Eternity's Sunrise: The Imaginative World of William Blake

by Damrosch, Leo

  Blake’s art is iconic and symbolic, using conventional gestures and poses that were known as “pathos formulae,” and everything in it is intended to convey meaning. Thus, paradoxically, what he means by “particulars” is not the external characteristics that make a specific individual unique, but universal truths that are somehow uniquely embodied in every individual.47 It is fair to say that for most people, lacking Blake’s Platonic belief in such truths, his art doesn’t seem “particular” at all. To put it another way, his theoretical commitment to individuality leads him, paradoxically, to an artistic style based on highly conventional gestures.

  For the commercially successful productions of his time, Blake coined a phrase, “the contemptible counter arts.” He was fond of sarcastic puns like “the cunning sures and the aim at yours”—“connoisseurs” and “amateurs.” When he read Sir Joshua Reynolds’s much-admired Discourses on Art he filled the margins with furious commentary, starting with the title page: “This man was hired to depress art.” And on the next page: “Having spent the vigour of my youth and genius under the oppression of Sir Joshua and his gang of cunning hired knaves, without employment and as much as could possibly be without bread, the reader must expect to read in all my remarks on these books nothing but indignation and resentment.” An account of Reynolds’s death provoked a deft dismissal in verse:

  When Sir Joshua Reynolds died

  All Nature was degraded;

  The King dropped a tear into the Queen’s ear,

  And all his pictures faded.48

  Blake says that “the reader” must be prepared for indignation because he does, in fact, expect these marginal notes to be read by others. He and his friends used to circulate books among themselves, sharing their written reactions.

  Personal resentment aside, Blake’s antagonism to Reynolds was at bottom a profound philosophical difference, and understanding what that meant is crucial to appreciating his personal vision. “The disposition to abstractions,” Reynolds wrote, “to generalizing and classification, is the great glory of the human mind.” Blake retorted, “To generalize is to be an idiot; to particularize is the alone distinction of merit. General knowledges are those knowledges that idiots possess.”49

  Actually Reynolds believed, just as Blake did, that artists should depict ideal forms, and he too disparaged the circumstantial details in Dutch paintings. But Reynolds accepted the empiricist view that the mind is a blank slate until inscribed with sense data. Ideal forms, therefore, are artificially constructed by collecting actual examples in order to determine what they all have in common. In Reynolds’s words, the artist learns “to distinguish the accidental deficiencies, excrescences, and deformities of things from their general figures; he makes out an abstract idea of their forms more perfect than any one original.”50

  Blake too believed in ideal forms, but in an entirely different, Platonic way. “All forms,” he wrote in his copy of Reynolds’s Discourses, “are perfect in the poet’s mind, but these are not abstracted nor compounded from nature, but are from imagination.” And he had only contempt for the Lockean metaphor of the tabula rasa. “Reynolds thinks that man learns all that he knows. I say on the contrary that man brings all that he has or can have into the world with him. Man is born like a garden ready planted and sown; this world is too poor to produce one seed.”51

  At bottom Blake’s disagreement with Reynolds was more theoretical than practical, and it might be argued that the two kinds of idealized images can look pretty much the same. But it was also true that Reynolds got rich painting portraits of the wealthy and powerful, which was something Blake would never have done even if he had had the chance. And in intellectual terms, he regarded as hopelessly muddled Reynolds’s struggle to reconcile Platonic universals with the empiricist particulars. “The contradictions in Reynolds’s Discourses,” he wrote acerbically, “are strong presumptions that they are the work of several hands, but this is no proof that Reynolds did not write them. The man, either painter or philosopher, who learns or acquires all he knows from others must be full of contradictions.”52

  A Career of Disappointments

  Since Blake increasingly refused to work in the styles that were then popular, his failure to reach an audience was probably inevitable. Mere illustration bored him profoundly; he called it the “sordid drudgery of facsimile representations of merely mortal and perishing substances.” The kindly publisher Joseph Johnson, Gilchrist says, tried in vain to “help so unmarketable a talent.” Blake expressed contempt for contemporaries who achieved success by pandering to fashion. Their attention was fixed, he commented wittily, “on the many, or rather on the money.” Meanwhile his friends shook their heads at his improvidence. “On the subject of engravers,” one of them wrote in 1805, “you will be glad to hear that Blake has his hands full of work for a considerable time to come, and if he will only condescend to give that attention to his worldly concerns which everyone does that prefers living to starving, he is now in a way to do well.”53 The reverse turned out to be true. After 1806 there were no commissions at all for a decade.

  In 1809, in his early fifties and utterly frustrated by lack of recognition, Blake decided to mount a public exhibition of his own. Held in the family haberdashery shop, now owned by his brother James, it was modest in the extreme, and his highly idiosyncratic paintings must have made a startling contrast with the everyday inventory of stockings and gloves. As Gilchrist says, “An exhibition set going under such auspices was likely to remain a profound secret to the world at large.” On view were not the works that we admire today but large paintings on public themes. Blake called them frescoes, in homage to Michelangelo and Raphael. Two were symbolic representations of Britain’s naval hero Lord Nelson and prime minister William Pitt: The Spiritual Form of Nelson Guiding Leviathan and The Spiritual Form of Pitt Guiding Behemoth. These were covert attacks on Britain’s counterrevolutionary war policies, but they were so obscure that the few viewers who showed up were very unlikely to have understood them. We know that Blake dreamed of creating actual public frescoes, and there is a poignant allusion to that ambition in Kingsley Amis’s novel The Alteration. Amis’s premise is that Martin Luther became pope instead of launching the Reformation. As a result, the Catholic Church still rules supreme, and its great English cathedral now displays “Blake’s brilliant frescoes depicting St. Augustine’s progress through England.”54

  There was one extended review of the exhibition, and it was crushing. The re-viewer, Robert Hunt, coeditor of the Examiner with his brother Leigh, declared that it was his duty to speak out “when the ebullitions of a distempered brain are mistaken for the sallies of genius. . . . Such is the case with the productions and admirers of William Blake, an unfortunate lunatic, whose personal inoffensiveness secures him from confinement.” As for the Descriptive Catalogue that Blake had prepared, it was “a farrago of nonsense, unintelligibleness, and egregious vanity, the wild effusions of a distempered brain.”55 The Hunt brothers would subsequently appear as villains in Blake’s poems.

  After the failure of his exhibition, Blake gave up hope of reaching a wide public. In one way that was a handicap, since it allowed him to produce work that was increasingly self-absorbed and obscure. But it was also immensely empowering. He was now free to follow his vision wherever it might lead, making a modest living by selling his productions to a small number of sympathetic collectors. And he resumed the mode of creation that he had virtually invented in the 1790s, to which we now turn: images and words combined in “illuminated books.” “He had found the form of his life’s work,” one commentator says; “he had confronted and triumphantly solved one difficulty that most people never overcome—how to use their creative abilities to their fullest purpose.”56

  2. HOW SHOULD WE UNDERSTAND BLAKE’S SYMBOLS?

  Visions

  AT TIMES, especially in his later works, Blake may seem to be using a language that has only one speaker. But it is important to recognize that his imagination wa
s fundamentally visual and that by learning to “read” the images that accompany his words, we can gain access to the heart of his vision.

  And vision it literally was. Blake continued to see actual visions throughout his life and to draw inspiration from them. They were not hallucinations—he understood that other people couldn’t see them when he did—but he definitely perceived them as vividly as if they were physically present. This phenomenon is known as eidetic vision, thought to be common in children and often persisting in artistic adults. It generally entails the mental revival of images that were once actually seen, and many images in Blake’s art, though he thought of them as visionary, can indeed be traced to prints and paintings with which he was familiar. They share the aesthetic code of romantic classicism: feelings are personified in human form, either naked or clothed in diaphanous garments through which the body is clearly visible, and they stand out from a loosely sketched background that suggests timelessness. As in medieval art, which always interested Blake, these figures may differ greatly in size, reflecting their symbolic significance rather than any naturalistic scale.

  Whatever the source of his visions, Blake was convinced that he was not recycling ordinary sense impressions—which is how eighteenth-century psychology understood “imagination”—but perceiving reality with exceptional fullness and depth. In the catalog for the failed exhibition of his paintings he declared, “A spirit and a vision are not, as the modern philosophy supposes, a cloudy vapour or a nothing. They are organized and minutely articulated beyond all that mortal and perishing nature can produce. He who does not imagine in stronger and better lineaments, and in stronger and better light than his perishing mortal eye can see, does not imagine at all.” Elsewhere he said, borrowing a thought from Plato, “I question not my corporeal or vegetative eye any more than I would question a window concerning a sight; I look through it and not with it.”1

  A quarrel with a dissatisfied customer provoked from Blake a clear statement about visionary art. A very conventional clergyman named John Trusler, author of a work entitled The Way to Be Rich and Respectable, commissioned a drawing entitled Malevolence, which if satisfactory would be followed by Benevolence, Pride, and Humility. Trusler seems to have furnished very specific directions, and when Blake sent him the picture he said that he had tried his best to show “a father taking leave of his wife and child, [who] is watched by two fiends incarnate, with intention that when his back is turned they will murder the mother and her infant.” In the end, however, he had felt “compelled by my Genius or Angel to follow where he led.” Trusler replied indignantly, “Your fancy, from what I have seen of it . . . seems to be in the other world or the world of spirits, which accords not with my intentions, which whilst living in this world, wish to follow the nature of it.” Blake retorted, “I know that this world is a world of imagination and vision. I see everything I paint in this world, but everybody does not see alike. To the eyes of a miser, a guinea is more beautiful than the sun, and a bag worn with the use of money has more beautiful proportions than a vine filled with grapes. The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way.”2

  Personification

  Before we explore the symbolic images in Blake’s own work, it will be helpful to look at some illustrations he made for poems by other writers (he never illustrated novels). It was his custom to give visual embodiment to metaphors—Yeats called him “a literal realist of the imagination”—and that was common among artists at the time, following the practice of eighteenth-century poets to personify abstract ideas.3 But far more than other artists, Blake added conceptions of his own in a kind of dialogue with the text, or even a critique of it. At times his visual images differ so strikingly from their verbal sources that we need to go to his own symbolic mythology in order to understand them. He considered it entirely appropriate to import his personal symbols in this way, for he saw them as reflecting the ultimate reality that we all inhabit.

  A relatively simple example of personification is a picture illustrating a passage in Thomas Gray’s Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College (figure 12), one of a set of watercolors that Blake made for a friend in 1797–98. Pasting texts from a standard edition of Gray’s poems onto the middle of each page, he surrounded them with images. In this poem Gray imagines that he is looking down from Windsor Castle at the famous school from which he had graduated, yearning for a lost paradise of “careless childhood.” The Thames flows between Eton and Windsor, and Gray asks the river to describe the schoolboys of the present day:

  Say, Father Thames, for thou hast seen

  Full many a sprightly race

  Disporting on thy margent green

  The paths of pleasure trace,

  Who foremost now delight to cleave

  With pliant arm thy glassy wave?

  The captive linnet which enthrall?

  What idle progeny succeed

  To chase the rolling circle’s speed,

  Or urge the flying ball?4

  Samuel Johnson, who detested poetic personification, commented sternly, “His supplication to Father Thames, to tell him who drives the hoop or tosses the ball, is useless and puerile. Father Thames has no better means of knowing than himself.” But for Blake personification was no mere rhetorical device; it expressed his belief that nature is fundamentally human. That is to say, we inhabit a universe that is pervaded by spirit, altogether different from the soulless machine postulated by empiricist science and by materialist philosophy. Since our imaginations are human, we find human meaning and value in the world. And it is thus that nature can move us to tears—or to intuitions that are even deeper, as Wordsworth said in a poem that Blake admired, Ode: Intimations of Immortality:

  12. Father Thames

  Thanks to the human heart by which we live,

  Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,

  To me the meanest flower that blows can give

  Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.5

  River gods were conventionally depicted with urns from which their waters flow, and Blake’s Father Thames leans on just such an urn. But nothing in Gray’s poem suggests that this god should be a massive giant, dwarfing the youths at play. In part, perhaps, his size reflects the significance of the Thames in British national consciousness. But even more striking than his bulk is his brooding expression, with furrowed brow (crowned, for some reason, with vine leaves). His mood seems to reflect that of the two youths just below him who are looking downward, while a tiny figure on his urn gazes into the distance. The swimmers may be blithely oblivious of the disappointments and suffering that await them, but their happiness can only be momentary, and the seated pair seem to know it. They are pensive and withdrawn, already experiencing the melancholy that suffuses Gray’s poem—“Ah fields belov’d in vain!” Perhaps the little figure on the urn is already gazing into the unknown but ominous future. Seventy lines later, the poem will end with an aphorism that has become proverbial: “Where ignorance is bliss, / ’Tis folly to be wise.” Nostalgia came early to Gray, as did a sense of his life as one long defeat. He was just twenty-six when he wrote the Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College.

  More startlingly imaginative is a color print with watercolor that illustrates a speech in Macbeth (color plate 1). Paintings based on Shakespeare’s plays were popular, but they normally illustrated one or another dramatic episode. If a different artist had chosen this speech, the resulting picture would probably have shown Macbeth lost in thought or pacing uneasily. Blake’s picture does nothing of the kind. What it does do is give visual embodiment to Macbeth’s words as he contemplates murdering the king and foresees the dreadful consequences:

  Besides, this Duncan

  Hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been

  So clear in his great office, that his virtues

  Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued, against

  The deep damnation of his taking-off;

 
And pity, like a naked newborn babe

  Striding the blast, or heaven’s cherubin horsed

  Upon the sightless couriers of the air,

  Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye,

  That tears shall drown the wind.

  These are not easy metaphors to find visual equivalents for. The literary critic Cleanth Brooks complained long ago that a newborn baby “could not of course even toddle, much less stride the blast,” whereas if it could indeed stride the blast, it would hardly be pitiable.6

  Blake never gave this picture a title; it was his friend Frederick Tatham who called it Pity. It could just as well have been Heaven’s Cherubin or The Sightless Couriers of the Air or The Naked Babe.7 For he has actually managed to combine the two very different metaphors that Shakespeare separates with the word “or.” We usually think of cherubs as infantile putti, but that is not the original meaning of the word. In his 1755 Dictionary Samuel Johnson, quoting Shakespeare’s lines, defines a cherub as “a celestial spirit which, in the hierarchy, is placed next in order to the seraphim.” These are mighty angels (“cherubin” is plural) and were usually depicted as male. In Blake’s picture, however, a pitying female cherub bends down and opens her hands protectively to receive a tiny infant from a mysterious woman reclining below. The babe—with adult proportions, not a realistic newborn—is not so much “striding” as joyously flinging open its arms, perhaps to be received into eternal life.