3.  Energy is Eternal Delight.

Blake goes on to write down some of the Proverbs which he collected while walking among the fires of hell.  These “Proverbs of Hell” fill four pages of the book, and they are among the most wonderful things Blake has written.  Finished in expression, often little jewels of pure poetry, they are afire with thought and meaning, and inexhaustible in suggestion.  Taken all together they express in epigrammatic form every important doctrine of Blake’s.  Some of them, to be fully understood, must be read in the light of his other work.  Thus, “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom,” or, “If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise,” are expressions of the idea constantly recurrent with Blake that evil must be embodied or experienced before it can be rejected.[80] But the greater number of them are quite clear and present no difficulty, as for instance the following:—­

     A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees.

     He whose face gives no light shall never become a star.

     No bird soars too high, if he soars with his own wings.

     What is now proved was once only imagined.

     As the air to a bird or the sea to a fish, so is contempt to the
     contemptible.

     Exuberance is Beauty.

     Everything possible to be believed is an image of truth.

There are two tendencies of Blake’s mind, both mystical—­that is, rooted in unity—­the understanding of which helps, on the one hand, to clear much in his writing that seems strange and difficult; and, on the other, reveals a deep meaning in remarks apparently simple to the point of silliness.  These are his view of the solidarity of mental and spiritual as compared with physical things, and his habit of concentrating a universal truth into some one small fact.

For Blake, mental and spiritual things are the only real things.  Thought is more real than action, and spiritual attitude is more real than thought.  It is the most real thing about us, and it is the only thing that is of any importance.  The difference between Blake’s attitude and that of the ordinary practical man of the world is summed up in his characteristic pencil comment in his copy of Bacon’s Essays on the remark, “Good thoughts are little better than good dreams,” in the Essay on Virtue.  Blake writes beside this, “Thought is act.”  This view is well exemplified in the Job illustrations, where Blake makes quite clear his view of the worthlessness, spiritually, of Job’s gift to the beggar of part of his last meal, because of the consciously meritorious attitude of Job’s mind.[81]

If this attitude be remembered it explains a good many of the most startling and revolutionary views of Blake.  For instance, in the poems called “Holy Thursday” in the Songs of Innocence and Experience, he paints first of all with infinite grace and tenderness the picture of the orphan charity children going to church, as it would appear to the ordinary onlooker.