ngdoms is the explanation of the petulant sayings he
wrote on the margins of the great sketch-book, and of those others, still
more petulant, which Crabb Robinson has recorded in his diary. The sayings
about the forgiveness of sins have no need for further explanation, and
are in contrast with the attitude of that excellent commentator, Herr
Hettinger, who, though Dante swooned from pity at the tale of Francesca,
will only 'sympathize' with her 'to a certain extent,' being taken in a
theological net. 'It seems as if Dante,' Blake wrote, 'supposes God was
something superior to the Father of Jesus; for if He gives rain to the
evil and the good, and His sun to the just and the unjust, He can never
have builded Dante's Hell, nor the Hell of the Bible, as our parsons
explain it. It must have been framed by the dark spirit itself, and so I
understand it.' And again, 'Whatever task is of vengeance and whatever is
against forgiveness of sin is not of the Father but of Satan, the accuser,
the father of Hell.' And again, and this time to Crabb Robinson, 'Dante
saw devils where I saw none. I see good only.' 'I have never known a very
bad man who had not something very good about him.' This forgiveness was
not the forgiveness of the theologian who has received a commandment from
afar off, but of the poet and artist, who believes he has been taught, in
a mystical vision, 'that the imagination is the man himself,' and believes
he has discovered in the practice of his art that without a perfect
sympathy there is no perfect imagination, and therefore no perfect life.
At another moment he called Dante 'an atheist, a mere politician busied
about this world, as Milton was, till, in his old age, returned to God
whom he had had in his childhood.' 'Everything is atheism,' he has already
explained, 'which assumed the reality of the natural and unspiritual
world.' Dante, he held, assumed its reality when he made obedience to its
laws a condition of man's happiness hereafter, and he set Swedenborg
beside Dante in misbelief for calling Nature 'the ultimate of Heaven,' a
lowest rung, as it were, of Jacob's ladder, instead of a net woven by
Satan to entangle our wandering joys and bring our hearts into captivity.
There are certain curious unfinished diagrams scattered here and there
among the now separated pages of the sketch-book, and of these there is
one which, had it had all its concentric rings filled with names, would
have been a systematic exp