Page:Life of William Blake, Gilchrist.djvu/95

 of the 'pietist who crawls, groans, blubbers, and secretly says to gold, Thou art my hope! and to his belly, Thou art my god,' follows a cordial assent. 'Everything,' Lavater rashly declares, 'may be mimicked by hypocrisy but humility and love united.' To which, Blake: 'All this may be mimicked very well. This Aphorism certainly was an oversight; for what are all crawlers but mimickers of humility and love?' 'Dread more the blunderer's friendship than the calumniator's envy,' exhorts Lavater. I doubt this! says the margin.

At the maxim, 'You may depend upon it that he is a good man, whose intimate friends are all good, and whose enemies are characters decidedly bad,' the artist (obeying his author's injunctions) reports himself Uneasy,' fears he 'has not many enemies!' Uneasy, too, he feels at the declaration, 'Calmness of will is a sign of grandeur: the vulgar, far from hiding their will, blab their wishes—a single spark of occasion discharges the child of passion into a thousand crackers of desire.' Again: 'Who seeks those that are greater than himself, their greatness enjoys, and forgets his greatest qualities in their greater ones, is already truly great.' To this, Mr. Blake: I hope I do not flatter myself that this is pleasant to me.'

Some of Blake's remarks are not without a brisk candour: as when the Zurich philanthropist tells one, 'The great art to love your enemy consists in never losing sight of man in him,' &c.; and he boldly replies, 'None can see the man in the enemy. If he is ignorantly so, he is not truly an enemy: if maliciously so, not a man. I cannot love my enemy, for my enemy is not a man but a beast. And if I have any, I can love him as a beast, and wish to beat him.' And again, to the dictum, 'Between passion and lie there is not a finger's breadth,' he retorts, 'Lie is contrary to passion.' Upon the aphorism, 'Superstition always inspires littleness; religion grandeur of mind; the superstitious raises beings inferior to himself to deities,' Blake remarks at some length: 'I do not allow there is such a thing as superstition, taken in the