198 Ideals in the Modern World
provoking. One fi nds an ally in the devil. In an age of timid confor-
mity, you can turn toward Satan— and in par tic u lar Satan as John
Milton imagines him—to fi nd energy, in de pen dence, passion, and
freedom. Blake’s contemporaries already spend a great deal of time
contemplating heaven, albeit naively enough; it is time to greet them
with the wisdom of hell.
In the wisdom of hell, “Energy is Eternal Delight” (34). Men and
women need to cast their passivity away and embrace the will to life
that is inside them. Too much has been given over to culture—it is
time for Nature to reassert itself. Nature reasserts itself in Blake’s
willingness to speak provocatively about desire and its liberating
power: and so he pre sents the proverbs of hell and the wisdom of
hell. “The road of excess” Blake (or the devil within him) tells us,
“leads to the palace of wisdom” (35). “Drive your cart and your
plow over the bones of the dead!” (35). And “He who desires but
acts not, breeds pestilence!” (35). And “Prisons are built with the
stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion!” (36).
That a proverb of hell is true in some absolute sense does not
matter very much to Blake. What does matter is that hell’s wisdom
wakes us up to all the concessions we have made to the conforming
and the coy. Are these lines true? There is truth in them— and the
truth is larger to the extent that the vision of the devil, which is
often the vision of Nature infl amed, has been suppressed. The
devil becomes plausible insofar as the angels have too fully had
their way.
At the center of the gospel of hell is an erotic wisdom. One feels
that Blake comes close to speaking in his own person when he an-
nounces ideas about the rejuvenation of heaven and earth. Blake says
that when the cherub who guards the tree of life— that is, the tree
of desire, will, passion— leaves his post, matters will change. All of
creation will appear as it is, “infi nite and holy,” whereas now it “ap-
pears fi nite & corrupt” (39). How will this change take place? It