Page:William Blake in his relation to Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1911).djvu/9

— 9 — ". Blake is a passionate preacher of moral and political freedom and repels all the coërcive devices of the formalist as well as the regulative distinction between right and wrong of the moralist. Man is law to himself. "Nor is it possible to thought a greater than itself to know". The divine human body may not be divided into two parts, body and soul, labelling the one as evil the other as good (The voices of the devil. Marriage of Heaven and Hell). In his Books of America and Europe he expands on the triumph of free love and throughout all Blake's works we find, that he preaches free indulgence in all bodily desires, though always with a sub-idea that only in this way the spirit can be made free. Abstinence sows sand all over The ruddy limbs and flowing hair; But desire gratified Plants fruits of life and beauty there." (Couplets and Fragments.)

He who desires but acts not breeds pestilence." (Marriage of Heaven and Hell.)

Does not the worm erect a pillar in the mouldering churchyard And a palace of Eternity in the jaws of the hungry grave? Over his porch these words are written Take thy bliss, Oh Man!" (Daughters of Albion.) These can serve as examples for the fore-going and I could find ever so many more, for Blake likes to repeat his favourite doctrines again and again under different forms. Swedenborg does not preach these extreme views, but Blake was not the first mystic, who held the opinion that the desires of the body had a right to be indulged in. There existed a religious sect, who called themselves "Brethren of the free spirit", they were adherents to the principle that unless the lusts of the body be satisfied, the spirit cannot be raised to the heights of its true development. And it is not impossible that Blake in his vast reading had come across this theory and adopted it as his own.