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my proportions; & some scarce see Nature at all. But to the Eyes of the Man of Imagination, Nature is Imagination itself. As a man is, so he sees. As the Eye is formed, such are its Powers.
     
    This is beautiful; as many of Blake’s personal notes, in letters, marginalia, notebook jottings, and recorded conversation, are beautiful. But they are beautiful in the same way, just as most of The Four Zoas, Milton, and Jerusalem is ugly in the same way—as a series of passionately eloquent self-assertions, so burning in their exaltation that they seem to spring out of deep gulfs of private misery and doubt. That last word is always Blake’s enemy. Just as he believed that
    He who doubts from what he sees
Will ne‘er Believe, do what you Please.
If the Sun & Moon should doubt,
They’d, immediately Go out
so he felt the antagonism of the age to his vision to be such a burden that he exceeded what is normal in the human longing for certainty and made his kind of certainty the supreme test of a man. Reading a contemporary work on mental disorder, he suddenly scrawled in the margin:
     
    Cowper came to me and said: “0 that I were insane always. I will never rest. Can you not make me truly insane? I will never rest till I am so. 0 that in the bosom of God I was hid. You retain health and yet are as mad as any of us all—over us all—mad as a refuge from unbelief—from Bacon, Newton and Locke.”
    Blake never wrote anything more important to himself. If he was mad, it was as a refuge from unbelief, and thus with the satisfaction of being firmly placed in the sense of his own value. His terrible isolation spoke in the need to defend his identity; if madness was the cost of this, it at least placed him “over us all.” And he was higher than his age and over most of those who lived in it—higher not in a fantasy of superiority, but in the imaginative subtlety and resolution of his gifts; his faith that
    we are put on earth a little space,
That we may learn to bear the beams of love.
    Yet what is so marked in his history is his need to prove to himself that his genius could survive. For he was struggling with his own temperament in a time when society threatened his right to exist.
    Blake’s need of certainty, whatever its personal roots, is also one of the great tragedies of modem capitalist society; particularly of that loss of personal status that was the immediate fate of millions in the industrial England of the “dark satanic mills.” Blake was only one of many Englishmen who felt himself being slowly ground to death, in a world of such brutal exploitation and amid such inhuman ugliness, that the fires of the new industrial furnaces and the cries of the child laborers are always in his work. His poems and designs are meant to afford us spiritual vision; a vision beyond the factory system, the hideous new cities, the degradation of children for the sake of profit, the petty crimes for which children could still be hanged. “England,” a man said to me in London on V-E day, “has never recovered from its industrial revolution”; Blake was afraid it could not survive it; the human cost was already too great. He never saw the North of Britain, but the gray squalor of the Clydebank, the great industrial maw of Manchester and Liverpool, the slums, the broken families are remembered even in the apocalyptic rant of Jerusalem, where
    Scotland pours out his Sons to labour at the Furnaces;
Wales gives his Daughters to the Loom.
    The lovely poem at the head of Milton, beginning
    And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England’s mountains green?
is so intense a vision of a world other than the real industrial England that it has long been a Socialist hymn of millions of its working people.
    Blake was an artisan; an independent journeyman living entirely on the labor of his hands, dependent on patrons in a luxury trade that was being narrowed down to those who could please most quickly. He lived as near the bottom of the