T

XII: HIS SYSTEM OF MORALITY

HOUGH the material world was of no importance to Blake, it was nevertheless part of his office as a prophet to show us how we ought to live in it. The four Zoas wage unceasing warfare within us: their innumerable children make our souls into fields of desperate battle. It is our part to reduce this chaos to harmony. We are not powerless against them, for the eternal essence of the soul remains always master of its own destiny. Blake disregarded entirely all theories that restricted or abolished individual liberty and, as a consequence, individual responsibility. The idea of predestination finds no place in his work, except as a prophetic vision of a regenerated humanity, returning once more to the eternity whence it had come. The scientific conclusions of Determinism he would have energetically denied, if he had known them, as false laws governing delusive phenomena. He felt himself to be both free and responsible; and this was enough for him; his own intuition being a far higher kind of evidence than any logical proof, no matter how convincing. Each of us, therefore, must, as he did, order his own life, reduce his warring instincts to harmony, and prepare for his ultimate regeneration. What are the rules in accordance with which this preparation must be made?

Blake's life, as we have seen, was that of a good and upright man from the point of view of our moral code. But in his heart, he groaned under this code, and hated the social conditions which made it necessary. His own system of morality was created for an ideal world. Our narrow, rigid laws would be as much out of place there as our shabby creeds and our atheism would have been in his own soul. He never gave any clear or methodical exposition of his rules, which we find scattered, like all the rest of his teaching, in fragmentary passages all through his works. Moral discourses, aphorisms and ejaculations were set forth at the bidding of the Spirit; and the time and manner of the Spirit's utterances are independent of all laws. Blake would probably have shrunk with repugnance from the idea of collecting his principles into a systematised doctrine, and so sacrificing them upon the altar of reason. Swedenborg, that "fallen angel," adopted this course; but none of the great prophets have

ever done so. It is our task to engrave these principles in our souls, and to reduce them to logical order, if we are so unfortunate as to have any need of order or of logic. And even then, Blake's system will fail to produce the effect of a complete doctrine. There are many points upon which he does not touch at all, many questions which he leaves unanswered. The whole resolves itself into certain general tendencies; attitudes of mind rather than rules to be followed. Even these tendencies, however, are clear enough to be characteristic of a man so different from ordinary men. As we might have guessed beforehand, they belong rather to a dreamer living among his visions of the ideal than to anyone taking an active part in the affairs of this real world of ours.

For Blake, no system of morality could exist without religion, or rather without faith. It is as absurd, according to him, to speak of natural morality as to speak of the reality of nature and its phenomena. All these things pertain to sensual experience and reason, and are therefore illusory. Natural morality, that which he calls the morality of Rousseau, is Tirzah, the harlot, the abomination, the false Babylon that shall be destroyed for ever. Does it not even now vanish, together with nature itself, as soon as we close our eyes and cease to behold it? And, when we reopen them in the grave, it will have disappeared still more completely. How can the experience of mortal man, this "worm of sixty winters," suffice for the making of rules which are to order his immortal life? How can the finite set bounds to the infinite, and say, "Thou shalt go no further"? How can this illusive life, which is but the sleep of death, say to the undying soul," Thou shalt do this or this, because I am the Truth"? Such, nevertheless, are the pretensions of natural morality and natural religion. The Earth, bowing down to Nature, worships nothingness. We see her, in the illustration to page 16 of America, as a colossal figure praying, with clasped hands, to a bare rock in the distance. On her head are tiny figures of priests with their books, but in the folds of her robe men and women embrace; and, behind her, bare trees and shrivelled thorn-bushes assume vague human shapes, and stretch out their branches to grasp each other. Blake's idea here is clear enough: he himself would never have offered up prayers to a stony heaven, a mere abstraction, a logical conception of moral duty, which has no existence.

His morality comes directly from his revelations. We are surrounded on all sides by the world of Eternity which his visions showed

him: we are citizens of Eternity, and we ought to live as such. The ideal which we, here on earth, in this terrible sleep of Ulro, must aim at is to restore as far as possible the life lived by the Eternal Man before his fall, the life of the primal Eden, which will also be the life of the New Jerusalem, when the sleep of death is past. There were two great distinguishing characteristics of man's state before his fall into the ocean of time and space: he was infinite, and he was one, comprising in himself the whole of humanity. These two words, "Infinity" and "Unity," sum up all Blake's ideal conceptions: they form the strong foundation upon which he built his most surprising theories and systems. He always has one instance to cite in corroboration of his teachings: the instance of Christ, in Whom was actually incarnated the Divine Humanity, and Whose soul was infinite, representing the very soul of the universe. We ought therefore to be guided by His example and His teaching. He has shown us how to find the lost Eden again, and how to build the New Jerusalem. And this is why Blake refers to Him constantly as a proof and a living application of his theories. But it does not at all follow from this that he was a Christian in the ordinary sense of the word. His interpretation of the Gospel is the reverse of orthodox. His Jesus, as he says himself, "will not do, either for Englishman or Jew." It is to this Christ of his dreams, the Christ of the Everlasting Gospel, that reference must often be made in any account of his system.

The consequence of the human spirit's infinitude is the absence of all restriction. Hence the first great principle of Blake's morality: "All restriction is evil." The energies and perceptions of man in his unfallen state were unlimited. Restrictions only came when he separated himself from Eternity and received a body, when Urizen built the Mundane Shell around him, when Adam became the Limit of Contraction. Our aspirations and our desires are all that remain to us of our original infinity. They can never be satisfied in the world of time, because they belong to eternity. And it is well for us that this is so; because it is they alone that keep alive in us a memory and a reflection of the Divine Vision, and so prevent us from losing our last hold upon Eternity. The idea is not a new one, but the conclusion that Blake draws from it is much more original. Our desires being our only remembrance of Eternity, we ought not to oppose or restrain them, but, on the contrary, to obey them, to give them a free rein, and endeavour to satisfy them. Thus all our desires will 'The Everlasting Gospel.

become so many efforts to recover our eternal inheritance; and if they do not win it for us, they can at least bring us nearer to it, and save us from losing it altogether. But what is law, whether moral, religious or social, if not a limit set to our desires, a restriction? It was the Law that bound Ore down upon the hard rock of jealousy and necessity, that slew Fuzon upon Mount Sinai, that caused the Tree of Mystery to grow around Urizen, that crucified Jesus. The law is an evil, and should be banished from the world. Obedience to it is an evil. No one can be blamed for seeking to satisfy his desires and following them with all the strength that is in him.

Here, then, is the first principle of Blake's morality: the destruction of the Moral Law. The doctrine is a strange one, to say the least. It makes us think, more than once, of the Superman extolled by certain later moralists and especially by the followers of Nietzsche, the man whose very superiority sets him above all laws; or, again, of the Puritan saints, whom the consciousness of their pre-election excused from following any of the ordinary rules of morality. But, for Blake, it is not necessary to be a Superman, or one of the Elect. Simply to be a man is enough to entail upon us the right and the duty of obeying only the dictates of our infinite aspirations. We might well ask whether we have not been transported into some Abbey of Thelema, with "Do what thou wilt" for its only rule, and without even the principle of honour to keep a check on evildoing. Or are we not, rather, closer to Rousseau's maxim: “Follow Nature," though Blake would have condemned it as blasphemous? In any case, this principle is set forth in so many passages, and in so many different ways, and is followed to its ultimate results through so extraordinary a course of reasoning, that we can have no doubts as to its significance. Everyone ought to have entire liberty to follow his instincts and to use his energies without any impediment. The physical world and its laws form a barrier which we cannot break down. But why should we make for ourselves a still darker prison by adding to these inevitable restrictions those of moral or social laws?

And so we see Blake here becoming a revolutionary, and an enthusiastic admirer of the newly liberated America, and of the efforts made by France to rid herself of the monarchy and break, once for all, the chains that bound her in the past. We see him summoning all the powers of heaven to fight against the ancient laws, and leading the nations of the earth and the celestial legions into battle with mystical and triumphant songs of liberty.

But it is the principle of moral liberty, or perhaps we should rather say moral anarchy, which is the most striking and characteristic element in Blake's doctrine. All the champions of political libertyand there were already many of these, had at least respected the ordinary rules of morality. Blake proceeds to undermine all these rules without compunction. They are represented by the Decalogue, and the Decalogue is the work of death. It was Urizen who composed it when he stretched out his leprous hand over the world and, under the name of Jehovah, tried to make himself the only god. It was the spirit of selfish individualism that made these laws of jealousy in order to preserve its own existence. The Decalogue is the law of egotism egotism in religion, in the conception of parental authority, in the respect for persons and property, and, finally, in the possession of woman and in married life. On the one hand, it sins against the great principle of universal union without any separation of personal identities on the other, its perpetual " Thou shalt not " means the destruction of all man's energies. And this is why humanity is for ever in revolt against it, and brute force must be employed to secure respect for its ordinances. " Prisons are built with stones of Law." 1

Authoritative religions have set the Decalogue on high, and have sacrificed to it all that was infinite in the human soul. The holocausts offered on the altars of the old gods were only a symbol of the immolation of our desires before this cold abstraction which is the Law. Every ornament of perfection, and every labour of love,

In all the Garden of Eden, and in all the golden mountains,
Was become an envied horror, and a remembrance of jealousy,
And every Act a Crime, and Albion the punisher and judge.

Cold snows drifted around him: ice covered his loins around. 2
He sat by Tyburn's brook, 3 and underneath his heel shot up
A deadly Tree: he nam'd it Moral Virtue, and the Law
Of God, who dwells in Chaos hidden from the human sight.

Albion began to erect twelve Altars

Of rough, unhewn rocks, before the Potter's Furnace.

He nam'd them Justice and Truth. And Albion's Sons

Must have become the first Victims, being the first transgressors.1 Hence comes Blake's hatred of what he calls " Druidical Religions," those which had as their symbols altars of sacrifice, like the dolmens Marriage of Heaven and Hell, p. 8. 2 i.e., he lost his creative power. 'Where the gallows stood. Jerusalem, p. 28, 1.