No More Learning

The errors in the handiwork of exalted spirits are as the more
phantastical errors in their lives; as Coleridge's opium cloud; as
Villiers De L'Isle Adam's candidature for the throne of Greece; as
Blake's anger against causes and purposes he but half understood;
as the flickering madness an Eastern scripture would allow in august
dreamers; for he who half lives in eternity endures a rending of the
structures of the mind, a crucifixion of the intellectual body.


II. HIS OPINIONS ON DANTE.

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
little 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 naive 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 of 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.