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-forg´d 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.