These lines should not only cause the reader to rejoice, but also remind us of the many things from which Blake abstained: abstentions, both forced or part proudly assumed, which choked even his lyrical intelligence again and again. In the second half of the eighteenth century, liberty seemed an end in itself, but its most ardent disciples were the first to learn, though they did not always admit, that it is another name for responsibility and that it depends upon as many voluntary checks as the external bonds that it overthrows. Blake was above his age, but the voice of his age can be heard distinctly in his challenging verses.

      The note of compassion is no less remarkable in both of them. The songs on the sadder sights of London may have been occasioned in part by the talk that Blake heard at the Mathews’, but there is no verse more poignant, even in Blake, than this:

      It seems to come from the heart of Christian charity; the gaiety of goodness, the spontaneity of joy, is expressed in a perfect motto:

      All happy people live completely for the moment, and who does not remember with sacred delight the days of youth? Blake was later to give a divine blessing to this spontaneousness by declaring that “Jesus acted from impulse, not from rules.” The art of keeping young is here; if this is not cultivated so as to become a habit then we are preparing for ourselves no memories beyond regrets. Unfortunately there are bad impulses, but their indulgence brings satisfaction, not joy, and Blake, like the rest of us, saw the world as his own reflection, and believed others to have been born as good as he. In lyrics like this last he appeals to an active instinct as profound as our receptivity to beauty. These lovely lines to “Morning,” for instance, are simply painting a picture of the joy of being outdoors:

      What a landscape of light and mist and cloud is hidden in the intellectual image of the sun freed from fears! Could there be a more characteristic example of Blake’s intellectual alchemy? I have contented myself with such perfect things as these, for a long study of the interpretations of the admittedly difficult lyrics has left me convinced that no intellectual interpretation is satisfactory and that all attempts are much duller than the poems themselves. You cannot, I believe, recast the thought of a poet which is more than usually lyrical, which, indeed, is more truly a lyrical gift than an intellectual one. Everything that Blake said he said with equal vividness, and the continually growing mass of commentary is threatening to overlay the lyric beauty which remains his final claim to a high rank in English culture.

      William Blake, Illustration from The First Book of Urizen, plate 7, 1794.

      Colour relief etching, with added hand colouring, 15.1 × 10 cm.

      The British Museum, London.

      William Blake, Illustration from The First Book of Urizen, plate 11, 1794.

      Colour relief etching, with added hand colouring, 15.4 × 10.2 cm.

      The British Museum, London.

      It is with the “Everlasting Gospel,” written much later, probably about 1810, that Blake’s mystical philosophy is most nearly married to his verse, and in taking it after the early poems, we must guard ourselves against overlooking the influences to which he had committed himself completely in the interval. There seems to be an increasing tendency to consider his writings separately from his life, as if he had devoted himself to mystical philosophy – without a doubt, a few extremists will be found to assert that he did. The golden rule of criticism, that a man’s life must be remembered when we would interpret his work, that his work will illumine the obscure corners of his character, is essential to the understanding of Blake. Criticism devoted exclusively to his books, or even to his designs, is barren, for his complex gifts were further complicated by his peculiar circumstances, his strange upbringing, his natural recoil from his age, and the limited influences, which were all that his active imagination had to feed on. No one seems more original. No original mind was, in fact, so much at the mercy of its fate. To allow, even for a moment, his mental background and personal circumstances to slip out of our consciousness is to sacrifice the very foundation on which his peculiarities were nursed. The “Everlasting Gospel,” then, is the poem of a peculiar mind which had experienced nothing to check and everything to encourage its singularity. Blake’s only religious teachers were heresiarchs, and it became natural to him to identify good sense with idiosyncrasy, and to value his interpretation of familiar truths and figures in proportion as it was peculiar to himself. The life which Blake lived and recommended to men is that cultivation of personality that is instinctive in most artists, even in the articulate souls of poets. No one had thought before of incorporating this into a pseudo-theological system or of identifying it with the teaching of Christ. We must look in the “Everlasting Gospel” for what Blake found, not for the gospel which everyone but he had overlooked. This poem’s true subject is the mind of the author, and in it we can learn of his interpretation of the Bible. Like all Blake’s challenging utterances, the couplets that compose the “Everlasting Gospel” contain a

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