Scanned, proofed and corrected from the original edition for your reading pleasure. (Worth every penny!)
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An excerpt from the beginning of the:
INTRODUCTION
When Blake spoke the first word of the nineteenth century there was no one to hear it, and now that his message, the message of emancipation from reality through the 'shaping spirit of imagination,' has penetrated the world, and is slowly remaking it, few are conscious of the first utterer, in modern times, of the message with which all are familiar. Thought to-day, wherever it is most individual, owes either force or direction to Nietzsche, and thus we see, on our topmost towers, the Philistine armed and winged, and without the love or fear of God or man in his heart, doing battle in Nietzsche's name against the ideas of Nietzsche. No one can think, and escape Nietzsche; but Nietzsche has come after Blake, and will pass before Blake passes.
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell anticipates Nietzsche in his most significant paradoxes, and, before his time, exalts energy above reason, and Evil, 'the active springing from energy' above Good, 'the passive that obeys reason.' Did not Blake astonish Crabb Robinson by declaring that 'there was nothing in good and evil, the virtues and vices'; that 'vices in the natural world were the highest sublimities in the spiritual world'? 'Man must become better and wickeder,' says Nietzsche in Zarathustra; and, elsewhere; 'Every man must find his own virtue.' Sin, to Blake, is negation, is nothing; 'everything is good in God's eyes'; it is the eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil that has brought sin into the world: education, that is, by which we are taught to distinguish between things that do not differ. When Nietzsche says: 'Let us rid the world of the notion of sin, and banish with it the idea of punishment,' he expresses one of Blake's central doctrines, and he realises the corollary, which, however, he does not add. 'The Christian's soul,' he says, 'which has freed itself from sin is in most cases ruined by the hatred against sin. Look at the faces of great Christians. They are the faces of great haters.' Blake sums up all Christianity as forgiveness of sin:
'Mutual forgiveness of each vice,
Such are the gates of Paradise.'
The doctrine of the Atonement was to him a 'horrible doctrine,' because it seemed to make God a hard creditor, from whom pity could be bought for a price. 'Doth Jehovah forgive a debt only on condition that it shall be paid? … That debt is not forgiven!' he says in Jerusalem. To Nietzsche, far as he goes on the same road, pity is 'a weakness, which increases the world's suffering'; but to Blake, in the spirit of the French proverb, forgiveness is understanding. This forgiveness,' says Mr. Yeats, '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.' He trusted the passions, because they were alive; and, like Nietzsche, hated asceticism, because
'Abstinence sows sand all over
The ruddy limbs and flaming hair,
But desire gratified
Plants fruits of life and beauty there.'
'Put off holiness,' he said, 'and put on intellect.' And 'the fool shall not enter into heaven, let him be ever so holy.' Is not this a heaven after the heart of Nietzsche?
Nietzsche is a Spinoza à rebours. The essence of the individual, says Spinoza, 'is the effort by which it endeavours to persevere in its own being.' 'Will and understanding are one and the same.' 'By virtue and power I understand the same thing.' 'The effort to understand is the first and sole basis of virtue.' So far it might be Nietzsche who is speaking. Only, in Spinoza, this affirmation of will, persistent egoism, power, hard understanding, leads to a conclusion which is far enough from the conclusion of Neitzsche. 'The absolute virtue of the mind is to understand; its highest virtue, therefore, to understand or know God.' That, to Nietzsche, is one of 'the beautiful words by which the conscience is lulled to sleep.' 'Virtue is power,' Spinoza leads us to think, because it is virtue; 'power is virtue,' affirms Nietzsche, because it is power. And in Spinoza's profound heroism of the mind, really a great humility. 'he who loves God does not desire that God should love him in return,' Nietzsche would find the material for a kind of desperate heroism, made up wholly of pride and defiance.
To Blake, 'God-intoxicated' more than Spinoza, 'God only acts and is, in existing beings and men,' as Spinoza might also have said; to him, as to Spinoza, all moral virtue is identical with understanding...
