Aesthetic Humanism: The Radical Romantic Vision of Blake and Byron

By John William Davies, B.A.

A Thesis Submitted to the Department of English

California State University Bakersfield

In Partial Fulfillment for the Degree of Master of Arts in English

Spring 2013

Copyright

By

John William Davies

2013

Aesthetic Humanism: The Radical Romantic Vision ofBlake and Byron

By John William Davies

This thesis has been accepted on behalf ofthe Department ofEnglish

by their supervisory committee:

Dr. Susan Stafinbil

Committee Chair

Dr. Steven Frye

Aesthetic Humanism: The Radical Romantic Vision of Blake and Byron

If Shakespeare “invented the human,” a claim made rather spectacularly by the critic

Harold Bloom in a 1998 book, then the six British poets who comprised what was to become known as the Romantic Period perfected the mode. Shakespeare, in Bloom’s terms, depicted interiority in a unique way, allowing his characters to “overhear” themselves, to be self-reflective and existential (or proto-existential). Existentialism proper, along with the whole modern conception of self, has been merely catching up. It is my contention that the Romantics accelerated this paradigm shift by making the figure of The Poet highly subjective in a way it had not been before. Byron is the archetype. The “Byronic Hero” inaugurated in “Childe

Harold’s Pilgrimage,” and perfected in “Manfred” and “Don Juan,” is subjectivity (at least male subjectivity) personified, a titillating amalgam of ambition, weakness, androgyny, power, lust; mortality and immortality in locked combat like Jacob and the angel. Only Jacob is not an abstract, allegorical figure here. These characters are Byron, by his own admission “such a strange mélange of good and evil that it would be difficult to describe me” (qtd. in Abrams 555).

We have another name for this and it is “human nature.”

The American and French Revolutions brought into stark relief the arrogance of Empires and Systems versus the needs and demands of individuals. These movements, along with the general spiritual crisis concomitant to the industrialization of Europe, brought about a restlessness in the artists and artisans that eventually crystallized as “The Spirit of the Age.”

Keats wrote, “Great spirits now on earth are sojourning.” The “spirits” that have made it into the generally recognized Western Canon are William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor

Coleridge, George Gordon (Lord Byron), Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats. Not all of these

1 poets were recognized at the time, but as a collective, they represent the shift in artistic consciousness in 18th and 19th century Britain, that led to a shift in the world’s consciousness as to what humanity is and what purpose it serves in the Universe.

This leads naturally to religious questions. The Romantics can rightly be described as

“humanists,” in that they viewed the common human good as Ultimate. Shelley saw religion as inherently corrosive and even printed a controversial pamphlet entitled “The Necessity of

Atheism.” Wordsworth and Coleridge were promiscuous in their metaphors, freely mixing nature-cult with the standard Christian idiom. Keats was a skeptic, but used God as a poetic device. William Blake was another matter entirely. Peter Ackroyd writes, in his influential biography, Blake:

All the evidence of Blake’s art and writing suggests that he was imbued with a

religion of Piety, enthusiasm, and vision. His older brother, who settled into a

trade as a hosier, claimed to have seen Moses and Abraham. He was also reputed

to ‘talk Swedenborg,’ which in the language of the period, meant that he espoused

some visionary faith bearing traces of the radical mysticism of the seventeenth

century and earlier. This was Blake’s inheritance, and it can be truly said that he

is the last great religious poet in England (Ackroyd 18).

Blake himself had a vision of God at the age of eight and never let go of his religious preoccupation, though the metaphysical system he was to later develop in his poetry, while steeped in Christian idiom, was highly idiosyncratic and even Gnostic. His overriding motif is

“The Human Form Divine,” an abstract of mankind’s qualities at their most benign and at their most malevolent. “God” for Blake is very much anthropomorphic, merciful in that man is merciful, cruel in that man is cruel.

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Blake’s humanized God and Byron’s divinized man represent two poles of Romantic vision that can help us understand the unique humanism forged in that heady Age. Though the

Romantics took their inspiration from the intensely secular French Revolution, Romanticism was not an artistic basis for secular humanism (Shelley’s atheism notwithstanding). Nor was it the basis for a new religious humanism, although certainly Romantic zeal coursed through later religious movements dedicated to suffrage and the abolition of slavery. Romantic humanism preached an ideal humanity mediated by Art, an aesthetic humanism that incorporated religious and secular values in an unprecedented way. Mankind in these works is both Divine and, to borrow a phrase from Bloom, “human, all too human.” This paper will reexamine Byron, long viewed as “anti-metaphysical,” in light of new religious readings of his work and place him in conversation with Blake, a religious visionary who betrays easily as much cynicism toward the

Heavenly realm as Byron does. I will begin by examining a representative work from each poet

(Songs of Innocence and Experience for Blake and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage for Byron) in a new light, looking particularly for shades of ambivalence where the authors’ views have been previously considered to be self-evident. I will argue that both poets exemplify a wily transgressiveness in relation to moral, ethical, and sexual norms (a kind of antinomianism, the heresy by which the sinner buries himself or herself so deeply in the underworld of transgression that salvation is virtually required). I will follow this by placing the poets in direct communication with one another, something they have conveniently already done in the dueling works Cain (by Byron) and The Ghost of Abel (by Blake). I will be paying close attention to the satirical nature of each poet’s work, suggesting that, especially in Byron’s case, his attitude towards the Divine is found between the lines. I intend to establish the basis of what I’ve called

“aesthetic humanism” by way of a dialectic between these two seminal poets’ bodies of work.

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The larger point to be made, in relation to the Romantics’ co-invention of the human, is that the

Byronic Hero is but one incarnation of Blake’s “Human Form Divine,” and that figure is the basis for much of our understanding of the modern Western personality.

The artists of the Romantic Period (1785 – 1830 is the span generally agreed upon by literary historians) were primed to reevaluate human concerns by a number of powerful, historical factors. One is the Enlightenment, which began to strip away myth and metanarrative, albeit in exchange for a new metanarrative called Progress. Terry Eagleton has written incisively on the “nausea” left by the departure of transcendence post-enlightenment. In his book Reason,

Faith and Revolution he writes:

A new, prestigious image of Man was born as free, controlling, agent-like,

autonomous, invulnerable, dignified, self-responsible, self-possessed,

contemplative, dispassionate, and disengaged. This is Man’s ‘coming of age,’ but

it is a maturity that is inseparable from a certain infantile anxiety. At the peak of

his assurance, Enlightenment Man finds himself threateningly alone in the

universe, with nothing to authenticate himself but himself. Sovereignty proves to

be inseparable from solitude (82).

Add to this the social uncertainty and unrest brought about by technology and peoples’ revolutions, sketched by M.H. Abrams in his celebrated anthology, The Romantic Period:

This was a turbulent period, during which England experienced the ordeal of

change from a primarily agricultural society, where wealth and power had been

concentrated in the landholding aristocracy, to a modern industrial nation, in

which the balance of economic power shifted to large-scale employers, who found

themselves ranged against an immensely enlarging and increasingly restive

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working class. And this change occurred in the context of revolution – first the

American and then the more radical French – and of wars, of economic cycles of

inflation and depression, and of the constant threat of the social structure from

imported revolutionary ideologies to which the ruling classes responded by the

repression of traditional liberties (2).

These revolutions reverberated in the literary communities of England. Foundational texts included Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, Mary Wollstonecraft’s A

Vindication of the Rights of Man and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and Thomas Paine’s

Rights of Man. Poets became, in Shelley’s phrase, the “unacknowledged legislators of the world,” though Byron sought some acknowledgement in the form of an impassioned speech before the House of Lords on the rights of stocking industry workers, who had taken to criminal acts as the result of systemic mistreatment.

Blake addressed world events through a series of highly esoteric epics such as London,

Jerusalem, and America: A Prophecy, but it was the succinct and incisive poems of Songs of

Innocence and Experience that prophesied Dickens in their gritty descriptions of London urban life. “The Chimney Sweeper” begins:

When my mother died I was very young,

And my father sold me while yet my tongue

Could scarcely cry “’weep! ‘weep! ‘weep!”

So your chimneys I sweep & in soot I sleep. (1-4)

The songs, composed between 1789 and 1805, are designed to create in the reader a growing sense of dis-ease. A weeping child appears in the “Introduction” to Songs of Innocence, surrounded by the tranquil calm of nature, replaced with the all-seeing Bard of Songs of

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Experience, a deceptive juxtaposition because the Songs of Innocence betray traces of bitter experience between the lines. Two poems called “Holy Thursday” are often contrasted as a benign and a sinister description of children being led to mass, but the first “Holy Thursday” with its jarring repetition of the word “innocence” and its majestic description of beadles and white wands, calls to mind the phrase “lambs to the slaughter” even before the idea is drawn out more explicitly. Furthermore, Blake’s work is, as always, accompanied by pictorial engravings that are often – as in the case of “The Sick Rose” – frankly sexual.

In her book on the Dionysian subtext of Western Culture, Sexual Personae, Camille

Paglia titled the chapter on Blake “Sex Bound and Unbound.” She calls Blake’s poetry “sexual grand opera of instability, anguish, and resentment,” referring specifically to the references to adultery and homosexuality in his larger works, but also to works like “Holy Thursday” in which

“the beadles are perverts, voyeurs, decadents. They freeze the children’s river of life.” As for the chimney sweep, prematurely frosted, “the white hair is sexually universalizing because the exploited are humiliatingly feminized by amoral political power” (272).

In this context, a seemingly pious poem such as “The Lamb,” which speaks of Christ using that biblical metaphor, must be reexamined. If Christ is as human as he is divine, he is therefore frail and exploitable – like a lamb. God may be the bad guy here. Paglia points out that

Blake’s God is often depicted as “ravishing” his supplicants. He hovers over Adam in the plate

“God Creating Adam” with a look of triumphant ecstasy.

The point is not that God is evil, but rather that if God is the ultimate expression of all the qualities of his creation, he is – at some level – both good and evil. One of the ways in which the

Romantic poets demonstrated their solidarity with the poor and exploited was by depicting The

Other, The Cast Out, the dejected sympathetically. Byron’s heroes in particular were evocative

6 of Faust or Faustus or “The Wandering Jew.” Writing on Byron, Paglia notes, “Byron relishes sexual criminality. Forbidden love makes his characters superhuman. Rejecting all social relationships, Byron’s heroes seek only themselves in sexually transmuted form” (347). This often takes the form of incest, with the characters of Manfred and his sister Astarte as the archetypes. Don Juan is both androgynous and virile to such an exaggerated extent that Paglia sees the character as homoerotic. Noting Byron’s documented love affairs with young noblemen,

Paglia insists “Juan is partly Byron and partly what Byron likes in boys” (352).

Byron’s commingling of the themes of transgression and spiritual seeking recalls the ancient heresy of antinomianism, derided by Saint Paul in the Epistle to the Romans.

Antinomianism teaches that the soul must sin its way to salvation, in the words of a U2 song, “to taste and to touch and to feel as much as a man can before he repents” (“The Wanderer”).

Blake’s position on “sin” is never more explicit than the famous line from “The Proverbs of

Hell,” “sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse an unacted desire” (67).

It would be a mistake to take a line like this at face value, any more than we would too readily accept Byron’s lines in his epic play Cain:

The snake spoke truth: it was the tree of knowledge;

It was the tree of life: - knowledge is good,

And life is good; and how can both be evil? (I, I, 36-38)

Byron and Blake both wrote at a time when the concepts of good and evil were in flux.

The powerful, including church leaders, had set the meaning of good for everyone. However, it was becoming clear through the revolutions, that this kind of good was actually evil and that the underclass, the “sinners” must, by contrast be good. In choosing Cain for a hero, Byron may not have been insulting God or religion at all, which has been the critical consensus, but rather trying

7 to understand those concepts from the point of view of the ultimate outsider, in much the same way that the recent books on Judas have tried to do. Romantic scholar Matthew Green, in his article “Voices in the Wilderness: Satire and Sacrifice in Blake and Byron,” has pointed out that these writers are satirists which means that they are critics of their culture. Their subject matter, whether secular or religious, is a vehicle for critiquing culture, not a commentary on secularism or religion per se.

In the article “I am more fit to die than people think,” Harold Ray Stevens locates a number of instances of Byron expressing curiosity about the afterlife, many of them in the first poem to establish the “Byronic hero,” “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,” which describes the travels and reflections of a world-weary young man who, disillusioned with a life of pleasure and revelry, looks for distraction in the form of a long and wandering journey through many foreign lands. The epic took six years to complete, and by the final Cantos Byron was writing in the first person as Harold, daring his audience to associate him with his hero.

Stevens refers especially to the many references to Harold’s soul in Canto III: “the soul’s haunted cell” (5); “What am I? Nothing; but not so art thou,/Soul of my thought! with whom I traverse earth,/Invisible but gazing, as I glow/Mix’d with thy spirit, blended with thy birth” (6);

“Yet time … had altered him/In soul and aspect as in age” (8); “his soul was quell’d/In youth by his own thoughts …” (12). Most lyrically in Canto IV, line 137: “There is that within me which shall tire/Torture and time, and breath when I expire;/Something unearthly, which they deem not of,/Like the remembered tone of a mute lyre …” (IV, 137). Although there was certainly precedence for using metaphysical language for poetic effect, such moving lines lend credence to

Byron’s supposed words near the end of his life, “I am more fit to die than people think.”

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Much of this language associates “the soul” with “the mind,” an idea later popularized by

Carl Gustav Jung and suggested by Blake in the line from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

“All deities reside in the human breast,” that is the heart, or what later New Age movements would come to call “consciousness” (11.12). The Marriage of Heaven and Hell provides important insights into the Romantic engagement with the Divine. Metaphysics are no longer construed as a binary apposition, with heaven on one side and hell on the other, but “Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence” (3.5, 6).

“Without Contraries is no progression,” which applies also to the Songs of Innocence and

Experience, which are of course songs of innocence and experience whether they appear in the first half or second half of that great work.

As “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage” is a work of “titanic, cosmic self-assertion,” which nevertheless manages to speculate on God and the soul, so Songs of Innocence and Experience is a blatantly religious work suffused with humanity, a fact never more blatant than in “The Divine

Image”:

To Mercy, Pity, Peace and Love,

All pray in their distress,

And to these virtues of delight

Return their thankfulness.

For Mercy, Pity, Peace and Love

Is God, our father dear:

And Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love

Is Man, his child and care.

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For Mercy has a human heart,

Pity, a human face,

And Love, the human form divine,

And peace the human dress. (1-13)

Blake is notably ambivalent about these qualities, a fact that becomes stark when one reads the sequel “A Divine Image” and the words “Cruelty has a Human Heart/And Jealousy a Human

Face,/Terror, the Human Form Divine,/And Secrecy, the Human Dress” (1-4).

Blake's agon with God exemplifies the first tenet of aesthetic humanism: each individual is his own creator. Blake was notoriously suspicious of any outside, imposing "system," which has continuously led many to question his sanity. "I must Create a System or be enslaved by another Man's" he has the mythical Los say in Jerusalem. Clearly Blake's religious vision was not one of meek piety. Conventional Christology holds that God became Man in order to reinforce his own exaltation ("draw all men unto me"). For Blake, "God becomes as we are, that we may be as he is" ("There is No Natural Religion"). It is human exaltation that God was after.

For an individual to recognize his or her exalted state, as Blake believed he did, was to be enlightened.

The mode of self-creation is earned experience. Northrop Frye explicates this well in his essay "The Keys to the Gates." Reality for people in the Middle Ages and through the

Renaissance, Frye writes, "was arranged on four levels: On top was heaven, below it was the proper level of human nature . . . and at the bottom was the world of sin, death, and corruption"

(236). Through "education, virtue, and moral law" man might be raised to a proper standing

10 with God. The French and American Revolutions challenged this hierarchical paradigm. They also represented loss of innocence.

For Blake, innocence is not traced back to the Garden of Eden. It is traced back to each individual's misconception that life is a garden, God is in his heaven, and all is right with the world. "As the child grows up," according to Frye's reading of Blake, "his conscious mind accepts 'experience,' or reality without any human shape or meaning, and his childhood innocent vision is driven underground into what we should call the subconscious, where it takes on an essentially sexual form" (237). One has a choice at that point to go on pretending that the world is ordered and holy or to behave rebelliously with conscious intent. Behavior such as homosexual intercourse, a frequent theme in Blake's writings, is no longer seen as a perversion, but rather another case of Jacob wrestling with the angel.

Frye divides Blake's cosmos into four levels, corresponding to parts of a body ("The

Human Form Divine"): 1. The head (pictured as the city of God in Blake's larger works and called "Urizen"), 2. The body (pictured as a garden and called "Tharmas"), 3. The loins (pictured as the soil from which the garden grows and called "Orc"), 4. The feet (pictured as the underworld of dreams and called "Los" or "Urthona"). This redeemed golem can only be formed by successive levels of experience, namely disillusionment, the overcoming of frustrated desire, and the exercising of creative power. Creative power stems from the realm of dreams, "the feet," and not the head, so this vision is revolutionary.

The necessity of creative power in realizing experience points to another tenet of aesthetic humanism: the primacy of art. Before the Romantic Poets, art existed only to serve a higher purpose. The seemingly subtle but crucial difference brought about by Blake and his successors is that with them art was so essentially integrated into that higher purpose, that it

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becomes difficult to distinguish God from Art. Blake called the Bible "The Great Code of Art,"

but this did not lead him to interpret art according to finely articulated theological arguments.

Rather, he viewed the Bible as subversive, frightening, and difficult, like great art.

God's creations unsettle Blake, as we see in the poem "The Tyger." "Tyger! Tyger!

Burning bright/In the forests of the night,/What immortal hand or eye/Could frame thy fearful

symmetry?" Setting aside for a moment the possible allusions to sexual energy or the "realm of

dreams," those lines suggest that a tiger could be many things, or could be seen to be many

things. A tiger is like a fire: burning bright in red and orange, animated by wild, unpredictable

movements. The ambiguity is heightened both by the inhuman overgrowth characteristic of a

forest and the darkness of night. Yet, despite all these "asymmetrical" forces surrounding and

obscuring the image, there is a clear linear beauty that emerges. The poem goes on to employ

metaphors drawn from human industries, like metalworks, but is this dread Creator beating out

an anvil or a hammer, or is he spraying colors onto a canvas in mad ecstasy (prefiguring Jackson

Pollock maybe -- a modern interpreter may ask)? The disciples asked "What manner of man is this" when Jesus calmed the storm. Blake seems to ask what manner of man might create the storm to begin with. How is it that precision is wedded to chaos?

These questions are answered only by more questions, perhaps the most poignant among them being: "Did he who made the Lamb make thee?" The real question here is: Do Innocence and Experience have the same origin? "The Tyger," like most of the poems in Songs of

Experience, has an antecedent in Songs of Innocence: "The Lamb." Although the most obvious

difference between the poems is the sweet and lilting verse of "The Lamb" versus the pounding

rhythms of "The Tyger," the most significant difference between them is that Blake answers the

questions he asks of "The Lamb." "Little Lamb, who made Thee? . . . Little Lamb, I'll tell

12 thee!/He is called by thy name,/For he calls himself a Lamb." He calls himself a Lamb. Were it not for "Experience," that statement may appear to be a standard bit of religious consolation.

However, in "The Tyger" the creator figure is ominous and mysterious and it is unclear whether there is just one. The divine psychology is so complex and counterintuitive in Blake that we may suspect that "he calls himself a Lamb" as a ruse, or possibly out of schizophrenia. Yet, as dubious as this name is, "We are called by his name." The poem ends "Little Lamb God bless thee./Little Lamb God bless thee" (20). The effect is one of a lullaby, but as we've seen, being lulled to sleep is not the warm comfort it may at first appear to be in Blake. At some point, the

Lamb must wake up.

As Frye demonstrates, The Songs of Innocence and Experience represents, in miniature,

Blake's mature vision which becomes more and more esoteric and critically challenging in the longer works. To reiterate, Innocence is redeemed through applied Experience. As Frye puts it,

"The act of creation is not producing something out of nothing, but the act of setting free what we already possess" (254). The unsettling solution to the riddle of "The Lamb" and "The Tyger" is that we as human beings possess qualities of both and possess the ability to call either into existence. "The Divine Image" of Innocence lyricizes lamb-like qualities: mercy, pity, peace; "A

Divine Image" is its complement; cruelty and terror reign there. Only in identifying one with the other can we create.

This is the core morality of aesthetic humanism: good and evil have the same source. Our acts are not good or evil according to their inherent merit. It is our motive that counts. To quote

Shakespeare in Hamlet, "There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so" (II.ii.250).

Reality is waiting to be transformed by our imagination. This is an idea that has permeated

Western art and literature since the Romantics, and found its full flower perhaps in

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Postmodernism, a radically secular mode. But in Blake it might be more appropriate to use the word "Gnostic." He anticipates Freud in positing an uncanny "dream world" from which a stained innocence emerges to impose new levels of experience, but he also anticipates Jung in connecting that dream world to something deeper and more ancient, even Eternal. Ultimately categories like "religious" and "secular" would probably elicit ambivalence in Blake, as they would in Byron, as we will see later in this study. Neither poet would counsel a mortal to sin merely, nor would they strive to convince him that sin doesn't exist, but they might each counsel him to sin transcendently.

It is in this area that the (frequently misunderstood) work of Camille Paglia might help to shed light on the Romantic moral vision. Of Blake she claims he "turned sex and psyche into a

Darwinian cycle of turbulent natural energies, fleeing, chasing, devouring" and she similarly paints Byron as a devourer, assisted by a preternatural charisma that attracted both men and women (270). This is the correlation that makes each poet a candidate for the "antinomian heresy," the idea that one can sin one's way to salvation, even if that salvation is - as it was for

Byron - a Cult of Self.

Paglia's analysis of Songs of Innocence and Experience centers on "Infant Joy" from

Innocence, which she calls "Blake's most neglected major poem" (272). "Infant Joy" is one of the last poems of the Innocence cycle and runs thus:

I have no name

I am but two days old. -

What shall I call thee?

I happy am

Joy is my name. -

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Sweet joy befall thee.

Pretty joy!

Sweet joy but two days old.

Sweet joy I call thee:

Thou dost smile.

I sing the while

Sweet Joy befall thee. (1-12)

As has been clearly established (not just from Frye's remarks, but from any basic understanding of Blake's work), this poem should not be read at face value as a sweet song exchanged between parent and infant. The infant is untouched human nature in for a rude awakening. It is also a blank slate, a canvas for creation.

Paglia views the emerging theories on human nature in Blake's time as a tug-of-war between Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Marquis de Sade; humanity is either inherently good or inherently corrupt. For her, "Infant Joy" expresses this tension:

"Infant Joy" exposes the authoritarianism in Rousseauist "concern," "caring," and

"understanding," today's self-righteous liberal values. In the poem's eerie dialogue

I hear George Herbert's homoerotic intensities. In its blank encapsulization I feel

claustrophobic Spenserian embowerment. "Infant Joy" comes from the rape cycle

of The Faerie Queen. It is the provocative vulnerability of the fleeing Florimell,

the purity that sucks filth in its wake. "Infant Joy" is a Rousseauist vacuum into

which Sadean nature is about to rush (273).

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Paglia's phrase for "innocence" is "moral emptiness," which makes innocence sound like a type of nihilism. In a way it is. Or rather, Blake's hypnotic rendering of innocence gives the reader permission to respond nihilistically. Any gesture of love that one may feel compelled to make is also, according to Paglia, "an assertion of power" (274). The reader "hovers" over the poem, and symbolically over the infant in it, as God "hovers" over Adam in Blake's artwork "God creating

Adam," an image that is suggestively sexual on many levels: the closeness of Creator to creation,

the tightness of their robes, and the snake that winds around Adam's limbs.

"Infant Joy," Paglia concludes, brings us "face to face with the biologically fundamental.

. . . Man is born into his chains, the mother-born body binding us to creature comfort, sex, and

pain" (276). This is Sadean reality to Rousseau's sentimentality, but Blake is creative. He uses

the uneasy implications of innocence creatively. In this way, at least one counterpart to "Infant

Joy" might be "The Sick Rose" of Experience. In "The Sick Rose," Blake immediately ravishes

the picture of innocent beauty that he presents: "O Rose thou art sick." The rose in the poem is

infected by an "invisible worm" that "finds out her bed." The allusion to deflowering is not

subtle, but the rose regenerates, if you will, autoerotically. Paglia again: "Blake's masturbatory

rose belongs to the tradition begun in Egypt where autoeroticism is a method of cosmogony"

(277).

Sex is the key to the Romantics' brand of humanism. Starting with Blake, sex is not

immoral (or moral only in certain circumstances) as it is in conventional religion, nor amoral as

it is in purely secular humanism. Sex, rather, transcends moral categories. There are moments in

Blake in which it seems that for him sex is the only thing that's real. His pictorial art is replete

with huge, totemic phalluses. In a kabbalistic turn of events, that which makes the rose sick will

also make her well.

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This kind of counterintuitive moral vision can be found later in Nietzsche, one of the more prominent heirs of aesthetic humanism, who writes in On the Genealogy of Morals, warning against asceticism as a response to life's moral conflicts:

[A]n ascetic life is a self-contradiction: a ressentiment rules here without equal,

that of an insatiable instinct and will to power, wanting to be master not of

something in life but of life itself, of its deepest, strongest, most primal

conditions; here an attempt is made to use force to stop up wellsprings of force.

(99)

Nietzsche’s point is prefigured in Blake’s famous line "[S]ooner murder an infant in his cradle than nurse an unacted desire." Perversion, depicted so cannily in the “Holy Thursday” poems results from allowing desire to fester, which is the real machination of an ascetic lifestyle. It is a myth, according to Blake (and Nietzsche, and all of what I am terming the aesthetic humanist tradition), that a life free of sin is a matter of self-control. It is a matter of self-denial. And if knowing oneself is the route to enlightenment, self-denial (ironically) is the ultimate "sin."

The masturbation image is exactly right, and serves to articulate the real relationship between innocence and experience. An individual's first manipulation of his or her genitalia physicalizes the dawning awareness that one is a sexual being, that one can experience desire, and ultimately that one is independent of the authority figures who had heretofore seemed to be

"God." It is a sickness in one sense, but in another sense it represents liberation. It is an innocent act in one sense, but in another sense it is the first entree into experience.

Similarly, the poems of Songs of Innocence and Experience are not strict antitheses. They are commentaries on each other. "Experience" is the effluvia of "Innocence" and leaves the reader pondering what it was in innocence that was capable of producing the fruits of experience.

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Blake's goal is unity. In one of his core works, The Four Zoas, he writes "Four Mighty Ones are in every man; a Perfect Unity" (referring to the four aspects of the Human Form Divine that I explicated earlier, using Frye). M.H. Abrams writes, in the introduction to his Norton Anthology entry on Blake: "Blake's mythical premise, or starting point, is not a transcendent God but the

'Universal Man' who is himself God and incorporates the cosmos as well" (38).

The idea that Selfhood is a universal value and that alienation from the self, represented as alienation from some Universal Self, is the central human dilemma has animated not just the secular philosophy of the 20th and 21st centuries, but also their theology. Blake anticipated

Nietzsche, but he also anticipated Kierkegaard, whose writings centered around the concept of identity. Kierkegaard in turn anticipated the "theology" of the sixties, as well as the more conventional theological character of that era's most important legacies, including the Civil

Rights Movement.

Abrams offers an insightful synopsis of Blake's worldview: "[Blake's ideas] . . . have in our own time become the prevailing point of view - that our fall (that is the malaise of modern culture) is essentially a mode of psychic disintegration . . . and that our hope of recovery lies in a process of reintegration" (39). I believe that Blake's extensive literary and artistic project proposes that Art itself is the integrating agent. It is only through a creative force of will, expressed most purely in artistic endeavors, that we can redeem innocence. But, we must go further. We must, as Wilde was to later propose, make of our lives a work of art.

The intense identification of life with art was to become one of the key features of the

Romantic Period in British poetry. No figure expressed this more fully than George Gordon,

Lord Byron. Many modern commentators have identified Byron with the birth of the idea of celebrity, the apotheosis of the principle that each individual is his own creator. Paglia's book

18

Sexual Personae includes a long interlude in which she compares Byron to Elvis Presley in attitude, style, and charisma.

Along with his compatriot Shelley, Byron was a firm advocate of the primacy of art.

Abrams calls him "the very prototype of literary Romanticism" in his personification of The Poet as a bardic, quasi-spiritual figure (551). The Byronic hero, as it was to become codified in the works of Mary Shelley and later Charlotte and Emily Bronte, is both God and Muse. His art was certainly a vehicle for him to work out a deep sense of alienation, which he personified in the figures of Cain, Manfred, Childe Harold, and others.

Byron was also deeply ambivalent regarding moral categories, presenting unspeakable sins as secret paths to enlightenment. Homosexuality and masturbation are present in his works, as they are in Blake's, but the most common symbol for the antinomian principle in Byron is incest. Incest serves roughly the same purpose in Byron as the masturbation metaphor does in

Blake's "The Sick Rose." To find oneself, one must enter oneself (personified as a twin or sibling). Incest when tragically enacted in real lives is the sharing of a secret, but in the Gnostic legacy perpetuated by the Romantic poets, secrets are powerful and creative.

Clearly in Byron, as in Blake, sex transcends morality. What is less clear in Byron is whether sex, in all its permutations, is truly redemptive. In fact, it is in the area of redemption where a dialectic between these two poets may prove most fruitful. Byron seems to place himself forever outside of the Garden of Eden, exiled, a position Blake may have identified with the human condition. Blake, however, offers answers - often in subverted or inverted applications of religious principles. Byron has long been viewed as virulently anti-religious. I hope to challenge that assumption, but I think at the very least we can say that - whatever his true attitude toward religion - it was a subject about which he was hardly disinterested.

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Byron's poetry is not nakedly metaphysical like Blake's, but metaphysical implications are seldom far away. Take the poem "Darkness" for example, written at around the same time as

Byron's first epic quest-poem Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. "Darkness" paints a picture of a world-wide apocalypse, a common theme in Romantic poetry, as Europe was drenched in the blood of its revolutions. The poem ends in a concatenation of mighty negations:

The populous and the powerful - was a lump,

Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless -

A lump of death - a chaos of hard clay.

The rivers, lakes, and oceans all stood still,

......

The waves were dead, the tides were in their grave,

The moon their mistress had expired before;

The winds were scattered in the stagnant air,

And the clouds perish'd; Darkness had no need

Of aid from them - She was the universe. (70-82)

Byron eschews the redemptive hope of a rescuing Messiah amidst all this annihilation, but his interest in eschatology is nonetheless a religious interest. The voice in Byron's poems tended to offer the darker perspective. The essayist Paul Douglass has called this tendency in

Byron "suffering as foundational artistic principle" (17).

Certainly Byron the man suffered. He was born to a profligate father and troubled mother, was deformed since birth with a mangled foot, was sexually abused, spent much of his life battling various sexually and alcoholically transmitted ailments, and died young, a painful

20 death. Yet, in correspondences with friends regarding the end of his life, confidently asserted: "I am more fit to die than people think." We might wonder whether Byron saw his suffering as redemptive.

Biographical criticism has fallen out of fashion, but in Byron's case, it would be imprudent to set his life aside entirely. He associated himself intimately with the icon he created: the mysterious and possibly evil wanderer whom women (and sometimes men) find nevertheless powerfully seductive: The Byronic Hero (transmuted over time into the Romantic Man of

Feeling). One formative experience that might especially help us to understand Byron's complicated attitude toward religion is his early sexual abuse at the hands of his Presbyterian nurse May Gray. Benita Eisler details those experiences with uncommon clarity and insight in her book Byron: Child of Passion, Fool of Fame:

. . . [H]is Presbyterian tutors, along with a succession of Scripture reading

nurses, including Agnes Gray and her sister May, made sure he read all the books

of the Bible "through and through before I was eight years old," he later told his

publisher John Murray, "that is to say, the Old Testament, for the New struck me

as a task, but the other as a pleasure." For one story especially, the conflict of

Cain and Abel, he felt the ambiguous thrill of identity; he could elevate his own

deformity to the grandeur of a curse - the mirror image of a sense of election.

During the late winter and early spring of 1799 Byron lodged alone with

May Gray. It was during this period that the nursemaid began regularly taking the

boy into her bed and masturbating him. . . . She would later start beating the child

she had initiated into sexual activity. In Byron's most scarring early memory,

pious hypocrisy had masked the cruelty and corruption of May Gray, his

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Scripture-quoting nurse and seducer. The small boy had been punished, driven

from childhood, he later said, by the knowledge of heaven and hell as sexual

torment. His apprehension of Christianity would remain that of a clever, angry

schoolboy scoring off the arrogance and moral vacuity of the established church.

. . . Too intellectually rigorous and class-conscious to consider the evangelical

alternative or dissenting sects whose "enthusymy" he derided, Byron seized for

himself the starring role of fallen angel, the outcast branded with the mark of

Cain. (26, 39, 299)

This is more than simple derision toward religious belief. By this account, in a spectacular act of metathesis, Byron has inserted himself into the Biblical narrative. Several critical essays have been published in the last few years that have challenged the idea that Byron is merely antireligious, or as Harold Bloom termed it in his classic study on the Romantics The

Visionary Company, "anti-metaphysical." Two essays that I want to consider closely both deal with Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, the work that first brought Byron fame. Childe Harold tells the story of a young nobleman's worldly education derived from a long sojourn across Europe, and it follows Byron's own travels from his early twenties. The essays are "'Eden's Door': The Porous

Worlds of Don Juan and Childe Harold's Pilgrimage" by Harold Ray Stevens and "Byronic

Ambivalence in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage IV" (dealing with the fourth "canto" in the epic poem) by Vitana Kostadinova.

Hopps opens his article with a discussion of the critical consensus on Byron since the renaissance of Romantic Studies in the 1970s. "Byron has been read as an ironist and a nihilist with a 'scorn for metaphysics' (Harold Bloom, The Visionary Company)" (110). Hopps also cites

Camille Paglia's reading of Byron as a poet of "earthly horizontality" (as opposed to Shelley's

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"spiritual verticality"). Since I have made some investment in Paglia's insights, I will come back to her later. For now, suffice it to say that Hopps considers the critical tradition insufficient in this regard. Byron is not simply a "secular poet." If a universe like Blake's, admitting all manner of spiritual beings and ideas, is "open" and a universe like Shelley's, strictly scientific and materialistic, is "closed," Byron's universe - Hopps contends - is "porous." Childe Harold's

Pilgrimage and the later epic Don Juan "are filled with exits and entrances," or "emigrations" and "immigrations" through which the numinous may traverse.

Childe Harold's Pilgrimage is marked by emigrations primarily, appropriate for a work that depends on "outward" movement. As the pilgrimage begins, the poet is not subtle in declaring that his intention is expansion:

I live not in myself, but I become

Portion of that around me; and to me

High mountains are a feeling, but the hum

Of human cities torture: I can see

Nothing to loathe in nature, save to be

A link reluctant in a fleshy chain,

Class'd among creatures when the soul can flee. (III, 72-73)

Hopps identifies the features of an ecstatic experience: being outside of oneself, "becoming" one with one's surroundings, all features of a Wordsworthian nature-cult, but not entirely uncongenial to Blakean transcendence (111). There is little evidence that Byron was directly influenced by Blake (though Blake in his later years was affected by the writings of Byron), but

Byron had directly maligned Wordsworth. Whatever satire there may be, there remains some truth. According to Hopps, Byron's depictions of transcendent experiences are not just a

23 commentary on his predecessors' beliefs; Byron actually presents a theologically astute rendering of "ekstasis," Greek for "ecstasy," and the subject of theological treatises since the first few hundred years after Christ.

Hopps gives special attention to the sixth century theologian Denys the Areopagite, whose writings were common coin in Byron's England. Denys's writings on ekstasis spell out theologically what "Childe Harold" was to later narrate viscerally. Hopps identifies three features of Denysian ekstasis that find a place in Childe Harold's experience: the ability of the divine being to be outside of himself without leaving the sacred locus, the radical contagiousness of the ecstatic experience, and the ability for ecstasy to be communicated "horizontally" between mortals (creating a space for Paglia's "earthly horizontality").

"According to the writings of Denys and Byron," Hopps continues, "the relationship between heaven and earth is not one of absolute separation. . . . Rather, the chiastic ekstasis they both describe betokens a porousness that allows them to participate in one another" (115). In

Don Juan, Hopps points out, there is one instance where the hero invites the indwelling spirit of the Virgin Mary, standing in vertical relation to the Madonna. This, again, does not render the hero's quest spiritual. Don Juan is a profoundly earthly and earthy character, though he may spiritually rhapsodize - existing as he does in a culture with a rich spiritual tradition. Religious touches also have an artistic merit that Byron cannot be ignorant of. Many of Byron's recorded comments on religion were either dismissive or derisive. A skimming over the Romantic record might lead one to place Blake in the "heretic" camp and Byron in the "apostate" camp. Hopps' point, and Kostadinova's, and mine - at least with regard to Byron (though I include Blake) is that the reality is more subtle.

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Hopps' term is "porous;" Kostadinova's is "ambivalent." Dealing with the fourth canto of

Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, she opens her musings: "In Childe Harold's Pilgrimage IV, Byron's treatment of imagination and reality, art and nature, subjectivity and objectivity, reason and feeling, freedom and tyranny, time and eternity, demonstrates a Romantic logic that defies one- sidedness." Like Hopps, she challenges the traditional critical reading of Byron: "I want to argue against a number of familiar critical readings of the canto that want to read it according to the binary logic of 'either/or' whereby Byron becomes either (mostly) optimistic or (mainly) pessimistic" (11).

Before I consider Kostadinova's insights in detail, it might be wise to refresh the reader on the substance of the fourth canto. The fourth canto marks the end of the poet's travels as he arrives in Italy, muse to so many British bards including The Bard. He stops in Venice, Arqua,

Ferrara, Florence, and finally Rome - "the birthplace of civilization," and along the way both praises and bemoans what civilization has wrought. Among the scions of civilization is the poet himself: brooding, torn, wise, sinful, noble, mortal - but for participating in what is immortal, including Nature and Art.

Having arrived in Rome, he stands before a great ocean and praises its "eloquent proportions." Here is a scene that has outlived so many kingdoms: "Thy shores are empires, changed in all save thee - Assyria, Greece, Rome, Carthage - what are they?" (IV.162, 1630).

Finally, the poet bids "farewell," to the ocean, to the reader, and - it is inferred - to life. Whether the sadness of the farewell or the grandeur of unbidden nature worship is greater is the subject of

Kostadinova'a article.

Kostadinova shows her hand with the title of her piece. The emotions are equal, but they don't cancel each other out; they exist in tension, which is the frission of the canto. She points to

25 the very first stanza in which the speaker contrasts the glory of the past with that which is eternal: "States fall, arts fade," yet "Beauty still is here" and "Nature does not die" (IV.3). "The transience of human achievements is counterbalanced by the immortality of nature," she writes,

"and by the canto itself, which keeps record not just of beauty, but also of human history" (12).

It is as if Byron is ventriloquizing Shakespeare, but on a grand scale: "so long lives this/And this gives life to thee" (Sonnet 18).

Nature simultaneously imprisons and releases the imagination of the artist, and vice versa. In Wordsworth, the buck stops with Nature, which has always retained at least some of its

Edenic glory. In Byron, Kostadinova notes, Edenic glory is extinct, if it ever existed - but a poet may rehearse this ancient paradise and remake it, here echoing Shelley more than Wordsworth, and even more so anticipating the insights of Mary Shelley. The poet is the Modern Prometheus

(13). But soon Nature regains primacy. Stanza 163:

And if it be Prometheus stole from Heaven

The fire which we endure, it was repaid

By him to whom the energy was given

Which this poetic marble hath array'd

With an eternal glory - which, if made

By human hands, is not of human thought;

And Time itself hath hallowed it, nor laid

One ringlet in the dust - nor hath it caught

A tinge of years, but breathes the flame with which 'twas wrought. (IV. 163,

1459-1467)

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Kostadinova translates this "communion with the objective is now preferred to communion with creative subjectivity" (14). This antithesis is maintained until it becomes clear that the poet means to promote uncertainty itself as his own kind of reality principle. Kostadinova renames

Byron's sustained ambivalence "multiple oneness," which brings us closer to Blake's "Human

Form Divine," the mighty golem we had been trained to call "God."

Byron's life was lived with subjective abandon, but ambivalence makes more sense - towards objectivity, Nature, God - than blunt antipathy to those values. As Eisler cogently observes, May Gray had taught him pleasure and pain in one fell swoop so that for Byron, one of the values that I have associated with "aesthetic humanism," that good and evil derive from the same source, was a brute fact. Eisler records some of Byron's stauncher statements regarding spiritual concerns, including, in a private correspondence with a personal friend who espoused

Christianity: "I will have nothing to do with your immortality; we are miserable enough in this life without the absurdity of speculating upon another" (297). However, he most certainly did speculate on the next life, both as a poet and as a man. Such statements have led to the impression that Hopps and Kostadinova's essays were written to correct: that Byron's metaphysical speculations were superficial, a vein he tapped artistically but only as a more colorful disavowal.

As for earthly horizontality, he was probably more diagonal. Paglia's essay in Sexual

Personae which paints Byron as a secular poet and the first celebrity, also deals with his many modes of sexual transgressiveness: incest, effeminacy, and transvestitism. Citing works that I have so far here overlooked, she writes:

Romanticism's feminization of the male persona becomes effeminacy in

Byron. The unmanly hero of "The Bride of Abydos" is stranded among

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women. Incestuous feeling is incubated in an Oriental haze. "The Corsair"

introduces seductive Gulnare, to appear transvestite in a sequel. Gulnare's

relations with the corsair are like Kleist's Penthesiles with Achilles, a

dancelike exchange of strength and weakness. There are heroic rescues,

then capture, humiliation, and recovery. Byron ritualistically elaborates

each stage of assertion and passivity, making the narrative a slow masque

of sexual personae (349).

Most controversial is the relationship depicted between Byron's quasi-Faust Manfred and his

sister Astarte, mirroring perhaps Byron's own relationship with his half-sister Augusta Leigh. In

Manfred's ultimately tragic story, Paglia sees a foreshadowing of Edgar Allen Poe's The Fall of

the House of Usher, but wonders whether the fall is a kind of rise, like the Gnostic account of the

Resurrection where Christ "rises again" only to be killed on the cross, an act that can't negate the

resurrection because it already happened.

Byron's work is replete with such clever reversals, apotheosized in the epic Cain, which

we might call his spiritual autobiography. Cain is subtitled "A Mystery" in the tradition of religious plays since the time of Chaucer and is told in that genre. Byron referred to his few plays as "mental theater" meaning they were meant to be contemplated rather than performed. Theater

as an active art was dormant during Byron's time, still awaiting the revival of the late1800s,

when many of our modern ideas about Shakespeare were codified.

Byron's play possesses much of the grandeur of Shakespeare, contrasted with the

brooding aloneness of the central character. The opening scene depicts the first family in an act

of sacrifice before the Lord. Adam, Eve, Abel, and the wives of Cain and Abel (who are also

28 their sisters, inevitable if we are to believe Biblical genealogy) each declare in turn their great thankfulness to God, praising his glory and splendor and provision. Adam's speech is typical:

God, the Eternal! Infinite! All-Wise! ---

Who out of darkness on the deep didst make

Light on the waters with a word --- all hail!

Jehovah, with returning light, all hail! (I.i.1-4)

When it comes time for Cain to participate, he merely utters "Why should I speak?" to the consternation of all. This inaugurates a theological discussion in which Cain's parents and brother become ever more concerned and animated and Cain ever more cynical and petulant.

Finally, the conference hinges on the incident that got them all expelled from Paradise, Adam and Eve's capitulation to the serpent's wiles over the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Cain answers them with four simple words that nevertheless encapsulate centuries of theological dispute: "The snake spoke truth."

This, as any astute student of the Genesis story will know, is technically true. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil was the one tree from which Adam and Eve were not to eat, for it would make them like God. The symbolism is dense, but decipherable. God understands good and evil in their global totality. If evil is to be allowed, it must have a place in the divine plan.

Evil is the first atom bomb, a powerful deterrent in the right hands, a destructive chaos otherwise. What knowledge Adam and Eve may glean is inherently limited by their mortality.

The snake seeks to confer on them power without responsibility. Their assent launches human history as we know it, an endless striving to catch up to our own knowledge, exiled from the palpable presence of the Almighty.

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The snake is not the devil. Byron makes this clear in his preface and later, when Lucifer appears as a character, he denies any identification with that chthonian worm. Lucifer is depicted in Miltonian splendor, mighty, proud, and sad. That the snake shares in the numinous secrets known "only" to God and the devil suggests that these secrets are actually built into the fabric of creation. The snake is the reptilian back-brain, the "it" that we each all are and yearn to escape being. Cain's neurosis is found in the very center of this "it"-ness: we die. He doesn't know what this means, but knows that it is true, and suspects that it is a terror rather than a wonder.

When Adam counsels Cain to be thankful for what he has, he exhorts "Dost thou not live?" To which Cain replies "Must I not die?" At this Eve realizes the jig is up. She wails "Alas, the fruit of our forbidden tree begins to fall!" (I.i,27-31). The balance of the play follows Cain's quest for knowledge, illustrated by a long dialogue with the fallen angel Lucifer. Lucifer's fatalistic perspective confirms every suspicion that Cain had had regarding God's mixed motives so that by the end of their acquaintanceship God is, for both Cain and Lucifer, not a being worthy of devotion but rather a being addicted to it. Humans at their brightest might reflect God's glory, but they may never share in it. It is this thoroughly disillusioned Cain who erupts in anger the next time he is expected to offer a sacrifice to the Lord, ultimately slaying the "good" brother

Abel.

Even before the banishment that makes Cain the first Byronic wanderer, he asks the existential question: "Why do I exist?" (II.ii, 279). This is the question that animates all self- awareness and can never have one single motivation for being asked nor can it have just one single answer. Posed by Cain, the question queries human existence generally, Cain's existence in particular, Cain's place in the human drama, and at the theological level, the existence of evil, a matter which Byron's Lucifer expounds on with subtlety and pathos:

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Evil and good are things in their own essence,

And not made good or evil by the giver;

But if he gives you good - so call him; if

Evil springs from him, do not name it mine,

Till ye know better its true fount; and judge

Not by words, though by spirits, but the fruits

Of your existence, such as it must be.

One good gift has the fatal apple given -

Your reason:

......

Think and endure, and form an inner world. . . . (II.ii, 452-463)

Byron's metaphysics, at least for the purpose of this play, are complex rather than dualistic. Lucifer is more than a pawn in God's game, but less than his true equal. The dark one is certainly not the progenitor of evil, though he may employ it. In Byron, evil has a part to play and is therefore sympathetic to some degree. It is what it is and cannot be anything else. In this we are not far from what has been traditionally maintained by the Kabbalah, the first mystical commentary on the book of Genesis.

As Jewish theologian Gershom Scholem writes in his 1962 study On The Mystical Shape of the Godhead: Basic Concepts in the Kabbalah, "Good and evil are rarely defined in the classical texts of most religions; instead they are taken for granted as givens" (56). Evil is nonetheless unquestionably present in the world, and that fact does seem to contradict, or at the very least complicate, the concept of an all-powerful and at the same time all-good and merciful creator. This has led to centuries of theodicy, the philosophical tradition dedicated to reconciling

31

God's goodness with evil's existence. Perhaps the most troubling theory is the one inferred in

Lucifer's speech in Cain, that evil is somehow originated by God. This interpretation has some scriptural ballast, for instance Isaiah 45:7 which reads "I form the light, and create darkness; I make peace and create evil; I am the Lord that doeth all these things."

The word "kabbalah" means "hiddenness" so in that tradition any interpretation that might be offered must be stripped away to reveal a deeper interpretation. In the case of finding evil's origin in God, that deeper interpretation is provided by the "tree of life," the symbol most associated with Kabbalah and a mystical complement to the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The tree of life is a kind of geometrical map of God's personality, consisting of three columns: a left column referred to as "the pillar of severity," supported by three orbs, splendor, strength, and understanding; a right column referred to as "the pillar of mercy," supported by victory, mercy, and wisdom; and a center column that represents God's true nature. The center column is supported by the "kingdom" orb at the base, "foundation" just above it, "reality" at the nucleus, followed by "knowledge," and finally "The Crown," Jehovah's diadem.

The orbs represent the ten "sefirot," or emanations of the Most High. Because the pillar of severity and the pillar of mercy work in concert, God has the capacity to be just as well as charitable. As Scholem explains it, humanity is heir to God's being in the kabbalistic texts, and so may strive and sometimes participate in the sefirot. However, when the pillar of severity is divorced from the pillar of mercy, evil results. Evil, then, is not caused by either God or humanity, but may be activated by humanity through an incomplete application of the divine.

Though unrelated to the sefirot (except by analogy), emanations play a crucial part in

William Blake's theodicy and are featured prominently in Paglia's analysis of Blake. She identifies Blakean emanations roughly with her own "sexual personae," unembodied aspects of

32 male and female qualities that alternately clash and intertwine, causing sparks that animate the human experience with angelic and daemonic dimensions. Emanations are abetted by Spectres, our shadow-selves later to appear prominently in the writings of Jung. To return to Paglia and

Blake for a moment before continuing with Scholem and Byron:

In Blake the soul has split, so that his poetic poems ask what is the "true"

self. This is a new question in history, more sweeping than the multiple

impersonations of the Renaissance, where social order was still a moral

value. In Blake, territorial war is waged among parts of the self. His

characters are in identity crisis, Rousseau's invention. In his Spectres and

Emanations, Blake is doing allegorically what the nineteenth century

novel will do naturalistically, documenting the modulations of emotion.

Blake rejects Judeo-Christian morality. Nevertheless, he wants to integrate

sexuality with right action. But sex, which Christianity correctly assigns to

daemonic realm, always escapes moral control (288).

Here we are back at the crux of Cain. Scholem discusses one more kabbalistic theodicy and that is that of the "holy sinner." In this conception, sins - specifically sexual sins - draw out darker elements of the Creator, which if seeded correctly will mature into good elements and do away with darkness forever. This is "the bold thesis, highly significant in the history of religion, that the root of the Messiah's soul stems from the abyss of evil and formlessness, as well as the idea that, even when it comes into contact with light, it still manifests its original nature in strange outbursts of antinomianism" (Scholem 87).

Byron's play does not directly address the idea that sin may be redemptive, nor does it entertain the old Catholic doctrine that original sin is somehow linked with sex, but we do have

33 something of a Magnificat dedicated to Cain's "sister-wife" Adah in Act II, Scene 2, subtly recapitulating a familiar transgressive theme in Byron, while at the same time drawing attention to the earthly loyalties that keep Cain from sharing in either the divine or the diabolic nature.

And we have the Byronic precedent. Each of the noble's wanderers - Childe Harold, Manfred,

Don Juan, punctuate their quest for knowledge with an equally determinant quest for carnal pleasure. The curtain goes down on Cain just as the hero is beginning his life-long exile and sojourn. His wife is by his side, but readers of Byron have reason to believe that Cain may yet become another "holy sinner."

One can't simply flip Byron's protagonists and say that every move away from God was a veiled overture, but his willingness to tackle religious themes suggests an investment in their outcome, even if we may suspect from Byron's personal correspondences and the strain of rebellion that runs through all of his work, that his real appraisal of this compulsive investment was that it is fool's gold. The themes draw him regardless. Eisler writes, "With its echoes of

Shelley's Prometheus Unbound and Milton's Paradise Lost, Cain: A Mystery focused on Byron's own greatest obstacle to faith: how to accept a God who defines knowledge and truth as evil and sin" (695).

Eisler locates in Cain subtextual references to Byron's sometimes tumultuous relationship with the more conventionally atheistic Percy Shelley. Byron, whose statements against religion I have already mentioned and have hopefully managed to complicate, viewed Shelley's evangelistic unbelief as beyond the pale. Eisler records Byron's dismissal of that part of Shelley as "crazy against religion & morality," however she also records the nickname that Byron gave

Shelley: "The Snake" and finds significance in Cain's line "the snake spoke truth."

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If one were determined to pin Byron down in all of his vacillations, one could do worse than the label "agnostic." This makes him more congenial with Blake "the last great religious poet in England" than one might think at first blush. Blake could work with agnosticism. An agnostic hasn't yet hardened into a Pharisee, the furthest calling from truth. One crucial difference between Byron and Blake however is this: Readers may speculate over whether

Byron's many literary heresies were in fact inverted acts of devotion; Blake's definitely were.

Like Byron, Blake's sensibilities with regard to religion were set early. His biographer

Peter Ackroyd notes that when Blake wrote in The Proverbs of Hell that "a fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees," he was recounting an actual event from his childhood. Although

Blake's wife always insisted that he had told her of having visions as early as four years old,

Blake's first recorded vision was from when he was eight. "Sauntering along, the boy looks up and sees a tree filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars"

(Ackroyd 34).

Byron's trauma was sexual. Blake's was spiritual (or psychological). William was simply a very sensitive child raised in an atmosphere especially designed to activate a nascent artistic imagination. His parents were "dissenters," that is to say followers of the eighteenth century scientist and Christian mystic Emmanuel Swedenborg, who claimed to traffic regularly in the climes of heaven and hell, reporting back to his followers ever new insights, insights that generally challenged the established church. If Blake's visions were the result of something we might now diagnose, we can at least say that his placement in that family and that time was serendipitous, or fateful.

Ackroyd accepts the diagnosis that Blake scholars have posited for many years: "eidetic imagery," a psychological term for a particular type of hallucination that occurs most commonly

35 in young people. He writes, "textbooks supply numerous instances of hallucinatory images that are always seen in the literal sense; they are not memories, or afterimages, or daydreams, but real sensory perceptions" (35). Sufferers of this condition often spend years of difficulty in distinguishing between a subjective and objective world. What is unique in Blake is that this condition, which normally expires some time in adolescence, seems to have persisted throughout his life.

Blake's visions not only informed his art, they informed his social conscience as well. As he became educated on the vast disparity in wealth and agency between castes in England and across Europe, his private cosmos became more and more complex, and his application of religious terms became more and more pointed. He would have seen in Byron, if not a kindred spirit per se, at the very least a fellow outsider. We know that he read Byron. In fact, Lord Byron has the distinction of being the only living contemporary of Blake to receive a dedication from him, in the form of the illuminated work The Ghost of Abel, Blake's sequel to Cain.

The Ghost of Abel begins "To LORD BYRON in the wilderness," corroborating the conflation of author and character in Cain. Blake continues in his typically esoteric fashion: "Can a poet doubt the visions of Jehovah? Nature has no Outline:/But imagination has. Nature has no

Tune: but Imagination has!/Nature has no Supernatural and dissolves: Imagination is Eternity"

(1-5).

The evocation of imagination and eternity opens a dialogue between the works. The works' authors had both associated artistic values with eternity. Mere humanity, without the aid of art, dies. Blake's amendment is a commentary. In The Ghost of Abel, "Lucifer" is called

"Satan," an aesthetic demotion. Jehovah appears as a character, which he had not in Cain and the totality of the action revolves around a struggle for supremacy between these three. The slain

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Abel cries out for blood, for justice. Jehovah counters that any justice meted out on Cain must also be answered for. The cycle of violence and justice will be unending. Satan proposes the solution that a piece of God himself, His Son, be slain to cover Cain's sin. Broken by the lawyer's trick, but not bowed, Jehovah counters, "Such is My Will that Thou Thyself go to Eternal

Death/In Self Annihilation even till Satan Self-subdued Put off Satan/Into the Bottomless Abyss whose torment arises forever and ever" (18 -22).

The punishment is essentially that of Sisyphus from Greek mythology. The devil's actions, and hence his existence, is cyclical, non-creative: evil begets evil begets evil and so on.

Redemption is extralinear, an "end" to the story that reveals glory after glory forever, not repetitively but imperishably, not according to the curse of a time that doesn't end, but according to the blessing of a time beyond time.

Blake is also advocating for spiritual verticality over earthly horizontality. Jehovah has a trajectory in mind for the human race, for reasons known only to Him. Man is always running, on a flat plain, away from something or toward something (unsure of what he is escaping or striving for), or descending into the earth. Redemption makes of the descent an ascent, like

Jacob's ladder. It is this revolution that shapes human history - the shape of a cross.

This is not to say that Blake wants to nail Byron to it. In his article "Voices in the

Wilderness: Satire and Sacrifice in Blake and Byron," Matthew Green discusses the dialectic proposed by these two works, and discovers several areas of commonality. The commonalities begin with authorial voice. Though Byron's aesthetic is a kind of heightened naturalism, akin to

Milton, and Blake's is stubbornly visionary, they both speak in a voice that is consciously

"doubled," or perhaps more accurately "multiplied." Cain rehearses Byron's own neuroses, as well as calling to judgment the insufficiencies of both scientific and religious ontologies

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(Lucifer's transmission of knowledge to Cain involves allusions to eighteenth century science).

The Ghost of Abel is subtextually about Blake's very personal preference for imagination over materialism, and at the same time comments on the culture of revolution then sparking Europe.

"Byron and Blake," Green continues, "thus demonstrate a common debt to an Augustan satirical tradition that, though popular amongst large sections of readers and prevalent in the press, was nevertheless excluded from many of the aesthetic and religious systems that were to be identified with Romanticism" (120). All of the Romantic Poets used symbol-systems, none more ornate nor more studied than Blake's, but Byron and Blake shared a special affinity - Green argues - for employing symbols to mask social critique. Blake's heretical masterpiece The

Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Green writes, "developed from a Swedenborgian pamphlet into a

Menippean satire in extending specific attacks on individuals into a unique contribution to the

Revolution Controversy. Blake anticipates Byron in relativizing – or at least historicizing – received morality in order to challenge predominant conservative values" (121).

The model for both Byron and Blake is Jonathan Swift. The Marriage of Heaven and

Hell, Green notes, explicitly co-opts imagery from Part IV of Gulliver's Travels and Part III of

Gulliver's Travels, the proto-science fiction interlude involving the flying island of Laputa provides the template for another Blake work, An Island In The Moon, and for Cain's scenes flying around the solar system with Lucifer in Byron's Cain.

Cain and The Ghost of Abel then belong to a satiric fraternity, related yet at odds.

Certainly neither Byron nor Blake accepted received wisdom in religion. While Cain does contain coded critiques of that paradigm along with the Enlightenment paradigm that provides its own bible of answers (we again see shades of Nietzsche as we had in Blake; On The Genealogy of Morals explicitly maligns the false dichotomy between religion and science), Green cites the

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Romantic critic Anne Barton "who has argued that for Blake the author of Cain 'was a potential poet-prophet' destroyed by his allegiance to false gods of realism and rationality: a man clinging to a world of fact when he should look beyond it'" (122).

Green's insights center around the concept of sacrifice in both works. For Green, Blake's ode to redemption over vengeance is - not surprisingly - not simply a reinforcement of Christian dogma. In fact, it may be the exact opposite. Blake had expressed detestation for the doctrine of atonement in private correspondences, and here makes Satan that doctrine's advocate. Making

Satan speak for Abel does not exonerate Cain, but it does put them on more equal footing. Both

Byron and Blake seem to be saying that humanity itself is animated by the diabolic principle.

Substitutionary sacrifice does not transcend that principle; it recapitulates it.

Green puts it, "Even if Cain were sacrificed in order to repay the debt incurred by Abel's murder, this act of atonement could only succeed if the two brothers were truly interchangeable, if all positive contents of their identity were emptied out such that they could be rendered as mere equivalencies" (124). But then if they were equivalent, someone would have to die to cover

Cain's blood. Adah in Byron's play makes such an offer and is harshly rebuffed by Cain, leading

Green to conclude that "Byron's text, like Blake's, depicts atonement as an untenable response to the fact of death" (124).

The uninterchangeability of people both confirms and affirms Cain's other-ness. By erasing Abel's existence, Cain showed that that existence was truly unique, irreplaceable, and that – by extension - his own was too. Cain is still punished to wander forever, working out that existence, but at least he knows that he is Cain (and not Abel). Green concludes by stating,

"Without death there could be no strife, kindness or sacrifice of self for other. Death therefore

39 brings with it its own act of kindness - the death of death - in preventing community from simply collapsing into unity. The other name for this gift is freedom" (128).

By presenting Cain and The Ghost of Abel as twin satires, Green restores these works to their initial social utility. Byron and Blake, along with their contemporaries, were striving to

exist in a world where Enlightenment brought not peace, but new and cleverer engines of

violence. Much of that violence had to do with establishing and preserving autonomy, that is

identity. Through recasting the story of the first fractured fraternity, Byron and Blake ask the

question that the French and American revolutions had also asked, on a grander scale: "Who am

I?" And, what amounts to the same thing, "Who are they?"

The revelation these artists helped to catalyze is one we are still catching up to: "they" is

us. It is there in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and in Percy Shelley's "Ozymandias," which tracks

greatness from pedestal to dust; it is there in Coleridge's split-selves, later absorbed into Poe,

whose characters are always fighting and fleeing from some shadow, and Jung, who argued that

this Shadow is a psychological fact; it is there in Keats' odes, which suggest that man enjoys a

symbiosis, not just with woman or fellow-man, but with objects as well.

"Violence," theologian Regina Schwartz writes in her study The Curse of Cain: The

Violent Legacy of Monotheism, "is not only what we do to the Other. It is prior to that. Violence

is the very construction of the Other" (5). The reason her book is subtitled "The Violent Legacy

of Monotheism" is because she sees this otherness as largely the creation of monotheistic

thinking. When Byron depicts the act of sacrifice before the Lord that leads ultimately to

fratricide, he tries to manufacture a justification for the Lord's preference for Abel's sacrifice,

namely that Abel had actually prepared both sacrifices and Cain's heart was never really in the

enterprise to begin with. Shwartz is closer to the biblical narrative when she explains that God’s

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preference for Abel has less to do with Abel’s intrinsic worthiness and more to do with God’s

intrinsic monism.

Blake’s cosmos rejects strict monotheism. Blake’s God is alternately Jehovah,

corresponding roughly with the character who goes by that name in the Torah; Urizen, the Law-

Giver; Jesus, yes, but Jesus is sometimes interchangeable with the Human Form Divine, a more

literal concept in Blake than “The Body of Christ” in Saint Paul (for Blake, God is a man); and

Nobodaddy – the empty symbol of priests and kings.

Blake and Byron both understood another principle that Shwartz covers in her book – the

tyranny of the existing hierarchy does not stem from something innate in that hierarchy; it stems

from hierarchical thinking. As Carl Schmitt, a political theorist whose work was coopted by the

Nazis, has written, “All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized

theological concepts not only because of their historical development – in which they were

transferred from theology to the theory of the state, whereby, for example the omnipotent God

became the omnipotent lawgiver – but also because of their systematic structure” (qtd. in

Shwartz 6).

This was as true in the eighteenth century as it was in the twentieth, and as it is in the twenty-first. Eradication of the Other was supposed to be the Christian mission: “There is neither

Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians

3:28), and yet by some accounts division has been the hallmark of Christian history. Secularism is no antidote, as Byron’s dreary “Darkness” confirms. The Romantic antidote is Art and the artistic mission, direct communion with the Collective Unconscious, where all distinctions fail.

One might argue that Byron’s relentless self-promotion complicates this reading. Byron is The Other, almost literally. He cast himself as Cain. This is why, in hindsight, Blake is so

41 important. By answering Cain with The Ghost of Abel, Blake opened up the possibility that there is in fact an equivalency. Yes, we are our brother’s keeper. Cain has transgressed the Byronic corpus and become a part of Blake’s universe, a part of The Human Form Divine.

Admittedly to claim that any figure or figures or movement “created the modern western personality” is a kind of exaggeration and a kind of shorthand. Singular explosions in art and culture, such as British Romanticism, are always anticipated by a thousand small agitations, and we can never be totally sure of the degree to which hindsight colors our impression of past paradigms. As an example, surely Shakespeare did not “invent the human,” but it can be argued that his body of work provides the perfect snapshot of a more general movement in society from aggregate identity to existential identity. Similarly, to say that the modern western personality is an amalgam of Blakean transcendence and Byronic solitude is a truth, if not the truth.

Byron is everywhere. Ever since Mary Shelley based the character Victor Frankenstein on the indecorous male attributes of her husband and their noble friend, the Byronic Hero has captured the public imagination. The qualities of this figure were codified by Charlotte and

Emily Bronte in their novels Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights: imposing, rugged, morally suspect, and possessing a mysterious and possibly scandalous past, often the lord of a manor or castle whose secrets are kept along with their owners’. During the same nightmare summer of

Frankenstein’s composition, another acquaintance of the Shelleys and Byron, John Polidori, wrote The Vampyre. His titular character also possesses identifiable Byronic traits, making

Byron the de facto progenitor of the modern vampire character in literature, stage, and film.

Culture critic Camille Paglia has associated Byron with that most glamorous, depraved archetype of the twentieth century: The Rock Star. She sees Elvis; I see Bono, whose extraordinary longevity as a public figure, along with his band U2, is due – at least partly – to his

42 ability to project rock and roll excess while living a dedicated humanitarianism. Bono is Byron and Blake, even singing Blake’s poem “Jerusalem” at a successful Glastonbury appearance in

2011. U2’s imagery traffics promiscuously in the diabolical and the divine: a devil costume on a

1993 tour, God recast as a seductive belly dancer in the song “Mysterious Ways,” the spiritually vertical and the earthly horizontal married perfectly in the desert ballad “Where the Streets Have

No Name.” The song “Running To Stand Still,” told from the perspective of a heroin addict, demonstrates that even a rock and roll messiah is ultimately alone.

Blake’s tenure in the zeitgeist has been more subtle, but no less pervasive than Byron’s.

Beat poetry scholar Regina Marler tells the story of Allen Ginsberg’s awakening to his poetic calling in her book Queer Beats: How The Beats Turned America On to Sex, an anecdote in which William Blake plays a shocking and integral part:

In the summer of 1948, Allen Ginsberg sublet a Spanish Harlem apartment

from a fellow student at Columbia University and began reading the

the theology books stacked around the room in orange crates. In a mystical

frame of mind, he pored over William Blake, Saint Teresa of Avila, Saint

John of the Cross. One afternoon, he lay by the open window, his pants

unzipped, reading Blake’s “Ah! Sunflower” while masturbating. After he

came, he heard a low, ancient voice that seemed to emanate from

somewhere in the room. It was the voice of Blake himself, he realized,

reciting his own poem. “The peculiar quality of the voice was something

unforgettable,” Ginsberg later explained, “because it was like God had a

human voice, with all the infinite tenderness and mortal gravity of a living

Creator speaking to his son” (Marler xv).

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There, in one fell swoop, is the eradication of Otherness, the sexual transgressiveness of the

Romantic Poets, the blurring of secular and religious categories, and – above all – the lesson that

Art, namely poetry, can liberate where nothing else can. Ginsberg’s seminal “Howl” explodes onto the page like the Bard of “Experience” on mescaline: “I/I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving/hysterical naked,/dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry/fix,/angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the/starry dynamo in the machinery of night” (1-7).

Ginsberg went on to provide much of the spiritual content of the hippie movement in

England and America in the sixties. Romantic values during that time predominated in a way that they had not since the original Romantics. Once again, the West was beset by revolutions, violence, and global uncertainty. And once again, art flourished as an antidote to nihilism as well as to hollow piety. From that time sprung Glam and later The New Romantics, a media label for musicians and artists in the eighties who strove to bring back Byronic decadence with strong traces of Blakean gnosis.

The Blakean gnosis informs the Byronic decadence. We travel without the traditional ministrations of religion, but we don’t travel alone. Sexual experimentation sparks the imagination; it is not an end in itself. It is a matter of self-creation, which is why movements for gay and lesbian liberation share so much in common with the Romantic legacy. In fact, it might be argued that the first fully formed aesthetic humanist was Oscar Wilde. Wilde struck a distinctly Byronic pose and often vies with Byron for the credit in inventing our modern conception of celebrity – glamorous, decadent, and lonely; nevertheless he shared some of

Blake’s social concerns, as we see in the children’s fable “The Selfish Giant” and the poem

“Ballad of Reading Gaol,” and some of Blake’s Gnostic imaginings, as we see in Wilde’s intense

44 identification of himself with Christ in the heartbreaking long letter to his lover Alfred Douglas,

De Profundis.

Wilde too cast himself as an outcast, as a “Cain,” but aesthetic humanism reclaims the shadow. In aesthetic humanism, as I’ve defined it, the old dualisms do not apply. The sinner is the saint. This is the insight shared by Byron and Blake, or to put it more accurately, revealed by a joint study of their works.

Byron was the consummate sinner. Initiated into sin early, he broke every taboo in his personal life and peopled his epic works with lost souls: Childe Harold, Manfred, Don Juan,

Cain. By most accounts, he was content to live east of Eden. Castigated by others as “mad, bad, and dangerous to know” (Caroline Lamb’s famous indictment). He described himself as “a strange mélange of good and evil.” It is that mélange that has interested me in this study. I’ve detected, along with a growing group of critics, a spiritual curiosity encoded into the wanderings of Childe Harold and of Cain. The former ends on an embankment, seemingly desolate, but that does not exonerate it from having been a “Pilgrimage,” and perhaps its entry into the canon is its eternal reward. Byron was not merely a poet of “earthly horizontality;” his art was much more complex than that, and does contain moral lessons, inverted or no.

Blake was born to be a saint. Raised by mystics, he was possessed of visions from an early age. Those visions attended him throughout his life, informing a literary and artistic corpus of profound depth and imagination. In Songs of Innocence and Experience he applied his visionary art to the human experience, with pointed references to the politics and social unrest of his day. Towering over all societies in Blake is “The Human Form Divine,” God as a real man and not just an abstraction. He was, as Ackroyd noted, “the last great religious poet in England,”

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but he was pointedly not a curator for ancient pieties. Blake’s religion was smirched with the dirt of the world, and that of even lower climes.

I have argued that these two giant iconoclasts of the Romantic Period invented something new in their melding of all of these ambiguities: aesthetic humanism, the child of Cain and Abel.

Aesthetic humanism grants its adherents the power of self-creation. It argues that Art is primary.

It looks, as Nietzsche would have it, “beyond good and evil,” and locates a redemptive spark in

once unspeakable sins. The motto of this philosophy has been the motto of the modern and post-

modern age, though neither Byron nor Blake said it; Keats did: “Beauty is truth. Truth, beauty.”

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Appendix: Illustrations

“God Creating Adam” – William Blake

Source: www.wordpress.com

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“The Tree of Life”

Source: www.tarotofthepomegranate.com

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