Class 10: Between Reason and Romance A. William Blake and the Crisis of Faith 1. Title Slide 1 (Blake: Newton) 2. Phillips: William Blake (1807, London, National Portrait Gallery) I have shown pictures before by William Blake (1757–1827)—his Ezekiel in last week’s class, for instance. He keeps on cropping up whenever you look at the turn of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, the passage from Reason to Romance. And yet he is difficult to fit into any continuity before or after: a maverick, a genius, a mystic, or simply a madman. I struggled a lot with the shape of today’s class, until I realize that it was this quality—Blake’s refusal to fit in—that made him such a perfect entry into what appears to have been a very troubled time. 3. Blake: “The Lamb,” video reading 4. Blake: “The Lamb” (1789, Library of Congress) Blake was a Christian—or at least he began as one. When looking at his early poetry collection, Songs of Innocence (1789), we might think of his faith as rather simplistic, as exemplified, for instance, in his poem “The Lamb.” The images in this video enhance the poem’s apparent naiveté, though hardly any more than Blake’s own hand-tinted engraving. Blake apprenticed as an engraver before studying at the Royal Academy; his work as a poet is entirely that of an amateur, though he published his poetry and art together as integrated artwork. 5. Blake: “The Tyger,” video reading by Tom O’Bedlam 6. Blake: “The Tyger,” detail (1795, British Museum) Blake followed up Songs of Innocence in 1794 with Songs of Experience, in which the naïve images are replaced by altogether more disturbing ones. “The Lamb” is answered by “The Tyger,” apparently the most anthologized poem in the English language. Let’s compare the two poems. It is tempting to think of them as a simple contrast of good and evil. But there is a strong sense that Blake admires the Tiger, who has a wild magnificence in his words even more than in his drawing. Blake apparently saw the coexistence of Lamb and Tiger as an example of the opposites that must be first grasped and then reconciled in any system of belief. Note also his wonderful lines, “When the stars threw down their spears, And water’d heaven with their tears,” a cosmic vision that seems to come straight from Milton, and that would become increasingly important in his later apocalyptic work. 7. Blake: Newton (c.1804, Tate Britain) 8. — the same, with quotation from Jerusalem Here again is the image I used for the title slide, an engraving representing Sir Isaac Newton (1643– 1727). It bears a certain similarity to the picture of God the Creator I showed in the first class: the all- — 1 — powerful figure bending over the world with his compasses, Newton as the Divine Architect. However, this was not Blake’s view of Milton at all. Look at these lines from his poem Jerusalem: “Cruel works with cogs tyrannic, moving by compulsion each other.” 9. Blake: Urizen (c.1818, Library of Congress) 10. Blake: The Four Zoas from Milton (c.1810, Library of Congress) 11. Blake: Milton Annihilating the Selfhood of Deceit from Milton (Library of Congress) And in fact, by identifying the Architect figure with God in our first class, I was making a deliberate mistake. For this is not God but Urizen, one of four primal figures in Blake’s highly idiosyncratic mythology called the Four Zoas. Urizen represents order and design, yes, but he also embodies laws and written rules, that he uses to trap and bind mankind in a huge net. Blake did not want to be tied by the rules of conventional religion any more than his life was constrained by the ties of conventional morality. He had, by all accounts, a happy marriage; he taught his wife to read and write and to color in his illustrations; they remained devoted until his death. But at the same time, he railed against the sexual conventions that take one “who burns with youth” and binds her “in spells of law to one she loathes. Must she drag the chain of life in weary lust?” In his long poem, Milton (1804–10), Milton returns from Heaven and is eventually united with Blake himself, entering him through the foot. In Plate 18 from the poem, Milton attacks Urizen directly; note the presence of what look awfully like the Ten Commandments in Hebrew! 12. Blake: Jerusalem, plate 76 (1806–20) 13. Blake: Satan before the Throne of God from Job (c.1805, NYC, Morgan Library) Like almost all the artists we shall look at today, Blake believed in God. While dismissing most of the works of the Church, he did not dismiss Christ. But his vision was generally a fiercer one, certainly in his verse. However, very few of his religious works come from the Gospels. When he is not illustrating his own mythology, he tends to choose subjects that take place as much in heaven as on earth. One such is the Book of Job, which he began illustrating in 1805 and published in print form in 1826. The Bible story begins, as we know, when Satan challenges God, betting that even the devout Job will lose his faith if he is stricken with enough misfortunes. Around 1930, the choreographer Ninette de Valois (1898–2001) asked Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958) to write the music for a “Masque for Dancing” based on the Blake illustrations. I had the privilege of seeing it in the late 1950s, but it is not done now, and there is no footage available. But I have put together a sequence from near the end of the work, together with some of Blake’s watercolors. I wanted to get in more of them, so they don’t necessarily follow the events in the music, but the sections you will hear are Pavane of the Sons of the Morning, Satan’s Expulsion from Heaven, Galliard of the Sons of the Morning, and Altar Dance. 14. Vaughan Williams: Job, a Masque for Dancing, excerpt — 2 — B. The Tree of Reason 15. Benjamin West: The Expulsion from Paradise (1791, Washington NGA) 16. Denise Levertov: “Contraband” (with West painting) 17. — the above, continued I have shown you this painting before. It is The Expulsion from Paradise (1791) by the American painter Benjamin West (1738–1820), one of a cycle of religious paintings for George III that he never got to complete; it is now in Washington. I show it partly as one of the very few large-scale religious paintings of the period that comes over as anything other than a dusty echo. But mainly I am using it as a background to the poem “Contraband” by Denise Levertov (1923–97), whose father, a German Hasidic Jew, emigrated to England, converted, and eventually became an Anglican priest! Levertov herself emigrated to America, and made her own spiritual journey from agnostic Jew to committed Christian. This poem relates to all that, but it also speaks to the general problem of reconciling Reason with Faith. And the later Eighteenth Century was the principal battleground for that conflict. 18. Joseph Wright of Derby: A Philosopher Lecturing on the Orrery (c. 1766, Derby) 19. Joseph Wright of Derby: An Experiment with the Air Pump (1768, Tate Britain) The Eighteenth Century was of course the Enlightenment. Faith, on the whole, was replaced by Reason. Although entirely secular in subject, paintings such as these two by Joseph Wright of Derby (1734–97), might almost be seen as sacred, in tribute to the new god of Scientific Knowledge, that Blake railed against. Almost none of these new philosophers, however, were Atheists. Most were Deists—that is to say, people who believe in God as the Prime Mover and Creator of the world, but also that he did not intervene in his creation thereafter. Hence they reject such things as miracles, the doctrine of the Trinity, and the need for an organized church. Deeper understanding is to be achieved by study rather than by prayer. 20. Denis Diderot: pages from the Encyclopédie (1751–72) Principally, this philosophy developed in France. And one of its first fruits was the Encyclopédie issued between 1751 and 1772 under the principal editorship of Denis Diderot (1713–84). The first step towards understanding the world is to make an objective record of what is in it—something we now take for granted in our obsession for catalogues and lists, but revolutionary in its time. 21. Voltaire and Rousseau, with poem by Blake Two of Diderot’s contributors were Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet, 1694–1778) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78). The two knew and respected one another. Both were Deistss, though they different in personality, Rousseau being the more emotional, Voltaire the more cynical. Voltaire, in fact, was so unspoken in his anticlericalism and opposition to any kind of magical thinking that his works were often banned, and he himself was imprisoned for more than a year. But he gave us Candide, which is one of the sharpest pieces of social and religious satire ever written. The innocent Candide and his not-so-innocent foster-sister Cunegonde are brought up by their tutor Pangloss to believe that, since — 3 — God made the world, he must have made everything in it, and even apparently bad things must have their purpose. Of course, an alarming succession of bad things immediately start happening, some of them historical. Candide gets nearly killed several times, and Cunegonde is raped, then becomes the mistress, on alternate nights of the week, of the Grand Inquisitor and Chief Rabbi.