READING WILLIAM BLAKE

Transcription

1 READING WILLIAM BLAKE

2 Also by Stephen C. Behrendt HISTORY AND MYTH: ESSAYS ON ENGLISH ROMANTIC LITERATURE (editor) THE MOMENT OF EXPLOSION: BLAKE AND THE ILLUSTRATION OF MILTON SHELLEY AND HIS AUDIENCES P.B. SHELLEY, ZASTROZZI AND ST. IRVYNE (editor) APPROACHES TO TE AC HING SHELLEY'S FRANKENSTEIN (editor)

3 Reading William Blake STEPHEN C. BEHRENDT Professor of English University of Nebraska, Lincolrz M MACMILLAN

4 Stephen C. Behrendt 1992 Softcover reprint ofthe hardcover 1st edition All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or und er the terrns of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1 P 9HE. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and dvil claims for damages. First published 1992 by THE MACMILLAN PRESS L TD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world Edited and typeset by Grahame & Grahame Editorial Brighton British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Behrendt, Stephen Reading William Blake I. Title 821 ISBN ISBN (ebook) DOI /

5 for Joseph Wittreich

6 This page intentionally left blank

7 Contents Preface List of Plates Key to Abbreviations A Note on Copies viii x xi xii 1 Introduction: Reading Blake's Texts 1 The Illuminated Page 12 An Example: Five Plates from America 25 2 Songs of Innocence and of Experience 36 The Songs in Context 42 The Songs and the Reader 51 3 Three Early IIIuminated Works 73 The Book of Thel 74 Visions of the Daughters of Albion 84 The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 93 4 Lambeth Prophecies I: History of the World 101 Reconstituting History 105 Metamorphosis and Encyclopedic AIIusion Lambeth Prophecies II: History of the Universe 125 Inversion, Reversal, and the Ways of Seeing 126 Myth, Metamorphosis and the Nature of Reality Epic Art: Milton and Jerusalem 152 Milton and Epic Art 153 Jerusalem and the Eternal Community 165 Notes 174 Index 191 VB

8 Preface This book explores the dynamics of the reading process involved in reading William Blake's illuminated poems. Those poems include on the same pages verbal texts and visual texts that often seem to be at odds with one another or even, at times, to be entirely unrelated. Because reading verbal texts and visual texts involves different aesthtic assumptions and operations, the texts of Blake's iiluminated pages simultaneously make different demands on their readers, which further complicates the reading activity. I have not attempted here to offer a comprehensive reading of Blake's poetry. Rather, I have explored some of the demands that Blake's illuminated texts place upon us as part of the process of reading and comprehension. I have tried to outline some of the ways in which the intellectual and imaginative transaction proceeds between author and reader via the medium of the iiiurninated text as physical artifact. That text comprises a fertile intersection among frequently differing <and in no case identical) systems of reference applied to the text by author and readers, each of whom brings to the reading activity different degrees of cultural conditioning. I wish to thank the University of Nebraska Research Council for funding that enabled me to conduct research at some of the most important Blake collections, as weil as for the summer fellowship that enabled me to devote the summer of 1990 to the final stages of this study. I thank, too, the National Endowmnent for the Humanities for a Travel Grant that facilitated my return to England to conduct additional research as the project neared its conclusion. I am grateful for the advice and assistance I have received at numerous institutions whose Blake collections have figured in my research for this book. Arnong these, I extend special thanks to the staffs 01 the Tate Gallery (and to Martin Butlin especially), the Fitzwilliam Museum (and Jane Munro), the British Museum, the Library of Congress and the Huntington Library. To those colleagues and friends who graciously read and commented on parts of the manuscript, and especially to Marcia Pointon, I extend my thanks as weil. To Patricia FIanagan Behrendt I owe a particular debt of gratitude, both for her insightful readings of the viii

9 Preface ix manuscript in its various stages and for her unfailing support and enthusiasm. Studying with Joseph Anthony Wittreich, Jr., at the University of Wisconsin some twenty years ago, I came to what is proving to be a life-iong interest in Blake and in the lively and complex milieu of his times. To this superbly gifted scholar, stimulating colleague and good friend, I dedicate this book. STEPHEN C. BEHRENDT

10 List of Plates 1. America: A Prophecy, frontispiece (Copy 0), Fitzwilliam Museum. 2. America, plate ii (Copy 0), Fitzwilliam Museum. 3. America, plate 1 (Copy 0), Fitzwilliam Museum. 4. America, plate 2 (Copy 0), Fitzwilliam Museum. 5. America, plate 3 (Copy 0), Fitzwilliam Museum. 6. Songs of Innocence and of Experience, title page (Copy T), British Museum. 7. "The Blossom" (Songs of Innocence and of Experience), (Copy T), British Museum. 8. "The Divine Image" (Songs of Innocence and of Experience), (Copy T), British Museum. 9. "The Human Abstract" (Songs of Innocence and of Experience), (Copy T), British Museum. 10. Visions of the Daughters of Albion, title page (Copy 0), British Museum. 11. Europe: A Prophecy, plate 11 (Copy K), Fitzwilliam Museum. 12. The Book of Urizen, title page (Copy D), British Museum. 13. The Book of Urizen, final plate (Copy D), British Museum. 14. Milton, plate 18 (Copy A), British Museum. 15. Mi/ton, plate 42 (Copy A), British Museum. 16. Jerusalem, plate 99 (Copy E), Paul Mellon. To minimize confusion, I refer to these illustrations throughout the text not as "Plates," but as "Figures," to distinguish them from references to Blake's finished "plates". x

11 Key to Abbreviations All quotations from Blake's writings follow The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, revised edition, ed. David V. Erdman (Berkeley: University of Califomia Press, 1982). These are identified in the text as "E", followed by page, plate and line numbers. A helpful monochrome visual guide to Blake's illuminations is David V. Erdman, The Illuminated Blake (Garden City: Doubleday, 1974), which reproduces copies of the illuminated plates. Where the differing order of plates in various co pies of Blake's poems makes dting pages by plate numbers alone insufficient, I have also included references to this edition, citing them in the text as "IB", followed by page number. Abbreviations of Titles Cited T MHH VDA A E SL BU BA BL M J FZ VLJ DC The Book of Thel The Marriage of Heaven and Hell Visions of the Daughters of Albion America: A Prophecy Europe: A Prophecy The Song of Los The Book of Urizen The Book of Ahania The Book of Los Milton Jerusalem The Four Zoas AVision of the Last Judgment Descriptive Catalogue xi

12 A Note on Copies Generally, I refer in this book to the plates of Blake's iiluminated poems without distinguishing among copies unless there is particular reason for calling attention to one copy rather than another. With this compromise the Blake purist must inevitably find some fault, for the variations among copies are often very great indeed. One finds, for instance, significant differences among copies in quality of printing, nature and extent of coloring, degree of "finish" and other technical details, as weil as - in many wor ks - the order of the plates themselves. Unfortunately far the average reader, there is simply no substitute for seeing Blake's texts in the original. Even the finest of reproductions, as for instance the magnificent facsimiles issued by the Blake Trust, fail adequately to "rcproduce" the originals. Same guidance on the complicated matter of variants is available in David V. Erdman's The Illuminated Blake,l although the observations about colors and details that accompany the monochrome reproductions are frequently idiosyncratic and subject to very considerable dispute, as is inevitable with any such attcmpt to catalogue the minutiae of Blake's illuminations. In the course of writing this book I have studied many of the copies of Blake's works in Great Britain and the United States. Doing so has reminded me of just how profound are the differences among copies of individual works, and how profound tao are the differences in the effects which those various copies have upon a reader. Early works like the Songs of Innocence and of Experience display some of the most dramatic variations. Early copies of Innocence, for instance, are generally only lightly colored, with some wash effects that do not extend into the verbal text areas, while in late copies (Iike Copy Z, the Roscnwald copy of 1826; Library of Congress) the coloring is very elaborate: figures and details are colored carefully and intensely, gold and silver touches are added, colored washes of varying intensity are applied to the area of the verbal text, and in general virtually no "white space" is Ieft on the pages. This heightened finish characterizes most of the copies of his works Blake prepared after 1800, and is particularly apparent in the splendid late copies of works Iike America: A Prophecy (Copy 0, Fitzwilliam Museum) and Eurape: A Prophecy xii

13 A Note on Copies xiii (Copy K, Fitzwilliam Museum) that he prepared for lohn Linnell in about There are also monochrome copies of some of the illuminated poems, printed in inks of various colors, most frequently greenishblack or reddish- brown. Uncolored copies of poems like America and Europe dramatically remind us of the relation that the illuminated plates of the earlier Lambeth prohecies in particular bear to the graphie arts tradition represented in the politieal caricature, whose conventions and visual vocabulary Blake frequently employed. These uncolored co pies possess a drama that, while very different, is no less striking than that of the fully colored copies. Their monochromaticism, especially when the ink is dark, and the more immediately apparent visual integration of their pages, underscore these works' radieal departures from the visual form of the conventional typeset book adorned with engraved illustrations. In the mid-1790s Blake experimented in his illuminated poems with color-printing, the medium of the series of large prints that includes Nebuchadnezzer and Newton. Most copies of The Book o[ Urizen, for instance, are color-printed. Copy G (Library of Congress [Rosenwald]), the copy used for the 1958 Blake Trust facsimile, is the only exception; printed on pages bearing an 1815 watermark, it is stunningly finished in watercolor. The color-printed copies use generally darker, even muddy colors and opaque pigments that often entirely obscure the printed lines of the illuminations. These color-printed plates often possess a heavy, dark quality that strikes one variously as ominous, foreboding, or simply oppressive; this quality naturally colors the reading process, particularly in the case of a poem like Urizen, whose verbal text is itself so dark and violent. Blake occasionally prepared color-printed copies of the Songs, where the effects of the color-printing process are somewhat less striking than in a work like Urizen, simply because smaller areas of the page are involved, and because the plates are themselves smaller. In these more sparing uses of color-printing, Blake sometimes achieves a bright, jewel-like quality of color and detail, as he does for instance in the plates for Experience in Copy T (British Museum; a "composite" copy, containing plates from, apparently, at least two separate sets, some printed in orange-brown ink and colored with watercolor, others printed in blue-green and color-printed, and still others printed in yellow- brown and color-printed). While the color-printed plate for "The Human Abstract" (Figure 9) is visually appealing with its clear, bright colors, that for "The Tyger" is

14 xiv A Note on Copies much Iess successfui: colored in dark biue, green, red-brown and yellow, the tiger is curiously unaesthetic - even downright ugly. In other instances, however, color-printing produced pages of startling vibrancy and aesthetic impact: Copy F of The Marriage 0/ Heaven and Hell (c. 1795, Pierpont Morgan Library) is an excellent example of a richly-colored and aesthetically dynamic copy. Typical of the astonishing variations that can oeeur are those between the respective plates 11 of the Riches and the Kerrick copies of The Marriage 0/ Heaven and Hell (Copies Hand I, Fitzwilliam Museum; JB 108). The former, originally purchased by John Linnell in 1821,2 consists of small pages printed on both sides and colored meticulously: the lettering is carefully over-written in a variety of colors, sometimes including more than one color in a line. The design at the top of plate 11 in Copy H shows a figure group on an island surrounded on both sides and in front by blue sea. Curls of rieh green vegetation rise up over the woman and child at the right, beneath a sky that is entirely open and washed in pastel watercolor all the way to the sides and top of the plate. The Kerrick copy, Copy I, whieh is probably the one ordered in 1827 by T. G. Wainewright,3 is dramatically different in aesthetic effect. Hs pages are printed on one side only, and on substantially larger leaves (23.8 x 29.7 cm. as opposed to 13.2 x 20.4 cm.). This carefully and richly watercolored copy is touehed with gold and IighUy eolored with watercolor washes in the verbal text areas, with the sharpness of the images further increased by eareful detailing in black pen, creating the jewel-iike ehect of miniature paintings, a form in which Blake was proficient. The design on plate 11 of Copy I is very different from that in Copy H. Most imrnediately apparent is the introduction of a brownish, cave-like arch surrounding the figure group and beyond which the sky is washed horizontally in blue, magenta, and yellow. Significant alterations oceur in the figure group as weil. For one thing, this no longer seems the island it was in the earlier version. There is blue sea to the fight, inc1uding furious blue waves breaking over the woman and child, but a green, grassy expanse extends to the left, where the flame-haired figure rises. The columnar object at the center, which contains at its base an aged, bearded, Urizenic face, is not colored brown here, but rather blue, as if the object were same sort of cascade or waterspout. The "Minute Particulars" of the visual details and the overall aesthetic impact of these two very different finished versions of the same plate produee significantly different reading experiences

15 A Note on Copies xv for Blake's reader. These are the sort of variations, however, to which the reader who has not considered multiple copies of the individual works is not party. One might reasonably argue, though, that Blake's contemporary readers were no better off: typically they bought a single copy of a given work, not several, and so were little more likely to consider the impact of variations among copies than is areader today who is looking at a single original or a good facsimile. Well-intentioned scholars occasionally assert that one cannot say anything definitive about Blake's illuminated works unless she or he has examined all copies and, indeed, has all of them in one place - a plain impossibility - for simultaneous comparison. Realistically, we are best advised simply to acknowledge that very real and significant variations exist among copies, and that these variations materially affect one's aesthetic responses to the pages and therefore one's intellectual responses to - one's interpretations of - the poems. We must remain alert to the range of these variations and their effects upon readers who are themselves even more various in what they bring to the reading process than the illuminated pages which Blake contributes to that process. In the chapters that follow I deal only sparingly with these matters of variation, not because they are unimportant, but because fully to pursue them and their consequences for the reading activity is a task whose monumentality - and elusiveness - would defeat both its own purpose and any reader's attempt to follow so minute a discussion. Besides, attempts to render pictures in words - or, for that matter, words in pictures - are frustrated in advance by the wholly different natures of the media and of the aesthetic acts involved in perceiving and comprehending them. My focus in what foliows, therefore, will remain on the broader outlines of the subject.