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Blake, William (1757-1827)

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Blake, William (1757-1827) BLAKE, WILLIAM 19 the leading figures of the School of Common Sense, supporting a traditional current of realism in opposition to the sceptical tenets of David Hume. His major philosophical treatise, An Essay on Truth (1770), won him a royal pension granted by George III. Beattie held traditional religious views which tended to reconcile the more moderate branches of the Church of England and of the Presbyte­ rian Church of Scotland. A staunch defender of faith, he was highly suspicious of such eighteenth-century notions as the essen­ tial trustworthiness of human reason and the inevitability of pro­ gress. At the same time, he shared his contemporaries' heightened sensibility and fascination with nature. Beattie's miscellaneous poems include odes, epitaphs, elegies and fables written in the classical mode. He advocated the principle of the imitation of nature and the use of poetic diction. His most famous poem, The Minstrel (1771-3), composed in Spenserian stanzas, brought him renown and helped pave the way for Wordsworth's Prelude and Clare's 'The Village Minstrel'. The poem traces the 'progress of genius', the growth of Edwin's mind from childhood to maturity. The wild scenes of Scotland fill the young hero's mind with wonder, and the first book of the poem is an image of Eden on earth. However, the conversation with a hermit living in a se­ cluded cave wams the boy of the unexpected dangers of the world. Nature, glamorous as it may seem, is but a Paradise Lost in which man must be guided by reason and instruction. The consummate poet, a man of genius, must be able to combine the pleasures of the imagination with the requirements of mild reason. Thus anticipat­ ing Coleridge's well-known distinction between fancy and imagin­ ation, Beattie, though a late-Augustan poet, also ranks among the early Romantics. PIERREMORERE Blake, William (1757-1827) Blake was born in 1757 to a hosier and apprenticed at fifteen to the engraver [ames Basire, for whom he made drawings at Westmin­ ster Abbey, thereby acquiring a taste for the Gothic. In 1780 he J. Raimond et al. (eds.), A Handbook to English Romanticism © Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 1992 20 BLAKE, WILLIAM witnessed the Gordon Riots and the buming of Newgate Prison. He married Catherine Boucher in 1782, and the following year his Poetical Sketches were printed at the expense of [ohn Flaxman and the Revd. A. S. Mathew but not published. He opened a print shop in partnership the following year. In 1789 he and his wife attended the first London meeting of the Swedenborgian New Church, and he engraved Thel and The Songs o[ Innocence. The French Revolution was set in type but never published, and by March 1791 the poet had moved across the Thames to 13 Hercules Buildings, Lambeth. In 1793, when Louis XVI was executed and war declared between Britain and France, Blake engraved America and TheVisionso[the Daughters o[Albion. By this time he was clearly distressed at the course of the French Revolution and wrote in his notebook, '1 say I shan't live five years, and if I live one it will be a wonder.' 1794 saw the publication of the combined volume The Songs o[Innocence and o[Experience, of Europe and of The First Book o[ Urizen. Along with twelve colour prints, including Newton and Nebuchadenezzar, the last three illuminated prophecies of the Lam­ beth period were produced in 1795. Theyare The Song o[ Los, The Book o[ Los and The Book o[ Ahania, whose last plate, featuring a heap of guillotined heads, suggests an increasingly pessimistic view of the revolutionary process. From 1797 onwards, using atlas-sized paper provided for the project of illustrating Young's Night Thoughts, Blake composed Vala, his first long poem, which he revised over a ten-year period until it grew into The Four Zoas. From 1800 to 1803, the Blakes lived at Felpham, Sussex, under the patronage of William Hayley, minor poet and bel esprit. Blake worked on The Four Zoas by night and Hayley's assignments by day, producing engravings and miniatures with increasing per­ sonal dissatisfaction. In April 1803 he was accused by Scofield, a drunken soldier whom he had evicted from his garden, of uttering seditious threats - a serious accusation in view of the war hysteria that prevailed in Britain at the time. Blake's trial for sedition in [anuary 1804 at Chichester Quarter Sessions ended in acquittal to the cheers of the spectators. Meanwhile the poet had taken rooms in South Molton Street, London, had completed Milton and had begun [erusalem. The next twenty years of Blake's life were marked by increasing poverty, obscurity and loneliness.A notebook entry reads, 'Tues­ day [an, 20, 1807, between Two and Seven in the Evening ­ Despair'. His first and only exhibition, which was held in 1809 in BLAKE, WILLIAM 21 his brother's shop and for which he wrote A Descriptive Catalogue, proved a failure. The Examiner called him 'an unfortunate lunatic'. He was reduced in 1815 to engraving figures of dishes for a cata­ logue of Wedgwood's pottery and later on to selling his collec­ non of prints. Flaxman and Thomas Butts, however, remained friends of Blake, with Butts commissioning aseries of watercolours of Job in 1818. It was at this time that a young painter, [ohn Linnell, and a group of his friends, calling themselves 'the Ancients', became Blake's admirers and supporters. The first copy of [eru­ salem was engraved in 1820 and Linnell commissioned the Dante illustrations in 1824. In the same year Blake became acquainted with Samuel Palmer. On April 1827 he wrote to George Cumber­ land, 'I have been very near the Gates of Death & have retumed very weak & an Old Man feeble & tottering but not in Spirit & Life, not in the Real Man, the Imagination which Liveth for Ever.' He died on 12 August of that year, singing about what he saw in heaven. Modern criticism of Blake begins with Northrop Frye and David V. Erdman. Frye's Fearful Symmetry (1947), which has passed into general literary discourse as no other study of Blake has done, presents Blake as a central rather than a peripheral figure in English literature and defends ]erusalem as his ultimate attempt at stating by means of an explicit myth the simultaneity of cosmic, historical and psychological events. A remarkably biblical poet (even by the standards of English literature) Blake develops a central myth whose boundaries are creation, fall, redemption and apocalypse. Man is a Luvah, or form of life, subject to two im­ pulses: one the prophetie impulse, leading him forward to vision; the other the natural impulse, which drags hirn back to uncon­ sciousness and finally to death. There is, however (and somewhat paradoxically), an Aristotelian side to Frye's approach and he seems to forget that he is himself, at times, the source of the highly patterned reality he perceives. Erdman's Blake: Prophet against Empire, subtitled 'A Poet's Interpretation of the History of his Own Time' (1954), attends not to archetype but exc1usively to the politico­ historical element in Blake: not only the revolutionary and Napo­ leonic wars, but also domestic repression in Britain, persecutions in Ireland and the French Terror are shown to be part of the fabric of Blake's poems. Erdman - whose Illuminated Blake (1974), a plate-by-plate commentary of the corpus, is invaluable - is par­ ticularly instructive on America and Europe. But to read Blake's 22 BLAKE, WILLIAM work as covert political allegory is finally reductive, as it exdudes the archetypal element completely. At the opposite extreme (though both consider a Blakean plate as a cryptic document to be deciphered), Kathleen Raine's approach is fundamentally apoliti­ cal. Her Blake and Tradition (1968), despite its massive leaming, suffers from an over-literal application of supposed occult sources. Morton Paley's two studies Energy and the Imagination (1970) and The Continuing City: Blake's [erusalem (1983), while taking into ac­ count the enormous development of Blake scholarship, provide a background against which the unique figure of Blake stands dearly outlined. America As indicated on the title page, the poem was composed at Lambeth (where Blake had settled by March 1791) and printed in 1793. Its mood originally partook of the joyful certainty typical of the years 1790-1 that, with the advent of revolution in America and France, a Golden Age was dawning. But by 1793, at a time when the counter-revolution was building up and the British government had (on 21 May) passed an Act 'against diverse wicked and se­ ditious writings', it took some courage to give one's address on the front-page of so controversial a book. America was the first of Blake's illuminated books designated as a 'prophecy'. He no longer attempted in it, as he had done in The French Revolution (1791), to dramatise history. Instead, and this is in keeping with his concep­ tion of a prophet's duty, he recorded the formula of all revolutions, making use of the American material without regard for chron­ ology. For specifically historical references Blake drew information from [oel Barlow's Vision of Columbus (1787) and its epic pageant of American history viewed prophetically by Columbus from a Mount of Vision. Blake extended the stage to include both the British and American coasts, swelled the machinery to a large cast of angels and demons, and replaced Columbus with the King of England, who, looking westward from Albion, trembles at the vision of the Insurgents.
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