Love and hate as active contraries: a comparison with Blake
We do not want joy and anger to neutralise each other and produce a surly contentment; we want a fiercer delight and a fiercer discontent.
Blake offers a useful comparison for the insistence that opposed passions should remain powerful. In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, plate 3, he declares that love and hate, like attraction and repulsion, are necessary to human existence. The sentence begins, ‘Without Contraries is no progression.’ The work's first printing dates to 1790; the inspected Project Gutenberg text reproduces the Boston, John W. Luce, 1906 edition, where this passage appears on p. 7. This is a philosophical parallel, not evidence that Chesterton is quoting Blake here. (Blake, pp. 7–9; Blake Archive, printing history.)
The difference matters as much as the resemblance. Blake immediately challenges religious classifications of good and evil by associating the former with passive obedience to reason and the latter with active energy; ‘The Voice of the Devil’ then contests the condemnation of bodily energy. Chesterton's ogre's castle and cottage instead make a demand upon the reader's relation to a single world: attachment must sustain the effort to change what provokes anger. The paragraph asks how to preserve both emotions, rather than making energy itself the criterion of goodness. (Blake, pp. 7–9.)
Chesterton's later William Blake (first published 1910; inspected in Gutenberg's transcription of the Duckworth/Dutton volume) helps locate the affinity without erasing the difference. In its discussion of Blake's philosophy, he describes revolutionary idealism as a struggle of the invisible against the visible: an ideal can judge existing arrangements rather than merely accept them. Yet he also criticizes making a passing mood sovereign over enduring human goods. Read alongside this later discussion, the present demand for fiercer feelings is best understood as a demand for reforming commitment, not an unrestricted endorsement of whatever the strongest passion happens to want. That is an interpretive comparison across the two books, not a documented account of this paragraph's composition. (Chesterton, William Blake, discussion following ‘The Ghost of a Flea’, especially the paragraphs beginning ‘This definition explains other things’ and ‘There were some of Blake’s intellectual conceptions’.)
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