Page:Life of William Blake, Gilchrist.djvu/385

 At page 61 of the Notes we are introduced to another of Blake's antipathies:—'The "great Bacon," as he is called (I call him the little Bacon), says that everything must be done by experiment. His first principle is unbelief, and yet here he says that art must be produced without such method. He is like Sir Joshua, full of self-contradiction and knavery.' Bacon, known to Blake by his Essays, was also Antichrist in his eyes. The high, worldly wisdom and courtier-like sagacity, not unmingled with politic craft, of those Essays were alien to the sympathies of the republican spiritualist, despite the imaginative form with which those qualities are clothed in Bacon's grand speech,—his stately, organ-like eloquence.

The artist's copy of the Essays, a duodecimo, published by Edwards, in 1798, is roughly annotated, in pencil, in a very characteristic, if very unreasonable, fashion; marginal notes dating, I should say, during the latter years of Blake's life. We have frequent indignant comment and execration. The epithets 'fool,' 'liar,' 'villain,' 'atheist,' nay, 'Satan,' and even (most singular of all) 'stupid,' are freely indulged in. There is in these notes, however, none of that leaven of real sense and acumen which tempers the violence of those on Reynolds. Bound by the interests of faithful biography, we will borrow a few characteristic sentences; but only a few.

'Good advice for Satan's kingdom,' is the inscription on the title-page. 'Is it true or is it false,' asks the annotator, 'that the wisdom of the world is foolishness with God? This is certain: if what Bacon says is true, what Christ says is false. If Caesar is right, Christ is wrong, both in politics and religion, since they will divide themselves in two.' 'Everybody knows,' he writes again, 'that this is epicurism and libertinism, and yet everybody says that it is Christian philosophy. How is this possible? Everybody must be a liar and deceiver? No! "Everybody" does not do this; but the hirelings of Kings and Courts, who made themselves "everybody," and knowingly propagate falsehood. It was a common opinion in the Court of Queen Elizabeth that