Page:William Blake (IA williamblake00ches).pdf/129

 he was drawing all his energies from the religion that he denied. A Roman would have rebelled for Rome, but not for Calas. This personal humanitarianism is the relic of Christianity—perhaps (if I may say so) the dregs of Christianity. Of this humanitarianism or sentimentalism, or whatever it can best be called, Blake was the enthusiastic inheritor. Being the great man that he was, he naturally anticipated lesser men than himself; and among the men less than himself I should count Shelley, for instance, and Tolstoy. He carried his instinct of personal kindness to the point of denouncing war as such—

"Naught can deform the human race Like the Armourer's iron brace."

Or, again—

"The strongest poison ever known Came from Cæsar's iron crown."

No pagan republican, such as those on whom the eighteenth century ethic was founded, could have made head or tail of this mere humanitarian horror. He could not even have comprehended this idea—that war is immoral