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BLAKE, BYRON and the BLUSHING ARCHANGELS Peter Cochran (A Paper Given in London in 2001 to the Combined Blake and Byron Societies)

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BLAKE, BYRON and the BLUSHING ARCHANGELS Peter Cochran (A Paper Given in London in 2001 to the Combined Blake and Byron Societies) 1 BLAKE, BYRON AND THE BLUSHING ARCHANGELS Peter Cochran (A paper given in London in 2001 to the combined Blake and Byron Societies) One of my more amusing experiences in 1999 was going through a proof copy of Benita Eisler’s Byron, Child of Passion, Fool of Fame, and feeling curiosity give way to disbelief, as elementary howler followed elementary howler. One of those howlers is of pertinence to us tonight. Desperate to contextualise Byron in the English Romantic Movement, Eisler had sought one famous London name here, there, and everywhere, without success so far, but had at last, as she thought, cornered him: Write but like Wordsworth, – live beside a lake … she noted, from Hints from Horace; good – evidence of Byron’s determination not to write like Wordsworth – we knew that – but look what followed! And keep your bushy locks a year from Blake …1 An Eislerian sentence was down at once, on Byron’s wariness about modelling his verse on that of William Blake. What was I to do? Should I leave this alone? There were enough howlers in the book already to sink the Titanic: I had them all typed out, ready, Quixote-like, to e-mail them to the publisher. To leave this one alone was a temptation – but – magnanimity triumphed – I could not allow the error to stand so exposed – and noted for the publisher, not without a twitch of regret, that this “Blake” was not the poet, visionary, and engraver, but a famous men’s hairdresser who practised in Fleet Street (“as the line might suggest”, I believe I added). The error disappeared from Eisler’s published text (as did all the rest of the major howlers – the world has had fun since, finding a lot more tiny ones); but with it, of course, disappeared the only use of the name “Blake” in the whole volume. For the two men never met. Blake knew of Byron – who didn’t? But Byron never knew of Blake. Southey met Blake, and, it goes without saying, pronounced him to be “evidently insane” and his designs (they were the ones for Jerusalem) to be “hideous”.2 Coleridge knew of Blake, and recognized his genius at once;3 Caroline Lamb heard of Blake, and even, it seems, had him to dinner;4 but Byron left London, left England, and died, without knowing anything about Blake. What a pity! For the two, so dissimilar in some ways, had much in common. In this paper I wish to examine some of the similarities. To dispose at first, however, with the obvious dissimilarities. Byron was an aristocrat: Blake not. Byron was (more or less) rich: Blake not. Byron was internationally famous: Blake known only to a few. Byron had an eventful life (to understate the case): Blake an uneventful one – in external particulars, at least: his internal life was far richer 1: HfH 474-5; CPW I 306. 2: Simmonds 134. 3: Holmes II 473-4. 4: L.G. Mitchell’s biography of Lord Melbourne, p.84, refers generally to the fact that Blake was a protegé of the Lambs, along with William Godwin and Sir Thomas Lawrence, and that he dined there. David Cecil's biography, p.156, says specifically that Blake dined with the Lambs in 1820. Mitchell references P. Marshall's William Godwin (Yale UP 1984) pp.355, 374. Also a letter of W. Godwin to Melbourne 22 Sept. 1834; Melbourne MSS Box 42/109. Lady Charlotte Bury, The Diary of a Lady in Waiting, London 1908, ii pp.214- 215. (I am grateful to Paul Douglass for his help here.) 2 than that of most men. Byron travelled in Portugal, Spain, Greece, Albania, Turkey, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland and Italy: Blake made one unsatisfactory move into Sussex. Byron had an unsuccessful marriage, but compensated with so many other liaisons that it confounds the spirit to contemplate them: Blake had a happy marriage, was never unfaithful to his wife, and she was never unfaithful to him. Byron wrote in a variety of styles, but none so strange as to court incomprehension; and he enjoyed large print-runs: Blake wrote much of his most important work in a style which still baffles non-specialists, and few of his works – hand-engraved as they were – reached more than a dozen single imprints. Byron’s work, though it received much illustration, is in no need of it: with Blake’s heavily-pictorial work, to speak of “illustration” is to miss the point, for the texts and the engravings are indivisible, and each complements the other within a whole which is greater than the sum of its parts. Byron was an admirer of the eighteenth-century rationalists, Voltaire, Hume, and Gibbon: Blake started by admiring them, but changed his mind, depicting them, in Jerusalem, for instance, as despairing, incommunicative figures squatting bound in a dark cave. 5 Byron was a charismatic, who, however, never enjoyed visions (or if he did, he kept quiet about them): Blake was a plain man, who had regular visitations from angels and prophets as he walked about the streets of London. Perhaps it was this sense of being privileged supernaturally which enabled Blake to remain happy in England, while Byron felt it necessary to leave and become a citizen of the world: Byron gave up on the country, and one cannot imagine him voicing such innocent patriotic aspirations as And now the time returns again: Our souls exult & London towers Receive the Lamb of God to dwell In Englands green & pleasant bowers.6 … even though one of Byron’s more memorable characters, Junius in The Vision of Judgement, gains a cheer on his climactic line, “I loved my country, and I hated him!”7 To dispose of some interesting similaritie s. Both poets hated well, and let their detestation of England focus on one particular person. It is an interesting measure of the different attitudes each had to his readership that Byron chooses Southey, the well-known Poet Laureate, as his fall-guy (harbouring private as well as public grudges against him): where Blake chooses (among others) the otherwise unknown Private John Scofield, cause of his trial for sedition after their altercation outside the Fox Inn, Felpham, in August 1803. As Blake, in being acquitted of the charge, may be said to have triumphed over Scofield, in a way that Byron never finally triumphed over Southey, the case is even more singular. Both were admirers of Milton; though Blake admired him as a poet and fellow-visionary, and Byron less as an artist and more as a type of incorruptible political integrity. Blake, an underpaid artificer himself, had much sympathy with the poor, and much disgust for the hypocritical indifference with which England treated them: … Because of the Opressors of Albion in every City & Village: They mock at the Labourers limbs! They mock at his starvd Children. They buy his Daughters that they may have power to sell his Sons: 5: Jerusalem, plate 52. See also ibid, plate 90, 64-6. 6: Jerusalem, plate 77. 7: TVOJ 83, 8. 3 They compell the Poor to live upon a crust of Bread by soft mild arts: They reduce the Man to want: then give with pomp & ceremony. The praise of Jehovah is chaunted from lips of hunger & thirst …8 Byron, from his own perspective, would not disagree: I have traversed the seat of war in the peninsula, I have been in some of the most oppressed provinces of Turkey, but never under the most despotic of infidel governments, did I behold such squalid wretchedness as I have seen since my return in the very heart of a Christian country …9 Blake and Byron both detested militarism. Here’s Blake: Wilt thou now smile among the scythes when the wounded groan in the field We were carried away in thousands from London: & in tens Of thousands from Westminster & Marybone in ships closd up: Chaind hand & foot, compelled to fight under the iron whips Of our captains; fearing our officers more than the enemy. 10 Byron’s lighter tone, and his emphasis on mercenaries, should not blind us to the strength of his feelings on the same subject: Then there were foreigners of much renown, Of various Nations, and all Volunteers, Not fighting for their Country or its Crown, But wishing to be one day Brigadiers, Also to have the sacking of a town, A pleasant thing to young men in their years; ’Mongst these were several Englishmen of pith – 11 Sixteen called Thomson, and nineteen named Smith. Neither poet was a friend to English imperialism. Here is Blake, in his own idiom: Such is the Ancient World of Urizen in the Satanic Void Created from the Valley of Middlesex by Londons River From Stone-henge and from London Stone, from Cornwall to Cathnes The Four Zoa’s rush around on all sides in dire ruin Furious in pride of Selfhood the terrible Spectres of Albion Rear their dark Rocks among the Stars of God: stupendous Works! A World of Generation continually Creating; out of 12 The Hermaphroditic Satanic World of rocky destiny. 8: Jerusalem, plate 30. 9: Frame Worker’s Speech, CMP 26. 10: Jerusalem, plate 65. 11: Don Juan VII stanza 18. 12: Jerusalem late 58. 4 And here Byron, in his (Don Juan is approaching London): The Sun went down, the Smoke rose up, as from A half-unquenched Volcano, o’er a space Which well beseemed “the Devil’s drawing room”, As some have qualified that wondrous place; But Juan felt, though not approaching home, As one who, though he were not of the race, Revered the Soil, of those true Sons the Mother, Who butchered half the Earth, and bullied t’other.
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