Blake, Modernity and Popular Culture

Blake, Modernity and Popular Culture Edited by

Steve Clark and Jason Whittaker

Blake, Modernity and Popular Culture

Also by Steve Clark BLAKE IN THE NINETIES (with David Worrall) BLAKE, NATION AND EMPIRE (with David Worrall) HISTORICISING BLAKE (with David Worrall) THE RECEPTION OF BLAKE IN THE ORIENT (with Masashi Suzuki)

Also by Jason Whittaker WILLIAM BLAKE AND THE MYTHS OF BRITAIN RADICAL BLAKE: Influence and Afterlife from 1827 (with Shirley Dent)

Blake, Modernity and Popular Culture Edited by Steve Clark and Jason Whittaker

Selection, editorial matter and Introduction © Steve Clark and Jason Whittaker 2007 Individual chapters © the contributors 2007 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2007 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13 978–0–230–00844–1 hardback ISBN-10 0–230–00844–5 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Blake, modernity, and popular culture / edited by Steven Clark and Jason Whittaker. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–00844–1 (cloth) ISBN-10: 0–230–00844–5 (cloth) 1. Blake, William, 1757–1827–Influence. 2. Blake, William, 1757–1827– Appreciation. 3. Modernism (Literature) 4. Influence (Literary, artistic, etc.) 5. Popular culture–History–20th century. 6. Popular culture–History– 19th century. 7. Blake, William, 1757–1827–knowledge–Popular culture. 8. Popular culture–Great Britain–History–18th century. 9. Popular culture– Great Britain–History–19th century. I. Clark, S. H. (Steven H.), 1957– II. Whittaker, Jason, 1969– PR4148.I52B63 2007 821'.1–dc22 10 16

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

Contents Acknowledgements

vii

Notes on the Contributors

viii

Introduction: Blake, Modernity and Popular Culture Steve Clark and Jason Whittaker

1

1 Popular Millenarianism and Empire in Blake’s Night Thoughts G. A. Rosso

12

2 Blake in Theatreland: Fountain Court and its Environs David Worrall

26

3 Emanations and Negations of Blake in Victorian Art Criticism Colin Trodd

39

4 ‘Esoteric Blakists’ and the ‘Weak Brethren’: how Blake Lovers Kept the Popular out Shirley Dent

57

5 Blake: Between Romanticism and Modernism Edward Larrissy

69

6 ‘There is no Competition’: Eliot on Blake, Blake in Eliot Steve Clark

78

7 Children of Albion: Blake and Contemporary British Poetry James Keery

100

8 Queer Bedfellows: William Blake and Derek Jarman Mark Douglas

113

9 ‘This Angel, who is now become a Devil, is my particular Friend’: Diabolic Friendships and Oppositional Interrogation in Blake and Rushdie Matt Green

127

10 Friendly Enemies: A Dialogical Encounter between William Blake and Angela Carter Christopher Ranger

v

140

vi Contents

11 Blake beyond Postmodernity Mark Lussier

151

12 What is it Like to be a Blake? Psychiatry, Drugs and the Doors of Perception Wayne Glausser

163

13 The Silence of the Lamb and the Tyger: Harris and Blake, Good and Evil Michelle Gompf

179

14 From Hell: Blake and Evil in Popular Culture Jason Whittaker

192

15 Fit Audience tho Many: Pullman’s Blake and the Anxiety of Popularity Susan Matthews

205

Bibliography

221

Index

234

Acknowledgements This book originated in a conference at St Mary’s College, Twickenham, entitled ‘Blake and the Popular’, and the editors would like to express their gratitude to the College, as well as to David Punter and the Centre for Romantic Studies, Bristol for support in helping that event go ahead. We would like to thank Tristanne Connolly, Paula Kennedy, Helen Craine and Christabel Scaife for their help and advice during editing, but most of all we would like to thank Shirley Dent, who came up with the original idea for the conference and has, as ever, poured in ideas and suggestions for Blake, Modernity and Popular Culture.

vii

Notes on the Contributors Steve Clark is currently Visiting Professor at the University of Tokyo. His other publications include Historicizing Blake (1994), Blake in the 90s (1999) and Blake, Nation and Empire (2006) (all co-edited with David Worrall), and The Reception of Blake in the Orient (2006) (co-edited with Masashi Suzuki). Shirley Dent is press officer for the Institute of Ideas, the Battle of Ideas and development editor of Culture Wars, the reviews website of the Institute of Ideas. She is the co-author (with Jason Whittaker) of Radical Blake: Afterlife and Influence from 1827 (2002), and has written on the critic and editor Anne Gilchrist for the collection Women Read William Blake (2006). Mark Douglas is senior lecturer in Film Studies at University College, Falmouth. He has published essays on Derek Jarman, Shakespearean adaptation for the screen and has research interests in literature and film. He is currently collaborating on a research project on artists on film. Wayne Glausser is Chair of English at DePauw University, Indiana. He has published several essays, mainly in two areas – English literature and philosophy of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; and American fiction and popular culture of the twentieth century – and in 1998, he published Locke and Blake: A Conversation across the Eighteenth Century (1998). Michelle Leigh Gompf received her PhD in 2001 from The University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She is now an Assistant Professor in the Division of Language and Literature at Concord University, Athens, WV, and is currently working on a book-length exploration of Harris’s use of Blake and Blake’s concept of good and evil. Matthew J. A. Green is Lecturer in Modern English Literature and Director of the Centre for the Study of Byron and Romanticism at the University of Nottingham. His most recent works includes articles on Blake and enlightenment, as well as a longer study, Visionary Materialism viii

Notes on the Contributors ix

in the Early Works of William Blake: The Intersection of Enthusiasm and Empiricism (2005). He is general editor of Working with English: Medieval and Modern Language, Literature and Drama, an online journal promoting research in the field of English studies. James Keery teaches English at Fred Longworth High School, Tyldesley. Carcanet published his That Stranger, The Blues in 1996 and his new edition of Burns Singer’s Collected Poems in 2001. He is currently preparing papers on J. H. Prynne (for Jacket), on the Apocalypse (for PN Review) and on Poetry (London) for the Modernist Magazines Project. Edward Larrissy is Professor of English Literature and Head of School at the University of Leeds. His work centres on Romantic poetry (mainly Blake) and twentieth-century poetry. His books include Romanticism and Postmodernism (1999), Yeats the Poet (1995) and Blake and Modern Literature (2006). Mark Lussier is an Associate Professor of English at Arizona State University, and his book Romantic Dynamics: The Poetics of Physicality was published in 1999. His essays on William Blake have appeared in numerous journals, including, most recently, ‘Blake and Science Studies’ in Palgrave Advances: William Blake Studies. His current booklength research project is provionally entitled Colonial Counterflows: Orientalism, Romanticism, and the Emergence of Buddhism in NineteenthCentury Europe. Susan Matthews is Senior Lecturer in English at Roehampton University. Her main interests are Blake, women’s writing of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and the literature of sensibility. Her current project is on ‘William Blake and the Feminization of Culture’. She is interested in the ways in which Blake’s writing reflects the tensions of his commercial work, which brings him into contact with the polite and with the power of women as consumers. Christopher Ranger received his PhD from Essex University. His thesis, ‘Friendly Enemies: Blake, Bakhtin, Feminism’, focuses on the dialogical relationships between Blake and a range of other writers. He teaches at Canon Palmer Catholic School, London. G. A. Rosso teaches English at Southern Connecticut State University in New Haven, CT. He has written and co-edited several books and essays

x Notes on the Contributors

on Blake, including Blake’s Prophetic Workshop: A Study of The Four Zoas (1993), Blake, Politics and History (1998) and ‘The Religion of Empire: Blake’s Rahab in its Biblical Contexts’, in Alexander Gourlay (ed.), Prophetic Character: Essays on William Blake in Honor of John E. Grant (2002). Colin Trodd teaches art history at the University of Manchester. He has co-edited Victorian Culture and the Idea of the Grotesque (1999), Art and the Academy in the Nineteenth Century (1999), Governing Cultures (2000), Representations of G. F. Watts (2004) and Civilised Painting? (2005), a Special Issue of Visual Culture in Britain. He is currently completing Visions of Blake: William Blake in the Art World 1830–1930. He currently serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Victorian Culture. Jason Whittaker lectures in English with Media Studies at University College, Falmouth. He has published various papers on Blake and on digital and new media studies. His books include William Blake and the Myths of Britain (1999) and Radical Blake: Influence and Afterlife from 1827 (2002, with Shirley Dent). David Worrall is Professor of English at Nottingham Trent University and is currently Vice-President of the British Association for Romantic Studies. He is editor of The Urizen Books (1995) and co-editor (with Steve Clark) of Historicizing Blake (1994), Blake in the 90s (1999) and Blake, Nation and Empire (2006). He is also the author of Theatric Revolution: Drama, Censorhip and Romantic Period Subcultures, 1774–1832 (2006).

Introduction: Blake, Modernity and Popular Culture Steve Clark and Jason Whittaker

When William Blake died on 12 August 1827, he left behind him, in the words of his most recent biographer, G. E. Bentley, a ‘fading shadow’. While Bentley notes that the number of obituary notices that appeared were ‘more … than might have been expected’ (BR 465), those expectations were very low. Although Blake was a minor footnote in the established histories of British literature and art, it is not true, as Richard Holmes (2004) has remarked, that by the time of his death ‘he was already a forgotten man’; indeed, plenty of nascent biographers were keen to use the deathbed scene of this obscure engraver, painter and sometime poet to establish their visions of a reinvigorated sentimental aesthetic and to serve as the foundation for their own future reputations. Allan Cunningham ventriloquised Blake thus in his 1830 Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects: ‘Why should I fear death? Nor do I fear it, I have endeavoured to live as Christ commands, and have sought to worship God truly – in my own house, when I was not seen of men’ (cited in BR 654–5). The author of Jerusalem might have approved, although it is hard to imagine the diabolic engraver of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell being quite as complacent. Despite the regular appearance of numerous articles on Blake’s influence, particularly in Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly, full-length studies are few and far between. Deborah Dorfmann’s informative and valuable Blake in the Nineteenth Century (1967) is confined, of course, to the simpler task of outlining Blake’s reputation before the explosion of self-professed followers in the twentieth century. Robert Bertholf and Annette Levitt’s William Blake and the Moderns (1982) extends the temporal reach of Blake’s influence, but concentrates on a very traditional high cultural genealogy. The book that offers a wider consideration of 1

2 Steve Clark and Jason Whitaker

Blake’s cultural impact is Shirley Dent and Jason Whittaker’s Radical Blake: Influence and Afterlife (2002), which drew on and extended the emerging body of work concerned with Blake’s influence on areas such as film, political philosophy and popular music as well as more conventional literary studies. A more recent and detailed study of Blake’s impact on literature is Edward Larrissy’s Blake and Modern Literature (2006). What is perhaps so unusual about Blake is that the influence of his work is often much more visible than that of other writers and artists. All scholars devoted to a particular author wish to plead a special case for their subject, but there remains something slightly odd about Blake’s incorporation into the canon, a process that began with Alexander Gilchrist’s biography of the pictor ignotus, published in 1863 with help from the Rossettis and Swinburne, and which achieved a great leap forward with Blake’s adoption by modernist poets – most notably W. B. Yeats – and important work by critics and scholars in the twentieth century such as S. Foster Damon, Northrop Frye, David Erdman and G. E. Bentley. Their labour, and that of many other critics and writers, has secured Blake’s position as an artist and writer, and so elevated it that the London printmaker has, predictably enough, been subjected to a critical backlash for his religious, political and sexual views. Yet while Blake is often studied as one of the big six of Romanticism, anyone who reads his work, particularly if they move beyond the pastoral lyrics of Songs of Innocence and of Experience, cannot help but note its strangeness. Blake was by no means the first oddball to occupy a quiet recess in the pantheon: John Bunyan, Christopher Smart, even that linchpin of theories around the anxiety of influence, John Milton, read bizarrely. It is Blake, however, who is most often interpreted as the emblem of the unorthodox imagination and, as Schuchard (2006) has indicated, he was more firmly situated in the esoteric, erotic and apocalyptic counterculture of the Enlightenment than most. Much of our appreciation of Blake’s strangeness comes from his artistic talents: an engraver by training, a painter by inclination, not only have his illuminated manuscripts provided a more material environment for his literary vision than can be attained by most writers, but his other paintings and prints, such as the magnificent large colour print of Newton, have inspired generations of writers and artists. Again, this is not to imply that Blake’s inspiration on artists is unique: countless illustrations of the works of Shakespeare and Milton indicate otherwise, and Blake’s own illuminations of figures such as Orc and Urizen tend to block out later interpretations – the original is all too

Introduction 3

visible, especially when reproduction technologies emerge later in the twentieth century providing cheap and easy access. Such mechanical reproductions may lack the aura of Blake’s illuminated manuscripts, but the importance of these cannot be underestimated for extending the reach of his reception. The particular danger of this special pleading for Blake is that it settles on a series of convenient antinomies that have been viewed with suspicion for at least the past three decades: alternative versus mainstream, high versus popular culture, individual versus society. One can exaggerate Blake’s cultural isolation during his lifetime; obviously there was relative decline and neglect between 1806 and 1818 – what Bentley refers to as Blake’s period of ‘independence and obscurity’ – but in the late 1780s Blake could easily be viewed as a rising talent with a profitable business that attracted the attention of London’s middle class (including potential sponsorship for a grand tour in 1784 as well as a nomination for the post of royal drawing master in 1787) and, during the 1790s, as historicist scholars such as David Worrall and Jon Mee have demonstrated, Blake was strongly involved in the radical and feverish currents of metropolitan life during the French Revolution. As G. A. Rosso argues in chapter 1, ‘Popular Millenarianism and Empire in Blake’s Illustrations to Night Thoughts’, the consensus that Blake withdrew from radical politics to embrace a more apolitical version of Christianity is not necessarily borne out by closer examination of texts such as Vala: or the Four Zoas and the genesis of that text in the illustrations to Young’s Night Thoughts. Blake’s illustrations to these, along with those for Blair’s The Grave, demonstrate that Blake was strongly allied to popular culture at the turn of the nineteenth century, whatever we think of such texts now. What is more, in the 1820s Blake returned strongly to the cultural fold via his associations with artists such as John Linnell, Samuel Palmer and John Varley, and if his reputation was founded on anecdotes such as the apparition of visionary heads, on one level at least there was a public willing to accord a role, however limited, to this eccentric artist. In a different fashion, David Worrall’s ‘Blake in Theatreland: Fountain Court and its Environs’ (chapter 2) demonstrates how much the activity of William and Catherine Blake could be affected by their residence in the heart of London’s theatrical and radical press industries. Despite the invocation of ‘Visionary forms dramatic’ at the close of Jerusalem (98:28 E 257), the possible influence of theatre on Blake has previously been almost entirely neglected. This was a popular intersection between high culture and mass audiences, particularly through the phenomenon

4 Steve Clark and Jason Whitaker

of portraiture, which brought the cult of celebrity to a wider public. The significance of that public during the eighteenth century as part of an emerging public sphere has, of course, become increasingly common in English literary and cultural studies, but in the past decade its role during Blake’s lifetime has been examined much more closely by a number of critics and theorists. For John Brewer (2004), the visibility of the private lives of politicians during the 1770s constituted a proto-mass media, which in turn, during Blake’s life, linked into improvements in transport and communications that allowed a national press network to flourish, bringing with it a sense of accountability to a community geographically dispersed and not personally known. Of course, this eighteenth-century public sphere was still considered primarily as part of a Hanoverian political culture which was the prerogative of an elite aristocratic culture, but an infrastructure was beginning to emerge that would, given the impetus of technological innovations throughout the nineteenth century, acquire its own momentum with unpredictable consequences. Yet we should be cautious of rushing to the conclusion that the radical culture of the 1790s was, in James Epstein’s words, creating ‘an autonomous and distinctly working-class or plebeian “public sphere”’ (1994, 150). Rather, in terms of Foucauldian regulation and transgression, Kevin Gilmartin (1996) suggests that as the government adopted the techniques and organisation of the London Corresponding Society to promote a loyalist counter-revolutionary public sphere of greater longevity and political effectiveness, the popular press of the early nineteenth century was as much stimulated by pro-Establishment ambitions as (following E. P. Thompson) the emergence of a radicalised English working class. More recently, Ian Haywood (2004) rightly notes how the French and American Revolutions encouraged mass participation in culture as well as politics in the late eighteenth century, but also provides ample documentation of how the radical press of the 1820s mutated into the mass circulation ‘yellow press’ of the Victorian period, something much closer to the modern mass media. There are, then, two contradictory senses of modernity: one stemming from the Enlightenment discourse on human rights; the other based on a society constructed around mass circulation and consumerism. Any simplistic view of popular culture that posits implicit resistance to elite culture is, of course, to be viewed sceptically: from their inception, mass popular media were compromised. The term ‘popular’ may be regarded as a median (between high and mass culture) or even

Introduction 5

palimpsestic term. At the negative extreme, it links to critiques of mass culture in British, American and continental traditions as intrinsically debasing – a term preserved, though reversed, in the postmodern celebration of the dispersal of the aura of the artwork and residual elitist pretensions. Mass culture is both the culture of the masses (hence antielitist, democratic, oppositional) and culture presupposing techniques of mass production (hence ideological, manipulative, alienating). It is rarely used before the late nineteenth century, with the development of the yellow press and advertising, but a case can be made for expanding the category to include almanacs, chapbooks, ballad-sheets, handbills – crossovers on the boundaries of literacy. In such a context, proto-mass culture seems to presuppose an antithesis with elite culture but that itself is difficult to sustain in the context of the 1790s, where a text such as Volney’s Ruins of Empire achieved wide dissemination. By the late nineteenth century, another industrial revolution based on the inclusion of a greater percentage of society in consumer culture, as well as new techniques and inventions, underlay the invention of the modern mass media, bringing with it widespread literacy that inspired fear and loathing as well as utopian aspirations founded on democratic inclusion (Brantlinger, 1998). Early accounts of such developments, notably those of Walter Benjamin, alternated between these extremes, for if the easy equation of popular culture and opposition is suspect, so too are those models of mass culture that view it as imposed from above, and therefore a form of false consciousness. Who, for example, originates mass culture? How can leaders be exempted from its processes of formation? How can one account for the turbulence and resistance that characterise nineteenth-century working-class history? Therefore an emphasis on cracks, fissures, competing sites of appropriation becomes attractive in discussion on the reception and mass dissemination of a figure such as Blake. Blake criticism has tended to speak of dissenting, antinomian or a variety of questionable synonyms assumed to presuppose radical tendencies (such as enthusiasm) rather than in terms of popular or mass culture in contradistinction to elite formations. It should be noted, to borrow Raymond Williams’ terms, that mass culture is often technologically innovative and so emergent, whereas practices and representations deemed working-class may often be categorised as residual in so far as they merge with a sentimental ideal of folk sensibility, as preserving traditions unable to manifest themselves in the mainstream public sphere. This is where the slippage occurs between a potentially loyalist popular culture and one seen as necessarily oppositional. One could

6 Steve Clark and Jason Whitaker

very easily see the connection between tavern culture and the London Corresponding Society in the 1790s, but it is hard to see how practices such as bull-baiting and cockfighting, equally constitutive of the plebeian public sphere, were radical. However, the more plausible origins of a modern British mass media in the Regency press, particularly during the Queen Caroline affair, indicate its future volatile relations with both oppositional causes and elite formations (both for the opposition and the elite establishment): much of the radical press that had emerged from the 1790s onwards metamorphosed into more general muckraking, gradually becoming the yellow press of the early Victorian era, more concerned with the scandals surrounding mistresses and divorce proceedings than with ideological conflicts. The ready trade in such titles also indicated the materialisation of a recognisable consumer society, the defining features of which – crowds, commodities, urbanism and new technologies of reproduction – became established between the 1820s and 1855, when Gautier referred to this experience as la modernité, a phrase used more famously by Charles Baudelaire in his Le Peintre de la vie moderne. The concept of the Modern pre-dates the Romantic in the Ancient versus Modern debates of the late seventeenth century (which were redefined as classic versus Romantic in the later nineteenth century). Modernism emerges as a reaction to the Romanticism of the nineteenth century, but modernity comes first as a recognition of the contemporary as irrevocably different, leading to those familiar traits that Charles Taylor (1992) calls the ‘epiphanies of modernism’: the growing importance of the individual, the dominance of instrumental reason and ultimate control of our disciplined bodies by the state. The relation of modernity to modernism is itself vexed. The latter movement includes both celebration of the machine and new technologies (Futurism, Vorticism) and an oppositional strand stemming from Romantic critiques of industrialisation (Eliot, Lawrence). Blake is both eminently compatible with its genealogy in French Symbolism (Symons, after all, writes books on The Symbolist Movement in Literature [1899] and on William Blake [1907]) and immediately vulnerable to its critiques of Romanticism as, following T. E. Hulme’s gibe, ‘spilt religion’. The antithesis between modernity and modernism, as well as between high modernism and popular culture, may be seen as retrospective constructs: these manifestations are much more porous than proponents or detractors of its subsequent academic canonisation have acknowledged. Modernism, following on from the biographical potboilers of the nineteenth century, lays the foundations for the reception of Blake in

Introduction 7

the twentieth century, but there has been a proliferation of Blakes since the Second World War which could, rather loosely, be termed postmodern. (Blake has an afterlife outside the academy, but is often cited as attracting the most specialist and pedantic of criticism as part of the nebulous but persistent Blake industry.) Blake was seized upon by Nelson Hilton and others as an example of a poststructuralist writer whose complex prophetic works deconstructed any sure ideological meaning, but postmodern appropriations of Blake tend to appear across a wide cultural spectrum, for example in a tendency to playfulness and a debunking of monolithic aesthetic values in the work of Chris Ofili and other artists of the BritArt trends during the 1990s. It is paradoxical that a writer and artist so determined to control every aspect of his work (a product of the ‘egotistical sublime’ every bit as Romantic and individualistic as that which Keats detected in Wordsworth) should lend himself to such varied assimilation. The Blakean style is immediately recognisable as a brand name – or even a logo for a certain intimation of visionary (or pseudo-visionary) poetics – and one that thus has a peculiar relationship with the logic of late capitalism. Ironically, the emergence of a Blakean ‘brand’ may be oddly closer to the spirit of Blake’s enterprise than many writers drawing on literary affinities, even where these are deeply felt, as in the case of Rossetti, Swinburne, Yeats, Ginsberg or Lawrence. For writers working after the Second World War, Angela Carter or Salman Rushdie among them, the problem for this postmodern Blake is that they wish to use him as a playful, iconoclastic figure of subversion, yet he must also remain a writer who retains sufficient individuality and authority to repay more traditional forms of homage. In terms of his reception, Blake can be thought of as a self-constituting and individualistic Romantic imagination or as a composite product of intersecting discourses. The first would support traditional, primarily literary, theories of influence, transmission and reception; the second a depsychologised model of circulation, proliferation, competing attempts at appropriation. The two are by no means mutually exclusive: Blake’s texts, both literary and pictorial, cannot be segregated from narratives, indeed mythologies, of the life generated almost from the day of his death, itself a complex and ambiguous tableau of genius neglected and faith redeemed. The recuperation of Blake did not begin with Alexander Gilchrist’s Life of William Blake, ‘Pictor Ignotus’ (published by Macmillan in 1863 and reprinted in two volumes in 1880), but it did see the beginnings of a Blake industry which was to mythologise as well as popularise the engraver’s life. Gilchrist’s biography, completed by his wife, Anne, who

8 Steve Clark and Jason Whitaker

was also to prove influential in developing a public taste for the works of Walt Whitman, was aided to press by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his brother, William Michael, the Pre-Raphaelite painter having been given a great deal of additional material by another Blake collector, John Clarke Strange. Algernon Charles Swinburne was to publish his own appreciation of Blake five years later, and these works did much to revive interest in Blake in the second half of the nineteenth century. As Colin Trodd observes in chapter 3, ‘Emanations and Negations of Blake in Victorian Art Criticism’, the critical practices of Swinburne and the Rossettis were used in part to transport ‘private’ designs into ‘public’ ideas. Yet even before the ‘discovery’ of Blake’s paintings at the Burlington Fine Art Club in 1876, Blake was increasingly being considered by the public – one that, ironically, considering his role in the twentieth century as arch-dissenter, focused on his commercial publication. Shirley Dent’s ‘“Esoteric Blakists” and the “Weak Brethren”: How Blake Lovers Kept the Popular out’ (chapter 4) offers a polemic complement to Trodd’s essay, arguing that the assiduous promotion of Blake’s works by an initiated brotherhood of aesthetes ultimately served to confirm their superior sensitivity and refinement. The late nineteenth century was an important period of transition for Blake, a time when he finally became popular. Yet, although this is often seen as a result of changing public taste, the reasons for this transition are much more embedded in the cultural logic of late Victorian society. Blake did not necessarily wish to be obscure during his lifetime, indeed he initially conceived his illuminated books as a commercial scheme, but the intense laboriousness of creating his almost medieval manuscripts – most gloriously evident in copy E of Jerusalem, the only coloured version of Blake’s final epic, painted by hand – precluded a wide market. Technological limitations rather than ideological eccentricity converted Blake’s public ideas into private ideas, and indeed for half a century after his death the artist was most widely recognised in precisely those commercial works that had successfully engaged with the technical constraints of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century book publishing, the illustrations to Edward Young’s Night Thoughts and Robert Blair’s The Grave. The conditions of modernity of the late Victorian period enabled the popularity of Blake’s other, more peculiarly visionary work. The explosion of mass media in the 1880s required new technologies of reproduction to enable capitalist consumerism of new texts: the growth of lithographic and eventually photographic reproduction techniques are the basis of Blake’s reputation in the twentieth century – and, ironi-

Introduction 9

cally, expose him to a series of shifting oppositions with the popular. The very mechanical reproduction that enables so many followers of Blake to appreciate his works is in danger of decomposing the aura of his original invention. Blake’s (sometimes problematic) appropriation by modernism is the subject of Edward Larrissy’s ‘Blake: Between Romanticism and Modernism’ (chapter 5), beginning with the threevolume edition of Blake’s work produced by Edwin Ellis and W. B. Yeats, but notably influential in the poetry and criticism of W. H. Auden. For Auden (as for Joyce and André Breton, though not for Yeats), Blake was the Romantic who provided a strangely anti-Romantic link to the Modernist movement. At the same time, as Larrissy points out, ‘Romanticism’ as we know it had barely come into being before the arrival of ‘Modernism’, and rather than simply being seen as an antidote to Romantic badness, Blake is an example of how the Romantic artist was being defined during the early years of the twentieth century. Steve Clark’s ‘“There is no Competition”: Eliot on Blake, Blake in Eliot’ (chapter 6) examines more closely the assumed antithesis between Blake and that Modernist poet of the twentieth century who has become something of a hate figure in Blake studies. The negative construction of Eliot, argues Clark, is based on a highly selective retrospective reading of Eliot’s criticism, particularly as his more favourable 1927 essay, ‘The Mysticism of Blake’, is often overlooked compared with the more hostile remarks made in The Sacred Wood. As well as exploring the points of rapprochement between the two poets, both positive and negative, Clark’s essay demonstrates how Blake could be used as cultural capital in the struggle between Modernism and the contemporary popular culture of such forms as cartoons, thrillers and the music-hall, but also that the boundaries between Eliot and these manifestations of popular culture are much more porous than first appears. James Keery, in ‘Children of Albion: Blake and Contemporary British Poetry’ (chapter 7), takes the publication of Michael Horovitz’s Children of Albion, Poems in the Underground in Britain in 1969 as a starting point for considering the ways in which popular culture and Modernism have interacted. Iain Sinclair and J. H. Prynne drew on Blake to provide apocalyptic ecstasies in opposition to the Movement orthodoxies that had developed during the 1950s. From poetry to painting and film, Blake’s unorthodox contribution to oppositional politics is the subject of Mark Douglas’s ‘Queer Bedfellow: William Blake and Derek Jarman’ (chapter 8), which also attempts to move beyond the impressionistic comparisons drawn between the two, exploring instead how Jarman

10 Steve Clark and Jason Whitaker

used Blake to orient his own encounter with nationalist politics and the meanings of Englishness. Matt Green’s ‘“This Angel, who is now become a Devil, is my particular Friend”: Diabolic Friendships and Oppositional Interrogation in Blake and Rushdie’ (chapter 9) and Christopher Ranger’s ‘Friendly Enemies: Blake and Angela Carter’ (chapter 10) both deal with writers who have readily mixed elements of low and high culture in their postmodern work. Green opens up the manner in which Rushdie utilises Blake’s sense of the prophetic as a foil for the divine encounters of his increasingly delusional protagonist, Gibreel, indicating Blake’s posthumous role as an iconoclast railing against the mythologies that underpin political tyranny and religious oppression. For Ranger, the connections between Blake and Carter are initially much more difficult: Carter was fascinated by Blake’s revolutionary project, yet despised much of his sexual politics. Allusions to Blake abound in Carter’s writing, but Ranger is more concerned with the relationship between sexual and political liberation, and with the polarisation of reason and imagination in the texts of both writers. Moreover, Blake’s ability to combine political commitment with irony and generic parody provides Carter with a model for her own assault on the ‘social fictions’ of her day. The tensions raised by the simultaneous adoption of Blake as a brand and his championship by no-logo, anti-capitalist adherents inform ‘Blake beyond Postmodernity’ (chapter 11), by Mark Lussier, a wideranging reflection on Blake’s influence on contemporary culture. While the overt influence of Blake has apparently waned since its peak in the 1960s and 1970s, when Blake was often explicitly invoked as a rebel by writers and artists, Lussier argues that the appearance of Blakean imagery in a number of recent texts as varied as Nike ads, popular physics texts and pulp fiction and cinema demonstrates some of the means by which Blake’s influence filters into popular culture. Academic studies of Blake have tended to neglect the phenomenon of how the rippling presence of Blake infiltrates any number of para-literary and popular texts. The definition of Blake may be more problematic than ever, precisely because the strong image of the artist defined by Victorian and early modernist culture has begun to disintegrate, but the visions of Blake are, if anything, more widespread than ever. The modernist tension between elitist high culture and popular culture, supposedly erased or dismissed by postmodernism, takes on new forms in the reception of Blake during the mid-twentieth century, particularly as he is taken up by oppositional or counter-cultural

Introduction 11

figures. Wayne Glausser’s ‘What is it Like to be a Blake? Psychiatry, Drugs and the Doors of Perception’ (chapter 12) argues that many writers who attempt to ‘get inside’ Blake’s mental world through hallucinogens or diagnostic speculation oversimplify Blake in the process of identifying his visionary essence. Beginning with Aldous Huxley and following psychological and psychiatric speculation in the work of Kay R. Jamison and Huston Smith, Glausser suggests that the tendency is to treat Blake’s unusual perception as a matter of pathology rather than inspiration. The final chapters of this volume indicate the ways in which some of the old certainties of divergence between modernist hostility to popular culture and a counter-cultural celebration of anything antagonistic to the old elite have begun to break down. Michelle Gompf, in ‘The Silence of the Lamb and the Tyger: Harris and Blake, Good and Evil’ (chapter 13), discusses one of the most avowedly popular representations of Blakean ideas in recent years in the books of Thomas Harris, who uses Blake references, both explicit and implicit, verbal and visual, to underline and emphasise a particular philosophy regarding Good and Evil, namely that the two are intertwined and coexist. The popular perception of Blake as a demonic advocate is explored from a slightly different angle in Jason Whittaker’s ‘From Hell: Blake and Evil in Popular Culture’ (chapter 14), which concentrates particularly on the graphical novels of Alan Moore, the absurd fiction of J. G. Ballard and Michael Dibdin’s thriller Dark Spectre to indicate some of the ways in which Blake is often used as a means to explain a peculiarly perverse form of evil, an intelligent psychopathy, that also has as its real target the institutional hypocrisy of moral law. Finally, Susan Matthews, in ‘Fit Audience tho Many’ (chapter 15), assesses how the heterodox use of Blake in Philip Pulman’s trilogy for children, His Dark Materials, with its shifting parameters of popular and elite culture, can illuminate comparable tensions in the reception of his work in his own time. Writing to Dr Trusler on 16 August 1799, Blake says of his works, ‘And tho I call them Mine I know they are not Mine’ (E 701). In this volume we hope to have explored both some of their diverse and unpredictable trajectories and the broader issues of the relation of elite and popular culture posed by their reception history.

1 Popular Millenarianism and Empire in Blake’s Night Thoughts G. A. Rosso

Nor Man alone, his breathing Bust expires; His Tomb is mortal; Empires die: Where, now, The Roman? Greek? They stalk, an empty Name! Yet few regard them in this useful Light; Tho’ Half our Learning is their Epitaph. Edward Young, Night Thoughts Blake’s Night Thoughts illustrations relate in complex and dynamic ways to several contemporary contexts of the popular which help illuminate important aspects of Blake’s designs, especially the political dimension of his apocalyptic theology. One context is the widespread popularity of Young’s poem itself, which accounts for the interest of Blake and his publisher, Richard Edwards, in a project that could tap into the lucrative art market of the period. Edwards sought to capitalise on Young’s reputation as well as the commercial success of the bookseller trade opened up by John Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery and its rivals.1 While the combination of religious piety and graveyard melancholy contributed most to the popularity of Young’s poem and to Edwards’ interest in it, Blake responded deeply and positively to its eschatological critique of imperial ambition, developing it in his own, more radical directions. Blake drew in part on the radical millenarian subculture of the 1790s, a second context, which reached its heyday in 1795, the year of the Richard Brothers controversy.2 The radical millenarians were not ‘popular’ in terms of a mass following: they were a relatively small faction within the ‘complex and heterogeneous network of forces and tendencies’ that comprised 1790s radicalism and reform (Makdisi 2003, 12

Popular Millenarianism and Empire in Night Thoughts 13

20–1). But recent scholarship (Mee 1992, 1998, 2002; Thompson 1993; Worrall 1999) confirms that Blake shared the populist stance and vocabulary, the enthusiastic rhetoric and antinomian principles, of many radical millenarians. My essay builds on this scholarship, but claims that while Blake applies the pressure of radical millenarianism to Young’s more orthodox eschatology, he also develops Young’s antiimperial stance in ways that sharpen the radicals’ critique of church and state into a more pointed attack on the British Empire. Blake did not directly address a radical millenarian audience: watercolours were not popular culture like prints and handbills, although Blake was a printmaker by trade. His immediate audience was probably painters and engravers such as William Sharp, an advocate of Brothers and, like James Gillray, Blake straddled both the popular and polite spheres (Donald, 29, 36–43, 162–6). This claim brings us to a third context of the popular, the genre of Anglo-Indian history paintings then in vogue, depicting English victories on the Asian subcontinent. This context forms part of the larger colonial history and culture of the era, which saw dramatic shifts generated by the American and French Revolutions and the rise of the anti-slavery movement. Between 1776 and 1815, the British Empire was undergoing a major realignment, moving its central locus of operation from North America and the West Indies to the East, primarily to India, although Canada and key Caribbean islands as well as Mediterranean and coastal African commercial and military bases remained crucial to its overall strategic and commercial designs. Blake was aware of the transatlantic theatre of imperial action, as shown in his continental prophecies and the Stedman engravings. At least one Night Thoughts design, NT508, shows his knowledge of Britain’s activity in the East and of the art that supported it. Popular demand for this art was created by the Anglo-Mysore wars which dominated British–Indian relations from 1767 to 1799. These wars were costly and prolonged, factors that curbed the ‘jingoistic exuberance among the public at large’ after the Seven Years War (Archer, 419). But patriotic fervor was revived in the early 1790s by the news that Charles Cornwallis, Governor-General in India, had reached Seringapatam, the Mysorian stronghold, and forced the leader, Tipu Sultan, to negotiate a treaty. This treaty stipulated that Tipu hand over two of his sons as hostages, an episode that inspired a score of paintings in the 1790s, most of them prominently featuring elephants. In these paintings, the elephant often functions as a symbol of imperial power and ceremony. In the design to NT508, Blake counters this symbolism by portraying the

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fall of the British Empire in an image of Satan hurled headlong with an elephant into the bottomless pit, where he (they?) will be bound in chains at the millennium. Blake’s awareness of popular millenarianism, coupled with his knowledge of imperial history and art, enables him to radicalise Young’s critique of empire in Night Thoughts (see Mitchell 1982, 22–3). Yet, while Blake returns Young to his biblical sources in order to activate latent meanings (see Grant 1970, 307), he does so through a sympathetic critique in which he both reliably and ironically illustrates Young’s text. Admittedly, Young’s otherworldly eschatology is politically conservative, and throughout his life he ingratiated himself, often in terms of the obsequious preferment hunter, to figures in positions of power. Blake could see as well as anyone that Young’s apocalyptic passages, while critical of empire, are invariably contained by the pious latitudinarian rhetoric of the Anglican clergyman. But Blake also discerns in him a judgement against empire that, while it derives from a tradition of otherworldly Christian eschatology, he intensifies and historicises for his own immediate political purposes. Blake incorporated images of regicide and imperial humiliation into his Night Thoughts that, while they had no discernible political effect, demonstrate an affinity with the most radical millenarians of his day. Mee and John Barrell show that designs from the Book of Daniel illustrating the fall of the Babylonian kings Belshazzar (NT60) and Nebuchadnezzar (NT299) were freighted with political meaning, especially following George III’s illness in 1788 when the image of Nebuchadnezzar circulated as a cipher for the deranged king. Brothers’ interpretation of George III as Daniel’s lion with eagle’s wings (a symbol of Babylon) gave ‘renewed vigour’ to this identification (Daniel 7:4; Mee 1998, 108; Barrell 2000, 544–7). But in addition to these designs, Blake drew some 24 illustrations across the nine nights in which royal figures are cast in a critical light or subjected to judgement, usually in relation to an apocalyptic text.3 These designs are concentrated in Nights VI–IX, which present Young’s critique of ambition, especially imperial ambition. Nights VI and VII in particular contain ten, that is nearly half, of the anti-monarchy designs; these Nights form two parts of the section titled ‘The Infidel Reclaimed’ which disputes the glory of worldly riches and ambition. Edwards may have been less anxious about these designs, as Young intends his critique to improve monarchs morally by refocusing their ambition on otherworldly concerns. But the concentration of Young’s criticism in these Nights, matched by the predominance of Blake’s anti-monarchical

Popular Millenarianism and Empire in Night Thoughts 15

images in them, suggests a correlation, however much Blake develops Young for his own purposes. This development culminates in the colossal title-page to Night VIII (which features the harlot and dragon of Revelation) and in the papal caricatures that follow (NT349, 396), examples of popular religious images that serve as a bridge to the sequence of designs illustrating Young’s apocalypse in Night IX. The watercolours in these later Nights are anticipated in Night I by the most revolutionary of the designs, NT20 (p. 8 of the engraved version), which portrays Death wielding a dart and killing two kings. In the context of the hysteria that followed the regicide in France and the mob attack on George III’s coach in 1795, a year of food riots and intense anti-government agitation, this design is perhaps the most explicitly seditious image in Blake’s entire canon (see Barrell 2000, ch. 14; Emsley). In the engraved print, Death holds his dart aloft as he tramples on the necks of two monarchs: one wears a crown while the other’s crown has toppled to the side. But while close in spirit to popular millenarian prints advocating regicide, Blake’s design adheres closely to the passage in Young: ‘Death! Great proprietor of all! ‘tis thine / To tread out empire, and to quench the stars’ (I:203–4).4 This design is a faithful illustration of the text, whose warning about empire grows out of Young’s personal experience with suffering and death. This design illustrates the analogies in the text between domestic, imperial and cosmic realms: Each Moment has its Sickle, emulous Of Time’s enormous Scythe, whose ample Sweep Strikes Empires from the root; each Moment plays His little Weapon in the narrower sphere Of sweet domestic Comfort, and cuts down The fairest bloom of sublunary Bliss (I:192–7) Young domesticates the political import of the anti-empire image. Referring to the recent and unexpected deaths of his wife, step-daughter and her husband (the ostensible events that called forth the poem), he asks Death, whose great tasks are to tread out empire and tear down the stars, why he must exhaust his ‘partial Quiver on a Mark so mean? … Insatiate Archer! Could not One suffice? / Thy shaft flew thrice, and thrice my Peace was slain’ (I:204–12). Blake also focuses on the cosmological import of the image, but he politicises Young’s

16 Tony Rosso

theology by injecting the urgent millenarian energy of 1795 into the design. NT20 thus anticipates the merging of anti-empire and apocalyptic themes which reaches a crescendo in designs to Nights VIII and IX, particularly in NT425, in which the ‘Insatiate Archer’ returns with his massive bow and arrow to lay the mighty low at the Last Judgment. The critique of imperial ambition in Nights VI–VII provides further occasion for Blake to loosen Young’s eschatology from the constraints of Anglican tradition. Opening Night VI with reflections on his wife’s death, Young consoles himself with rationalist proofs of immortality, at times enlivening the theological argument with passages of lyrical ‘enthusiasm’ (VI:99–109). From here he shifts into a sustained critique of ambition, arguing that where immortality rules ‘Pomp Imperial begs an Alms of Peace’ (VI:146). He equates temporal ambition with avarice (l.221), says ‘Great Ill is an Atcheivement of great Pow’rs’ (l.277) and laments the bloodshed of Christian princes (ll. 357–61), concluding by defining a great leader as one who subordinates empire to ethics. To be sure, Young does not directly oppose empire: ‘That Prince, and that alone, is truly Great, / Who draws the Sword reluctant, gladly sheaths; / On Empire builds what Empire far outweighs’ (VI:362–4). His narrator even praises Britain’s ‘wide Dominions ravish’d from the Deep’ (l.777), its trans-oceanic commerce and ‘naval Thunders’, ‘Britannia’s Voice! That awes the World to peace’ (ll. 791–2). But this encomium to Britain’s imperium pelagi (‘empire of the sea’) is an enticement that the narrator urges Lorenzo, his worldly foil, to resist. He does so by placing this empire panegyric within the context of the second temptation scene (on the kingdoms) from Paradise Regained (2:298–4:211). In Milton’s scene, the Son rebuts Satan’s imperial offering: ‘Thou neither dost persuade me to seek wealth / For Empire’s sake, nor Empire to affect / For glory’s sake by all thy argument’ (3:44–6). In similar vein Young responds to the reason why he has raised these themes: ‘To flatter thy grand Foibles, I confess,’ the narrator says; ‘These are Ambition’s works; and These are great; / But This, the Least Immortal souls can do; / Transcend them all. – But what can These transcend?’ (ll. 808–11). The question is rhetorical but it apparently inspires Blake, who draws the transcendent perspective on NT261, a version of the temptation scene from Milton’s poem. The design portrays an exasperated Satan hovering above the inlaid text, his right arm and index finger pointing alongside the text to the ‘loaded Seas’ below; on a mountain ledge Jesus calmly but firmly resists the offer, as he does in Blake’s Paradise Regained illustrations (B 544 7).

Popular Millenarianism and Empire in Night Thoughts 17

The question also inspires Blake’s illustrations of the resurrection which close Night VI and open Night VII. These designs span volumes 1 and 2 in the watercolour edition, showing that at crucial junctures – frontispieces and title-pages, opening and closing pages – Blake foregrounds his reworking of Young’s eschatology. In the above example, Blake suggests that Jesus’ power to resist Satan’s temptation at the end of Night VI foreshadows his victory over the grave at the resurrection, visualised on NT263–5. These designs – the final page of Night VI and the frontispiece and title-page to volume 2 – recall the frontispiece to the entire work (NT1) in which an energetically ascendant Jesus parts the clouds at the Second Coming. Blake is responding to a fundamental theme in Young rather than illustrating a specific passage. But in combination with other framing pictures, NT1 helps place the two most celebrated Night Thoughts designs, the title-pages to Nights III and VIII (NT78 and 345), clearly in relation to Young’s own eschatological critique of empire. Blake in turn situates Young’s eschatology within the volatile political moment of 1795 when the British state faced what Barrell calls ‘a new kind of political crisis’, one in which the Pitt government ‘was fighting a war on two fronts, against a republican abroad and a small but highly organized network of popular radical ‘army’ societies at home’ (2000, 29). In response, the counter-revolution concentrated on an alliance of church and crown that grew closer during the war as part of an effort to refurbish the image of royalty in the wake of the French Revolution and Reign of Terror (Colley, 204–17; Bayly 1989, 109–15). Blake captures this alliance in his set of anti-papal designs concentrated mainly in Night VIII. NT345 is the most celebrated of these designs, and its great power and originality have led critics to isolate it from the Night Thoughts context. But this design not only climaxes the textual and visual critique of imperial ambition in Nights VI and VII, it also generates the papal caricatures that follow in Night VIII (NT349, 396), especially NT349, which exposes the state-church’s support of Britain’s oceanic empire. In addition to serving this important structural function, NT345 embodies the conjunction of millenarian themes and anti-empire eschatology which forms an important aspect of Blake’s Night Thoughts project. The mid-1790s context can account in part for the expression of doomed melancholy on the face of the Babylon harlot and for the grotesque visages on the quartet of dragon heads below her, as distinct from the trio of human heads in the left margin above the pope, ‘the central head in this apparatus’ (Grant 1990, 101). As a symbol of Rome,

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the harlot was idolised for her power and wealth, which John interprets as drawn from the blood of her victims: by painting the harlot’s cup red, Blake highlights this vampiric aspect of his source. Revelation also states that a key to the harlot’s ‘mystery’ is that the dragon’s heads will turn on her and ‘eat her flesh’ (17:16), revealing a self-destructive division within the empire. Thus, in NT345 Blake keenly delineates the symbolic components of empire, exposing not only its mysteriously alluring and lurid power, but also its impending doom. This note of doom resonates with the crisis of the British imperial state in 1795, the date on the Night VIII title-page. Two other iconographic sources can help establish the specific historicity of NT345: Albrecht Dürer’s The Whore of Babylon and James Gillray’s The Prophet of the Hebrews, a satirical print by Richard Brothers. Dürer historicised the Book of Revelation in the context of the German Reformation and provided the model for the Lutheran September Bible (1522), whose Apocalypse designs were the first to symbolise the Roman pontiff as Antichrist, crowning the Babylon harlot with a tiara (Carey, 145). The vision may refer to the mid-decade war of the Pitt ministry and the judicial and military wings of the Anglican state against popular radicalism and French republicanism. The Gillray print can help make this point. Appearing on 5 March 1795, the day after Brothers’ arrest, it depicts Brothers as a crazed sans-culotte treading on the seven-headed dragon, whose heads include a crowned king and a tiara-ed pope: the pope looks up in horror as Brothers’ right foot crushes his throat, as Death does to the kings in NT20. Gillray foregrounds the dire implications of Brothers’ prophecy by depicting Babylon as London burning, with St Paul’s Cathedral engulfed in flames, its toppling orb-and-cross spire echoing the headgear of Blake’s central dragon head (also in NT396). Gillray illustrates Brothers’ threat to the British Empire by showing two ships sinking below his outstretched right hand, his left holding the Book of Revelation as blood drips into the sea from the rouge-bonneted sun. Gillray, however, visualises clearly what the state-church imperium should do to Brothers and the revolutionary millenarians: the ‘Gate of Jerusalem’ is the triple gallows. Blake reverses the reactionary import of Gillray’s print by exposing the fear of imminent doom in the figureheads of empire. To counter Gillray’s propaganda, Blake returns to the image of Death’s dart from NT20. He illustrates John’s judgement against the harlot from Revelation 17:16 through the image of the pointed dart at the end of the dragon’s tail, aimed directly at the harlot sitting on the far right

Popular Millenarianism and Empire in Night Thoughts 19

(judge) head of the dragon. However, between the dart and the harlot lies the title-page insert with ‘Virtue’s Apology’ inscribed in the centre. Blake here targets Young’s apologetics as part of his critique; he returns Young to his more radical biblical source, the Book of Revelation, which exposes the alliance of church and state, of commerce and war, in the composite figure of the Babylon harlot-dragon. Blake clearly draws the word ‘Mystery’ on the woman’s forehead in order to emphasise her identity as John’s harlot, particularly her ideological function, the deification of imperial power. In contrast to the sexual grotesqueness of Dürer’s harlot, Blake’s alluring harlot stays closer to the political meaning of Revelation. Since the cult of emperor worship was enforced throughout the Roman Empire, John connects the dragon of Roman military power with the harlot of religious coercion, forging them into a two-fold symbol of oppression. As with Rome, Britain needs the seduction and deceit of the harlot’s religion and wealth to make empire desirable. But in so far as Britain’s imperial dominance is justified as ‘virtuous’ by its own state-church establishment, Blake shows it as doomed as John’s harlot to self-destruction. The design on NT349 is important in this regard as it turns the traditional anti-Catholic animus of Protestant millenarianism into a more specific critique of Anglican collusion with Britain’s sea-borne empire. As in NT345, Young’s text plays a minimal role in this manoeuvre, although Young could be as anti-papist as any British Protestant of the time. In NT349, and its companion designs NT396 and NT91, Blake displays his attraction to popular anti-papal religious imagery. In the text, Young continues to subordinate temporal ambition to the endtime ‘at hand’, comparing ‘Time’s Ambitions’ to the bubbles swallowed by Leviathan (VIII:34–9). Significantly developing Young’s offhand allusion to the biblical dragon, Blake draws a scaly pontiff carrying a crosier as he directs the mission of the sea beast bubbling up from the deeps to the ocean surface. Blake has the pontiff ride the beast to signal his identity with the Babylon harlot on the Night VIII title-page. Though lacking the orb-and-cross emblem of the state–church alliance atop his headgear, the figure also resembles the central dragon head in NT345, the cloven-hoofed pope in NT396 and the papal figure of NT91, which depicts a pontiff with Lucifer in hell, citing Isaiah 14 (a popular prophecy against another king of Babylon). NT91 echoes other millenarian designs from Blake’s work in 1794–6 – particularly the colour print Lucifer and the Pope in Hell (B 287, 349) – and its central figure is nearly identical with the papal caricature in Europe [12(14)]. In NT91, the papal figure wears a red robe whose colours reflect the

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flames rising on the right of the inlaid text; Young equates Lucifer with the Roman Church and Blake duly places him in hell. Beyond Young, however, Blake borrows from seventeenth-century polemical prints that equate the pope with the typological King of Babylon (Bindman 713). Blake shares this historicising move with radical millenarians of his day, who identify British despotism with the autocracy of papal Rome. But while Blake draws on traditional northern Protestant imagery to critique the papacy, his focus in NT349 is not simply on the Roman or the English state church but on Britain’s transatlantic empire. Blake’s pontiff not only sits astride the dragon but, more importantly, rides him under water, exposing the submerged bond of religion and empire as satanic. We should note that radical millenarians such as Brothers and Richard Lee also registered their ambivalence towards the British Empire. After his arrest in 1795, Brothers wrote to Pitt and George III warning them that without his counsel, ‘death will take place on thousands; London falls, and the British empire sinks, never – never to rise any more’ (1795, 21). And, in contrary mode, Lee displays an acerbic anti-empire wit in his poem ‘The Crown a Bauble’, where he takes on the mock-persona of an emperor: O! did my vast Dominions stretch As far as Ocean rolls, And could my pompous Mandates reach Th’ Extreme of both the Poles; Did my large Revenues flow in From India’s richest Veins … The shining Bauble, from my Brow I’d tear with high Disdain! (ll. 9–14, 21–2)5 Lee’s focus here, and in his work in general, as with other radical millenarians, is on abuses by the English monarchy and the Anglican Church. And Brothers was deranged: he preserved a role for the British Empire in his utopian future, offering his only parliamentary supporter, Nathaniel Brassy Halhed, the Governor-Generalship of India and Pitt the Board of Control (Barrell 2000, 523). Thus, while Blake shares with the radicals an anti-Catholic bias and the historical strategy that associates British monarchy with the papacy, his knowledge of western imperial tradition, and of Young’s place within it, enables him

Popular Millenarianism and Empire in Night Thoughts 21

to redirect attention towards the collusion of crown and church with British imperialism. Blake’s treatment of the papal figure in Europe can buttress this point: in the text that accompanies the design, Albion’s Angel sees Urizen ‘on the Atlantic’ with his brazen book that ‘Kings & Priests had copied on Earth / Expanded from North to South’ (E 11:2–5). Visually, as Erdman asserts, the papal figure may be ‘King George himself’ disguised as ‘pope of the established church’ (1974, 169); but textually, the plate illustrates a key image in Revelation 13:3–4, the great red dragon’s transfer of power to the beast from the sea, symbolic of Satan’s conferral of imperial power on Rome. In this and other anti-papal designs, Blake reinterprets traditional Protestant iconography, returning to its biblical sources in an effort to expose the complicity of Albion’s church with Britain’s global dominion. Although textual evidence in Young for the anti-papal designs is minimal, it is crucial for the final design we will consider: NT508. On a page in which Young delivers his boldest criticism of empire, including Britain within his remarks, Blake responds with his most inventive anti-imperialist design in the series. Young delivers his judgement, couched in the rhetoric of quotation, from a transcendent mount in eternity: Call’d here Elijah, in his flaming Car? Past by you the good Enoch, on his Road To those fair Fields, whence Lucifer was hurl’d …? O! that the Fiend had lodg’d on some broad Orb Athwart his Way; nor reach’d his present Home; Then blacken’d Earth with Footsteps foul’d in Hell, Nor wash’d in Ocean, as from Rome he past To Britain’s Ilse; too, too, conspicuous There! (IX:1848–59) Young is stating that Britain is Rome’s satanic heir. This passage is his sharpest condemnation of empire, a reversal of his earlier translatio imperii or westerning-of-empire theme in Imperium Pelagi (1730). It calls forth a clever and contextually rich design in which Blake depicts Satan-Lucifer driven from heaven by lightning, carrying a staff or sceptre in his right hand and a shield clasped to his left arm, which appears to be in the mouth of an elephant falling with him into hell or the bottomless pit. The elephant, a popular symbol of British rule in Asia, is a stroke of inventive genius, enabling Blake to develop the

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millenarian theme of Satan’s fall through an illustration of Young’s most critical page. Blake’s imagery draws on popular demand for Anglo-India history paintings which was generated in part by Cornwallis’s defeat of Tipu Sultan at Seringapatam in 1792. All the major paintings of this event, specifically of Cornwallis’s treaty with Tipu, include elephants spatially positioned to emphasise the pageantry of imperial conquest and benevolence: Mather Brown’s Lord Cornwallis receiving the Sons of Tippoo (1793); Henry Singleton’s Lord Cornwallis receiving the sons of Tipu Sultan as hostages and an identically titled painting by George Carter (Archer, figures 335 and 194); Robert Home’s Lord Cornwallis receiving the sons of Tipu Sultan as hostages, Seringapatam, 25 February 1792 (Archer 1979, figure 213); and Arthur William Devis’s Lord Cornwallis receiving the Sons of Tippoo (Bayly 1990, figure 11). The paintings by Brown and Singleton were praised for idealising Cornwallis and the young Muslim hostages and for creating Roman parallels of British ‘benevolence in conquest’ (Bayly, 154). Blake counters this rhetoric in his design to NT508 by visually identifying Lucifer with the elephant and creating a rich texture of biblical citations on the satanic nature and millennial demise of empire. First, the design recalls the allusion to Isaiah’s prophecy against the king of Babylon (14:3–23), illustrated on NT91 and in Lucifer and the Pope in Hell. The text reads in part: ‘Hell from beneath is moved for thee to meet thee at thy coming … Thy pomp is brought down to the grave’ (14:9, 11). Pomp is an especially salient motif in Young’s critique of imperial ambition (VI:146; IX:176–204). In addition, NT508 depicts Lucifer falling into hell with a sceptre or staff in his right hand, cut off at either end by the bottom and left margins, and a lightning bolt flashing behind and across his body, details that appear in Isaiah 14: ‘How hath the oppressor ceased! The golden city ceased! The Lord hath broken the staff of the wicked, and the scepter of the rulers’ (14:4–5). Isaiah taunts the king in mythological terms – ‘How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer’ (14:12) – which Christian writers reinterpret as a typological prefiguration of Satan’s fall. In the Gospel of Luke, for example, the lightning image is introduced by Jesus when he declares to his followers after they cast out devils: ‘I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven’ (Luke 10:17). Another image of lightning attends an eschatological announcement in Matthew when Jesus proclaims that Antichrist will be exposed at the Second Coming: ‘For as the lightning cometh out of the east, and shineth even unto the west; so shall also the coming of the Son of man’ (Matt. 24:27). Blake aligns these biblical

Popular Millenarianism and Empire in Night Thoughts 23

texts by drawing Satan in a pose that inverts the posture of Jesus in NT1: both figures part clouds in open-armed gestures, but Satan is inverted, his power reversed by the ascending power of Blake’s Jesus. In Revelation Satan is not only ‘cast out’ of heaven (12:7) at the first coming, but ‘cast … into the bottomless pit’ at the second (20:3; Isa 14:15). Also, in Revelation Satan ‘the dragon’ symbolises ancient Rome, while in NT508 he represents Britain’s satanic inheritance of the Roman Empire, a connection emphasised in Young’s text. Thus, the elephant falling with Lucifer suggests that the British Raj is as doomed as Rome. The signature event of all versions of millenarianism, the casting of Satan into the pit and the advent of millennial rule, is given a decisively anti-imperialist turn in Blake’s design. The merging of Satan and the elephant indicates the allusive range of Blake’s pictorial strategy, one that places Young’s text, popular imperial iconography and radical millenarianism on the same page. Although the elephant most immediately symbolises the imperial pomp of Anglo-British rule, Blake’s depicts it shedding a tear, representing the sorrow of conquered India and perhaps his sympathy with it. The elephant is a reluctant companion as Satan thrusts his right arm into its jaw, pulling the creature down with him by its ivory tusks. The elephant’s fate, however, is visually bound to Satan’s, making it more centrally symbolic than in previous depictions in Blake’s work. In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell the elephant makes a (textual) appearance with Britain’s imperial armies. In ‘A Song of Liberty’ a revolutionary figure rises in flames and causes ‘the jealous king’ to fall from his heavenly throne above the Atlantic: ‘Down rushd beating his wings in vain the jealous king; his grey brow’d counsellors, thunderous warriors, curl’d veterans, among helms, and shields, and chariots horses, elephants …’ (25:15). In 1794–95 Blake produced three copies of The Marriage, a work that helps contextualise NT508, for in this design Blake illustrates not just Young’s reference to Lucifer falling to Britain’s isle but a prophecy of the British Empire’s (‘eastern’) doom. In the ‘Song’ the ‘son of fire in his eastern cloud’ (emphasis added) burns the king out of his dens, liberates his ‘horses’ (and elephants) and proclaims: ‘Empire is no more’ (25:18–20). While the Atlantic dominions are the specific focus of prophetic doom in The Marriage, Blake’s design on NT508 resonates with a wide range of visual and verbal texts and contexts to deliver a revolutionary message about the satanic nature and impending fall of Britain’s universal empire. The overall thrust of the designs we have surveyed combines the urgency of popular millenarianism with the scope of Young’s empire

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critique to vary and extend the eschatology of both. Blake’s antimonarchy designs are featured in Nights VI–VII in which Young critiques imperial ambition, but they also culminate in, and contextualise, the extraordinary title-page to Night VIII, NT345. This singularly brilliant design is rooted in the visual-verbal context of these Nights, particularly as part of volume 2 of the watercolour edition in which the frontispiece and title-pages (NT264–5) carry forward the eschatological theme of key pages in volume 1 – NT1, NT38, NT78. But it also introduces the papal caricatures of Night VIII, NT349 and NT396 (echoing NT91), which indicate not only Blake’s anti-Catholic tendency but his effort, in common with the radical millenarians of his day, to update traditional Protestant polemic against Rome as a critique of the Anglican monarchy and church. On the evidence of NT349 and its relation to NT345 and the other papal caricatures, Blake in turn seeks to transform this popular religious tradition by adding the crucial component of the sea. These designs thus express the convergence of radical millenarian themes and anti-empire imagery that characterises the apocalyptic theology of Blake’s Night Thoughts. The correlation between Young’s text and Blake’s designs is conveyed most compellingly by NT508, which turns Young’s critique of Britain as Rome’s satanic heir into an attack on the British Raj in India. The multiple dimensions of this and other designs, revealed through Young’s text and in relation to contemporary political and artistic contexts, show that Blake is making a statement about monarchy in its alliance with empire and not just with state religion. Ultimately, Blake’s Night Thoughts illustrations present a varied and complex dynamic of meaning. An important aspect of this dynamic involves Blake’s creative engagement with Young’s eschatology in relation to popular millenarian prints and British imperial paintings in the mid-1790s.

Notes 1. Beginning in 1795, Blake drew 537 watercolours for Edwards in two years to serve as the basis for a deluxe four-volume engraved edition of Young’s poem. In 1797 the first volume was published, comprising the first four of nine Nights with 43 engravings by Blake, but Edwards did not send out copies for review and abandoned the project without issuing further volumes (Grant et al., 3). No more than 200 copies of the engraved edition and only 20 copies of the two-volume watercolour edition were sold. Edwards soon after took a sinecure in the Vice Admiralty Court in Minorca, provided by the Earl Spenser, who was given a coloured copy of Blake’s Night Thoughts (Bentley 2004, 161–72). Thus, Blake’s designs were known to only a small group of collectors, fellow artists and engravers, and an empire man.

Popular Millenarianism and Empire in Night Thoughts 25 2. In 1792 Brothers developed a following by writing apocalyptic pamphlets declaring he was ‘prince of the Hebrews’ and ‘nephew of the Almighty’ and that George III would lose his throne for the war against France. He was arrested in 1795 and confined in an asylum until 1806 (see Mee 1992; Barrell 2000, ch. 15). 3. For Night VI, see NT229, 233, 240, 249, 251, 262; Night VII: 279, 291, 299, 327; Night VIII: 345; and Night IX: 424–37, 451–2, 463, 537. Unless otherwise noted, all citations to Blake’s Night Thoughts illustrations are to the Complete Edition edited by Grant et al. 1980. 4. Quotations from Night Thoughts are to the Cornford edition, cited by ‘Night’ in Roman numerals followed by Cornford’s line numbers. 5. In The Death of Despotism, a four-page pamphlet with no publishing information. The poem also appeared under the title ‘The Baubles of Courts’ in Lee’s Songs from the Rocks.

2 Blake in Theatreland: Fountain Court and its Environs David Worrall

When William and Catherine Blake moved to 3 Fountain Court, Strand, sometime in 1821, far from entering a London area suitable for a quiet semi-retirement, they found themselves relocated to the very centre of the capital’s theatreland and radical press industries.1 This chapter examines the Blakes’ close physical proximity to a vigorous and rapidly changing local culture. Angus Whitehead’s recent essay has considerably enlarged our understanding of the circumstances surrounding their occupation of the Fountain Court premises, not least in bringing to light that their landlord, Henry Banes, made William a legatee (78–9). This essay extends Whitehead’s findings by arguing that their new premises at the eastern end of the Strand brought them tantalisingly close to London’s latest developments and to a subterranean culture of poetry, music and song. Perhaps the most tangible evidence of the proximity of the encounter between Blake’s image-making and the local popular culture of the Strand comes in the appropriation in 1822 by the radical William Benbow of Blake’s stipple engraving with mezzotint, ‘Mrs. Q.,’ after Jean François Marie Huet-Villiers (Worrall 1998). Whitehead’s identification of ‘Mrs. Q.’s’ publisher, J. or I. Barrow, with the John Barrow who had acted as witness to Henry Banes’s will now brings Fountain Court, Barrow and Blake into much sharper focus. Benbow’s use of ‘Mrs. Q.’ as the frontispiece for Edward Eglantine (pseud.), Memoirs of the Life of the Celebrated MRS Q— … Embellished With A Striking Likeness (1822) is the only known use of one of Blake’s images by a contemporary radical pressman. According to a Home Office spy, Benbow had ‘lately taken [William] Cobbett’s Shop in the Strand’ in July 1820, perhaps only six months before the Blakes moved there.2 But whatever the ultimate transmission route, the connections between Blake, Barrow and Benbow had served their purpose. 26

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The area in which the Blakes now resided had undergone enormous transformations, changes which decisively affected its character, social demography and connections with the capital’s cultural life, with the industries associated with the theatre dominating the local economy in the environs defined by the north bank of the present-day Waterloo Bridge and taking in Fountain Court. However, not only was Somerset House (the home of the Royal Academy throughout this period) within a few hundred metres of the theatres of Covent Garden and Drury Lane, by 1783 a substantial number of Academicians were living and working in the vicinity of Covent Garden (Pointon, 41). The Royal Academicians and the acting profession were highly convergent in employing similar methods to maintain their social influence and ensure continued access to affluent patrons. Holger Hoock’s The King’s Artists: The Royal Academy of Arts and the Politics of British Culture, 1760–1840 (2003) has drawn attention to the importance of both formal and informal dining in fostering links with likely patrons and their intermediaries (218). What has not been noticed before is the degree of social reciprocity between the two professions. On John Philip Kemble’s retirement from the stage in 1817, a lavish dinner was held in his honour where the courtesy of the Royal Academy invitations was reciprocated. Although London’s principal actors and managers were nowhere near as institutionally or professionally organised as the Academicians, it is not difficult to discern how much the acting profession valued and imitated their colleagues in the visual arts. A number of Royal Academicians attended Kemble’s dinner and made elaborate contributions to the celebrations, including a specially inscribed medal worn by the organising committee throughout the meal. Blake’s long-time friend John Flaxman (who also attended that evening) had designed a classical presentation vase for the occasion.3 Other guests included the important patron of painting the Earl of Egremont and the painters, sculptors or Royal Academicians Benjamin Robert Haydon, Francis Leggatt Chantrey, Sir Thomas Lawrence, Benjamin West, J. M. W. Turner and Robert Smirke as well as the architect John Soane, all sharing their tables (rather incongruously) with the clown Joseph Grimaldi and the comedians Charles Mathews and John Liston (Kemble, 47–52). Of those present, apart from the long-term support Blake enjoyed from Flaxman’s advocacy, the Earl of Egremont was already a Blake patron, having commissioned a notable version of A Vision of the Last Judgment (pen and watercolour over pencil, Petworth House, 1808) while Sir Thomas Lawrence, whom Blake had met at a dinner party at least as early as 1818, went on to

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purchase copies of ‘The Dream of Queen Katherine’ and ‘The Wise and Foolish Virgins’, having taken a liking to the Butts’ commissions for those works. In April 1826, when Blake was living at Fountain Court, Lawrence also purchased a proof set of Blake’s Illustrations of the Book of Job engravings (Bentley 2001, 349–50). In February 1827, shortly before Blake’s death in an unsuccessful round of salesmanship on the artist’s behalf, John Linnell offered the Paradise Regained drawings to Chantrey and to Lawrence. (Both declined the purchase [Bentley 358].) Like the annual Royal Academy exhibitions, Kemble’s retirement dinner was carefully engineered not only to celebrate the social status of the theatre but also to facilitate useful interactions between practitioners and influential potential patrons. Although Blake was never firmly established within the social perimeters of either of these circles, it is quite clear that, in so far as painters relied on good connections with actors and dramatists, so too networks of a commercially oriented sociability linked the established painters to those, like Blake and Linnell, who operated intermittently on their outermost fringes. Living in close proximity to the theatre, not too far from the residences of many Royal Academicians and their principal exhibition space at Somerset House, there were obvious advantages to someone like Blake to live there, particularly if he was by then assisted professionally by Linnell, who moved much more easily among such distinctive coteries. The Blakes’ location at Fountain Court in the heart of the theatre district would be a structural factor in their lives and will be returned to in this essay. This burgeoning of a popular interest in drama was intimately connected not only with the mass movement of people but also with the printing presses serving the theatres, the theatregoers and the visitors drawn to their performances. An early indication of this interest was Egerton’s Theatrical Remembrancer (1788) which, as has long been recognised, carried one of the earliest notices of Blake’s unfinished drama ‘King Edward the Third’, printed in Poetical Sketches (1783; in Egerton, 258). Egerton’s project catered for a public enthusiastic to collate, tabulate and record all new pieces of dramatic writing wherever they occurred, and to buy the book in which this information was printed. Blake’s interest in drama and theatre was probably, at best, intermittent. But in his old age he was taken by his friends John Linnell and John Varley to Drury Lane to see Sheridan’s Pizarro (1799) and Dirce or The Fatal Urn; he also went to the less obvious and less accessible venue of the West London Theatre, Tottenham Street, north-west of Covent

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Garden. The West London Theatre which Blake visited in 1821 was characteristic of how new theatres were gradually emerging, seeking to circumvent, by performing dramas with music, the hegemony of the Royal theatres in Covent Garden and Drury Lane with their monopoly in London of the spoken word. A possible reason for The West London’s safe passage was that the venue had once been strongly associated with the amateur dramatics of the Prince Regent’s Pic-Nic Club, the subject of two James Gillray prints, Dilettanti Theatricals; – or – a Peep at the Green Room (1803) and Blowing up the Pic Nic’s [sic] (Godfrey, cat. no. 187, 188). Although Gillray’s prints satirised the anger of the patentees at this infringement of their monopoly (with the additional irony of a royal prince infringing a royal patent), no doubt the Prince Regent’s association later helped established a precedent for the use of the building. Since the early 1800s, however, the playhouse had fallen on hard times, changing its name to The Regency Theatre (an obvious attempt to exploit past associations) and later The Regency Theatre of Variety, a venue playing such pieces as John Kerr’s Presumptive Guilt, Or The Fiery Ordeal; A Grand Melo Dramatic Spectacle In Three Acts (1818). Blake went to The West London to see what The Times called ‘a cutdown edition’ of John Dryden and Nathaniel Lee’s Oedipus: A Tragedy (1679). This was probably a version emphasising the piece’s unexpected burletta-like qualities, such as the first act opening where ‘The Curtain rises to a plaintive Tune’ or with Dryden and Lee’s original ‘Song to Apollo’ possibly burlesqued or substituted with something more racy to tie it more firmly to the Epilogue’s clue that the play had featured ‘Charm! Song! and Show! a Murder and a Ghost!’3 A review in The Drama; or, Theatrical Pocket Magazine notes that it had been ‘ostentatiously’ billed ‘for the last 2 months’ as a great rarity as if it were an authentic translation of the Oedipus Tyrannus of Sophocles. While Blake would certainly have been aware that John Flaxman had made designs (engraved by Thomas Piroli) for Compositions from the Tragedies of Aeschylus (1795), it is not inconceivable that, like many others, he went in the expectation of an historic reconstruction. The popularity of these entertainments, as well as the crowds they drew to the Fountain Court area nearer to the central playhouses of the Strand area, where the Olympic, Adelphi, Covent Garden and Drury Lane were located, had a marked effect on their surroundings. Across the road from Fountain Court, less than 500 metres away, was the playhouse known as the Sans Pareil (which in the 1810s changed its name to the Adelphi Theatre), a tall terraced playhouse which stands to this day.

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In the Strand, the principal thoroughfare traversing the frontage of Fountain Court and almost directly across the road from the Adelphi Theatre, by 1819 a tavern called The Coal-Hole had become part of a fugitive series of London private theatres, a louche category of playhouse strongly associated with disorder and financial irregularity (The Critics Budget, or, a Peep into the Amateur Green Room [1819], cited in Beaudry, 22–3). While a Victorian public house of that name still stands in the Strand close to the site of the original building, a glimpse at the area’s past is provided by the 1763 Old Bailey case of Thomas Powell, landlord of the ‘Unicorn Ale-house, in Fountain-court, in the Strand’, who had ill-advisedly fallen asleep ‘in my own tap-room’, when there were ‘divers coal heavers, and others, to the number of about twenty, in the house’ and had been robbed.4 The presence of the coal heavers provides a tantalising link to an account given by the editors of a late nineteenth-century history of music hall, who noted that, although the origin of The Coal-Hole title ‘is now lost in the mist of obscurity … it is surmised that it arose from the contiguity of the coal wharves, which at one time existed in its vicinity’ (Stuart and Parks, 21). Theatres were prodigious consumers of energy for heating and lighting – the theatre manager of a small provincial theatre in Lincoln complained in 1809 that lighting costs were £10 a week (Robertson, 7). It is quite possible that the Fountain Court area coal wharves chiefly supplied the two Royal theatres at Covent Garden and Drury Lane, a short haul up Bow Street. However, by the late 1820s, the position had changed. Remarkably, by 1820 the London East End Royalty Theatre (then called the East London Theatre), Tower Hamlets had its own gasworks which, when the playhouse was sold, was offered for sale as either a separate or a combined going concern. The Coal-Hole area developed into a tavern and entertainment location which Blake would have known. A decade later, The Coal-Hole appears to have reverted to its tavern origins to become one of the best known of the ‘song-and-supper’ clubs popular from the 1820s. Although The Coal-Hole ceased to be a private theatre, its ‘song-and-supper’ incarnation attracted not only the celebrated actor Edmund Kean, but also Charles Sloman, star of the Victorian music hall (music hall being the descendant of these clubs). As well as Sloman, then at the very beginning of his career, The Coal-Hole regularly featured (perhaps conferring on them some valuable measure of selfesteem) more obscure singers such as the ageing Joe Wells, whose renditions were chiefly remembered at the end of the century for their ‘coarseness and vulgarity’ (Stuart and Parks, 23). Like the playwright

Blake in Theatreland: Fountain Court and its Environs 31

Theodore Edward Hook, author of the anti-Methodist (heavily censored) Killing No Murder (1809), Charles Sloman used the venue to exercise his theatrical skills in improvising verses or songs. More mysteriously, Charles Stuart and A. J. Parks, early historians of the music hall, writing about the Coal-Hole at the end of the nineteenth century, recalled ‘An eccentric old character named Ben Mills [who] … used to sing an amusing ditty called “Billy Nuts, the Poet”’. Although the song is now lost, it is tantalising to speculate whether ‘Billy Nuts’ was a reference to William Blake, an allusion born not only of Blake’s local residence but of his reputation for madness (23). This transition of The Coal-Hole from tavern to private theatre and onwards to an incarnation as a ‘song-and-supper’ club of the later 1820s tells us much about the vitality and complexity of late Georgian London sociability and its connections with the personnel and intricate textualities of contemporary theatre. Someone who moved with ease between both worlds was the journalist and playwright Pierce Egan, who said that he balanced his drunkenness at Offley’s Cyder Cellar in King Street, Covent Garden with visits to picture galleries, to ‘make amends for it’ – an obvious allusion to the nearby Royal Academy rooms at Somerset House (Egan, 47). In another coincidence of these promiscuous cultures of printmaking and the press, Angus Whitehead has discovered that, at the death of the engraver and high-class print colourer Theodore Lane in 1828, Egan identified him as having been an apprentice of John Barrow’s at his Battle Bridge premises near St Pancras, the publication location of Blake’s ‘Mrs. Q.’. Egan’s text for Lane’s 36 etchings and woodcuts illustrating The Life of an Actor (1825) once again figures the intricate continuities stressed throughout this essay between Fountain Court, Regency pressmen, the acting profession and a vigorous local popular culture (Whitehead, 94). As print colourer and engraver, it is evident from Lane’s print the ‘House of Call for Actors’ that he and Egan were very familiar with the contemporary popularity of acting. At the Harp and O.P. (‘Opposite Prompter’) or P.S. (‘Prompt Side’) taverns (the latter also called Kean’s Head) in Russell Court, near Drury Lane, Egan recalled elaborate hoaxes played on ‘stagestruck’ youths who were brought to the tavern under the impression that they were being ‘formally introduced to the … proprietor of a country theatre’ and then duped into getting on a table to recite Shakespeare (Egan 27). Their fooling, at the very least, is an indicator of the popularity of actors and acting among members of the public who were eager, and gullible enough, to throng into the Strand environs in the hope of seeing John

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Philip Kemble, Edmund Kean or one of the other celebrated actors of the period. They were places, quite literally, of social upheaval and moral irreverence. The ‘song-and-supper’ clubs even spawned their own art-form, the improvisatore performance. This involved improvising songs composed on the spot. The most famous of the improvisators was the loyalist playwright Theodore Edward Hook, who usually performed at Offley’s, one of whose songs is recorded in Renton Nicholson’s Autobiography of a Fast Man (1863, 70–3). Nicholson’s reference (datable to the early 1830s) to George Ruthven of Bow Street, whom he describes as an ‘inveterate’ gambler, is particularly striking (88). Whether Nicholson knew it or not, Ruthven was a government informer and infiltrator whose operational name was ‘George Williams’.5 Ruthven’s presence provides conclusive evidence of the interchange between an official culture which persisted in the surveillance of working-class life and the semi-theatricalised revelry of the Strand area ‘song-and-suppers’, all within a teeming culture of print and song. From the late 1820s onwards, fugitive, pornographic, pocketsized song-books emanated from these clubs, with titles such as The Nobby Songster, A Prime Collection as now Singing at Offleys Cider Cellar: Coal Hole &c. and printed by William West of Wych Street. Around that time too, Jacob Beuler sang at similar haunts and published his song collection Bob Logic’s Memoranda: an Original Budget of Staves, Nightly Chaunted by Kiddy Coves, Knights of the Darkey, &.c&c. at every Free and Easy Throughout the metropolis, by Way of Prelude to The Sprees of ‘Life in London’ with its long and intricate expeditions into ‘flash’ language (a ‘kiddy’ is a thief; a ‘darkey’ a darkened lantern used by burglars). The significance of this boisterous, popular, oral culture was not only that its centres were in close proximity to Fountain Court but also that modern critical commentators have consistently returned to examine the role of oral poetic forms in Blake’s verse. The role of ‘orality in writing’ (Pierce, 449–70) in Blake’s verse provides a useful concept with which to negotiate the presence of this persistent aspect of Blake’s relief etched works. One can only speculate whether the elderly Blake joined in with any of the raucous late-night revelries of improvised song and verse at the nearby Coal-Hole, O.P. or P.S. taverns. However, there is no doubting the esteem in which Edmund Kean was held in the period from the late 1810s to the early 1820s and how this must have quite visibly rejuvenated the atmosphere of the Fountain Court area. Thirty years later the theatrical enthusiast William Robson, author of The Old Play-goer (1854), recollected with disdain that ‘Kean’s

Blake in Theatreland: Fountain Court and its Environs 33

person was mean … He wanted finish … study; his mind was not cultivated … [he] was a vulgar actor.’ In particular, Robson derided how ‘Kean … [could] keep the denizens of the Coal-hole in a roar’ (112–13, 117). The sort of plebeian qualities present in the Strand pressman William Benbow, who famously pirated Byron’s Cain: A Mystery from his Castle Street, Leicester Square, premises in 1822 – the same year as his pirating of Blake’s ‘Mrs. Q.’ image – were replicated nightly in Kean’s antics at the Coal-Hole. Benbow’s activities originating in the Strand included politicking on a national scale. With Kean descending into wanton drunkenness (‘I always take a “shag” before the play begins’), his dominance over the Coal-Hole involved ever more plebeian brawls in some of London’s most deprived and destitute locations (‘Kean got into [a] row last night in St. Giles [off Oxford Street], had his clothes torn off, was taken to the watch house, let out, slept in the neighbourhood, got scratched in the fray’ [Nelson and Cross, 16, 51]). While his sometime near-neighbour Benbow’s response to Byron’s Cain was to pirate it, Blake’s was the equally unorthodox route of producing a two-plate relief-etched illuminated book, The Ghost of Abel / A Revelation in the Visions of Jehovah Seen by William Blake (c. 1822). Again, within the vibrant print culture of the area, Benbow’s The Rambler’s Magazine; or Fashionable Emporium of Polite Literature (1822, 395) provided an equally individual response, finding a common atheism abounding in ‘Gibbon, in his Decline and Fall; Lord Byron, in his Cain, and other works; Lawrence, in his Lectures’, the last a reference to the ‘vitality’ debate championed by the surgeon Sir William Lawrence (1783–1867). In this rapidly changing world, one can only speculate whether Blake would have been aghast at the sort of promiscuities recollected by the emigrant actor Joe Cowell, who remembered that ‘the mob must ever have their idol … the privilege of calling them, behind their backs, “Old Sall Siddons” … they must meet them at the Harp … or the Coal-hole’ and be able to call them familiarly ‘“Charley [Benjamin] Incledon” or “Neddy Kean,” or they were not content’ (Cowell, 46). In this setting, song-making and semi-public performance became increasingly dominant. From the late 1820s, William West, whose toy-theatre prints will be discussed below, had the dubious sideline of producing and selling discreet, pocket-sized (32 mo), salacious song-books, often with crude hand-coloured and etched frontispieces, such as The Gentleman’s Spicey Songster (c. 1841), The Flash Songster and Cockchafer, A choice selection of flash, frisky, and funny songs (c. 1836), The Rambler’s Flash Songster, Nothing But Out And

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Outers, Adapted For Gentlemen Only (c.1838), The Libertine Songster and The Nobby Songster, A Prime Collection (c.1842). A popular songwriter such as Jacob Beuler, whose works were regularly featured at Vauxhall Gardens and The Royal Coburg, mirrored this taste more openly in his tour-de-force, ‘The Chapter of Cocks; Or, Cocky Cock, the Cocksmith, of Cock-lane, and the Coquetting Cock-eyed Maid at the Cock Public House. A Cockney Ditty’ (34–5). These were all indirect spin-offs of the era of two Regency gamblers, Tom and Jerry, and were sung – perhaps even composed – in the nearby West End theatrical drinking dens visited by actors and theatregoers alike, haunts such as Offley’s Cider Cellar in King Street, and The Coal-Hole. With songs such as ‘Mother H’s Knocking Shop’, ‘I am a Smutty Chimney Sweep’, ‘The Wig and the Pole’, ‘The Female Tobacconist’ (the pun being on ‘shag’ tobacco), ‘The Nice Old Gentleman’ and ‘A Rum-un to look at, but a Good-un to go’, this was a very different world from the traditional image of late Georgian or early Victorian children playing by the fireside. In many of them, such as The Nobby Songster, A Prime Collection as now Singing at Offleys Cider Cellar: Coal Hole &c., available from William West’s shop in Wych Street, opposite The Olympic Theatre just off the Strand near the site of the present day Aldwych Theatre and ex-BBC premises at Bush House, the Coal-Hole is specifically mentioned. The risqué titles hint at the dubious goings-on in this anarchic area and the disruptive effects it had on contemporary attitudes to class, conduct and decorum. According to some commentators, Lord Byron himself sometimes frequented The Coal-Hole and Offley’s Cyder Cellar, a recollection which, if true, would place its hey-day even earlier than is being argued for in this essay, but suggestive of the continuing connection between poetry and boisterous entertainment (Haddon, 5). Although any direct relationship between Blake and the riotous (if nearby) Coal-Hole must remain conjectural, there can be little doubt of his links to popular song. More genteel, but no less significant, were the complex networks of practices of song-making, publishing and technologies of graphic reproduction connecting several individuals within Blake’s circle of friends towards the end of his life. Keri Davies has drawn attention to Alexander Gilchrist’s anecdote about Blake becoming tearful whilst listening to Mrs Linnell singing the Scottish border ballad ‘O Nancy’s hair is yellow as gowd’ at their Hampstead residence, an event which presumably occurred during an excursion from Fountain Court. Through careful detective work, Davies has traced the ballad’s dissemination via The Scottish Minstrel: A Selection from the Vocal Melodies of Scotland Ancient & Modern Arranged for the Piano Forte

Blake in Theatreland: Fountain Court and its Environs 35

(Edinburgh, c. 1824), a six-volume work carrying vignettes etched by the painter, engraver and publisher William Home Lizars. Not only was Lizars known to the Linnells and John Flaxman, there is a strong probability – perhaps entirely unknown to Blake – that Lizars experimented with a method of stereotype relief etching which he sampled in the socalled ‘Third Edition’ of J. G. Lockhart’s Peter’s Letters to His Kinsfolk (1819). As Davies concludes, the frontispiece, ‘engraved in alto relievo’, to Peter’s Letters to His Kinsfolk is the only known example of printing from a relief etching process, as used in the illuminated books, to have occurred during Blake’s lifetime. In other words, the picture of Blake which emerges is of him embracing aspects of local popular culture but partaking of it in a quite distinctive, separate social environment. Not least, with Lizars having adopted Blake’s relief etching or stereotype method, it is extremely significant that the poet’s Ghost of Abel, itself a response to Byron’s and Benbow’s atheism, should have declared on its second plate ‘1822 W Blakes Original Stereotype was 1788’ (2: 30, E 272), making it a remarkable intervention, defensive or assertive, into the controversies over belief and reproductive print technologies which surrounded him. Lizars’ relief-etched stereotyping and its appropriation (or independent replication) typify much of the vibrancy of the contemporary print culture. Close to the Olympic Theatre in Wych Street (between the present-day Drury Lane and Aldwych) where he had moved from an Exeter Street location even nearer Fountain Court, from 1823 William West’s business in toy theatres, as well as the texts and prints to accompany them, provided a significant output of etchings (Speaight, 10–11). Although toy theatres may appear to be consignable only to the category of ‘juvenile drama’ (West’s preferred description for the genre), their presence indicates a more substantial taste for theatricality, one that extended to both parents as well as their children. George Speaight’s History of the English Toy Theatre 1828–33 (1946), captured, almost as it disappeared on the eve of the television age, the final vestiges of the Georgian and Victorian children’s pastime of wooden or cardboard theatres peopled by cut-out characters snipped from larger prints. West’s premises at the Theatrical Print Warehouse, 57 Wych Street, Strand, placed him and his wares not only directly opposite the Olympic Theatre in the same thoroughfare, but also hard by Drury Lane. West employed a number of artists and etchers, including George and Isaac Robert Cruikshank and William and Henry Heath. An attempt to link the name of William Henry Brooke, who signed some of his etchings ‘W. B.’, to William Blake was seriously

36 David Worrall

entertained during the first half of the twentieth century, but there can be little doubt that West, Hodgson and the other toy theatre printmakers considerably added to the need for etchers and colourers, and that West in particular supplemented this trade by vending the locally performed songs arising from Offley’s Cyder Cellar or the Coal-Hole (Stone, 41). The scale of the printmaking industry following the theatres should not be underestimated. Even the poorly received burlesque of Dryden and Lee’s Oedipus: A Tragedy which, as we have seen, Blake and Linnell went to see was followed by a toy theatre print of ‘Mr. Huntley as Oedipus / Performed at the West London Theatre’, issued from Duke Street, Soho.7 Thanks to the likes of West in Wych Street and Benbow in the Strand, there was no shortage of different classes of etching work in the immediate vicinity of Fountain Court – or even for the provision of new images, as the ‘Mrs. Q.’ appropriation suggests. Indeed, as Mei-Ying Sung (2006) has pointed out with reference to the growth of a substantial Midlands English manufacturing industry in transfer printing from engraved copper plates onto ceramics, a trade which sometimes employed London-based designers and copper plate suppliers, there was not even any absolute national decline in the early nineteenth-century English engraving trade. Blake’s inability, or decision not to capitalise on this growing market – to which he had been introduced as early as 1784 by John Flaxman – can be characterised as a determination not to court the popular. Examined from a consideration of the overall economic and cultural conditions of the Fountain Court area, and taking into account the vitality of both its radical and theatrical press, it is possible to conceive of Blake’s response to his sense of the burgeoning presence of plebeian or popular entertainments, from theatricals to tavern singing, as a decision to modulate into a set of quite specific artistic and economic choices about the future path of his career. Given the divisions and casualisations of the engraving and etching trade described by Morris Eaves (1992), Blake’s response to the prolific, boisterous – and occasionally even pirating – methods of the print and printmaking industry which surrounded him in the environs of Fountain Court, finds him making very rational decisions. If the crude etching and rough hand-colouring of the theatrical prints and salacious song collections were coming to dominate the local market, then the appropriate response was the course he took, that is, to take advantage of his experience with the repertoire of engraving skills taught to him by Basire and perfected over a lifetime and to withdraw from etching. With the 100 plates of Jerusalem

Blake in Theatreland: Fountain Court and its Environs 37

certainly completed by 1820, and with the single relief-etched plate of On Homer’s Poetry [&] On Virgil and the two relief-etched plates of The Ghost of Abel completed by 1821–2 shortly after he moved to Fountain Court, it made sense for Blake to turn to the much more skilful art of engraving when he engaged on the long-term project of Illustrations of the Book of Job, which was not completed until 1825 and published in 1826. By establishing his difference, Blake could hope to find what we now call a ‘niche market’, since the skills barriers to entry were set very high. Responding to a print market now borne along by etching, and being visibly and even audibly aware of the social, cultural and political changes so proximate to where he was living, Blake chose to emphasise how distinctive his engraving skills were in comparison to the etching dominating the rest of the marketplace. Given the laborious, exacting and elaborated way in which he worked on the 22 plates of Job, together with the setbacks and revisions betrayed in the hard evidence of repoussage on the back of the Job copper plates now archived in the British Museum, it seems clear that Blake wished to define his mastery of the art as being quite distinctive from the economically dominant process of etching (Sung 2005). In other words, Blake’s ultimate response to the proliferation of a popular, even plebeian, local culture was to reinvent himself as a virtuoso of the exacting skills of engraving. It was a response that capitalised on a lifetime of experience and which he knew could not be easily replicated by others. Far from being a quiet retreat, or even a removal into obscurity, Fountain Court brought Blake closer to the Royal Academy’s exhibition rooms, the spiralling interests in theatre and popular song almost audible from the Coal-Hole if not the Adelphi or Olympic Theatre, yet it spurred him to reassess and recalculate where his own skills lay in relation to this swiftly changing popular culture. Rejecting the path of The Nobby Songster … as now Singing at Offleys Cider Cellar: Coal Hole &c., Blake chose to illustrate the Book of Job.

Notes 1. The Blakes had moved to 3 Fountain Court, Strand in 1821. Blake’s comment that although ‘I live in a hole here … God has a beautiful mansion for me elsewhere’ comes from Gilchrist’s biography, quoted BR 753; Angus Whitehead, ‘William Blake’s Last Residence: No. 3 Fountain Court, Strand, George Richmond’s Plan and an Unrecorded Letter to John Linnell’, British Art Journal 6:1 (2005) pp. 21–30.

38 David Worrall 2. National Archives, P[ublic] R[ecord] O[ffice], Kew, H[ome] O[ffice] 20/14.22. 3. This episode in Blake’s life and The Times review are documented in Bentley (2001) 385; John Dryden and Nathaniel Lee, Oedipus: A Tragedy. As it is Acted at His Highness the Duke’s Theatre (1679), 1, 22, 80. Parts of The Times review appear to have been pirated in The Drama; or, Theatrical Pocket Magazine. For January [sic] (1822), 100. 4. Christopher Cormack, theft, 7 December 1763, The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, Ref. T17631207-37. 5. For an example of his infiltration of a political society, see PRO Treasury Solicitor 11/204/875 (ii) fol. 899, 18 Dec 1816. See also Worrall (1992), 104. 6. PRO HO 40/14. 63, 22 July 1820. 7. ‘Mr. Huntley as Oedipus / Performed at the West London Theatre / 13 Nov 1821 Jameson 13 Duke St’, Harvard Theatre Collection, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.

3 Emanations and Negations of Blake in Victorian Art Criticism Colin Trodd

On the fly-leaf of Alexander Gilchrist’s seminal The Life of William Blake (1863), we find these lines from Browning’s Pictor Ignotus: The sanctuary’s gloom at least shall ward vain tongues from where my pictures stand apart Browning’s poem is a kind of extirpative monologue in which the unnamed painter appears to imagine the conditions in which experience spills into and replenishes art to create a benign fullness of presence, a perfect expression of aesthetic life. And yet this image of graceful and harmonious completion is forced into place and momentarily glimpsed through the thicket of fragments at work in the self-cancelling structure of a poem where the operations of consciousness intrude into the work to block the flow of cohesive action and narration. Its subject does not develop; instead it is enmeshed in the problem of the relationship between conception and execution, as the increasingly nervous and rebarbative thoughts of the artist enter into and become the subject of the poem. Its monological nature is analogous to a condition of creative life where the artist is imprisoned by the images of freedom he imagines – or where the associative plentitude of imaginative life sustains the illusion that to think ideas into being is to produce art, or the conditions for the production of a total art work. In other words, the poem battles to make the unknown painter something more than an unknowable subject. It is also a poem about the stultifying conditions in which artists surrender their independence because of coercive commercial and academic pressures. In lieu of a discerning public, the artist is obliged to become popular, to satisfy the requirements of those who 39

40 Colin Trodd

… buy and sell our pictures, take and give, Count them for garniture and household-stuff, And where they live needs must our pictures live And see their faces, listen to their daily prate The true artist, then, shrinks from this space of material encasement with its ‘endless cloisters’ to confirm his identification with the possibility of an art rich in lived experience. Meanwhile, anticipating the appearance of these productive energies the artist is buffered by consciousness; here at least his work will become the monumental production of an inner world, a private place where conception and execution melt into a fertile imagery at once deliquescent and exalted, bodily and aesthetic. Browning uses the tension between order and disorder, action and thought, to explore how the monologue form might express the idea of the spiritual identity of the individual creator becoming available to an audience. Yet, in reality, Pictor Ignotus generates a structural equivalent of the experience of isolation and alienation, and it does so by creating a slippery framework in which the only place where the artist can perfect himself is outside the poem. Artistic thoughts do not form themselves into a system of theoretic elaboration, for as the poem ‘advances’ it becomes a bundle of signs pointing to an unalienable realm it cannot occupy. Nor is it the case that artistic identity is a condition of settled presence, for what seems to be the abyss of inwardness is forever in the process of becoming the true subject of representation. Tellingly, nature is swallowed by consciousness. Punished or praised, Blake comes into focus in Victorian art criticism as a celebrated example of the emergence of a particular development in modern culture: the appearance of the artist who is (too) close to his vision. For his admirers, Blake makes the enjoyment of the sensuous freedom of consciousness the subject of his art; for his critics, his productions confirm an inability to be self-critical and to acknowledge that the function of art is to act as a bridge between experience and nature. Accordingly, articulations of Blake tend to oscillate between ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ versions of the Pictor Ignotus as commentators model Blakean identity in terms of an ‘aberrant’ or ‘emancipatory’ sensorium, noting that, like Browning’s painter, he would rather live linked with his pictures forever than go to heaven.

Composing Blake Blake’s presence in Victorian visual culture was determined by a relatively modest body of images: the Songs of Innocence and of Experience,

Emanations and Negations of Blake in Victorian Art Criticism 41

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and The Book of Job interested those critics, collectors and commentators concerned with his pictorial achievements; the paintings and the large colour prints were generally less well known.1 These relief etchings and engravings were taken to emphasise or embody the key determinants of Blake’s genius: temperament and originality, or their conflation in an expressive and sensuous art where referents leak into a pictorial ground of air and light instead of forming a compositional universe made in and by techniques and technologies producing spatial clarity. Despite this fascination with the ‘enchanted’ nature of Blake’s pictorial style, his main Victorian advocates – Gilchrist, the Rossetti brothers, A. C. Swinburne and, somewhat later, Arthur Symons – tended to stress Blake’s powers of invention rather than his mastery of a specific medium. The embodiment of creative energy, his designs seemed to speak of some unfathomable depth of experience; his aesthetic caught between the struggle to overcome compositional formulas and the need to refashion notions of figural presence (Swinburne, 191, 307; see also RB 150–5). These commentators attempted to popularise a positive image of Blake against a cultural background where he was seen as an obscure and unreliable figure, an artist hostile to the foundation and reproduction of rules of pictorial composition derived from the sense-based, self-testing systems taught at the Royal Academy. Gilchrist, the Rossettis, Swinburne and Symons seize on the idea that Blake pictures a world teeming with life because his images represent the thronging physical world of his consciousness. They set out to make him popular by revealing that his is an art of physical perception. In each case, Blake is identified in terms of the conflict between the need to invent a form of art that is original and the desire to find a type of expression that makes this art intelligible. Gilchrist invites his readers to appreciate the visual character of an art ‘never imitative, but the expression of ideas pure and simple’; and Swinburne refers to Blake’s desire to liberate art from ‘barren symbols’ and ‘mendacious idols’ (Gilchrist 1907, 140; Swinburne, 3). Therefore, they present Blake’s art as the embodiment of conceptual energy rather than the result of the allegorical codifications produced by analytical consciousness in the form of academic art theory. This position offered the prospect of defining Blake as modern: it allowed writers to emphasise the capacity of his art to invoke and eliminate customary conceptions of pictorial order; and, at the same time, it encouraged the belief, expressed by the art critic F. T. Palgrave, that Blake lived ‘apart from chronology’ (Palgrave, 17). What concerns all these writers – and this is particularly evident in Gilchrist – is the status of an oeuvre where works fail to resolve

42 Colin Trodd

themselves into a unity, and the nature of an artistic career where creativity exceeds the capacity of criticism to capture, codify or explain its expression, development and organisation. In this view, Blake’s modernity is Janus-like: it inspires a pattern of Homeric labour where the artist becomes heroic because he overcomes academic mimesis to call attention to the material identity of the image; and yet this concern with the ground, surface and medium creates what are pictorially unstable forms. In other words, the fear remains that in looking at his images the viewer encounters the conditions for their critical exhaustion or destruction as sources of sensory knowledge.2 In contrast to these forceful pronouncements, other critics expressed less sanguine readings of Blake and his work. Perhaps the most intriguing were made in the 1860s and 1870s, in response to three key events in the public emergence of Blake as a significant presence in British art: Gilchrist’s widely reviewed biography (1863), Swinburne’s polemical essay (1867) and the Burlington Fine Arts Club Exhibition of his paintings, colour prints and relief etchings (1876) (Scott; BFAC). Both Gilchrist and Swinburne acknowledged the deleterious nature of Blake’s isolation from significant, extensive and persistent patronal networks in their accounts of his creative life, but other commentators tended to address this aspect of his cultural identity in two ways. In the first, the Ruskinian conception of Blake, his art is characterised as the projection of aesthetic failure, a condition of creative life where the fragmented self is unable to perceive a unity external to itself. The ‘warped power’ of Blake’s art must be recognised and rejected, Ruskin argues, for it generates a self-devouring imagination unable to express any sense of concrete, lived experience or record the true order of things (Ruskin, ‘The Cestus of Aglaia’, vol. 19, 133). The second response to Blake’s isolation, as found in essays by the art critic J. B. Atkinson and the literary commentators H. G. Hewlett and Oswald Crawfurd, indirectly draws on Ruskin’s claim that Blake’s art replaces compositional coherence with pictorial vitality. In addition, however, they all stress that individual works are the physical deposits of a mind deformed by addiction to stimuli. This finds its clearest expression in accounts of Blake’s executive skills, particularly the assertion that his images lack compositional sophistication or refinement. Accordingly, Blake’s art becomes a strange confection of the primitive and the modern because of its inability to protect the critical integrity of representation from the fantastical and anarchic forces that would deny any real contact between the subject and the world.

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By the 1860s and 1870s, then, the question of Blake’s artistic and social isolation had become a subject of fascination for critics, and many of them associated this with his apparent popularity in those self-enclosing groupings known as Pre-Raphaelitism and Aestheticism. However, the idea that Blake would become popular because his art defeated every attempt to make it reveal a coherent identity did trouble many figures outside the Gilchrist–Rossetti–Swinburne loop. As we will see, Atkinson and Hewlett, as well as the poets Francis Thompson and Coventry Patmore, were extremely anxious about the nature of Blake’s art, its relationship to a coterie culture, and the possibility that his works would be able to breed a condition of aesthetic desire, or the endless desirability of desire, through the ‘worship’ of their sensational qualities or effects. Tellingly, in their explanations of the BFAC Exhibition, Blake comes back to life in an art where bodily values overcome critical truth to generate a public as infantile as he is. This conquest-conversion model was but one response to the issue of Blake’s relationship with a ‘belated’ (elite) public formed in and through accounts of the emergence and development of the idea of the specialised nature of aesthetic knowledge. Yet these issues, of such interest to many of Blake’s Victorian commentators, have not attracted much attention from art historians, despite the fact that matters relating to patronal systems and processes, and their capacity to engender debates concerning artistic fellowships and cultural groupings, continue to be central to accounts of nineteenth-century British art. As will become apparent when James Smetham’s account of Blake is discussed, by the 1860s and 1870s it was possible to create an image in which he was both admired and feared. Of course, what might be called Blake’s dual identity can be traced back to contemporary encounters with his art. Indeed, the tension between Blake’s ‘individualism’ and his claim to embody an exalted form of image-making is central to nineteenthcentury debates about his value as a painter, designer and engraver. During Blake’s lifetime critics tended to find in his works inscriptions of his own identity, an identity that aspired to the gnomic and the popular. The literary critic Robert Hunt associated the manner and content of his images with an imagination governed by haptic intensity rather than conventions of visual mimesis (Hunt, 605). For instance, in his treatment of the body, Blake was taken to efface the pictorial logic and assertoric force of classical form by representing the ‘furious and distorted beings of an extravagant imagination’ (605). His fate, this argument contends, is to be unaware of his ironic plight: trapped within a demotic rhetoric of the body, which finds no

44 Colin Trodd

audience for itself, his art translates the beautiful into the ludicrous and thus the spectator is confronted with the irrational exuberance of ‘style’ rather than the rationalising forms and methods of ‘authentic’ academic art. Here, then, is the problem. Blake, it is assumed, wants his art to be public or communal, but this aim is constricted because his images conflate sensation and experience – they make expression a manifestation of the pure inwardness of the subject. Such observations would remain at the centre of anti-Blakean discourse where it is alleged Blake cannot examine the formal, critical and technical processes of composition, signification and representation. It is certainly the case that through his claim on the expressive intensity or physicality of the body Blake tends to disturb the tradition of Renaissance humanism, which, in the wake of Alberti, stressed the function of the human form as the central organising and governing principle of pictorial construction and discursive control. Nor is Blake drawn to Lessing’s counter-argument which, rejecting the belief that images are painted stories, proclaims that the highest and purest form of pictorial unity occurs when the artist expresses a significant moment before the culmination of a specific event (see Mitchell 1986). Apart from Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites, many Victorian art critics reproduced Albertian and Lessingesque dicta during their investigations into the conceptual identity of pictorial expression (Olmsted). Nor should we forget that within Reynoldsian art theory, the dominant system of academic pedagogy throughout this period, beauty is equated with central form, which is itself an abstraction from common nature; as synthesising formula the beautiful is a governing principle of critical judgement (Reynolds, 146–7; see also Barrell 1986, 69–162). For critics associated with these formulations of aesthetic experience and knowledge, Blake’s art was capricious and quixotic at the level of representation: it simply failed to make itself legible, being more fascinated with showing things than in telling an audience what they meant. Such apparent inability to order, organise or select forms to create rational compositions was equated with the contamination of polite culture by popular culture. The implication is that Blake could not adapt his designs to the requirements of academic culture because he celebrates individual invention above critical knowledge of visual form, an attitude expressed during his lifetime by the Royal Academician Joseph Farington, who wrote: ‘He does not employ [invention] … to give novelty and decoration to regular conceptions; but the whole of his aim is to produce singular shapes & odd combinations’ (151).

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These matters, concerned with the pictorial expression of taste, find an outlet in those later forms of art criticism dealing with the relationship between the nature of Blakean vision and Blake’s expression of freedom. This reaches its zenith in the dicta provided by major modernist critics such as Roger Fry and D. S. MacColl, for whom Blake’s ungovernable and irritating visual kineticism – compositional, bodily and gestural – confirms his incapacity to realise a coherent conceptual and social space in which an audience might be addressed.3 Such ideas were particularly prevalent in the 1860s and 1870s, where Blake is fantasised as the oxymoronic hero of a catastrophic failure that might, perversely enough, create the conditions for his emergence as a popular figure or cultural hero. This anxiety – that the modern artist has the opportunity to transform his critical failure into a form of selfadvertising uniqueness – is caught in Francis Thompson’s response to the Burlington Fine Arts Club Exhibition: ‘It was nearly all utter rubbish … [Blake] does not seem to have been made, but only to have assumed a sort of voluntary madness of freedom from convention in order to make himself original’ (217). Instead of attempting to collaborate with a public, Thompson’s Blake wants to be autonomous and to find some way of standing out from a cultural landscape populated by individuals, but this pursuit of individualism is not accompanied by any interactional or interpersonal coherence. Blake creates himself by denying the conditions in which he might be related to, or communicate with, others. Therefore, Thompson’s patrician disdain is directed at the self-mythologising activities of a cultural agent who desperately seeks a distinct persona in an overcrowded art market. If, as we will see, Swinburne’s Blake contributes to his ultimate failure by being in conflict with his desire to create, then Thompson’s Blake never achieves the condition of self-discovery because he is trapped by his desire to exchange the creative integrity and critical independence of art for a set of gestures, traces and acts within which the artist’s presence is embodied. Thus the significance of the terms ‘original’ and ‘originality’: they are signs of the worthless animation of a subject so self-enclosed that the primary function of his art is to attract and incarnate the impersonal desires of the multitude. In other words, it is because Blake’s art ‘imitates’ the illusion of freedom that Blake is unable to exercise any real independence or authority. By displaying this concern with expression-as-identity his work alienates itself from the conditions in which art participates in understanding the world as a realm of knowledge. For Thompson, and others of his ilk, Blake’s art is always disreputable because it is seen to exceed the

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idea of a universal sensuous ground that guarantees any possible codification of art and its experience.

Making Blake modern Behind many of the competing claims concerning Blakean identity lies a model of cultural practice based on the relationship between artistic freedom and patronal customs. Accordingly, some of the major Victorian readings of Blake’s worth as an artist are implicated in this narrative system, although their outcomes are somewhat different, for reasons which should become apparent. It is not my purpose in this essay to identify Blake as inherently radical or conservative, but I do want to suggest that the conceptual machinery within which his identity was articulated was effectively multi-coded. It would be easy to trace the development of Blakean criticism in which the negative value of ‘extravagance’ is converted into the positive value of ‘freedom’ and ‘freedom’ is subsequently incorporated into an image of political liberty or revolutionary energy; but this would be to ignore the fact that at every stage of the process opposing values were still in play. One notable example of this development concerns the subject of Blake’s social and cultural representation. Thus even when Blake is associated with the isolation of authentic art from a common public culture, this vision invariably connects his individualism to a fantasy about artistic fellowship, a vision of a patronal brotherhood among anti-academic, nonconformist artists. Two examples of this process, in which the writer imagines an experiential community of creators, are worthy of attention. The first source is Bernard Barton’s sonnet To Mr. Linnell, of Bayswater: Patron and friend of him who had but few Of either, justly worthy of the name, To smooth his rough and thorny path to fame; Methinks with honest pride thou must review That best of patronage, which took the hue And form of friendship, by its generous aim, To save our age and country from the shame Which from neglected genius must accrue! Nor wealth nor power the wretched garret sought, Where he, the gifted artist, toil’d for bread, T’was thine the balm of sympathy to shed, To soothe his wounded feelings while he wrought

Emanations and Negations of Blake in Victorian Art Criticism 47

Bright forms of fancy, images of thought, Or held high converse with the glorious dead. (in Story, 194) Barton, writing in 1830 in response to Allan Cunningham’s ‘William Blake’, published in the same year, is alluding to Linnell’s role as patron of Blake’s designs to the Book of Job, which, in addition to the Songs of Innocence and the designs to The Grave and Night Thoughts, formed the basis of his reputation as an artist during the years following his death. Barton imagines a frugal, heroic artist supported by altruistic as opposed to commercial patronage, and this panegyric to the cooperative activity of exemplary artworker-citizens modifies Cunningham’s ambivalent reading of Blake, where he is a selfcreated ‘outsider’ in a tradition of national art based on the empiricalentrepreneurial model of Hogarth and Wilkie (143–88). Like Cunningham, Barton stresses what Samuel Palmer would call the ‘ennobled poverty’ of Blake’s work-home; however, unlike Cunningham, Barton is not overtly suspicious of Blake’s imagination (Gilchrist 1907, 317). In contrast, Cunningham’s Blake is a strange combination of economic prudence and fantastical excess; as the artist misrepresents freedom as ‘an overflow of imagination’, he ‘dreamed himself out of the sympathies of actual life’. Thus his ‘unmeaning, mystical and extravagant’ art degenerates into a condition of anti-social infantilism or social narcissism at odds with the values of civil society (Cunningham, 169). The claim that Blake’s manic individualism conflicts with the interests, needs, social customs and patronal networks of liberalism will become a notable theme in Victorian criticism. Barton, of course, avoids confronting the issue of the lawfulness of Blake’s imagination by subordinating the nature of Blake’s thoughts to a vision of domesticity in which Linnell, his cultural benefactor and fellow artist, is able to redeem his isolation. Linnell, we might we say, exposes Blake’s homely identity to the world because he is fantasised as the convergence of two figures: the national artist and a national public, whose union promotes art by transforming Blake’s private domain into a lost public space of enlightened patronage, the true ground of cultural unity obscured by the meanness of art commerce and its institutionalising logic, as embodied by the machinations of the Royal Academy (see Solkin, Barlow and Trodd, Hoock, and Trodd for recent accounts of the Royal Academy during this period).

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Half-patriarch, half-prophet, Barton’s Blake is a hero of individualism made strong in and through physical and mental struggle. His figuration of Blake through a Jobian persona of redemptive suffering, one that is the nexus of inspirational vision and patronal custom, is developed and extended by James Smetham, the Victorian painter and poet. Near the end of his lengthy essay-review of Gilchrist’s Life, published in the London Quarterly Review (1869), he produces this remarkable vision: If we might have our wish, we would select some accessible but far removed quiet vale where Corinthian capitals could never intrude. Here we would have built a strong … simple building of one long chamber, lighted from above. This chamber should be divided into niches. In each niche, and of the size of life, there should be done in fresco in low tones of simple, deep colour, one of these grand designs [from The Book of Job] inlaid in a broad gold flat, which should be incised in deep brown lines with the sub-signification of Blake’s Marginalia.They should be executed by men well paid by the Government – men like G. F. Watts … D.G. Rossetti… Madox Brown … Burne-Jones, and W. B. Scott. At the inner end of this hall of power there should be a marble statue of Blake by Woolner – His looks commercing with the skies, His rapt soul sitting in his eyes. (265) Reborn as an inspirational presence, Blake emerges as a universal subject involved in the reorganisation of the British art world. Here, like the miraculous play of illumination and darkness in the Job designs, Blake is a semi-cloaked figure. His genius, Smetham implies, is to provide the conditions for his apotheosis: he makes and completes himself because his identity is absorbed into the figure of Job, the inspired witness of pain and vision, submission and mastery. Transforming affliction and alienation into spiritual homeliness, his life becomes the source of freedom, the projection of self and vision through the creative agency of the imagination. To this image of the admirable and godly artist-priest, Smetham adds more features. In this imaginary chamber Blake empties himself into his Job engravings, which are then redesigned as paintings. Nowhere in Smetham’s description do we get any real sense of the artistic identity or quality of Blake’s works; miraculously detached from his imagination, they are the necessary forms by which he is transformed from a

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compulsively self-destructive creator into an authentic and completed human personality, a universal artist-worker. In the Job designs, then, Smetham discovers a collective image in which Blake can be cured of a hyperbolic art whose compositions and characters seek to dominate the audience. This transformation in status from ruin to monument is accompanied by an emphasis on the luminary nature of an environment saturated in gold, flames and top lighting. Blake is enlivened by a divine spiritus, the luminous substance sent by God to bring heat and love to this marble statue. Smetham imagines this spiritus releasing the energeia Blake was unable to realise in his life; it is by recognising the light of God that Blake will finally become universal through incorporation into the realm of social action and communal life. Drawn to this sparkling phototropic realm his legatees will follow him by working to reveal the universal character of his Job, of transmuting it into a perfect art world, which is to say a sacred and protective precinct or numen. In Smetham’s view, Blake is a good exemplar of a model society for his representation will exist in a sphere dedicated to the cultivation of the mind, something advanced by the dedicated industry of his followers. This magical creation of his living presence, rather than his representation in those forms of action associated with the practical realm, is what concerns Smetham. Again, monumentality and intimacy are the attributes of a figure at once artwork and environment. So distance and proximity are crucial terms in a narrative where Smetham imagines correcting Blake’s isolation from the body of art by hiding him in a place where he is reunited with his true character. As a result, Smetham’s wondrous chamber transforms Blake into an effigy of art, a ceremonial body in its purest form, an immense being whose stature invokes the strength and power of God. And yet, at the same time, Blake is the embodiment of the modern artist lost in his solitude, the unknown hero whose sanctified space brings into being an equally lonely body of admirers. Blake has advocates rather than a public, and they visit this lonely shrine to pay homage to their patron saint of inspiration. Here a fraternity of artists, craftsmen and masons create a home for Blake in a cloistered sanctuary at once sensuous thought and foundational structure. Their glorious monument to his character becomes a popular shelter for his lonely sentinels. In short, in remembering Blake, Smetham imagines a conduit for the production of a truly national artistic consciousness, a claim found elsewhere in rather more prosaic accounts of the value of history painting as a marker of public culture.

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Of course, at one level Smetham’s vision is no more than the fantasy of artistic plenitude in which one ‘failed’ nonconformist artist is imagined by a latecomer whose failure is even more catastrophic and all-consuming. In imagining his Blakean chamber Smetham is imagining for himself an ideal vision of a social and cultural intimacy based on artistic fellowship, a surrogate family of creators at the centre of which Blake bodies forth freedom in the form of a prelapsarian Blakean Brotherhood. Accordingly, Blakean identity reveals itself as patronal power: Rossetti, Watts, Burne-Jones, Madox Brown, Scott and Woolner become public artists because they are members of Blake’s divine body.4 Just as the Blake imagined by Smetham is a sacrificial figure whose death leads to the rebirth of national art, so the Woolner statue is to be emblematic of his status as a divine gift of fertility: his generative powers enable contemporary artists to assemble as an association of equals rather than a school at the head of which is a ‘king’. However, this fantasy of democracy is opposed by the underlying structure of Smetham’s narrative, which is essentially authoritarian. Blake’s followers are the elect, but unbelievers, denied access to the Blakean shrine, are outcasts from this temple of brotherly love. Smetham’s Blake is iconic rather than iconoclastic: a Methodist Urizen or cultural Pantocrator, he is the source of artistic codes designed to separate lawful worshippers from ignorant sinners. Here Blakean identity is ritualised through legalistic imagery, although the figuration of freedom and imprisonment is religious rather than social, and so Blake becomes a sacral object in this mysterious sanctum. There are, I must acknowledge, three aspects of Smetham’s important text I have yet to explain, all of which can be approached through Lessing’s famous essay on the Laocöon. First, it is clear that Smetham wants to associate Woolner’s sculpture of Blake with the idea of the beautiful body of the state; his vision assumes a mirroring of perfection in which the government employs Woolner and other artists to delineate Blake as a clarified and unified form who enables members of the civic body to discover the conditions of their mutual affiliation, affection and integration. Secondly, unlike Lessing, for whom the serpent is an aberrant, atavistic and libidinal figure – a trace of the residual power of totemic forms within classical culture – Smetham’s serpent confirms Blake’s status as an eternal body, the hierophant of universal and divine knowledge. In this way he detaches Blake from any significant connection with the idolatrous populism or folkloric ritual. Thirdly, Smetham’s characterisation of this environment as a place where designs incorporate words into monumental images is extremely

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significant. Here we should note how the textualised shapes imagined by Smetham differ from Blake’s version of the Laocöon, a design of which he made around 1818. In Blake’s image the inscriptions form a snake-like scroll of words hovering over and threatening the heads of the Priest and his sons, becoming part of the design by simultaneously embodying and resisting its points of stress. Neither graphic nor discursive signs contribute to a continuous architectural or sculptural space – they battle with each other to define compositional power and identity. Where Blake’s kinetic words ‘degrade’ the image by compressing the energies it embodies, Smetham’s vision indicates a more stable relationship between inscription and design in a chamber-reliquary offering both aesthetic and moral pleasure. Smetham associates Blake with the Laocöon by making him overcome bodily pain, to become the figure of Job, the Everyman artist. Unlike his so-called ‘deformed’ designs, the Job images resemble the Laocöon in their capacity to control and shape gestures in accordance with a system of representation which is at once expressive and measured. Here Smetham concurs with earlier Swedenborgian commentators, in that he desires to find somewhere in Blake’s creations evidence of a vision which transcends what J. J. G. Wilkinson called ‘hideous forms [whose] lurid hellish colouring, exhale a very unpleasant sphere’ (30). Indeed, like Wilkinson, Smetham wants to discover in his work a reading of art – a figuration of the body – that is not pagan or primitive; a vision of the human form overcoming pain and suffering. In this way Smetham composes a set of episodes or scenes where he imagines himself as the editor-author of a project in which Blake is translated back into the ‘original’ state of the worker-artist by the cultural holism of communal labour linking him to his followers. This process of critical lamentation, of engraving Blake into an artistic environment devoted to the nobility of cultural labour as inspiration, allows Smetham to design a vision of Blake where suffering is a condition of creative fellowship – something remote from the unfortunate social circumstances in which the real Blake composed his extravagant designs. In this account we get close to Blake when he is transformed into an artwork, when he becomes a unified body available for contemplation in the ‘natural’ surroundings of a protective vale. Thus this imaginary improvement of the real Blake is identified as a process of improving access to his archetypal body, to reproduce an identity it will be impossible to replace or challenge, and to demonstrate his unattainable superiority by wrapping him in the social love of the public through the agency of a coalition of admiring artists. Clearly, such fantasies should

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be seen as a response to the anti-Blakean assertion that many of Blake’s images seek to enmesh their audience in their non-traditional compositional and pictorial structures; this is most evident in those writings where Blake is addressed as the self-seducing purveyor of extravagant, deforming or ludicrous forms at once sensational, inchoate and grotesque and where the connoisseur of aesthetic pleasure is resituated in the vaporous and oscillating atmosphere of physicalised designs.

Popular pictures or vendable values? We have witnessed Smetham’s conflation of the public for Blake’s work with disciples or votaries for whom he is a cultural idol. Unlike the equivocal nature of Blake’s art, Smetham’s imaginary chamber is a lawful space, a sanctified realm carrying Blake away from division and fragmentation into the unified body of art completed by those followers dedicated to recording and realising him in the identity to which he aspired. Blake, then, is recreated to dwell in a place more social than institutional; but now his imaginary presence generates the conditions for artists to establish a consoling refuge in a private palace devoted to securing the public freedom of art. His fecundity creates the conditions in which he can be remade, and his remaking is the foundational event in the production of a new body of national art. Blake collaborates in his rebirth by making himself available as an identity subject to allegorical personification and civic remembrance. Finally, then, he becomes one with his art when his art becomes an ideal habitation, a combination of art chamber, public art project and monument to a national school of art. Needless to say, other commentators treat Smetham’s vision of the marriage of Blakean identity and patronal culture rather differently during this period. Atkinson, Crawfurd, Hewlett, Patmore and J. A. Froude are more apt to identify Blakean energy as a form of psychological tyranny, in which his art bears down on his audience in order to imprison its members before his extravagant display of psycho-physiology forms. Crawfurd is prompted by the belief that Blake would entangle his audience in the distorted logic of an imagination ‘unable to assess facts’ (469); and Hewlett is disturbed by the ‘monomania’ of a despotic Blake cult whereby the delusions of an ‘esoteric circle’ destroy the ‘social fabrics’ from which public freedoms are made (783, 759). In both cases Blake’s art actively seeks to transform a rational public into a mass of idolatrous worshippers; and these

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writers share Patmore’s opinion that Blake is a symbol of the fusion of a primitive fascination with sensational images and a contemporary fashion to reduce the artist to a cultic identity. So instead of being a painter facing his public, here Blake is a fetish of the marketplace, a wasteful and unproductive power. Elsewhere, in a letter to W. M. Rossetti, Carlyle’s biographer, Froude, complains that Blake’s art does no more than represent the ‘prodigal carelessness of nature’ (in Rossetti 1905, 15). These ideas support Ruskin’s response to Blake. It follows that Blake’s modernity is problematic, disturbing and unpredictable. His social isolation and cultural dislocation, indicative of an inability to connect expression and fact, confirm multiple layers of illness. For such writers, Blake’s art is not evaluated but diagnosed; he is a victim of an aberrant biochemistry. Consequently, his paintings are the outcome of an unhealthy combination of imaginative power and an inability to select, order or arrange the materials of external reality or to synthesise them into an aesthetic unity of any kind. Here to be modern is to embody a sickness to which other bodies (critics and painters) want to belong, a psychological bonding centred on personal ‘freedom’ and ‘democratic’ individualism at the expense of public culture and historical life. As we have seen, Smetham imagines his Blake statue as an emblem of an ethical subject, and every aspect of his Blakean sanctuary suggests he is seeking to counter the well-established image of Blake’s art as capricious, wasteful or excessive. Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s supplementary chapter in Gilchrist’s Life offers the most detailed contrast to this reading. In addition to identifying Blake as a forerunner of the PreRaphaelites through his ‘prismatic system of colour’, in which tints are ‘laid on side by side’, Rossetti refers to the ability of his designs to evoke ‘the mingling of organic substances, the gradual development and perpetual transfusion of life’ (Gilchrist 1907, 392–3). For Rossetti, the primitive is not an arrested stage of development, and therefore suspect as a model of knowledge, but an ineluctable element in the experience of social, cultural and natural phenomena. Blake’s images embody freedom because they incorporate its experience into the forms they depict: their physicality generates dialectical processes in which forces and objects struggle to emerge from saturated fields or planes of colour. Gilchrist equates Blake’s sinuous compositions with the ‘force power’ of nature, and Rossetti is attracted to this endless mobility of energy as it passes through bodies. Blake’s gliding and enclosed forms are signs of an enchanted art rather than the antitypes dismissed by Hewlett and Atkinson as ‘infantile’, ‘grotesque’ and

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‘incoherent’. Yet Rossetti’s Blake remains resolutely two-dimensional: he sees and admires the mixture of geometric and floral motifs, symmetrical arabesques and flowing, rhythmic forms. This emphasis on decoration and ornamentation is extended to include Blake’s treatment of light, colour and linear perspective. Far from being signs of an arbitrary or abortive aesthetic, Rossetti equates these pictorial modulations with what he calls ‘abundance’ and ‘fullness’ (Gilchrist 1907, 391). Blake, he implies, designs an internally consistent world where the flat surface acts as a lattice, an elemental arrangement for the distribution of symmetrical bodies, thus highlighting the non-illusionistic character of his work. At the same time, because he equates the pictorial character of the image with the dynamic of organic growth, he is particularly interested in those parts of the composition that are no longer differentiated but integrated into a mosaic of forms. Energy and design are crucial terms for Rossetti, as they allow him to see Blake’s images in terms of achieved surface pattern rather than failed spatial illusion. It is Blake’s desire to conjoin the individual and the communal by equating the body with the conservation and expansion of force that Swinburne and Symons address. To be sure, in addition to repeating the Rossettian model, where Blake’s designs transmit life through the annihilation of differentiated forms, Swinburne and Symons associate Blake with a post-pantheistic Aestheticism, a condition where energy exceeds all controlling or governing powers. For Swinburne, Blake’s kineticist designs offer a radical account of pleasure and freedom; for Symons, they invoke a Nietzschean condition of thinking through the body. In addition, both writers stress Blake’s ability to internalise the idea of the audience by making his readers and viewers recognise something of themselves in restless works, which are now claimed to reveal the nature of consciousness, an exuberant becoming of clashing impulses, needs and powers. Where earlier private collectors like Isaac D’Israeli and T. F. Dibdin had seen in Blake’s works the fantastical emanations of a wild, irregular and over-individualised imagination, Swinburne and Symons are drawn to what they characterise as the remarkable survival of elementary forces compressed into literary and pictorial expression. Symons argues that Blake ‘creates life’ and that ‘every detail is seen with intensity, and with equal intensity. No one detail is subordinated to another, every inch of his surface is equally important to him’. For Swinburne, Blake is a compound of the physiological and psychological, an expressive Everyman whose work transforms bodily energy into epiphanic form. Exuberant rather than wasteful, his art is implicated in libidinal processes involving the acqui-

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sition and expenditure of energy. Swinburne, therefore, imagines the possibility of a bio-community generated from this cycle of consumption and discharge, the perpetual activity by which Blake’s imagination transforms the images it represents. Blake is always about to become a Whitmanesque artist who almost establishes a new patronal culture based on the transmission and reception of instinctual forces, a recuperative figure who bodies forth a new public from the fugitive joys of his own body. In Swinburne we see a vision where Blake’s art is etherealising itself, forcing itself from the gross weight of matter to exist in a self-contained aesthetic sphere of delicate, disincarnate colour. He discovers this enflamed quality in the illustrations to The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, America, The Book of Thel, The First Book of Urizen and Jerusalem. Yet, Blake must remain a nascent modern subject for, in the last instance, the Prophetic Books are of limited heuristic value, and Blake becomes self-cancelling as ‘fierce dim figures threaten and complain, mingle and divide, struggle and embrace as human friends or foes’. This relentlessly active and oceanic art is somehow trapped by its production of pulverised or intangible subjects that reform as ‘fruitless’ bodies (290, 307). At this ultimate level of expression, then, Blake is not transgressive enough for Swinburne, his idea of pleasure too conventional and his sense of self-generating power too weak to free himself from authorised formulations and judgements of beauty and legibility. In a sense Swinburne’s reading loops back to a conservative like J. B. Atkinson, for whom Blake ‘incites but disappoints’ (67). In both cases the spontaneity of Blake’s art is equated with the endless search for freedom in which the peculiar interests of the self block any lasting reconciliation of the artist with a wider group of interests or significant body of subjects. For the majority of radical and conservative Victorian commentators Blake is identified as a figure of freedom, but his sense of freedom is always imperfect, always failing to transform itself from the condition of artistic failure. Freedom is either self-consuming enthusiasm which fails to appreciate the social organisation of character and custom, or the valorisation of self-expression, the dramatisation of a process of self-struggle striving to incorporate the spiritual into the material. Blake seems to escape this cycle of emancipation and imprisonment when Barton and Smetham fantasise him as the lawful source of an imaginary and unknowable new dispensation for British art. But these processes are themselves based on the principle of liberation from a condition of artistic thraldom. Here the epic emptiness of the ‘public’

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is imagined as the endpoint of a project in which the solution to the problem of Blake’s art is to finalise his meaning by detaching him from its full and complete articulation. Once more condemned to be vivid rather than comprehensive, now the habitual imbalance of his art is rectified by the healthy and vigorous forces of the critic who identifies and isolates what is alive in Blake’s images in order to reveal their absolute identity, an identity deformed by Blake himself.

Notes 1. See also Dorfman (1969) and Bentley (1975) for further valuable details on the subject of articulations of Blake in Victorian culture. However, it should be noted that as these books are concerned with his literary reputation they offer a limited discussion of matters relating to visual culture. 2. Although they do not examine Blake’s appearance in Victorian art criticism, the most comprehensive accounts of his pictorial productions remain W. J. T. Mitchell, Blake’s Composite Art (1978), Morris Eaves, Blake’s Theory of Art (1982), Robert N. Essick, William Blake and the Language of Adam (1989), Joseph Viscomi, Blake and the Idea of the Book (1993) and Christopher Heppner’s Reading Blake’s Designs (1995). 3. For further important modernist encounters with Blake’s pictorial work, see MacColl (1902), 47, and Meier-Graefe (1907), vol. 2, 187–8. 4. For Rossetti, see Prettejohn (2000) and McGann (2000); for Burne-Jones, see Corbett (2001) and Lutchmansingh (1989); for Scott, see Usherwood (1989); for Madox Brown, see Bendiner (1997); for Watts, see Trodd and Brown (2004); for Woolner, see Barlow (1999). Of this highly interesting group of artists Watts was considered the most Blakean. One of his many Edwardian biographers referred to ‘a life without any parallel in the annals of British art. That of William Blake comes nearest to it, and we find the same remarkable poetical imagination, the same love of biblical story, the same mystical outlook and half-vision of things unseen by ordinary eyes’ (Dibdin 1923, 83).

4 ‘Esoteric Blakists’ and the ‘Weak Brethren’: How Blake Lovers Kept the Popular out Shirley Dent

Diehard devotees of Blake, people Swinburne coined ‘esoteric Blakists’ (Swinburne 1959, II, 348), present us with a conundrum. These Blake lovers, Swinburne chief amongst them in many ways, have often been vigorous champions of the poet-artist and pointed the way towards critical understanding and appreciation of the poet. At the same time they have have exercised a damaging influence over critical reception and understanding of him. Blake has all too often been co-opted as sign, seal and stamp of Blake lovers’ innate super-sensitivity and superior, albeit left field, refinement of feeling and understanding. To get Blake is to get bohemia: Swinburne’s spirited defence of art for art’s sake in William Blake: A Critical Essay in which he casts morality out of art – ‘Art is not like fire or water, a good servant and bad master … Handmaid of religion, exponent of duty, servant of fact, pioneer of morality, she cannot in any way become; she would be none of these things though you were to bray her in a mortar’ (1867, 90) – has been very much a template for subcultural and ‘boho’ appropriations and readings of Blake, from Aleister Crowley to Chris Ofili. I will argue in this essay that this sense of special readers for a special poet takes hold in the major mid-nineteenth-century revival of Blake and is a defining feature of Alexander Gilchrist’s The Life of William Blake and Algernon Charles Swinburne’s William Blake: A Critical Essay. In a nutshell, the Victorian Blake revival as we know it – Gilchrist’s Life and Swinburne’s Critical Essay – had little to do with encouraging a popular understanding of Blake and ironically set in train a pop culture misconception of Blake as a poet best suited to sub- and countercultures, a hallmark of the esoteric and obscure. This essay seeks to reinterrogate Blake’s rediscovery via the Gilchrist/ Pre-Raphaelite enterprise circle. In particular, the paradox of that 57

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rediscovery will be made explicit and re-examined: namely, that the mid-nineteenth-century Blake revival as it is generally understood as a Gilchrist/Pre-Raphaelite enterprise gives cultural visibility to Blake, undoubtedly helping him to register significantly on the radar of Victorian culture-vultures, while at the same time placing his work almost out of reach of all but an elite. However, the way in which lesser-known poets and critics such as Joseph Skipsey and James Thomson interpret and present his work suggests a reception history that is not predetermined by an opposition between an empathetic aesthetic minority and ignorant multitude. This re-examination is important because the pattern of appropriation established in the midVictorian era continues into both present-day academic and popular reception of Blake. There are then important lessons to be learnt from the lesser-known revivalists of Blake. At the outset I think it is wise to make clear that this is not an argument for an easy-access Blake or a Blake-for-beginners approach to popularising one of our most enduring and enigmatic poet-artists. All Blake scholars know that Blake is a difficult poet and artist, and that we have all benefited from superb scholarship that has thrown light on everything from the historical context and reference of the works to the tricky hermeneutics of the prophetic books. Serious study of Blake is and always has been a minority interest and none of us should be ashamed of that: the popular success of exhibitions such as that at Tate Britain in 2000 is due in large part to such scholarship. Where I want to focus this argument is not on Blake dumbed down but on Blake lovers’ failure to meet the challenge of Blake. What is that challenge and wherein lies the failure? Steven M. Lane’s (1999) assertion that Blake ‘was exclusive in the extreme’; that, even though some of his poems and designs have wide audience appeal, there has never been a ‘common reader’, hints that Blake wasn’t his own best publicist or populariser. This is undoubtedly true, as anybody who has read Jerusalem knows. It is fair to say that Blake did not see his work as part of a popularity contest and his despair that a public audience would ever ‘get it’ could bubble up, as it does from time to time in the Public Address. Blake was not afraid to challenge his readers, indeed he wanted the reader to ‘get it’, but by the time of Jerusalem experience had taught him that those who did were few and far between. When Blake addresses himself to the public at the start of Jerusalem there is a real sense that he knows that in displaying his ‘Giant forms to the Public’ his hope that ‘Therefore I print, nor vain my types shall be’ (E 145) might turn out to be exactly that: in vain. Blake is looking for

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no common reader but for a reader – whoever that may be – who will enter into the ideas of the poem. Blake does not necessarily know where that reader will come from or who they will be. This is important. It is very different to pursue an elusive reader who might appreciate Blake’s self-created system through their own efforts of understanding from prescribing an exclusive readership that has an innate sympathy for the work. The latter position is where Gilchrist’s Life starts and where Swinburne ends. Swinburne puts the case most boldly and baldly when he berates his fellow revivalists for publishing Tiriel: It should have been preserved, certainly, but strictly for the inspection of esoteric Blakists – never to be exposed to the eyes of Saducees, neophytes, weak brethren, – worshippers in the court of the Gentiles; whose faith may (not improbably) be shaken by its perusal, and their poor souls in consequence eternally lost; which result I do think you were bound in common Blakian charity (He would have said Christian, but I won’t) to take into consideration. Speaking from the severely orthodox (not to say High Church or even Ultramontane) point of view which I humbly presume the first (apostolic or patristic) commentator on Jerusalem has a right to take, I cannot but say I would rather this book had remained in the Apocrypha than been inscribed in the canon – that is, in the roll of those books ‘which whosoever believeth not, without doubt’ etc. etc. (Letter to William Michael Rossetti, 30 October 1874, in Swinburne 1959, vol. II, 348) Notwithstanding Swinburne’s energy and insight as a critic of Blake, his arrogance here is staggering. The ‘etc. etc.’ at the end, a tongue-incheek play on his priestly pomposity, does not diminish the fact that he is advocating an editorial approach that does not trust the judgement of ordinary readers when confronted by unadulterated Blake. Even as a joke, what is striking is the sense of religious initiation into an appreciation of Blake, couched in terms of doctrine and priesthood. This might be taken as one of Swinburne’s idiosyncratic moments of critical drama, part of the joke. But Swinburne is not the only Victorian to pose as a priestly protector of Blake’s work, keeping the riff-raff out, as Colin Trodd’s quote from James Smetham in his essay in this volume shows, with Smetham veering between the bureaucratic and the sacred, with life tickets requiring examination by a ‘Blake commission’. However Swinburne and Smetham, evangelical in their passion for Blake, are simply proselytising the cult of the privileged reader that the

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Gilchrist/Pre-Raphalite coterie had already established, albeit with their own esoteric twists and turns. Before examining in more detail the Gilchrist/Pre-Raphaelite establishment of the elite reader of Blake, it is important to highlight that there was another string to the nineteenthcentury Blake revival that struck a far more populist note. The pit-poet Joseph Skipsey edited Blake’s works for The Canterbury Poets series in 1885. Sabine Haass (1985) describes the market for The Canterbury Poets series as newly literate readers, found somewhere between unskilled workers and the middle class, and notes that the series played an important part in the popularisation of classical English literature. Skipsey evokes Swinburne’s interpretation of Blake in his introduction to The Canterbury Poets edition of Blake: ‘Mr. Swinburne appears to be able to penetrate and to bring to light the most precious jewels of meaning from passages in those books, which otherwise are, to my weaker sight, as dark as a coal-pit whose intense gloom is unillumined even by the dim light of the Davy lamp’ (31). What is evident here is that rather than dumbing down in a popular edition, the pit-poet who learnt to read in the darkness of the mine is pointing his readers in the direction of critical enlightenment. What is striking about the Blake ‘popularisers’ is that they do not seek to break down the temple of high-culture Blake that Swinburne and others strive to create; rather, they want to open up that temple to the ‘common people’ (Wilkinson 1851, xii–xiii). James John Garth Wilkinson, a Swedenborgian who edited and wrote the preface to the first printed edition of the Songs of Innocence (1839) and who was best known for the bizarre but popular work of physiology, The Human Body, saw printing as opening the door for the masses to undiminished literary richness: The means of making the poor man a proprietor of books, lay in the glorious new art that clothed all literature in a bodily frame of surpassing beauty and usefulness, and placed it in the hands of the common people in a form that before the invention of printing the greatest kings would have envied; and which even Virgil and Cicero would not have disdained as the material pedestal of their immortality. This art, simpler and more universal than writing, was not lower, but immeasurably higher than its predecessor, whose services were for the noble and learned. (1851, xii–xiii) In contrast to Wilkinson’s ‘universal art’ perspective, the Gilchrist/ Rossetti circle makes an argument for elite empathy with Blake. Their

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stall is laid out clearly and early in The Life of William Blake. To appreciate Blake, we are told, ‘one must almost be born with a sympathy for it’ (1863, 2). The majority of people, it is clear, will not, and possibly are not capable of, experiencing that spark of aesthetic awe on encountering Blake: At Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition of 1857, among the select thousand water-colour drawings, hung two modestly tinted designs by Blake, of few inches in size: one The Dream of Queen Catherine, another Oberon and Titania asleep on a Lily. Both are remarkable displays of imaginative power, and finished examples in the artist’s peculiar manner. Both were unnoticed in the crowd, attracting few gazers, fewer admirers. For one needs to be read in Blake, to have familiarized oneself with his unsophisticated, archaic yet spiritual ‘manner’ – a style sui generis as no other artist’s ever was – to sympathize with, or even understand, the equally individual strain of thought of which it is the vehicle. (Gilchrist 1863, 2) This passage, which comes right at the start of Gilchrist’s Life, flags up recognition as being at the heart of the Blake revival with the presumption that most are naturally too philistine to partake in this recognition. Gilchrist’s Life tells us that Blake’s eccentric genius is not recognised by most and it takes a spiritually attuned individual to recognise the gem before them, to enter into a special empathy with Blake’s work. The Life is full of these moments of quiet refuge from the rough and tumble of the world. Nostalgia for artisans living quaint lives in the turmoil of London – ‘old-fashioned people having (Heaven be praised!) tenanted it ever since the first James Basire and after him his widow ended their days there’ (22) – is a foil for what Gilchrist describes as the overwhelming, undifferentiated ‘surging’ mob: That evening, the artist happened to be walking in a route chosen by one of the mobs at large, whose course lay from Justice Hyde’s house near Leicester Fields, for the destruction of which less than an hour had sufficed, through Long Acre, past the quiet house of Blake’s old master, engraver Basire, in Great Queen Street, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and down Holborn, bound for Newgate. Suddenly, he encountered the advancing wave of triumphant Blackguardism, and was forced (for from such a great surging mob there is no disentanglement) to go along in the very front rank, and witness the storm

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and burning of the fortress-like prison, and release of its three hundred inmates. (35) This has always struck me as a peculiarly disingenuous description on Gilchrist’s part, whatever it tells us, as Erdman and Bentley point out, about Blake’s potentially active role in the riot if we read between the lines. The way Gilchrist relates it, Blake just happens to get himself caught up in the front ranks of the Gordon Riots, carried along by a surging (and implicit in the description if not so in reality), unthinking mob. Blake is portrayed as an accidental hero of history, forced out of his cocoon of artistic sensitivity in time to witness the burning of Newgate. The popular, the public, is presented as a dangerous but necessary force that swallows Blake up and pops him out at the very forefront of history. What Blake needs, Gilchrist’s Life so often suggests, is more people like us, sensitive individuals who recognise Blake’s worth ‘far from the madding crowd’. Blake is cast throughout as the pictor ignotus, in need of a particular sort of recognition. Fear not, is the message of Gilchrist’s life, for another sort of recognition is at hand: elite empathy with Blake by the privileged few. The depth and intensity of this criticism by empathy is clearly seen in Anne Gilchrist’s memoir of her husband Alexander in the 1880 edition of The Life of William Blake. The task that Gilchrist’s Life is engaged in is not objective criticism of a difficult poet and artist but an emotional synergy that is simply not achievable by the majority of people: He desired always to treat his subject exhaustively; as a critic to enter into close companionship with his author or painter; to stand hand in hand with him, seeing the same horizon, listening, pondering, absorbing. No subtlest shade of meaning, no shifting hue of beauty should escape him or his reader if he could help it. (‘Memoir’, in Gilchrist 1880, II, 369) While there is something admirable in this critical-devotion-to-thepoint-of-absorption, there is also something indulgent and self-serving about it. The message seems almost to be that ‘I, the critic, am become Blake’. There is undoubtedly a sincere interest and appreciation of Blake, not only in Gilchrist’s biography but in most of the critical writing on Blake by the Pre-Raphaelites. However, this appreciation is often a retreat into a solipsistic celebration of individual communion

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with Blake and his work, a critical stance that leads the commentator to disavow the popular per se as Dante Gabriel Rossetti does when commenting on the two Chimney Sweeper poems in Gilchrist’s Life: For instance, there is no comparison between the first Chimney Sweep, which touches with such perfect simplicity the true pathetic chord of its subject, and the second, tinged merely with the common-places of social discord. (1863, II, 25) Rossetti’s commentary in the second volume of Gilchrist’s Life hammers home the idea of the eccentric creative, unsullied by ‘the common-places of social discord’. The poet is a conduit of creativity standing apart from the world. This is the poet as the beautiful soul, where the eccentric individual is placed at the heart of the universe, a true ‘unacknowledged legislator’. In each style of the art of a period, and more especially the poetic style, there is often some one central derivative man, to whom personally, if not to the care of the world, it is important that his creative power should be held to be his own, and that his ideas and slowly perfected materials should not be caught up before he has them ready for his own use. (II, 25) I have no problem with the idea that artists in some way transcend their time through their work: that is what makes art universal. However, what Rossetti is pointing to is not a reaching out or even over-reaching on the poet’s part to say something that he feels must be said or expressed. It is a pointing inwards, a belief in individual creativity per se rather than what is created, where the ‘central derivative man’ labours on his ‘slowly perfected materials’. What really matters is an empathy with the creative outsider rather than judging the work by any universal standard. This idea of special sympathy runs throughout the Pre-Raphaelite notion of what it means to be a poet. But it goes further, bearing on ideas of what it is to be an editor and critic too. It is the very thing that William Michael Rossetti praises Swinburne for, noting that ‘In all the roll of poets, we certainly know of none who has given such signal proof of his power to enter re-creative, not imitative, sympathy into so many poetic models of style and form, so diverse and high, to search their recesses, and extract their essential aroma’ (1866, 33–4).

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It is worth pausing here to consider how the emphasis on empathy is expressed in criticism and commentary on Blake by the Victorians in general. Notably, not every nineteenth-century critic or appreciator of Blake had quite such an earnest approach to how a reader’s absorption in an artist’s work might play out. This is particularly seen in nineteenth-century parodies of Blake’s work. Parody crops up early in nineteenth-century appreciation of Blake, a pipe-obsessed autograph of the ‘Introduction’ to Songs of Innocence and of Experience in the leaf of copy E was recorded in the Sotheby’s sale catalogue of 1852. G. E. Bentley tells us that the chief effort of the parodist seems to have been to work some form of the word ‘pipe’ into each line (1964, 419). As Vivian Mercier points out, this playfulness in parodying Blake was not without its high culture pretensions, John Todhunter translating Blake’s ‘The Fly’ ‘into eleven lines of Catullan hendecasyllabic under the hauckneyed but appropriate title “Carpe Diem”’ (32). Other parodies’ playfulness is undercut by a sly menace, a subtle shaking up of any cosy reading of the ‘elite’ Blake: Spider! Spider! hid from sight Til some hapless fly alight What fore-thoughtful brain and eye Fashion’d thy web’s nice symmetry (Linton, 61–2) Rather than the awesome omnipotent power of the tyger we are presented with the well-thought-out and executed trap of the spider. This is the small guy spinning a well-connected web and winning, rather than metaphysical musing about the big picture. This is parody packing a punch above its weight. More often, however, this sort of earthy interpretation of Blake gives way to a romanticised and idealised ideal of the radical outsider: the Pre-Raphaelite coterie were not alone in their obfuscation of critical commentary with mystical musings about special sensitivities and relationships. Joseph Skipsey, whom we might expect to have a grittier grasp on criticism, describes critical perception in the most fanciful of terms: ‘for it is in the nature of things that the seer may see further than he thinks; that the singer may sing more than he knows; that in short, the poet’s work may awaken and arouse the mind of the reader to the perception of a star-like galaxy’ (Prefatory notice, p. 32). Even in its most political manifestations, such as the use of Blake in American abolitionist journals, understanding of Blake is

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presented as a fanciful empathy, a spiritual challenge to the hardheaded business of politics. The abolitionist Moncure Conway wrote: It is an incident to which I have lately recurred with enhanced interest, that the first time I ever heard the name William Blake mentioned, was on the occasion of the friends of Thomas Paine in a city of the Far West, to celebrate the anniversary of his birth. He was there named with honour as a faithful friend of Paine, whom he rescued from his political pursuers; but no one in the meeting seemed to have any further association with Blake. Immediately after the disciple who made this allusion, there arose a ‘spiritualist’, who proceeded to announce that the work of Paine was good but negative; he was but the wild-honey-fed precursor of the higher religion; he prepared the way for the new revelation of Spirits. So close did Paine and Blake come to each other again, without personal recognition, in the New World where each had projected his visions. (216–17) Even James Thomson, the poet-laureate of secularism best known for The City of Dreadful Night and who wrote an important mid-century essay on Blake, is celebrated by his biographer as being peculiarly ‘receptive’ to the point that his writing ‘might almost pass as written by Blake’ (Salt, 316–17). But there is an important difference between the Pre-Raphaelites and these lesser-known Victorian Blake lovers. The Pre-Raphaelites are predatory and proprietary in their love of Blake. They talk about ‘our Blake’ and feel that their special relationship with him gives them unique dispensation as editors and critics. It is a problematic conflation of the creative and the critical that has farreaching consequences. Dante Gabriel Rossetti is notoriously guilty of ‘shaking up’ Blake’s verse in Gilchrist’s Life with what Mark Greenberg has called his ‘freewheeling editorial practices’ (252). As we can see from Swinburne’s railing against ‘weak brethren’, this is not just overzealousness, but the nineteenth-century equivalent of dumbing down for the public’s own good. The Pre-Raphaelites felt that not only could they choose what is good for the public to know of Blake, they had a duty to make that choice. How different from Skipsey, who talks of expanding the imagination of the reader, of arousing something in the reader, whoever that reader may be. How different from James Thomson, who, despite his own tendency towards the obscure, sees the task of the editor as preserving for the public as a whole the works

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of a great poet and who takes the Pre-Raphaelites to task for failing in this respect: But if the above interlineal points mark omissions, the omitted passages should be re-instated in the next edition: the whole of this Song, as it stands in Blake’s earliest Volume or in manuscript, should be given at any rate in the Appendix if not the body of work. For this Chant belongs to the whole British people: it is one of the most precious among the heirlooms bequeathed to us by our forefathers; it is a national jewel of such magnificence that no one man, however honest and skilful, can be trusted to cut it and set it in accordance with his private opinion. (110) However, it is Richard Herne Shepherd who takes apart the rank snobpaternalism of the Pre-Raphaelites in his preface to the 1874 edition of Blake’s works which he edited for Pickering. Before closing our remarks, we must say a final word respecting the principle adopted by Mr. Rossetti in his reprint of some of these poems in the second Volume of Gilchrist’s ‘Life of Blake.’ Once for all, while rendering due homage to his genius and rare critical perception, as well as to the great services he has rendered to the fame of Blake, we must firmly protest against the dangerous precedent he has established of tampering with his author’s text. Much ruggedness of metre and crudeness of expression he has doubtless removed or toned down by this process; but however delicately and tastefully done, we contend that the doing of it was unwarrantable – nay, that it destroys to a certain extent the historical values of the poems. It was the growth of this mischievous system which prevented the readers of the eighteenth century from enjoying a pure text of Shakespeare; which to this day, in nine editions out of ten, gives a corrupt and mutilated text of such writers as Bunyan, Walton and De Foe, and which spoilt some of the finest hymns in our language. For where is the process, once admitted as legitimate, to stop? It is not every emandator who possesses the taste and judgement of Mr. Rossetti and in a case like the present one, where the original edition is almost inaccessible as a check, what protection has the reader against the caprice or vanity of an editor who does not adhere religiously to his author’s text? Mr. Rossetti (though sanctioned by Mr. Swinburne) has no more right to alter William Blake’s

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poems than Mr. Millais would have to paint out some obnoxious detail of mediaevalism in a work of Giotto or Cimabue; or Mr. Leighton to improve some flaw in the flesh-colour of Correggio. (Preface, xiii–xiv) While wanting to give Gilchrist, Rossetti and Swinburne due credit for their work in reviving the reputation and fortunes of Blake, the real tone of Richard Herne Shepherd will brook no tolerance of their highhanded editorial meddling. Rossetti’s tampering with Blake’s works is not just a tidying up of manuscript errors. It is a concerted effort to sugar-coat Blake for consumption by a popular culture that could not be trusted to stomach the strangeness and difficulty of Blake’s works in their raw state. The Pre-Raphaelite revival makes Blake palatable for public consumption. At the same time, the Pre-Raphaelite enthusiasts suggest an elusive and exclusive circle of ‘esoteric Blakists’ whose innate and superior sensibilities mean they can be trusted to gorge themselves on the real thing without the risk of critical or aesthetic indigestion. The message where Blake and popular appreciation is concerned is, and ever has been, published and be damned. Blake unadulterated is good enough for us, the public. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell may never make it into the bestseller list, but what of it? The point is to present the challenge of Blake rather than to prescribe the readership of Blake. The cultural elite needs to champion what is the best in art and literature rather than fretting – as the Pre-Raphaelites do – that the audience may simply not be up to the job. I cannot help but think it is this failure – the failure to believe that difficult work should challenge everyone and everyone should have access to the best art and the most challenging art – that got us into such a pickle with the recent discovery and future sale of The Grave watercolours. ‘Philistine’ was a term bandied around in the media when the export ban was finally lifted and the 19 watercolours were put up for sale individually at Sotheby’s, New York. Now, of course, it is philistine and distasteful that the integrity of such a work of art is steamrollered by commercial concerns. But we do need to stop and ask ourselves, who is calling whom a philistine here? It is no good for the British art establishment to call ‘foul’ when they have so far strayed from that basic principle of ‘challenge all with the best’. Part of the problem in championing Blake is not that he is not popular enough but that he is not accessible enough. These strange works – Blake’s most popular in his lifetime and throughout the nineteenth century – can

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appear to contemporary taste as both grotesque and gaudy in their body-soul literalism. What Arts Council boxes on diversity and social inclusion can The Grave tick? Not many. But should that matter? It is no defence of Blake to say he speaks specifically to this or that audience. Blake’s greatness lies in that odd, often faulty and failed vision that sought to speak to readers beyond his own time and place about universal and transcendent ideas and themes. This is why the ‘dark days for Blake’ media headlines of disgust at Blake’s works leaving these shores are both ludicrous and entirely to the point. The Financial Times report on the sale of the watercolours commented: ‘They’re being allowed to go quietly. Not a drum is heard, not a funeral note. They were on show for just three days at Sotheby’s in London but with no fanfares; only someone already in the know would have found their way through to an inner gallery on the first floor at Bond Street, where 19 of William Blake’s 20 watercolours illustrating Robert Blair’s The Grave (an uncannily resonant title these days) could be seen together for perhaps the last time in this country’ (Eyres 2006). At the same time as England is called on to mourn the leaving of England of Blake’s genius in The Grave watercolours, the watercolours are seen only by those in the know. Where was the demand by Blake scholars – the people who should lead the public art agenda around Blake – to show these works publicly so that as many people as possible could see them before they were packed up for the sale in the US? Why wasn’t the Sotheby’s exhibit heralded as such a chance, an opportunity to show clearly that public appreciation of Blake demands access to his most challenging and difficult work. A hint of that misguided Pre-Raphaelite idea of ‘our Blake’ is clearly detectable in that inner gallery, in the know, goodbye to Blake in Bond Steet. The case is this. Blake isn’t our Blake, in either the popular or any other sense. No art that is truly great can remain ‘ours’ for very long: it is its greatness that transcends time and place – from the shores of Felpham in the early nineteenth-century to a Bond Street gallery at the beginning of the twenty-first – that makes it universal. Great art is for everyman, not just art heritage lovers. Blake is there for the taking. From the Pre-Raphaelites on, the real distortion of Blake’s reputation has not come from popular culture but from the cultural elite’s lack of confidence that we can still understand and explore those brilliant, difficult and often frustrating works on their own terms.

5 Blake: Between Romanticism and Modernism Edward Larrissy

Blake is the Romantic writer who has exerted the most powerful influence on the twentieth century. Indeed, the more one looks into the matter, the more surprised one may be by the extent and pervasiveness of that influence. On the one hand, he is now regarded as one of the great canonical literary artists of the Romantic period, and he is rightly seen in relation to then current modes, such as the sublime. On the other, Blake’s popularity may have much to do with qualities that are supposed to differentiate him from other Romantics. In any case, if he were without any ado to be an example of Romantic influence, we would need a clear, essential idea of what Romanticism is – or was – and we do not. This chapter attempts to offer an account of Blake’s after-life which shows that he was central in the retrospective construction of a Romanticism that was acceptable to the twentieth century, and that this centrality is continuing into the twenty-first century. In the process, it will seek to be sensitive to the theoretical difficulties involved in describing canon formation. The greatest tribute paid to Blake at the end of the nineteenth century was the three-volume annotated edition, with lithographic reproductions of a fair number of the illustrations, by Edwin Ellis and W. B. Yeats. This edition benefited from the knowledge they shared of occult philosophies. However much their own interests have to be seen in the context of a late nineteenth-century fad for the occult, they are, despite eccentricities, to a significant degree illuminating about Blake, whose own knowledge can partly be explained by the eclecticism of antinomian Protestantism. One needs, though, to be clear that an interest in ‘occult’ Blake, while it may take a form we should find unbalanced in terms understanding his work, does not set Yeats’s interest apart from other Modernists. On the contrary, Leon Surette has 69

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shown in The Birth of Modernism (1994) how important an interest in occult philosophy was, not just to Yeats, but also to Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot – and that means to their most significant works as well. In any case, Blake’s conviction that ‘Without Contraries is no Progression’, which itself has some of its roots in philosophical alchemy, has left its mark everywhere on Yeats’s poetry and his esoteric writings. It is customary to compare Yeats’s juxtaposition of ‘The Song of the Happy Shepherd’ and ‘The Sad Shepherd’, at the beginning of the Crossways grouping, with the pairs of poems in Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Indeed, one of the notable things about Yeats’s shepherds is the gulf that separates their states of mind. The Happy Shepherd laments the passing of a world where dreams fed poetry and its replacement by modernity. But he is confident that telling one’s story into an echoharbouring shell will bring comfort. The Sad Shepherd takes the advice, but it doesn’t work for him: Then he sang softly nigh the pearly rim; But the sad dweller by the sea-ways lone Changed all he sang to inarticulate moan Among her wildering whirls, forgetting him. (Yeats 1970, 9) If one should be tempted to adduce Spenser or Milton’s ‘L’Allegro’ or ‘Il Penseroso’ as better sources, one should first ponder Yeats’s other contraries: ‘The Rose of Peace’ and ‘The Rose of Battle’; Self and Soul; Hic and Ille (even though the proximate source here is William Morris’s ‘Hapless Love’); He and She; Aherne and Robartes – or whole volumes: The Tower versus The Winding Stair – the former representing a proud, bitter, masculine assertiveness; the latter something inward, ruminative, which Yeats thought of as more ‘feminine’. Then, of course, there are moon and sun in A Vision, the great symbolic antinomies which represent what he sometimes calls Subjectivity and Objectivity. These two are indebted to Blake’s Energy and Reason, and to later formulations like Imagination and Nature. But the indebtedness is no mere borrowing of scaffolding: Yeats’s tinctures are not just opposites; they move in opposite directions, as do Blake’s contraries in his poem ‘The Mental Traveller’. Unlikely as it might seem, Yeats also thinks of his use of Irish mythology and romance in relation to Blake’s half-invented mythology. The explanation is this: Blake could not work with an overused

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classical system, and also needed to root his mythology in what he knew. So he created his own system and saw visions of its personages among the stones of Clerkenwell or the fields ‘from Islington to Marybone; Near mournful, ever-weeping Paddington’. Yeats, on the other hand, could revive a mythology that was not overused and that had the merit of being rooted by tradition in the hills, lakes, coppices and bogs of Sligo and Galway: The host is riding from Knocknarea And over the grave of Clooth-na-Bare; Caoilte tossing his burning hair, And Niamh calling Away, come away … (55) Yeats’s plays about Ireland, not least those that dramatise the Ulster cycle, must in part be seen in the light of Blakean archetypes and Blakean psychomachia. Nor are stylistic matters immune from influence, however unlike Blake Yeats may seem. The poems of the 1890s must be seen not just in relation to Symbolism, or the influence of William Morris’s poetry, but also in relation to that view of Blake – very influential from the 1890s and into the 1930s – which sees his lyric poetry in terms of symbolist suggestiveness and musicality: compare, for instance, the views of Yeats’s friend Arthur Symons, author of The Symbolist Movement in Literature and of an introduction to William Blake. By an apparent paradox, when Yeats becomes dissatisfied with the style of his 1890s poetry, he speaks in terms of a desire for firmer form, outline and energy, which suggests that he was attempting to rectify a mistaken interpretation of Blake and orient his own new style to those many utterances of Blake which praise definiteness. In this respect, Yeats’s attitude replicates the general trend of responses to Blake. Blake’s first influence is as a proto-symbolist. As Symbolism is surpassed by more radical aesthetic measures, which prize greater directness, Blake is co-opted to this movement too, and this is how he appears to Auden. In later years, Yeats was to proclaim that ‘Measurement began our might’ – the might of Western art. This sounds a trifle like Urizen, Blake’s tyrannical patriarchal deity, half false Jehovah, half ironhearted Jupiter, who divides and measures the universe. Yet Blake depicts a sublime as well as an erring figure, and Yeats’s proclamations can be seen as deriving from his life-long dialogue with his mentor. As

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age descends on him, Yeats sees himself as one of Blake’s old men: in particular, the tattered coat on a stick in ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ is a direct reference to this image, one of Blake’s designs for Blair’s Grave. Or this is what the old man is, ‘unless soul clap its hands and sing and louder sing / For every tatter in its mortal dress’. So, the soul grows young as the body grows old: contraries moving in opposite directions again. Clapping also derives from Blake – from his story about how, when his brother Robert died, he saw his soul rising from his body, clapping its hands. I referred earlier to the way in which the 1890s could see Blake’s technique in his lyrics in relation to Symbolism. There is a tradition of seeing Blake’s meanings as ineffable. Arthur Quiller-Couch, in On the Art of Reading (1920), implies that Blake’s poetry provides examples of the way in which true poetry is apprehended rather than comprehended (35). It is illuminating to note that ‘Q’ sees Celtic poetry as apprehended poetry par excellence, for this sheds further light on Yeats’s valuation of Blake, and may help to explain why he expressed the conviction that Blake’s family came from Galway, on no discernible evidence. The reducto ad absurdum of apprehended Blake, though, is to be found in A. E. Housman’s 1933 lecture, The Name and Nature of Poetry: For me the most poetical of all poets is Blake. I find his lyrical note as beautiful as Shakespeare’s and more beautiful than anyone else’s; and I call him more poetical than Shakespeare, even though Shakespeare has so much more poetry, because poetry in him preponderates more than in Shakespeare over everything else, and instead of being confounded in a great river can be drunk pure from a slender channel of its own. Shakespeare is rich in thought, and his meaning has power of itself to move us, even if the poetry were not there: Blake’s meaning is often unimportant or virtually non-existent, so that we can listen with all our hearing to his celestial tune. (40) The effect such a view might have on the interpretation of a reasonably clear use of Symbolism by Blake can be illustrated from Housman’s eccentric handling of Blake’s brief lyric ‘To the Accuser who is the God of this World’: It purports to be theology: what theological sense, if any, it may have, I cannot imagine and feel no wish to learn: it is pure and

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self-existent poetry, which leaves no room in me for anything besides. (45) As it happens, this is a good example of the extremes to which such an attitude might be taken, since the symbolism of the poem is not obscure. This false god remains the ‘Son of Morn’ (i.e. Lucifer) in ‘weary Night’s decline’ (i.e. fallen). He appears in a vision to the traveller (or pilgrim) when that traveller is ‘lost’ or deluded. He is Christian’s vision of Apollyon. In the lecture Housman described good poetry as interfering with shaving, because it caused the skin to bristle. It is also the one that hints at how to get a poem started: Having drunk a pint of beer at luncheon – beer is a sedative to the brain, and my afternoons are the least intellectual portion of my life – I would go out for a walk of two or three hours. As I went along, thinking of nothing in particular only looking at things around me and following the progress of the seasons, there would flow into my mind, with sudden and unaccountable emotion, sometimes a line or two of verse, sometimes a whole stanza at once, accompanied, not preceded, by a vague notion of the poem which they were destined to form a part of. (49) The inadequacy of this account makes one far more aware of how necessary and understandable were the efforts of Richards and Empson, contemporaneously in train in the Cambridge of Housman’s day. Housman’s lecture, however, is in part a reaction to those efforts. It is a pity that such ideas, which linger in popular theories of literature, should have helped slightly to tarnish by association the work of poets of exacting rigour such as Charles Baudelaire and Stephane Mallarmé. Whatever one may think of Housman’s jejune theorising, it may serve to underline the fact that, as much as anything, Blake in the early twentieth century, and just before, is considered an arresting aesthetic phenomenon, one that is hard to categorise, and this is true for more sophisticated critics than Housman, and equally true – if not more so – for comment on his graphic art. Roger Fry canonised Blake’s paintings for Bloomsbury and the art world and introduced him to their Elysium, where Giotto as much as Cézanne is praised for line, form and the relationship between masses of colour.

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In an article for the Burlington Magazine (1904) on ‘Three Pictures in Tempera by William Blake’, Fry (1961) fastens onto Blake’s anti-illusionism in some characteristically equivocal formulations: Blake’s art is a test case for our theories of aesthetics. It boldly makes the plea for art that is a language for conveying impassioned thought and feeling, which takes up the objects of sense as a means to this end, owing them no allegiance and accepting from them only the service that they can render for this purpose …. The theory that art appeals solely by the associated ideas of the natural objects it imitates is easily refuted when we consider music and architecture. … But in pictorial art the fallacy that nature is the mistress instead of the servant seems almost ineradicable … (174–5) The equivocation is to be found in the phrase ‘conveying impassioned thought and feeling’. This might appear to imply that the subject-matter of painting is still entertained, albeit in an ancillary role. In practice, Fry thinks only of what he calls ‘form’. Thus Blake is enlisted in the service of that critical spirit which was preparing the taste which would accept abstraction. While Housman could scarcely be said to be doing the same thing, he looks a little like Fry if you contrast the view of Blake offered by our own critical consensus – something not far from E. P. Thompson’s perhaps. The early twentieth century values something ardent, forceful, suggestive and eloquent in Blake’s aesthetic, and while there is no shortage of those who do understand that Blake had something to say, it is perhaps the perceived aesthetic qualities of this work that were decisive in raising the estimatation in which he was held. For W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender and Louis MacNeice by the 1930s, references to Blake are taken for granted. Sometimes they are the more telling simply by virtue of the fact that they are not self-conscious – like MacNeice’s epitome of the relationship between Northern Irish Catholics and Protestants in Autumn Journal XVI, ‘one read black, where the other read white’, which he does not even bother to attribute to Blake. MacNeice’s account of Yeats shows an easy understanding of the relationship to Blake, one that it is harder for contemporary specialists to muster. It is from Spender, though, that my favourite anecdote derives, the famous scene from World within World when the hearties at Oxford decide to break up the rooms of the newly arrived aesthete:

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I was sitting in a chair reading Blake when about a dozen of them trooped in, equipped with buckets and other clanking instruments of room-breakers and throwers-into-rivers. I could not decide on the most suitable way of receiving them, so I went on reading, very conscious of course that I was reading poetry. They were embarrassed as I. They stood about in an awkward semi-circle. One of them said: ‘What’s the big idea Spender?’ For reply I read aloud a few lines of Blake. I achieved the result: they simply changed their minds and left the room, shrugging their shoulders as though to indicate that I was too crazy for their treatment. (34) Yet Blake’s influence on Spender seems comparatively insignificant compared to that which he exerted on Auden. I have already referred to Blake’s habit of trying to haunt the best company, and this turns out to be the case with Auden too. Blake is essential to the working out of the socio-political-psychoanalytic theory of the Airman: the neurotic, homosexual outsider, surreptitiously undermining society from within, while at the same time renouncing the impossible task of trying to understand infection by the enemy, the forces of repression; bourgeois morality and the capitalist system. One must accept that infection will occur – as Auden says in The Orators, ‘The power of the enemy is a function of our resistance …. Conquest can only proceed by absorption of, i.e. infection by, the conquered’ (72). These remarks can be glossed by Auden’s discussion of T. E. Lawrence: ‘Only by the continuous annihilations of the self by the Identity, to use Blake’s terminology, will it bring us the freedom we wish for, or, in T. E. Lawrence’s own phrase, “Happiness comes in absorption”’ (cited in DavenportHines, 144). Now the broad outlines of the The Orators do owe something to the Marriage of Heaven and Hell, which it resembles in its dramatisation of opposed contrary principles, its impromptu and irreverent mythologising, its proffer of proverbs and outrageous aphorisms and its blend of prose and verse. But Auden’s comments are more learned in Blake studies than these broad outlines would suggest. The idea of accepting infection by the system to which one is opposed is strongly Blakean. (Blake calls it striving with systems to redeem individuals from these systems.) It explains why Blake will employ terms derived from René Descartes or Isaac Newton in the services of his own, anti-rationalist ideas. But one has to be quite well versed in Blake, including the more challenging later works, before one grasps this idea. Interestingly, the phrase ‘continuous annihilations of the self by the

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Identity’ derives from the later Prophetic Books, not from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: it contrasts the closed and tyrannical ‘Selfhood’, as Blake called it, with the openness and creativity of true human Identity. Sometimes the hardened self, as in Blake, is depicted as a father who accuses, as in this parody of a school hymn from The Orators: Not, father, further do prolong Our necessary defeat; Spare us the numbing zero-hour, The desert-long retreat. … but look! to us Your loosened angers come Against your accusations Though ready wit devise, Nor magic countersigns prevail Nor airy sacrifice. (100) Since we must acquiesce in the sickness caused by the father, there is even an ambiguity as to whether the first lines are addressed to a ‘Not father’ – similar to Blake’s Nobodaddy. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell remained a key text for Auden, and, as with Yeats, rethinking his own beliefs required rethinking rather than rejecting Blake. From May to September 1939, disenchanted with the political infatuation of a low, dishonest decade, and increasingly sympathetic to Christianity, he enlists Blake in his revisionism, labouring at a prose work, the Prolific and the Devourer, the title of which is one of the contraries from Blake’s Marriage. (For Blake, the Prolific are the Artists who produce, while the Devourers are reasoners and theorisers who are parasitic on the conception produced by the imagination, by the Prolific.) Auden makes the Prolific the artist and the Devourer the politician – a suggestion of the disillusionment to which I referred. The work is peppered with Blakeisms: ‘There are two and only two philosophies of life, the true and the false.’ Or, ‘There are not “good” and “evil” existences … everything that is is holy … Evil is not an existence but a state of disharmony between existences.’ ‘“Hell” is a state of being one may leave at any time. Worship of Jesus in churches has

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made him into a “false idol”’, and so on (Auden 2002, 409–58). Once Auden’s conversion was complete, he came to regard the thinkers he admired in the 1930s as preparing the way: what ‘Blake, Lawrence, Freud and Marx’ have to say is ‘implicit in the Christian doctrine of the nature of man’ (Pike, 39). Of the four figures mentioned, there is one who falls outside the customary purview of contemporary courses on Modernism, and it is not Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth or Shelley, but Blake. But note the assumption that Blake would naturally be a guiding light to any middle-class intellectual of his generation. That would certainly include Aldous Huxley, whose interest long pre-dates The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell. The reasons for his admiration were similar to Auden’s: Man according to Blake is simply a succession of states. Good and Evil can be predicated only of states, not of individuals, who in fact do not exist . … It is the end of personality in the old sense of the word. Eyeless in Gaza This remark, with its hint of impersonality, is telling about the reasons for Blake’s success in the 1930s. Auden has been seen, understandably, as ‘The Anti-Romantic Modern’ (Blair, 11–34). Blake seemed to offer an impersonal account of the structure of the psyche and, by this time, is also free from the taint of symbolist vagueness which had been one of the qualities that made him seem like a father of the avant-garde in the latter years of the nineteenth century. Not bad going for a poet not one of whose poems was included in the first edition of Palgrave (1861), although, of course, it was not achieved without opposition.

Note 1. W. B. Yeats, The Poems: A New Edition, ed. Richard J. Finneran, 2nd edn (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989), 9. Subsequent references are given as YP, followed by a page number, in parenthesis in the main text.

6 ‘There is no Competition’: Eliot on Blake, Blake in Eliot Steve Clark

I How unpleasant to meet Mr Eliot! With his features of clerical cut, And his brow so grim And his mouth so prim And his conversation so nicely Restricted to What Precisely And If and Perhaps and But. How unpleasant to meet Mr Eliot!1 Probably the majority of contemporary Blake critics would wholeheartedly endorse these sentiments about a writer who has become something of a hate figure in recent years: even the usually courteous and urbane Northrop Frye is moved to describe Eliot’s ideas as ‘fantastic and repellent’ (1963, 10). This is partly owing to the continuing impact of specific negative judgements, partly to commitment to an AngloCatholic royalist politics that has gone terminally out of fashion (though when was it ever in?), and partly to the promotion, in both poetry and criticism, of an ideal of elite culture which is now widely regarded as oppressive. Eliot’s evaluation has continued to set the agenda for preference of early over late Blake (particularly in Britain, where it has tended to be absorbed by criticism of a supposedly antagonistic political orientation). His remarks are far more ambiguous in their original expository contexts than their frequent citation might suggest; and their prominence owes at least as much to the contingencies of publishing history 78

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as to any theoretical consistency. The antithesis customarily assumed between Blake and Eliot is very much a retrospective and, to a certain degree, arbitrary construct. The essay ‘William Blake’ (originally entitled ‘The Naked Man’) in The Sacred Wood can be seen as a partly plagiarised self-diagnosis of the situation of the early twentieth-century American artist.2 The complexity of Eliot’s response may be better approached through a little-known review essay of 1927, ‘The Mysticism of Blake’, and through analysis of ‘East Coker’ as partial homage and reparation to a great if problematic precursor. In terms of specifically literary influence, the quatrain form of Poems 1920 is at least as much indebted to Blake as to Theophile Gautier; the ‘Unreal city’ of The Waste Land (CP 62) owes much to a flâneur tradition that can be traced to Blake’s ‘London’; and the symbolic geography formulated in the later prophecies permeates the bleak topography of the Four Quartets of ‘the gloomy hills of London, Hampstead and Clerkenwell, Campden and Putney, / Highgate, Primrose and Ludgate’ (CP 174). The infamous statement (‘classicist in literature, royalist in politics and Anglican in religion’ [1928]) is comparatively late and cannot be retrospectively mapped onto Eliot’s most productive period (approximately 1917–22). One might argue that the classicism was never more than a rhetorical chimera: Eliot was formed by and continued to be steeped in mid- and late nineteenth-century romanticism – Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne, Rossetti through to the minor 1890s poets, such as Davidson, Dowson and Symons. It is difficult to know precisely what royalism might have entailed for an early twentieth-century modernist intellectual beyond such quixotic gestures as wearing a white buttonhole flower (and hearing mass) on the anniversary of the Battle of Bosworth; even The Criterion remained a comparatively open house, willing to accommodate the sociology of Karl Mannheim (Ackroyd 1984, 167; see also Goldie; Harding). As for Anglicanism, it may be plausibly argued that Eliot, whatever his later overt theological commitments to Anglo-Catholicism, could never shake off the residual and rancid inheritance of American Puritanism (Jay, 11–31). The idea of Blake as a popular writer is of comparatively recent provenance. For Gilchrist ‘the unusual notes’ were ‘appealing to but one class and that a small one’, and the late nineteenth-century studies that proliferated in the wake of his classic biography emphasise issues of psychological quirkiness, madness and sanity, and the power of eidetic vision, rather any notional artisanal solidarity (Gilchrist, 27). The initial complaints concerning an excessive idiosyncrasy of

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invention, and subsequent reservations about cosseting academic exegesis, are both nicely captured in Eliot’s remark that ‘it is impossible to regard him as a naïf, a wild man, a wild pet for the supercultivated’ (SW, 151). The charge that navigating the prophecies requires a lifetime’s endeavour may be counterbalanced by noting, as Larrissy points out elsewhere in this volume, the widespread use of his work by critics such Quiller-Couch and Housman to exemplify an ideal of pure and immediately accessible poetry. Eliot’s own work can be linked to the carnivalesque aspects of Modernism, displaying hospitality to a wide spectrum of popular culture: cartoons, thrillers, music hall. Poems 1920 offers a series of satirical cartoons, which, for all their pseudo-erudition, ‘attains its effects [as with Marlowe] by something not unlike caricature’ (SW, 125); Sweeney Agonistes utilises Broadway lyrics and jazz rhythms; the encomium to the music-hall audience in ‘Marie Lloyd’ is perhaps the most unequivocal of Eliot’s essayistic tributes. In 1927, the year of his conversion and of ‘The Mysticism of Blake’, Eliot found time to review 24 crime novels (Sigg; Chinitz; Jaidka). Eliot’s sensibility remains in many respects American: one can defer to the ‘mind of Europe’ only if one has the option of disengaging from it (SW 158). For Henry James, Eliot argued, ‘the current’ of English literature ‘hardly matters’ in comparison to the cosmopolitan ideal: ‘It is the final perfection, the consummation of an American to become not an Englishman, but a European – something which no born European, no person of European nationality can become’ (HJ, 854). This is exemplified first by the French Symbolists, then Dante, finally perhaps Virgil: in each case, what is most important is the lack of allegiance to an English tradition primarily identified with the Protestant-Romantic inheritance of Milton and Blake.3 Points of rapprochement can also be found between Blake and Eliot not only in their broadly symbolist aesthetics but also through the negative case made against the latter in recent criticism on the grounds of anti-Semitism and misogyny. The polemic against Eliot’s anti-Semitism is now too familiar to need rehearsing in detail (see, for example, Julius). What is less frequently commented on is Blake’s absorption of Paine’s anti-Semitic stance in the 1790s: ‘he only denies that God conversd with Murderers & Revengers such as the Jews were. & of course he holds that the Jews conversed with their own [state religion] which they calld God & so were liars as Christ says’ (E 615). This is further supplemented by the exhortation in the 1820s: ‘Take up the Cross O Israel & follow Jesus’ (pl. 27 E 174). Jerusalem adopts

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the rallying-call of the London Society for the Conversion of the Jews, formed in 1809 but given fresh impetus in the 1820s by Henry Drummond, sponsor of the Albury Court conferences, and based on the theology of Edward Irving, in which concern for ‘the gathering and the avenging of the Jews’ coexists with the conviction that ‘God could not convert the Jewish people, because they were in the last stage of the heart’s ossification, their faculties engrossed and imbruted, and their consciences seared as with a red-hot iron’. Blake’s apparent philo-Semitism thus comes with a sting in the tail. The ‘Return of Israel’ is the necessary prelude for the ‘Saviour’ to become ‘apparent on the Earth as the Prophets had foretold’ (pl. 27 E 174), at which point the Jews themselves will be called to account for earlier crimes: ‘wherefore did Christ come was it not to abolish the Jewish imposture’ (E 614). One should also bear in mind Karen Shabetai’s contention, in the most thorough examination of this issue, that Deism may serve as ‘a codeword for Judaism’, bringing about an unexpected conjunction with Eliot’s notorious remark that ‘reasons of race and religion combine to make any large numbers of freethinking Jews undesirable’.4 It is tempting to juxtapose Eliot’s recoil from the ‘good old hearty female stench’ in the original drafts to The Waste Land (1971, 39) and the traumas of his first marriage, with the lifelong fidelity of William and Catherine Blake. Yet there is a strong undercurrent of neoplatonic animus against the ‘sexual machine’ of both male and female bodies in the later prophecies (Jerusalem 39:25 E 185). Enitharmon’s ‘The joy of woman is the Death of her most best beloved’ (E 317) suggests that female pleasure literally destroys her lover, and it is repeatedly insisted ‘no one can consummate Female bliss in Los’s World without / Becoming a Generated Mortal, a Vegetating Death’ (Jerusalem 69:30–1 E 221). Even in the famous early polemics of behalf of ‘Gratified Desire’ (E 466), there is plenty of equivocation: Thel’s refuses to enter the ‘grave plot’ of human sexuality (6: 9 E 6); Oothon shows distaste for the ‘abhorred birth of cherubs’ (5: 28 E 48); and a more general unease is apparent concerning ‘generation’, the entire process of biological reproduction. In addition, both Blake and Eliot may be seen as articulating a pathology of male childlessness. ‘Children’s voices in the orchard’ in ‘New Hampshire’ induces the lament, ‘Today grieves, tomorrow grieves’ (CP, 138); similarly the ‘laughter’ in the rose garden in ‘Burnt Norton’ is the prelude to ultimate exclusion: ‘Go, said the bird, for the leaves are full of children’ (CP, 172). This in turn recalls the infinitely poignant and peculiarly elegiac note of Blake’s ‘Nurse’s

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Song’ (E 15), delivered from but not therefore exclusive to a feminine persona: When the voices of children are heard on the green And laughing is heard on the hill, My heart is at rest within my breast And every thing else is still Then come home my children, the sun is gone down And the dews of night arise Come come leave off play, and let us away Till the morning appears in the skies (E 15) * I now wish to look in greater detail at Eliot’s critical responses to Blake in 1920 and 1927, and conclude by looking at his attempted rapprochement with his precursor in ‘East Coker’.

II Linda Shires, in the only detailed study of the composition of The Sacred Wood, stresses ‘just how precariously the book 1920 version had been achieved’ (Shires, 229). It was first proposed to the American publisher Alfred A. Knopf, in August 1918, as a ‘collection of verse and prose’ containing ‘several essays from the New Statesman and the Little Review and a good deal from the Egoist and two essays which Poetry in Chicago want me to write on the French poets’ (SL, 238 [on Rimbaud and Corbière, neither completed]). Eliot confessed to John Quinn, who dealt with negotiations on his behalf (6 January 1919): I am not at all proud of the book – the prose part consists of articles written under high pressure in the overworked, distracted existence of the last two years. But it is important to me that it should be published for private reasons. I am coming to America to visit my family within this summer or autumn, and I should particularly like it to have it appear first. (SL, 266) Eliot specifically wished to placate the ‘strong family opposition’ to his marriage and decision to live in England; but a more general inference

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can be drawn. His original intention was clearly to publish the book in the United States for an American audience. In May 1919, Eliot expressed to Quinn his wish to add ‘two or three other essays … better than anything in the manuscript’ from ‘the rejuvenated Athenaeuem’ which ‘are longer and better than any of those for the Egoist’ (SL, 296). When informed that his poems, but not his prose, had been accepted by Knopf, he approached Harriet Weaver (5 June 1919), wishing to ‘propose an entirely new book which would take some time to prepare’ (SL, 300): the first attempt to secure English publication. The following month (9 July 1919), Eliot sent Quinn a selection of articles ‘of what I consider the best of those I have been contributing to the Athenaeum’: these included ‘A Sceptical Patrician’, on Henry Adams; an ‘Elizabethan article … because of the American interest in War poets’; and an ‘article on American literature’, which ‘seemed to me appropriate’ (SL, 313). I do not wish to speculate on the possible contents of the earliest version, but the second, prepared between January 1918 and May 1919, would certainly have included ‘In Memory of Henry James’, ‘The Hawthorne Aspect’ and ‘A Sceptical Patrician’. An ‘essay on American literature’ is also mentioned, which presumably emerged from Eliot’s extension lectures on American literature, possibly on Emerson and Thoreau; though it may have been an expansion of material in ‘American Literature’.5 * I now wish to consider how the reception of ‘William Blake’ might have been altered if it had been published in its original context, alongside essays on James, Hawthorne and Adams.

III The Arts insist that a man shall dispose of all that he has, even of his family tree, and follow art alone. For they require that a man be not a member of a family or of a coterie, but simply and solely himself. (SW, 32) In The Sacred Wood, Eliot’s agile, worldly voice cannot lay claim to this high and idealistic vocation, but nevertheless reinstates it through its anti-type. William Blake offers both a mirror and an inversion of his

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own career in terms of ‘the several stages of his poetic development’, displaying the ‘peculiar honesty’ that allows the ‘unpleasantness of great poetry’ (SW, 151). Eliot’s own ‘early poems’ (e.g. ‘Circe’s Palace’ [CP, 598]) ‘show what the poems of a boy of genius ought to show, immense power of assimilation’; not ‘crude attempts to do something beyond the boy’s capacity’, but ‘quite mature and successful attempts to do something quite small’, with an ‘affinity with the very best work of his own [i.e. nineteenth] century’ (SW, 152). Blake’s gift of ‘exact statement’ produces ‘the poetry of a language which has undergone the discipline of prose’; his verse somewhat anachronistically heeds Pound’s dictum that poetry should be at least as well written as prose and offers a proto-imagist form of composition: ‘he has an idea (a feeling, an image); he develops it by accretion or expansion, alters his verse often and hesitates over the final choice’ (SW, 153). Most importantly, Blake is an ‘innocent’, whose ‘mind unclouded by current opinions’ exemplifes ‘the eternal struggle of art against education’: being early apprenticed to a manual occupation, he was not compelled to acquire any other education in literature than he wanted, or to acquire it for any other reason than he wanted it; and that being a humble engraver, he had no journalistic-social career open to him. There was, that is to say, nothing to distract him from his interests or to corrupt those interests: neither the ambitions of parents or wife, nor the standards of society, nor the temptations of success; nor was he exposed to imitation of himself or of anyone else. (SW, 152) Hence Blake represents an inverted self-portrait of the harassed and self-doubting reviewer, continuously subject to the temptations and distractions of a ‘journalistic-social career’. In the original review article ‘The Naked Man’ (Athenaeum 4681 [16 January 1920], 72–3), Eliot’s initial pledge to ‘define his limitations’ is restricted to a single reservation: ‘it is only when the ideas become more automatic, come more freely and are less manipulated that we begin to suspect their origin, to suspect that they spring from a shallower source’ (SW, 152). When the essay was revised for book publication, three paragraphs were added. Blake is now said to ‘attach more importance’ to his own philosophy ‘than an artist should’, which ‘makes him eccentric’ and ‘inclined to formlessness’. In this respect, his

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work is curiously reminiscent of ‘the most dangerous tendency of American versifiers’ which ‘is towards eccentricity and formlessness’.6 If ‘one remarks about the Puritan mythology a historical thinness’, this is a tradition to which Eliot himself rather than Blake belongs, ‘the reader with Calvinism in his bones and witch-hanging (not witch-hunting) on his conscience’ (ALAL, 52), intimately familiar with the way ‘Puritanism itself became repulsive only when it appeared as the survival of a restraint after the feelings which it restrained had gone’ (SW, 134). Eliot finds in Nathaniel Hawthorne a ‘very acute historical sense’ of the American ‘colonial history’, in which a ‘burden of self-improvement’ produces a debilitating introspection (SP, 361; HA, 861), and where the only dimension possible in which to ‘expand was the past, his present being so narrowly barren’ (HA, 862–3). Yet this position also permits a more emancipated and even rapaciously consumerist attitude to the ‘dead poets, his ancestors’: ‘Mr Pound proceeds by acquiring the entire past, and when the entire past is acquired, the constituents fall into place, and the present is revealed’ [1919, 1065]). It is continually insisted that literature must be more effective, more up-to-date: as Philip Larkin puts it, ‘a view of poetry which is almost mechanistic, that every poem must include all previous poems, in the same way that a Ford Zephyr has somewhere in it a Ford T Model’ (1964, 73). Hence the incessant appeals to the craft of the practitioner: ‘Coleridge is writing as a professional with his eye upon the technique’ (SW, 19). Formalism can be understood not as a form of disengagement but precisely as a reflection of worldly criteria in its effort to establish art as an autonomous yet economically highly valued sphere of activity (Menand). The ‘certain meanness of culture’ discerned in Blake similarly duplicates Eliot’s 1919 characterisation of the environment of ‘American Literature’: ‘Their world was thin. It was not complex enough. Worst of all it was second-hand, it was not original and self-dependent – it was a shadow’ (AL, 237). As for ‘large but insufficiently furnished apartments filled by heavy conversation’, whether or not this applies to Milton, it is surely apt for the typically unspecified location of Eliot’s own dramatic monologues (as in the original epigraph to The Waste Land: ‘He do the Police in Many Voices’). When Blake’s thought is disparaged as ‘an ingenious piece of homemade furniture’ (SW, 156), it is Emerson who springs to mind. In the same quintessentially American tradition of ‘homemade’ worlds, there may be placed Eliot himself, who, like Ivan Turgenev in Paris, a ‘perfect example of the benefits of transplantation; there was nothing lost by it’, occupied ‘a

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position which he literally made for himself, and indeed may almost be said to have invented’ (1917, 167). If with Blake ‘perhaps the circumstances required him to fabricate, perhaps the poet required the philosopher and mythologist’ (ASG 16), the same is true of Eliot’s historical fabulation of the ‘dissociation of sensibility’ and the ‘mind of Europe’ (SW 158). He constructs his own tradition, and in so doing, invents himself.

IV The strictures on the prophecies added to Eliot’s essay belong to a tradition already well established: as early as 1897 Yeats was rebuking critics who ‘dismiss them with shallow remarks about their formlessness, which we all know so well and chatter about their unintelligibility’ (1970, 282). With Eliot, bearing in mind the financial and emotional pressures to which the harassed reviewer was subject in 1919, it should be no surprise that his essay should be permeated by the text under review: Charles Gardner’s William Blake the Man (1919). Bentley’s dismissal of this as no more than a ‘pedestrian biography’ is perhaps unfair: Gardner’s extensive exposition of ‘Swedenborg’s influence’ as the ‘greatest and most lasting on Blake’s mind’ (55 [55–80]) lies behind Eliot’s remark: ‘To him there was no more reason why Swedenborg should be absurd than Locke. He accepted Swedenborg and eventually rejected him for reasons of his own’; and on closer inspection, the famous closing paragraphs of Eliot’s essay prove to be a close and highly derivative reworking of Gardner’s conclusion: The truth is that Blake was not a great thinker still less a systembuilder. He ought to have found the best Christian system while he was still young and kept to it. Then he could have lived his life vision within coherent bounds. Clear sharp dogma, like outline in art, would have given rest to his mind, substance to his vision and saved him from the waste of pouring out a torrent of incoherent sayings containing scraps of gnosticism, theosophy, rosicrucianism, and almost every heresy under the sun … The master-mind who could have given him a better system than his own and to whom he was beginning to listen was Dante … We may hazard the guess that he would have reached the Catholic form of Christianity, having thrown overboard his private symbolism on the way, and they he would have produced great long poems of crystalline clearness

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which would have placed him by the side of the master poets of the ages. (192–3) This comes nearly a decade before Eliot’s own conversion and classic exposition of Dante: in Poems 1920, ‘The Hippopotamus’ and ‘Mr Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service’ seem closer to a facetious blasphemy by a lapsed Puritan. Gardner’s polemic against the Protestant-Romantic tradition originates in an argument for the essentially Catholic trajectory of Blake’s work. Eliot’s limiting judgements have had such wide circulation that it is worth recalling the opening gambits of his essay. Here Blake is unhesitatingly classified as ‘great poetry’ and placed in a pantheon alongside ‘Homer and Aeschylus and Dante and Villon … Shakespeare – and … Montaigne and … Spinoza’. The quality of ‘peculiar honesty, which in a world too frightened to be honest is peculiarly terrifying’ is diametrically opposed to Eliot’s careerist temporising; Blake’s isolation serves as an indictment of the culture which ‘conspires’ against him. For an example of the ‘morbid or abnormal or perverse’ in Eliot’s own poetry of the period one need look no further than ‘History has many cunning passages’ (in ‘Gerontion’ [CP, 38]), which may certainly be seen to ‘exemplify the sickness of an epoch or a fashion’. The ‘extraordinary labour of simplification’ which enables Blake to ‘exhibit the essential sickness or strength of the human soul’ is contrasted with what Eliot’s implicit self-indictment for the ‘acquisition of impersonal ideas which obscure what we really are and feel, what we really and what really excites our interest’. In the Clark lectures, whose central thesis on poetry and philosophy would seem to require some consideration of Blake, there are only a few asides, but even here the implicit valuation is extremely high: ‘What happens to a poet who has an original philosophy? Does he not become the victim of those who want their philosophy cheap and without thought and is he not like Blake perpetually a riddle to those who seriously would estimate his greatness as a poet’ (1993, 224). As a thought experiment it is interesting to speculate on how the ‘estimate of [Blake’s] greatness as a poet’ might have been altered if the later assessment, ‘The Mysticism of Blake’ (Athenaeum, 17 September 1927) had been included in Selected Essays in place of, or alongside, ‘The Naked Man’ (a title dropped in order to disguise the review origins of the essay). This is more clearly a response to specific books, presumably issued for the centenary of Blake’s death, though Eliot does not

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mention the anniversary: Poetry and Prose of William Blake (ed. Geoffrey Keynes); The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (facsimile); Mona Wilson, The Life of William Blake; Max Plowman, An Introduction to the Study of Blake; Pencil Drawings of William Blake (ed. Geoffrey Keynes); and Helen C. White, The Mysticism of William Blake. The simple cost of the volumes under consideration should give pause for thought. At 12s 6d, Keynes can hardly be considered ‘extremely cheap’, as Eliot claims (a collection of the drawings at 35 shillings are said to be ‘also … extremely cheap’). No comment is passed on the cost of Wilson’s ‘genuine biography, not trying to write history and criticism at once’ at £2 5s, except perhaps obliquely: ‘in consequence this is a book which will keep its value’. The lower production values of Plowman’s Dent introduction (at 4s 6d clearly designed for a wider audience) elicit a degree of condescension. At this stage Blake is still very much a luxury item; while the proliferation of largely biographically-oriented potboilers over the preceding 30 years indicates widespread curiosity if not fascination, the proletarian perspective has at this point quite simply been priced out of the market. ‘If we have not yet made up our minds about Blake, we have no longer any excuse for not doing so’: the customarily feline and elusive ‘we’ with which Eliot opens may be seen as addressing an elite minority of Anglo-Catholic royalists, yet even the equivocation undercuts the close of the earlier essay and returns to the open-mindedness of ‘riddle’. ‘This volume [by Keynes] will introduce many readers to parts of Blake’s work which are previously almost unknown.’ Among the latter Eliot himself might perhaps be included: on the basis of the extremely limited citation in the Clark lectures and elsewhere, one might reasonably infer that he had not previously read the prophecies beyond the extracts included in Yeats’s Muses Library selection and Sampson’s Oxford edition. There are generous tributes to the prose, marginalia and letters, notably for the previously unavailable An Island in the Moon, and particularly high praise for The Marriage of Heaven and Hell as ‘one of his most amazing works, a book equal in importance to Thus Spake Zarathustra’. There is also particular emphasis on Blake as the ‘producer of his own works’: ‘other men have painted and written but with Blake the two activities were almost one’. That is one reason why Blake is so difficult a subject: the critic of Blake should be highly skilled in the technique of verse and prose

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and the technique of drawing and design and colour (which is why I approach him with diffidence). ‘Diffidence’ hardly captures the tone of the earlier essay, but here Eliot prefigures the modern critical commonplace that ‘No one who has read and looked at it in this new edition will want to read it in any other’. The issue of text and design is nowhere mentioned in 1920: the assessment made is exclusively of Blake as writer. Furthermore Eliot pre-dates a now routine categorisation of Blake by half a century – ‘It is a book which all libraries and all individual enthusiasts ought to possess’ – and the term is far from automatically pejorative Nor is that Mr Plowman too enthusiastic; one cannot be too enthusiastic. But in this book enthusiasm itself is the theme, instead of being (as it should be) a steady glow illuminating the merest statement of fact. Enthusiasm should inspire statement; in Mr Plowman’s book it takes the place of statement. At the very least ‘enthusiasm’ has a legitimate function to ‘inspire’ and could be seen as an indispensable component of the creative process. Plowman certainly is unapologetic in his contention that ‘all that is of real value in Blake can only be obtained by the individual through the exercise of his own imagination in direct contact with Blake’s written words’ (10). Eliot offers only two, unsatisfactory cavils to support his strictures: in response to the claim that ‘Blake freed Western art from slavish adherence to nature’, some consideration is requested of his relation to recent traditions of French art, to which he can be related immediately through common dependence on Swedenborgian correspondences. The formulation ‘When Blake took for his province the human soul he found in it a world wholly unmapped and uncharted’ comes very close to the earlier insistence on Blake’s ‘profound interest in human emotions and profound knowledge of them’ in The Sacred Wood: Eliot’s query as to the potential tautology of mapping and charting may be rebuffed simply enough: one refers to land, the other to sea. It seems fair to cite an example of Plowman’s prose: Q: Why is Blake like the underground? A: Because he is most enjoyable when he comes to the surface.

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Blake becomes a subterranean poet because he could not belong on the surface. There was congestion of the traffic with traditional ideas and many banal and useless effigies stood in the way. He did not mind going out of sight so long as he could control his own routes, his object being always to arrive. Many have denied Blake goes anywhere except around the Inner Circle, but there have always been old ladies from the country who have not dared to trust themselves to the lifts of Blake’s symbols, have fallen asleep on the journey. But Blake had a terminus and many stations on the way, and just as the Underground offers town-dwellers opportunities for exercise in the country, so Blake carries his readers beyond the boundaries of the mundane shell more surely and more quickly than any other English poet. We may prefer the town; that is, we may prefer the order and disorder of the visible to the apparent disorder of the invisible for there is always a chance that we may get stuck in the tunnel and then Blake is no joke to anyone. But while it remains true that he is most enjoyable when he emerges into the daylight of recognisable country, he remains about as valuable as the Underground station would be without the railway if we are content to walk around him picking out the non-symbolic plums. Every inch of his route is the result of hard boring through the dark clay and rock beneath our feet, and although old ladies may doubt it, the whole labyrinth is illuminated by the light of a superb intelligence. This jocular conceit pays homage to Blake’s modernity as well as playfully evoking the difficulties of negotiating his work: Eliot’s ‘traditional ideas’ have become ‘congestion of the traffic … with many banal and useless effigies stood in the way’. For Eliot, Plowman’s ‘disappointing book … might better be called “Preface to an Introduction to an Introduction”’. This recessive element is common to much classic Blake criticism, notably Frye’s: in terms of the proliferation of possible contexts, as Denis Saurat remarks, ‘The more we study and the more persuaded we become that there was not one absurdity in Europe at the end of the eighteenth century that Blake did not know’ (59). Eliot’s initial voracity should be noted: ‘I turned from page to page hungrily, always hoping finally to be introduced but’ – introducing a somewhat querulous note of social hierarchy – ‘the introduction never came off’: ‘If we must choose between the popular style of Mr Plowman and the university style of Miss White we plump for the latter.’ The criteria underlying the 1920 strictures are now rescinded in favour of another set of reservations: ‘I am not sure there is any such thing as mystical poetry. Mysticism after all and whatever we think of

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it is a whole-time job; and so is poetry.’ The bathetic ‘whole-time job’ recalls the earlier ethos of professionalism. (Though why can’t Blake job-share poetry and mysticism as well as text and design?) Eliot had himself earlier remarked with regard to Blake’s quatrains, ‘Such professionalism is art’s hard work on style with singleness of purpose’. It is perhaps predictable that the ‘last canto of the Paradiso’ is invoked as an Arnoldian touchstone of mystical poetry, but the status of the other two examples remains unclear: ‘Wordsworth’s great ode’ as ‘simply great poetry based on a fallacy’ may be related to Eliot’s later evocations of childhood (as intimations of transience rather than immortality), but the praise of Herbert Crashaw’s ‘Hymne’ to St Theresa as ‘a supreme instance of the erotic-devotional’ is difficult to reconcile with his vow of chastity made in the same year. The tone suddenly lurches into gratuitous insult: ‘Blake was not even a first-rate visionary; his visions have a certain illiteracy about them like those of Swedenborg’. The judgement can scarcely be considered ‘without prejudice’. The resolutely non-juring Blake is sneered at as a version of ‘the Rev Mr Vale Morgan in the Sunday paper a few years ago’, a figure more reminiscent of Eliot’s own editorial pontifications in The Criterion and at times near-farcical sermonising in The Rock: ‘But every son would have his motor cycle, / And daughters ride away on casual pillions’ (CP, 153). ‘Was he then a great philosopher? No he did not know enough’, echoes Arnold’s famous indictment of the Romantics, but also contradicts Eliot’s earlier charge of Blake being ‘too much occupied with ideas’: He made a Universe; and very few people can do that. But the fact that the gift is rare does not make it necessarily valuable. It is not any one man’s business to make a Universe; and what any one man can make in this way is not, in the end, so good or so useful as the ordinary Universe which we all make together. This espousal of the ‘ordinary Universe’ conveniently overlooks both Eliot’s earlier symbolist poetics and commitment to Bradleyan idealism: ‘In brief regarded as an existence which appears in a soul, the whole world for each is peculiar and private to that soul’ (note to The Waste Land 411: CP, 80). And to do what Blake did requires two things which are not good things. All of these commentators … have told us that Blake was

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completely alone and that he was deficient in humility, or exceeding in pride. Now Isolation is not conducive to correct thinking; and Pride (or lack of Humility) is as we know one of the chief theological sins. Blake is philosophically an autodidact amateur; theologically a heretic. The coercive (if traditionally Catholic) insistence on a single ‘correct thinking’ offers no support for the contention that the relation