Page:Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Lamb, etc., being selections from the Remains of Henry Crabb Robinson.djvu/38

DIARY ACCOUNT OF BLAKE hostile to Plato & reproaches Wordsworth with being not a Xn. but a Platonist.

It is one of the subtle remarks of Hume on certain religious speculations that the tendency of them is to make men indifferent to what ever takes place by destroying all ideas of good & evil. I took occasion to apply this remark to something Blake said. 'If so,' I said, 'There is no use in discipline or education, no difference betn. good & evil.' He hastily broke in on me—'There is no use in education. I hold it wrong. It is the great sin. It is eating of the tree of the Knowledge of good & evil. That was the fault of Plato—he knew of nothing but of the Virtues and Vices And good & evil. There is nothing in all that. Everything is good in God's eyes.' On my putting the obvious question, 'Is there nothing absolutely evil in what men do'—'I am no judge of that. Perhaps not in God's Eyes.' Tho' on this & other occasions he spoke as if he denied altogether the existence of evil, And as if we had nothing to do with right and wrong—It being sufficient to consider all things as alike the work of God (I interposed with the German word of objectivity which he approved of) Yet at other times he spoke of error as being in heaven. I asked abt. the moral character of Dante in writing his Vision. Was he pure? "Pure" said Blake—'Do you think there is any purity in God's eyes. The angels in heaven are no more so than we." "He chargeth his Angels with folly." He afterwards extended this to the Supreme Being, he is liable to error too. Did he not repent him that he had made Nineveh. It is easier to repeat the personal remarks of Blake than these metaphysical speculation[s] so nearly allied to the most opposite systems. He spoke with seeming complacency of himself—Said he acted by command. The spirit said to him 'Blake, be an artist & nothing else. In this there is felicity"—His eye glistend while he spoke of devoting himself solely to