Blake's Heroic Argument

David Fuller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317381341
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

First published in 1988, this book is a study of all Blake's work in illuminated printing. It traces in particular, the development of his ideas on politics, religion, sexuality, and the imagination. There are substantial sections on some of Blake's best-known works, including the Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and the Songs of Innocence and Experience, and full critical essays on the Four Zoas and Jerusalem.

The book describes the historical contexts of Blake's work, and sets it in relation to the political controversies of his age as these are reflected in the writings of Burke, Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft. It discusses the relationships of text and design in Blake, the characteristic verbal textures and rhythms of his longer poems, some influences on his thought, and developing structure of his personal myth and its relationship to other mythologies. The opening chapter discusses areas of fundamental disagreement with some of the main approaches to Blake whilst the final chapter discusses literary theory and the practice of criticism, arguing for an open and explicit involvement of personal experience and values and a more creative use of form in critical writing.

1 Before The Four Zoas

DOI: 10.4324/9781315675169-1

RHR-5646

David Fuller

All authentic literature is, on the one hand, an accusation of the existing society, but, on the other hand, the image of liberation.

Herbert Marcuse

William Blake is a philosophical poet-painter. His work presents a basic challenge to many ordinarily accepted ideas about religion, politics, personal life, the nature of consciousness and the nature and value of the arts. His central concerns are spiritual, political and personal freedom, and for him all freedoms are indivisible. Efforts to engage seriously with his work must be continuously concerned with the elucidation of his ideas which are always prominent. Blake wrote and designed with an intense moral passion and any discussion which does not respond to that central actuating passion will be worthless. Blake also wrote and painted with an equal commitment to the forms of his art. Discussion of form, like the engagement with ideas, occurs throughout his writings. Form was as important to him as content because it was inseparable from content. For Blake ‘Ideas cannot be Given but in their minutely Appropriate Words’. ¹ To abstract Blake’s ideas from their particular articulations in particular contexts is therefore to be false to him both as an artist and as a thinker. To move from a particular articulation to a general formulation is also to think in exactly the way Blake condemned. Truth for Blake is always to be found in attention to the particular, whether in art or in life; error is fostered by the lazy human habit or absorbing diverse particulars into a hazily perceived general.

We must, then, understand Blake’s ideas and their evolution by looking closely at their verbal and visual articulation in particular contexts, contexts which express and govern their full meaning. When we do so we see that in every area while some elements remain constant others undergo considerable development. ² The precise ideas change from one work to another. Their status within the works also changes. Blake was not always the same kind of polemical artist. In general, his early works are more directly polemical and their ideological content is more prominent while his later works are increasingly concerned with the centrality of the Imagination and therefore with fostering the kind of experience that generates a fully humane ideology. The early works are more immediately addressed to the world of action, the later ones more concerned with the consciousness from which all action springs. But the development is not uniform_ the polemical Blake of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell was active throughout his life, in the preface to Milton, the Laocoon engraving, ‘The Everlasting Gospel’, and elsewhere. Blake is a philosophical poet. He often expresses ideas directly. One inheritance of the Modernist movement is that most readers of poetry have been trained in an anti-didactic theory of art opposed to the direct expression of ideas in poetry. The Symbolist theory and practice accepted and adopted in the early work of Pound, Eliot and others produced some of the greatest poems written in English this century. Their revolt against the versification of shallow opinion, their enthroning the image as the sine qua non of poetry, was in its time a vital one. But for polemical and other reasons they presented the Symbolist method as the eternal and only method of poetry and though both Pound and Eliot later broke out of its limitations — parts of the Cantos and the Four Quartets being as overtly expressive of ideas as the Essay on Man — in practice and in theory with many areas of current writing, creative and critical, theirs is still the dominant mode. It is evidently not the method, however, of great poetry as diverse as the Anniversaries of Donne, the Moral Essays of Pope, or The Prelude. It is not Blake’s method. While it may be right to trace the doctrine of the image to the Romantic legacy against which the Modernists saw themselves as reacting, the Romantic poets themselves did not have a common attitude to this. Blake and Wordsworth especially have a Miltonic and eighteenth-century inheritance, and far from hating poetry that had a palpable design on the reader this is what they wrote. Certainly the way in which Dryden and Pope or Wordsworth include ideas in their poetry is different. In The Hind and the Panther or the Essay on Man Dryden and Pope are putting into verse already well-known ideas. In The Prelude Wordsworth is discovering and investigating ideas by articulating them in poetry. The common element in both cases is an unembarrassed directness about ideas which the typically Modernist slogan of William Carlos Williams, ‘No ideas but in things’, would disallow. The notion that poetry that overtly states or discusses ideas is necessarily aridly intellectual is simply one based on an arid idea of intellect, one quite foreign to Blake who praised the intellect so long as it was a product of the total emotional, imaginative and ratiocinative life. Purely ratiocinative intellect was to Blake anathema, but not the intellect’s necessary form. T.S. Eliot’s idea of a dissociation of sensibility — that is, of a radical split between the intellect and other modes of experience — is accurate not as an account of something that happened in the history of consciousness but as an account of a permanent fact of life against which each individual must struggle and with which the ethos of any particular culture will more or less help or hinder. Of the major Romantics, Blake, Wordsworth and Shelley at least consciously aimed to foster what is in Eliot’s terms an undissociated sensibility. It is one of the great virtues of their poetry that it fosters the integration of thought and feeling and is willing to tackle head-on all the intellectual consequences of its discoveries in the area of sensibility in a way that the Symbolist aesthetic’s refusal to allow all modes of mental operation into poetry prevents it from doing. The results of the Symbolist theory in reading Blake are made clear in Eliot’s view of him as a philosophical Robinson Crusoe lacking

a framework of accepted and traditional ideas which would have prevented him from indulging in a philosophy of his own, and concentrated his attention upon the problems of the poet. ³

The nonsense of this lies not only in Eliot’s mistaken notion of the origin of Blake’s ideas but in its implications about what the proper problems of a poet are: nothing to do with ideas we gather.

The Symbolist theory is politically convenient as a mode of reading literature which subverts current norms. It also suits the supposed objectivity and political neutrality of the educational system which still fosters it. It means that ideas in poetry need not be responded to as ideas, discussed in terms of their consequences for action, repudiated or practised. It is not a mode of reading Blake would have wished for.

The early work which best draws together the greatest range of Blake’s ideas is The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. The early tractates, All Religions are One and There is no Natural Religion, can act as a preface to this on the central issues of religion and the nature of consciousness. ⁴ The tractates were Blake’s first experiments in what was to become his distinctive form of illuminated printing — text and design printed together from an engraved copper plate. They were probably engraved in 1788. ⁵ In these Blake not only discovered, in the combination of text and related design, the perfect form for his work, but he also articulated in characteristic manner some of his most important beliefs, both about what he was opposed to in the spiritual and intellectual life of his age and what he proposed should be put in its place. In some of its political manifestations the spirit Blake opposed, which liked to think of itself as presiding over an Age of Reason, was in its death throes as he wrote these tractates. The Age of Reason had been, from the perspective of the vast majority of its inhabitants, an age of legitimised repression, robbery and violence. Its small ruling clique, that gilded a position of predator on the majority with a mask of reason and decorum, sense and refinement, was about to reap the whirlwind. The most obvious sign of this had been the American Revolution of the 1770’s, ‘a mighty & awful change [which] threatend the Earth’ as Blake later called it (B, 1537), but the greatest was still to come in the French Revolution of the following year. In some ways, however, the coming new age threatened to base itself on principles which Blake saw as just as unspiritual as the old and he was as much concerned in these tractates with the shaping of the future as with the destruction of the past.

Blake’s central concern in these works is the place of what he calls the ‘Poetic or Prophetic character’ or the ‘Poetic Genius’. In Blake’s view the age in which he had grown up, which he saw as an age dominated by scientific rationalism, had withered the faculty which to him appeared as the root of all life of the spirit, the proper exercise of which was central to all matters of personal, social or political liberty. The age of Newton and Locke had worn itself out in matters of the spirit and the state of the creative arts was an index of its bankruptcy. It was no wonder to Blake that the imagination, where it could maintain a residual life in these conditions, had been driven to melancholy or to madness, ‘mad as a refuge from unbelief as Cowper told Blake in a visionary greeting recorded in Blake’s old age (B, 1501). The imagination could find no form for its sane joys which, regarded as the torments of insanity by the angels of eighteenth-century rationalism, had been so imposed on as to see themselves in this way. Blake’s life’s work was a quest to create forms for the imagination to live in freely, and he began in these tractates by attempting to pull up some of the stinking weeds that had drawn life from the ideas of Locke in order to create a soil in which his own lapful of intellectual seed could flourish.

The weeds at which Blake was tugging in these collections of aphorisms sprang up in a philosophical and historical context which is now remote and though their essential substance is always with us their eighteenth-century form has long been extinct. The Natural Religion of Blake’s title refers to the popular eighteenth-century creed of Deism, which was the nearest thing in eighteenth-century Europe to an atheistical movement. Deism denied the importance of Revealed Religion and while it retained a belief in a creator, this creator was thought of as having withdrawn himself entirely from his creation. Man was therefore to devise his own moral laws from the observation of nature and the working of his reason. In this scheme a friend of sinners was unnecessary, faith unimportant, reason and moral judgement all. This at least is how Blake saw Deism and in this form he opposed it all his life, even more vehemently in his old age as Jesus became more important in his thinking. The philosophical basis of deist attitudes Blake located in Locke’s theory of knowledge, his view that man was born with no innate ideas, including moral or religious ones, that the mind was a sheet of white paper, or tabula rasa, in which all ideas, even the most complex and abstract, were built up from sensation and reflection. For Locke ideas which ‘the senses convey into the mind’ and ‘the operations of our own mind within us, as it is employed about the idea it has got’ are the sole grounds of our knowledge (An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, II. 1. 3, 4). Blake read Locke’s Essay in his youth when he felt for it — as he continued to feel — ‘Contempt & Abhorrence’ (B, 1497). That Blake took a most partial view of Locke — who, like Bacon, did not apply his thinking to matters of faith, who believed in the divine mission of Jesus, and, in opposition to the Deists, in the Gospel Revelation — is not to the point. Blake was not concerned with a dispassionate assessment of Locke but with cleansing the world of what had been the influence, pernicious as he saw it, of Locke’s ideas. What had, willynilly, flowed from Locke was the essential matter and in his analysis of this Blake was accurate enough. Locke’s psychology was at the root of Deism. Once applied to religious matters, to which Locke did not apply it, it provided an apparently coherent philosophical foundation for Natural Religion, and Blake draws some of the material for his early attack on this central intellectual enemy by an implicit but clear contradiction of its Lockean basis.

The form of Blake’s attack is itself expressive of the values of the creative imagination which he asserts against the prose of the sense-bound reasoning intellect. Blake’s quarrel was not with the workings of the reasoning faculty per se, which has important work to do provided it supplies itself with material from all modes of knowledge. Locke himself, as a giant of the mind, finds a place in Man restored to the proper use of all his faculties in the apocalyptic close of Jerusalem. But Blake’s business was not with that, to him, destructive reasoning which had at its basis the doubts of Descartes, but with creation whose strength was the firm persuasion which moves mountains. In opposition to Descartes, who taught the doubt of all that could be doubted and found himself the only certain object of knowledge, Blake was to assert the possibility of finding truth in all that could be believed. His opposition to the sober reasonings of Natural Religion is expressed therefore not only by what he says but also by his highly individual discovery of a form which is a provocation of the reader’s intellect and imagination in its combination of cryptic statement and suggestive emblematic design, a brilliant first assault on the values that had stifled the imagination.

Blake begins There is no Natural Religion with the two basic postulates of Lockean psychology. His ‘Argument’ forms the basis of Deism_ man has no innate ideas, and must learn all he knows through his senses. This statement of the basic tenets from which Natural Religion had been derived is followed by a series of propositions reducing the results of these views to absurdity. Where Locke had argued that man could, from knowledge derived from his senses and by inspecting the operations of his own mind, rise to the knowledge of God, Blake, for whom the reason is a sorting, combining and abstracting power not of itself creative, and the five senses a self-validating closed circle from which no other mode of perception could be glimpsed, sees the only possible result of these postulates as a beast whose desires and perceptions ‘must be limited to objects of sense’.

The second series of aphorisms then proceeds by a series of counter-propositions to the opposite conclusion of man’s infinite potential. Man has other modes of perception than his senses. Reason is not a static power which could finally know all — fortunately, since however great the infinite it must eventually become dull. It is man’s true nature to hate all limitations. No sort of finitude can satisfy man, but to Blake the Romantic thirst for the infinite is not a perpetually unsatisfiable longing which leads to despair. Man, far from being the beast to which Natural Religion would reduce him, through the perceptions of the ‘Poetic or Prophetic Character’, the faculty which the deist will not recognise, becomes identified with God. Blake’s is a magnificent assertion of human imaginative power against the, to him, dull and mechanistic conceptions of deism.

The creative imaginative faculty is likewise central to All Religions are One. Again Blake begins with premisses apparently based on Locke, and also on Bacon, that ‘the true method of knowledge is experiment’. There are things in both Bacon and Locke that Blake must have found congenial: the sturdy intellectual independence of each, Bacon’s sense that ‘Not to try is a greater risk than to fail’, or Locke’s analysis of kingcraft and priestcraft for example (Essay, 1.4.25). Blake’s lost annotations of Locke must occasionally have risen from the condemnation of ‘knavery’ and more detailed adverse comment to the relative glow of ‘excellent: a sentence which overthrows the whole book’. Bacon and Locke were great intellects, but riddled with fundamental errors. We can accept something of their position — an insistence on experience rather than the darkness of book-learned ‘authorities’ as the road to knowledge — but must then pass on rapidly from that. The experiments and experiences of the scientist and rationalist are far from what Blake has in mind as a source of knowledge of things of the spirit. For him the truly creative experiences from which we come to know anything worthwhile are those of the ‘immortal moments’ of which he speaks in annotating Lavater in which men ‘converse with God’ (B, 1374), the God that is who is Man’s highest potential, who man meets when he ‘sees the infinite in all things’.

Though, in opposition to the usual Christian dualism of mind and body, Blake does not regard the body as a garment of dross — it is rather a form of the soul — given the critique of Locke’s theory of knowledge offered in There is no Natural Religion we know that knowledge of God, the true Man, the Poetic Genius, cannot be derived from the senses. ‘The confined nature of bodily sensation’ here keeps a groping human figure in the darkness of a cave (ARO, 9). Our knowledge comes through the faculty which creates poetry, philosophy and religion, but these are always corrupted in this world, either by the weaknesses of the inspired individual or by society which fails to foster the voices of its prophets and makes them cry in the wilderness. The resultant diversity of the cry of man’s spirit, though this springs in part from differences of essence in individuals, differences which are not divisive but are part of the total variety in unity of creation, is therefore also in part a matter of individual and social accident. Man’s aim must be to see beyond the apparent diversity of spiritual perception, through the variegated garments of philosophies and religions, to the spiritual truths in which we find the ‘true Man’ in whom we are all members one of another. According to the proverb of Hell, ‘One thought fills immensity’, a sense of unity in creation which is basic to Blake’s sense of life here as it is in the myth of the fractured and ultimately reunited archetypal Man that is elaborated in the later poems.

The tractates are brief, and concentrated on a single subject, albeit for Blake a basic one. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, probably begun in 1789 and completed in 1790, is a much more inclusive and adventurous manifesto. This work is in fact the most comprehensive early statement of the attitudes and ideas that, with whatever changes, were to occupy Blake throughout the following decade, and in some measure for the rest of his life. ⁶ The philosophical core of the work is the Proverbs of Hell. Their main affirmations are of individual uniqueness, a consequent moral and psychological relativism, and the praise of uninhibited vigour of thought and action in all spheres, most ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Dedication
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• 1. Before The Four Zoas
• 2. Creation and Redemption and Judgement: The Four Zoas
• 3. The Human-Divine Vision: Jerusalem
• 4. Discussing Literature and Writing Criticism
• Notes and References
• Index