He believed in an invisible world which eclipsed the visible one he might have said with his friend the
Posted in General on 24. Jul, 2010
He believed in an invisible world which eclipsed the visible one; he might have said, with his friend the painter Fuseli, that “nature puts me out”, that nature turns me off. But he also believed that the minute particulars of the visible world are holy, that everything that lives is holy and that human beings, those inhabitants of the fallen world of the visible, are divine. This was one of the contraries by which he progessed.Ackroyd enjoyably admires the greatness of his William Blake, but is aware of the extent to which he can also be seen as the victim of his anxieties and isolation. Ackroyd’s book makes clear how intensely traditional was Blake’s innovative art.
It also sheds light on one in particular of the several paradoxes of his religion. Blake disliked all three.Blake is seen here as “the last great religious poet in England”. It is striking to be told this by the biographer of TS Eliot, the Eliot who declared that Blake was not traditional enough, and that his “gift of hallucinated vision” needed to be controlled by a respect for common sense and scientific objectivity. He says that he believes, with Blake, that the madness imputed to people in the later 18th century could consist of a refusal to accept the scientific outlook of Bacon, Newton and Locke. Cowper is still thought to have suffered from religious mania, but Ackroyd believes he succumbed to his delusions because he wasn’t religious enough: because he “had not trusted his own capacity for religious reawakening”. He makes the point that religious enthusiasm was deemed to be madness in the 18th century, with Blake himself qualifying for the category in many people’s eyes. I suggest he takes this ghostly stuff too much for granted – though I accept that, when Blake speaks of spiritual energy, he can remove from you the power of objection.Ackroyd’s feeling for religion shows itself when he writes about the 18th-century poet William Cowper, who feared that he was damned.
You’re left asking yourself how it can be powerful of Blake not to make sense.This brings one to the vision thing. The power Ackroyd praises in Blake is that of an art based on religious conviction, and Ackroyd comes across as someone with a feeling for religion and an appetite for vision and the greatness it confers Spiritual energy is referred to frequently. But is it? There then ensues a passage in which he is bewildering about Blake’s being bewildering. He likes to say of some effect or passage of Blake’s, verbal or visual, that it is “powerful”, and at one point quotes a passage about the creation of the “fallen” material world, beginning: “Till his brain in a rock, & his Heart/ In a fleshy slough formed four rivers/ Obscuring the immense Orb of fire/ Flowing down into night …” “This is powerful poetry,” he says.
His admiration for the pictures – with their excess of musculature and of morose antique hero – and for the poetry of the Prophetic Books, can sometimes, however, get out of hand. “He worked at literature and art at the same time, keeping the manuscript beside him and adding to it, at intervals, while the graver continued its task almost without intermission.” This is a contemporary witness to the intentness of Blake’s ambidextrous craft, carefully described by Ackroyd. How much it has to say about his best poems, which tend to be youthful and short, is a different story. It is the poetry which, for many readers, makes him great, and there are moments when such readers might feel this is a book about the wrong Blake.Ackroyd pays sustained attention to Blake’s practice as an engraver and illuminator.
“As a man is”, of course, “so he sees.” Blake’s saying suggests that he would not have been surprised to learn that Boswell saw very few mystics.Ackroyd’s approach helps to explain how Blake came to devote himself to composing and illuminating voluminously prophetic books of verse. Like Blake, Ackroyd is the dowser and diviner of an ancient past, and he is a chauvinist here on its behalf and on behalf of London the Great, “awash” at this time “with mysticism and millenarian yearnings”. The deluge was lost on the observant James Boswell, who was in town at the time (and who seems never to have heard of Blake). Blake counts, in this context, as “one of those extraordinary Londoners who, self-taught, reach out towards the past and seek the truths of ancient knowledge”, and his Prophetic Books count as the least he might have been expected to produce in the circumstances. He uses the word “secular” as if he doesn’t much like the sound of it.He has often been preoccupied with a dark past containing sorcerers and murderers, and here, too, there is plenty of talk of alchemists, astrologers, antinomians, cabbalists, sexual magicians, mesmerists, magnetisters, prophets.