Page:Life of William Blake, Gilchrist.djvu/97

 Blake exclaims, 'Oh that men would seek immortal moments!—that men would converse with God!' as he, it may be added, was ever seeking, ever conversing, in one sense. In another place Lavater declares, that 'He who adores an impersonal God, has none; and without guide or rudder launches on an immense abyss, that first absorbs his powers and next himself.' To which, warm assent from the fervently religious Blake: 'Most superlatively beautiful, and most affectionately holy and pure. Would to God all men would consider it!' Religious, I say, but far from orthodox; for in one place he would show sin to be 'negative not positive evil:' lying, theft, &c., 'mere privation of good; ' a favourite idea with him, which, whatever its merit as an abstract proposition, practical people would not like written in letters of gold on their temples, for fear of consequences.

One of the most prolix of these aphorisms runs, 'Take from Luther his roughness and fiery courage, from this man one quality, from another that, from Raffaelle his dryness and nearly hard precision, and from Rubens his supernatural luxury of colours; detach his oppressive exuberance from each, and you will have something very correct and flat instead,' as it required no conjuror to tell us. Whereon Blake, whom I here condense: 'Deduct from a rose its red, from a lily its whiteness, from a diamond hardness, from an oak-tree height, from a daisy lowliness, rectify everything in nature, as the philosophers do, and then we shall return to chaos, and God will be compelled to be eccentric in His creation. Oh! happy philosophers! Variety does not necessarily suppose deformity. Beauty is exuberant, but if ugliness is adjoined, it is not the exuberance of beauty. So if Raffaelle is hard and dry, it is not from genius, but an accident acquired. How can substance and accident be predicated of the same essence? Aphorism 47 speaks of the "heterogeneous" in works of Art and Literature, which all extravagance is; but exuberance is not. 'But,' adds