the divine spirit? Is the Holy Ghost
any other than an intellectual fountain? What is the harvest of the gospel
and its labours? What is the talent which it is a curse to hide? What are
the treasures of heaven which we are to lay up for ourselves? Are they any
other than mental studies and performances? What are all the gifts of the
gospel, are they not all mental gifts? Is God a spirit who must be
worshipped in spirit and truth? Are not the gifts of the spirit everything
to man? O ye religious! discountenance every one among you who shall
pretend to despise art and science. I call upon you in the name of Jesus!
What is the life of man but art and science? Is it meat and drink? Is not
the body more than raiment? What is mortality but the things relating to
the body which dies? What is immortality but the things relating to the
spirit which lives immortally? What is the joy of Heaven but improvement
in the things of the spirit? What are the pains of Hell but ignorance,
idleness, bodily lust, and the devastation of the things of the spirit?
Answer this for yourselves, and expel from amongst you those who pretend
to despise the labours of art and science, which alone are the labours of
the gospel. Is not this plain and manifest to the thought? Can you think
at all, and not pronounce heartily that to labour in knowledge is to build
Jerusalem, and to despise knowledge is to despise Jerusalem and her
builders? And remember, he who despises and mocks a mental gift in
another, calling it pride, and selfishness, and sin, mocks Jesus, the
giver of every mental gift, which always appear to the ignorance-loving
hypocrites as sins. But that which is sin in the sight of cruel man is not
sin in the sight of our kind God. Let every Christian as much as in him
lies engage himself openly and publicly before all the world in some
mental pursuit for the building of Jerusalem.' I have given the whole of
this long passage because, though the very keystone of his thought, it is
little known, being sunk, like nearly all of his most profound thoughts,
in the mysterious prophetic books. Obscure about much else, they are
always lucid on this one point, and return to it again and again. 'I care
not whether a man is good or bad,' are the words they put into the mouth
of God, 'all I care is whether he is a wise man or a fool. Go put off
holiness and put on intellect.' This cultivated life, which seems to us so
artificial a thing, is really, according to them, the laborious
re-discovery of the golden age, of the primeval simplicity, of the simple
world in which Christ taught and lived, and its lawlessness is the
lawlessness of Him 'who being all virtue, acted from impulse and not from
rules,'
And his seventy disciples sent
Against religion and government.
The historical Christ was indeed no more than the supreme symbol of the
artistic imagination, in which, with every passion wrought to perfect
beauty by art and poetry, we shall live, when the body has passed away for
the last time; but before that hour man must labour through many lives and
many deaths. 'Men are admitted into heaven not because they have curbed
and governed their passions, but because they have cultivated their
understandings. The treasures of heaven are not negations of passion but
realities of intellect from which the passions emanate uncurbed in their
eternal glory. The fool shall not enter into heaven, let him be ever so
holy. Holiness is not the price of entering into heaven. Those who are
cast out are all those who, having no passions of their own, because no
intellect, have spent their lives in curbing and governing other people's
lives by the various arts of poverty and cruelty of all kinds. The modern
Church crucifies Christ with the head downwards. Woe, woe, woe to you
hypocrites.' After a time man has 'to return to the dark valley whence he
came and begin his labours anew,' but before that return he dwells in the
freedom of imagination, in the peace of the 'divine image,' 'the divine
vision,' in the peace that passes understanding and is the peace of art.
'I have been very near the gates of death,' Blake wrote in his last
letter, 'and have returned very weak and an old man, feeble and tottering
but not in spirit and life, not in the real man, the imagination which
liveth for ever. In that I grow stronger and stronger as this foolish body
decays.... Flaxman is gone, and we must all soon follow, every one to his
eternal home, leaving the delusions of goddess Nature and her laws, to get
into freedom from all the laws of the numbers,' the multiplicity of
nature, 'into the mind in which every one is king and priest in his own
house.' The phrase about the king and priest is a memory of the crown and
mitre set upon Dante's head before he entered Paradise. Our imaginations
are but fragments of the universal imagination, portions of the universal
body of God, and as we enlarge our imagination by imaginative sympathy,
and transform with the beauty and peace of art, the sorrows and joys of
the world, we put off the limited mortal man more and more and put on the
unlimited 'immortal man.' 'As the seed waits eagerly watching for its
flower and fruit, anxious its little soul looks out into the clear expanse
to see if hungry winds are abroad with their invisible array, so man looks
out in tree, and herb, and fish, and bird, and beast, collecting up the
fragments of his immortal body into the elemental forms of everything that
grows.... In pain he sighs, in pain he labours in his universe, sorrowing
in birds over the deep, or howling in the wolf over the slain, and moaning
in the cattle, and in the winds.' Mere sympathy for living things is not
enough because we must learn to separate their 'infected' from their
eternal, their satanic from their divine part; and this can only be done
by desiring always beauty, the one mask through which can be seen the
unveiled eyes of eternity. We must then be artists in all things, and
understand that love and old age and death are first among the arts. In
this sense he insists that 'Christ's apostles were artists,' that
'Christianity is Art,' and that 'the whole business of man is the arts.'
Dante, who deified law, selected its antagonist, passion, as the most
important of sins, and made the regions where it was punished the largest.
Blake, who deified imaginative freedom, held 'corporeal reason' for the
most accursed of things, because it makes the imagination revolt from the
sovereignty of beauty and pass under the sovereignty of corporeal law, and
this is 'the captivity in Egypt.' True art is expressive and symbolic, and
makes every form, every sound, every colour, every gesture, a signature of
some unanalyzable imaginative essence. False art is not expressive but
mimetic, not from experience but from observation, and is the mother of
all evil, persuading us to save our bodies alive at no matter what cost of
rapine and fraud. True art is the flame of the last day, which begins for
every man, when he is first moved by beauty, and which seeks to burn all
things until they 'become infinite and holy.'