So far Blake and his century are a mere contrast. But here we must remember that the three elements of Europe are not the strata of a rock, but the strands of a rope; since all three have existed not one of them has ever appeared entirely unmixed. You may call the Renascence pagan, but Michael Angelo cannot be imagined as anything but a Christian. You may call Thomas Aquinas Christian, but you cannot say exactly what he would have been without Aristotle the pagan. You may, even in calling Virgil the poet of Roman dignity and good sense, still ask whether he did not remember something older than Rome when he spoke of the good luck of him who knew the field gods and the old man of the forest. In the same way there was even in the eighteenth century an element of the purely Christian and an element of the purely primitive. And, as it happens, both these non-rational (or non-Roman) strains in the eighteenth century are particularly important in considering the mental make-up of William Blake. For the first alien strain in this century practically represents all that is effective and fine in this great genius, the second strain represents without question all that is doubtful, all that is irritating, and all that is ineffective in him.
In the eighteenth century there were two elements not taken from the Roman stoic or the Roman citizen. The first was what our century calls humanitarianism—what that century called “the tear of sensibility.” The old pagan commonwealths were democratic, but they were not in the least humanitarian. They had no tears to spare for a man at the mercy of the community; they reserved all their anger and sympathy for the community at the mercy of a man. That individual compassion for an individual case was a pure product of Christianity; and when Voltaire flung himself with fury into the special case of Calas, 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.”
HAR AND HEVA (1795)