He fought on two fronts, and shifted his arms from one to the other without letting us know—more exactly, he did not let himself know. He created for himself a personality, in life and in art, that was the image of the thing he sought.

Like all the great enlighteners of the eighteenth century, Blake is against the ancien régime, in all its manifestations—autocracy, feudalism, superstition. Though he loathed the destructive reason of the Deists, he sometimes praised it in the fight against “holy mystery.” He was fighting for free thought. Yet he is not only a confederate of Diderot and Voltaire, Jefferson and Tom Paine; he is a herald of the “heroic vitalism” of Nietzsche and D. H. Lawrence, of Dostoevsky’s scorn for nineteenth-century utilitarianism and self-contentment. Where the Encyclopedists were concerned with the investigation, on “natural principles,” of man’s place in society and his order in the universe, Blake— who hated the Church as much as Voltaire and was as republican as Jefferson—was concerned with the freedom of man from all restrictions—whether imposed by the morality of the Church or the narrowness of positivism. Like Nietzsche, he considered himself an enemy of Socrates and of the Platonic dualism that became a permanent basis of Christian thought. What Blake said in so many of his early poems Nietzsche was to say in his autobiography: “All history is the experimental refutation of the theory of the so-called moral order of the world.” Zarathustra, dancing mysteriously to the bacchanal of Nietzsche’s imagined self-fulfillment, is prefigured in Blake’s Los, the crusading imagination with the hammer in his hand. And like Nietzsche, Blake writes in his masterpiece, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, with the playful daemonism of those, who league themselves with the “Devil” because his opposite number restricts human rights:

The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it.

With it there is the stress on heroic energy, on the rights of the superior that cannot be claimed under what Nietzsche called the “slave-morality”:

The eagle never lost so much time as when he submitted to learn of the crow.

Damn braces. Bless relaxes.

Improvement makes strait roads; but the crooked roads without Improvement are the roads of genius.

Destroy, Blake says, all that binds man to decayed institutions. But destroy as well man’s obedience to moral precepts that hinder the full power of his creative will to assert, to love and to build. Desire is never vicious in itself; it is only turned to vicious ends when driven out of its real channel. Restraint in the name of the moral code is alone evil, for it distorts man’s real nature. It is a device of the rulers of this world to keep us chained. For life is holy. Energy is eternal delight. Jesus is dear to us not because he was divine, but because he was a rebel against false Law, and the friend of man’s desire. He defied the Kings and Priests. He was against punishment. He was the herald of man’s joy, not of his imaginary redemption. Joy is the only redemption and all suppression is a little death. Humility is an imposture born of cunning. Better wrath than pity. “The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.”

If he had been Antichrist, Creeping Jesus,
He’d have done anything to please us:
Gone sneaking into the Synagogues
And not used the Elders & Priests like Dogs,
But humble as a Lamb or an Ass,
Obey himself to Caiaphas.
God wants not man to humble himself.

 

For he acts with honest, triumphant Pride,
And this is the cause that Jesus died.

In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Blake writes: “Opposition is true friendship.” His drive is always toward creative self-assertion, toward man as a free creator. In A Song of Liberty, his vision of the old world burning in the fires of the French Revolution leads him to cry: “Empire is No More!”

Let the Priests of the Raven of dawn no longer, in deadly black, with hoarse note curse the sons of joy. Nor his accepted brethren—whom, tyrant, he calls free—lay the bound or build the roof. Nor pale religious letchery call that virginity that wishes but acts not!

So far Blake is a libertarian, an eighteenth-century radical more vehement, daring and imaginative in his conception of freedom than others, but sharing in a revolutionary tradition. Where he becomes truly prophetic and difficult is in his rejection of materialism.