A New Mode of Printing

Blake was never an easy man socially. He was proud,

argumentative, and violently opposed to current fashion, in
his art and his philosophic and religious ideas alike. His only
tenable role in his world was that of the venerated teacher
he became, in his old age, to the group of youn painters
known as the 'Shoreham Ancients'.
Swedenborgian in religion, with no interest whatever in
making money, he was clearly destined for wordly failure.
He was a man of tireless industry, he carried out his
commissions
as
an
engraver
laboriously
and
conscientiously. But his thoughts were elsewhere.
Blake first used the method of illuminated printing in about
1788: There is no Natural Religion.
His brother Robert (who died in 1787) stood before him in
one of his visionary imaginations and so decidedly directed
him in the way in which he ought to proceed, that he
immediately followed his advice, by writing his poetry, and
drawing his marginal subjects of embellishments in outline
upon the copper-plate with an impervious liquid, and then
eating the plain parts or lights away with aqua fortis
considerably below them, so that the outlines were left as a
stereotype.
Blake's watercolour illumination, carried out by hand, also
owed something to supernatural inspiration. Joseph, the
sacred carpenter, has appeared in vision and revealed the
secrets to him.
He could print copies as he needed them: he continued to
print Songs of Innocence and later Songs of Innocence and
Experience, from time to time to the end of his life, as he
did his later books, whenever he found a purchaser.
The writing, engraving, printing and colouring was all
Blake's work: the binding was done by Mrs Blake.
Songs of Innocence may have been planned as book for

children, but once he was involved in its making, Blake

soon lost sight of any purpose but the creation of beauty.
He made some engraving for Mary Wollstonecraft's book.
She was under the influence of Rousseau, whose view of
childhood as a law unto itself contrasted strongly with the
pedagogic habit of mind in the Age of Reason. It must have
been during his association with her that Blake formed the
idea of making books for children, and about childhood,
wich should reflect the belief he shared with Rousseau that
the unfolding of the imagination of every creature, in
freedom, is the only true education.
Tyriel: he denounces the view of childhood as a passive
state to be formed by instruction.
He had never known a bad man who had not done
something very good about him. Blake's realization Every
man's genious is peculiar to his individuality is one he
shared with Mary and Rousseau.
Knowledge of ideal beauty is not to be acquired. It is born
with us. Innate ideas are in every man. Born with him: they
are truly himself.
The essence of Blake's Christianity was his vision of the
God within, Jesus the Imagination. Childhood is the
purest essence of the spirit of life. Everything that lives is
holy, not by virtue of any added qualities, but in its
essence.
Joy is the essence of life, and all life seeks joy as its natural
state. Life is neither great nor small, and the dignity of
every living essence is not relative but absolute. Childhood
was for him not a state of inexperience and ignorance, but
the state of pure being.
The Marriage: it reflects in its fiery forms and colours the
ideas of Hell or Energy.
He was a Republican and had hailed revolution in America

and then in France as an expression of freedom and of that

spirit of life that was holy. When in France the reality
proved to be otherwise, he changed his mind about the
value of political solutions.
He hated war, believing that the arts could only flourish in
peaceful states.
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Orc, the child who burns
in the flames of his own energy, is hailed as the Messiah of
the New Age whose prophet Blake believed himself to be.
Of all Blake's books, this has perhaps the greatest power of
word and of design. Energy is eternal delight and life obeys
the law of its innate energies. Free, life is mild and loving;
impeded, it is rebellious and violent. All Blake's sympathies
are with lion and devil, giant and fiery serpent of the other
deep. His tyrants are kings, churches, parents,
schoolmasters. This books is an expression of his sympathy
with the forces of revolution, seen as an expression of the
irrepressible energy of life. No psychic energy, or mood of
the soul, is merely good or merely evil: the face turned
depends upon circumstances.
Because he wrote that without contraries there is no
progression, it has often been assumed that the states of
innocence and experience represent a pair of contraries.
Experience is the antithesis of life. Life may be impeded
and denied: in London, by social injustice. The net of
religion runs through all; and the dark face of the human
city evoked is but the sum of inhumanity and of the
perversion and restraint of life for which every individual is
in some measure responsible. It is these mind-forgd
manacles which make thorns where there should be roses,
furtive whisperings instead of childish laughter,
tombstones where flowers should be. Blake indicts
Church and State, parents, nurses and schoolmasters; but
also, and above all, the tortousness of the Human Brain,
whose reasonings confound the simplicity of life, and which
knits a snare in which souls become inextricably

entangled, as in a spider's web of prohibitions and

hypocrisy. Many of the poems of Experience are antithetical
to those of Innocence; the difference between Infant
Sorrow and Infant Joy is that between love and the
absence of love.