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II' r — •?*■'* ,.,,,»iuiMmiiiiMii:Hi.'««P1 l ,/ , i V ap'il' v'<" ll »"y 1 " , i)/iw"?rr.«ififii,i' M'njJiTgn.M.i'iHiw.unUtT:•» «*! K Lii^i.i^X^il^■A^^s^i^# « ****** B&s3»v3 I BETSY BOWDEN's research interests extend from obscene puns in medieval Latin, published in Medievalia et Humanistica, to the world's first Ph. D. dissertation on the words and music of Bob Dylan. She now teaches mostly folklore in the English Department at Pennsylvania State IAN ILLUSTRATED QUARTERLY 52 Un i ve rs i ty. WAYNE GLAUSSER, Assistant Professor of English at Yolyme 13 Number 4 the College of William and Mary, works in nine• Spring 80 teenth-century British and American literature. ROBERT STERNBACH teaches English at Boston Univer• sity. He is currently working on a study of the development of Coleridge's poetry. CONTENTS LESLIE TANNENBAUM is an Assistant Professor of English at Ohio State University. He is author The Artistic and Interpretive Context of Blake's of articles on Blake, Byron and Mary Shelley. "Canterbury Pilgrims" His book, The Great Code of Art: Biblical by Betsy Bowden, 164 Tradition in Blake's Early Prophecies, will be published by Princeton University Press. Milton and the Pangs of Repentance by Wayne Glausser, 192 REVIEWS Christine Gallant's Blake and the Assimilation of Chaos reviewed by Leslie Tannenbaum, 200 Donald H. Reiman's The Evidence of the Imagination: Studies of Interactions between Life and Art in English Romantic Literature reviewed by Robert Sternbach, 203 NEWSLETTER ©copyright 1980 by Morris Eaves A Morton D. Paley CONTRIBUTORS EDITORS EDITORS: Morris Eaves, Univ. of New Mexico, and Morton D. Paley, Univ. of California, Berkeley. BIBLIOGRAPHER: Thomas Minnick, Ohio State Univ• ersity. ASSOCIATE EDITOR FOR GREAT BRITAIN: Frances A. Carey, Assistant Curator, Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum. PRODUCTION OFFICE: Morris Eaves, Department of English, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM'37131, TELEPHONE 505/277-3103. Morton D. Paley, Department of English, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720. Thomas L. Minnick, University College, Ohio State University, 1050 Carmack Road, Columbus, Ohio, 43210. Frances A. Carey, Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum, Great Russell Street, London WC1B 3DG, England. 164 THE ARTISTIC AN INTERPRETIVE CONT OF BLAKE'S "CANTERBURY PILGRIMS" BETSY BOWDEN n the past decade, three critics have bever hat."3 And neither can Blake' s portrait of discussed the painting itself of "Chaucers Chaucer indicate a source, despite i ts similarity to I Canterbury Pilgrims," along with Blake's earlier portraits. Chaucer's image had been passed commentary on it in the Descriptive Catalogue to his on as if through a four-century Xero x machine, 1809 Exhibition.1 But Blake, though timeless as thanks mostly to a life portrait in the margin of ever, was working not in a vacuum but in a historical his pupil Thomas Hoccleve's De Regit ive Prineipun, context of commentary on and illustrations to now Harl. MS 4866. Blake could have examined this Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. manuscript itself in the British Mus eum at Montagu House, or worked from one of the sco res of paintings A look at the artistic tradition Blake could and engravings that evolved from it. have known will show that he fit the Canterbury pilgrims into his own cosmology with only slight Clearly, however, Blake goes beyond any of his changes from earlier artists' representations. sources. He portrays the pilgrims all together on Although he tells in words the Blakean meanings of horseback, as no one before him had; and he positions many of the pilgrims, he portrays only two of them them to show particular relationships in his own as unmistakable symbols or types: he renders the Blakean cosmos. Even a glance at his oicture Wife of Bath as Whore of Babylon; and he shows the (illus. 1) suggests Blake's interest in binary Parson as the Good Old Man, like the one dying in symmetry and the pairing of characters.4 For his illustrations to Robert Blair's Grave. Otherwise, example, the Parson and Pardoner stand in defiant to picture the pilgrims as "physiognomies or contrast, face to face, like Good and Evil, with lineaments of universal human life,"2 Blake prin• the cruciform Host midway between. The Wife of Bath cipally does what artists before him had done: he and Prioress also form a symmetrical pair, though goes straight to Chaucer's poem. not such a direct contrast, as they ride midway in back and front halves of the procession. Blake also Because Chaucer's General Prologue pictures the pairs the Knight and Squire who head the procession pilgrims so minutely, artist-to-artist influences and the Poet and Philosopher who end it. The picture are hard to pin down. The Merchant sports a tall is balanced artistically, both in structure and in hat and forked beard in the fifteenth-century details. And the Descriptive Catalogue suggests Ellesmere manuscript, in the woodcut of Thynne's how such visual symmetry often indicates Blake's 1532 edition, in the engraving of Urry's 1721 spiritual interpretation of each pilgrim. But, how edition, in Blake's painting. Blake must have seen often? Can a boundary be drawn between Blake's one of these prototypes? No--"A Marchant was ther visual unity as an artist and his symbolic with a forked berd / . And on his hed a Flaundrish unity as a poet-philosopher? 165 To interpret Blake's interpretation, I will Chaucer follow'd Nature every where; but was look at precisely how he has changed each pilgrim never so bold to go beyond her. ... he has away from artistic tradition and, in several cases, taken into the Compass of his Canterbury Tales away from the details of Chaucer's poem. Blake's the various Manners and Humours (as we now Descriptive Catalogue commentary, too, differs in call them) of the whole English Nation, in his small but significant ways from previous Chaucer Age. Not a single Character has escap'd him. criticism. His does seem to share one problem with All his Pilgrims are severally distinguish'd the other, though: a continual use of vague, ab• from each other; and not only in their Inclina• stract terms like "grand" and "first rate" and tions, but in their very Phisiognomies and "powerful," non-descriptive non-individualized words Persons. Some of his Persons are Vicious, applied to general classes of mankind by the man and some Vertuous; some are unlearn'd, or (as who said, "To Generalize is to be an Idiot." Blake. Chaucer calls them) Lewd, and some are Learn'd. I will suggest, is purposely teasing the reader with Even the Ribaldry of the Low Characters is the inaccuracy and ambiguity inherent in such ab• different: The Reeve, the Miller, and the Cook, stract language, and thus forcing his audience to are several Men, and distinguish'd from each look instead at the picture. other, as much as the mincing Lady Prioress, and the broad-speaking gap-tooth'd Wife of Bathe. ... We have our Fore-fathers and To analyze the picture, to generalize will Great Grand-dames all before us, as they were sometimes be necessary. I will discuss in general in Chaucer's Days; their general Characters are earlier literary interpretations of Canterbury Tales, still remaining in Mankind, and even in England, and in general the group portraits of Canterbury though they are call'd by other Names than pilgrims which Blake could have seen in London or those of Moncks, and Fryars, and Chanons, and Felpham before 1809. Then I will discuss in Lady Abbesses, and Nuns: For Mankind is ever particular each figure in Blake's procession and its the same, and nothing lost out of Nature, though relationship to Blake's text, to Chaucer's poem, to every thing is alter'd. earlier artists' portrayals of that character, and to other figures in the procession. (I will mention only in passing the picture's background — the rising Dryden's essay would have suggested to Blake not only sun, Gothic arches, and so on--so as to keep bounds the constancy of the types of mankind but also on this article.5) And I will suggest, also, how several binary contrasts among Chaucer's pilgrims: Blake uses the binary symmetry of the picture to vice and virtue, lewd and learned, Wife of Bath and convey a spiritual meaning like that he illuminates Prioress. elsewhere. In "Canterbury Pilgrims," the types of mankind do not stand in static one-to-one binary Other eighteenth-century commentators also saw relationships. Within the frozen time and space of the Canterbury pilgrims as enduring types of mankind. this picture, a constant cell-like bisection and As a sampling, George Ogle in 1739 paraphrases re-bisection of types goes on, such that a given Dryden at great length, suggesting figure may be the spectre of one character, the complementary completing half of another, and the an Examination of the various Tempers and contrary of a third. Manners of Mankind, as We find them more expressly delineated in the ampler Designs of the Tales these Persons are made to relate. No literary critic before Blake had seen the . I shall venture ... to rank our Chaucer pilgrims in complicated binary relationships. But with . the best Drawers of Characters.6 what at first seems very Blakean about his Descriptive Catalogue commentary—that the pilgrims Sir John Hawkins in 1776 says that Chaucer represent eternal types that exist in all ages--was a standard interpretation in the eighteenth century. The earliest and most eloquent expression came from John Dryden.

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