Gilchrist on Blake: The Life of William Blake by Alexander Gilchrist. Richard Holmes

Чтение книги онлайн.

       EIGHT Meditation: Notes on Lavater 1788 [ÆT. 30-31]

      One of Blake’s engravings of the present period is a frontispiece after Fuseli to the latter’s translation of the Aphorisms of his fellow-countryman, Lavater. The translation, which was from the original MS., was published by Johnson in 1788, the year of Gainsborough’s death. If any deny merit to Blake as an engraver, let them turn from this boldly executed print of Fuseli’s mannered but effective sitting figure, ostentatiously meditative, of Philosophic Contemplation, or whatever it may be, to the weak shadow of the same in the subsequent Dublin editions of this little book. For the Swiss enthusiast had then a European reputation. And this imposing scroll of fervid truisms and haphazard generalities, as often disputable as not, if often acute and striking, always ingenuous and pleasant, was, like all his other writings, warmly welcomed in this country. Now it as a whole reads unequal and monotonous, does not impress one as an elixir of inspired truth; induces rather, like most books of maxims, the ever recurring query, cut bono. And one readily believes what the English edition states, that the whole epitome of moral wisdom was the rapid ‘effusion’ of one autumn.

      In the ardent, pious, but illogical Lavater’s character, full of amiability, candour, and high aspiration, a man who in the eighteenth century believed in the continuation of miracles, of witchcraft, and of the power of exorcizing evil spirits, who, in fact, had a bona fide if convulsive hold of the super-sensual, there was much that was germane to William Blake, much that still remains noble and interesting.

      In the painter’s small library the Aphorisms became one of his most favourite volumes. This well-worn copy contains a series of marginal notes, neatly written in pen and ink – it being his habit to make such in the books he read – which speak to the interest it excited in him. On the tide-page occurs a naive token of affection: below the name Lavater is inscribed ‘Will. Blake,’ and around the two names the outline of a heart.

      Lavater’s final Aphorism tells the reader, ‘If you mean to know yourself, interline such of these as affected you agreeably in reading, and set a mark to such as left a sense of uneasiness with you, and then show your copy to whom you please.’ Blake showed his notes to Fuseli; who said one assuredly could read their writer’s character in them.

      ‘All Gold! ‘This should be written in letters of gold on our temples,’ are the endorsements accorded such an announcement as The object of your love is your God;’ or again, ‘Joy and grief decide character. What exalts prosperity? What embitters grief? What leaves us indifferent? What interests us? As the interest of man, so is God, as his God so is he.’

      But the annotator sometimes dissents; as from this: ‘You enjoy with wisdom or with folly, as the gratification of your appetites capacitates or unnerves your powers.’ ‘False!’ is the emphatic denial, ‘for weak is the joy which is never wearied.’ On one Aphorism, in which ‘frequent laughing,’ and ‘the scarcer smile of harmless quiet,’ are enumerated as signs respectively ‘of a little mind,’ or ‘of a noble heart;’ while the abstaining from laughter merely not to offend, &c. is praised as ‘a power unknown to many a vigorous mind;’ Blake exclaims, ‘I hate scarce smiles; I love laughing!’ ‘A sneer is often the sign of heartless malignity,’ says Lavater. ‘Damn sneerers!’ echoes Blake. To Lavater’s censure 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 true sense of the word. A man must first deceive himself before he is thus superstitious and so he is a hypocrite. No man was ever truly superstitious who was not as truly religious as far as he knew. True superstition is ignorant honesty, and this is beloved of God and man. Hypocrisy is as different from superstition as the wolf from the lamb.’ And similarly when Lavater, with a shudder, alludes to ‘the gloomy rock, СКАЧАТЬ