Blake had made the startling discovery, which Nietzsche has popularized in our time, that the graces in wrong places are vices. Nietzsche went on to make the absurd assertions that humility and pity are the virtues of the herd and are never right in any place. Blake believed that the graces coupled with insight and understanding took on a new quality which made them divine.
To give examples: Blake, while submissive to Hayley, was humble, but at the risk of his birthright.
Hayley, exerting himself to find rich neighbours to sit for Blake to paint in miniature, was kind, but he was suffocating his genius.
To the scribes and Pharisees, Christ meek would have been Christ weak.
Modesty in one who does not know that all things that live are holy is prudery.
To pity oneself or another for the troubles that come through slackness is effeminacy. The true virtue here is to damn. Hence the right place for a man clothed from head to foot in hypocritic graces is hell, his right name is Satan.
But when a man has stripped himself of his virtues, and annihilating himself goes down with Christ into death, then he rises again into newness of life and vision, and the graces of the new life, still called by their old names, but now in their right places, are flaming, beautiful, irresistible.
Once Blake saw his man in his setting in eternity, he escaped from his initial resentment, and he could write calmly to Hayley and subscribe himself, "Your devoted Will Blake."
I may remark that Blake did not think he had invented new values, like Nietzsche, in his indictment of the virtues. His language was his own, but his conclusions were precisely the same as those of Wesley, Whitefield, Bunyan, St Paul, when they, in effect, speak of man's righteousness as filthy rags, and of his need to be clothed with the _living_ righteousness of Christ before his garment can be reckoned beautiful and clean.
A few quotations from _Milton_ may be given as Blake's final word on Hayley. I will write Hayley for Satan, and Blake for Palamabron.
"Blake, reddening like the Moon in an eclipse, Spoke, saying, You know Hayley's mildness and his self-imposition; Seeming a brother, being a tyrant, even thinking himself a brother While he is murdering the just."