William Blake's Theory of Art

"From every-one of the Four Regions of Human Majesty,
There is an Outside spread Without, & an Outside spread
Within
Beyond the Outline of Identity both ways, which meet in One:
As orbed Void of doubt, despair, hunger, & thirst & sorrow.
[J pl. 18:1-4; E 61]

The Contrast between these romantic attitudes and the attitudes of an earlier generation is sharp. For Reynolds, the public provides essential verification: "We can never be sure that our own sensations are true and right, till they are confirmed by more extensive observation. One man opposing another determines nothing; but a general union of minds, like a general combination of the forces of all mankind, makes a strength that is irresistible . . . . A man who thinks he is guarding himself against prejudices by resisting the authority of others, leaves open every avenue to singularity, vanity, self-conceit, obstinacy, and many other vices, all tending to warp the judgment, and prevent the natural operation of his faculties." [VII, 221-22; W 132-33]

The public offers a "union of minds" that authenticates the perceptions of its members, including its artists, who are thus warned when they verge on singularity . . . . [p. 178]

No romantic manifesto with which I am acquainted actually uses the metaphor of expression to describe the relationship between the artist and the audience. What we find instead are metaphors of personal relationship. In other words, in an expressive theory the focus is not on artist as a skillful artisan but on the whole personality, which the skills of the craft serve to express. The natural consequence of personalizing the work of art is personalizing the audience in turn. The pattern seems to be the natural one in expressive theories of whatever period. When Keats claims "I never wrote one single Line of Poetry with the least Shadow of public thought," he does not mean that he has not thought of an audience but that the only legitimate audience is his group of friends: "I wod be subdued before my friends, and thank them for subduing me," But "the Public" . . . . It is immediately clear that an expressive theory is present when a modern commentator like Lewis Mumford begins to draw sharp distinctions between art and technology in terms of personal feeling: "Art springs spontaneously, even in infancy, from the desire for individuation and self-expression--a desire that needs for its fullest satisfaction the warm-hearted attention and loving cooperation of others." [Art and Technics [New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1952], p. 33]

Alexander Pope does not envision the audience as properly warmhearted or loving. He sees that the public interest in poetic matters is entrusted to the critic, as the public interest in legal matters is entrusted to legislators and judges: "thus long succeeding Critics justly reign'd, /Licence repress'd, and useful laws ordain'd; /Learning and Rome alike in Empire grew." The ideal is social; the ability to act properly in the public interest requires not love but decency, fairness, and detachment, a freedom from personal prejudice:

"Careless of Censure, nor too fond of Fame,
Still pleased to praise, yet not afraid to blame,
Averse alike to Flatter, or Offend,
Not free from Faults, nor yet too vain to mend.
["An Essay on Criticism" [1711], in Pastoral Poetry and An Essay on Criticism, ed. E. Audra and Aubrey Williams, Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope [New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1961], vol. 1, pp. 316-17, II. 681-83, 741-44.]

Speaking for the painters of the age of Pope, Jonathan Richardson describes an ideal spectator who is hard to distinguish from the judge whom an innocent person in the dock prays to find on the bench. The primary requirement is logical turn of mind: "It is as necessary to a connoisseur as to a philosopher, or divine to be a good logician; the same faculties are employed, and in the same manner, the difference is only in the subject." Judges of painting need no special logic especially suited to the art. The kind of logic they employ can serve as an all-purpose social instrument supporting public policies in the public interest. The appropriately public voice that Richardson uses to describe what "we" desire in "our" connoisseurs of painting would serve equally well to urge a sound foreign policy: "The first thing then to be done, in order to become a good connoisseur one's self, is to avoid prejudices, and false reasoning."

"We must consider ourselves as rational beings at large, no matter . . . even of what part of the universe we are inhabitants. . . . Opinions taken up early, and from those we have loved . . . must have no advantage with us upon these accounts. Neither must our own passions, or interest. . . Nor must anything be taken for granted; we must examine up to first principles, and go on step by step in all our deductions. . . . And as truth is uniform, and evermore consistent with itself, the mind thus finds itself in perfect serenity." [Jonathan Richardson, "The Theory of Painting" [1725], in The Works of Jonathan Richardson, ed. Horace Walpole [London, 1792], pp. 169, 109-9. Richardson's "connoisseurs" are--in the broad eighteenth-century sense of the term--knowledgeable judges with good taste, of course, not the expert specialists who practice what is called "connoisseurship" in the jargon of modern art history.] Richardson spends his rhetoric on the advantages of detachment. Connoisseurs become citizens of the universe, "rational beings at large," by divesting themselves of prejudice, which is conceived as a product of parochialism inflicted by "those we have loved." "Our own passions" are included with self-interest as a form of prejudice, and unsettling passion contrasts unfavorably with the "perfect serenity" that accompanies truth, which is not characteristic but "uniform," always and everywhere the same when freed from the contaminations of personality.

Romantic descriptions of the ideal reader and spectator start [p. 185] closer to home, with attachment rather than detachment. The ideal is not a logical and socially responsible judge but an intimate personal relation tied emotionally to the author. Even "axioms in philosophy are not axioms until they are proved upon our pulses: We read fine--things but never feel them to thee full until we have gone the same steps as the Author," [Letters, ed. Rollins, I, 279.] Keats writes. As for that author, says Wordsworth, the poet is "an upholder and preserver [of human nature], carrying everywhere with him relationship and love." [Preface to Lyrical Ballads [version of 1850], Prose Works, ed. Owen and Smyser, I, 141.] Shelley identifies imagination with "love; or a going out of our own nature." The good man is the man of intense and comprehensive imagination, who can "put himself in the place of another and of many others." ["A Defence of Poetry," in Shelley's Critical Prose, ed. Bruce R. McElderry, Jr. [Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1967], pp. 2-3.] Byron's Dante imagines his audience as a woman and himself as one "who for that country would expire, /But did not merit to expire by her, / And loves her, loves her even in her ire!: [The Prophecy of Dante, 1:70-72]. The idea that the poet in any sense loves the audience, or the audience the poet, is alien to fundamental tendencies in Enlightenment classicism.

Thus the powerful association of expression with emotion extends beyond the work to the audience, suggesting a relationship not of entertainer to public, performer to judge, thoughtful person to thoughtful person, or teacher to student, but something closer to the relationship of lover to beloved, a deep, sympathetic communion that requires sexual, religious, or sometimes for Blake, chemical metaphors to describe it. Love is the feeling that governs the relationship, which will necessarily include, however, other feelings and other relationships as well; lovers who love each other profoundly will not fail to entertain, teach, inspire, and even debate each other. Ultimately, in theories as radical as Blake's metaphors of personal relationship move toward metaphors of identity. [p. 186]

The Themes of Blake's illuminated works can be divided into two, which are ultimately one: the battle to reintegrate the disintegrating identity of the artist and thus reunite the artist with the work under the constant threat of interruption from such externals as the demons of Titian and Rubens; and the battle to reunite the artist and the work with the audience of art.

Blake begins Jerusalem with an address "To the Public" that immediately asserts an intimate personal relationship with the reader: "After my three years slumber on the banks of the Ocean, I again display my Giant forms to the Public: My former Giants & Fairies having reciev'd the highest reward possible: the love and friendship of those with whom to be connected, is to be blessed: I cannot doubt that this more consolidated & extended Work, will be as kindly received" [J pl. 3; E 143]. The reader and the artist are friends; they love each other, and their friendship is a blessing to both . . . . Blake is thinking of his art as a way of finding the true "Public Voice" of his audience as opposed to "their Error," very much as the Gospels are a way of finding the true form of the Christian community. The Bible as a whole, in fact, offers a model of the artist's relationship to the audience [p. 187] that Blake could modify to the requirements of his expressive theory. [Some recent studies have defined Blake's idea of the audience in a biblical context . . . . ] [p. 88]

. . . . A public with no imagination that it can call its own is a public asleep. In a letter to Lady Beaumont, Wordsworth describes his potential audience as "grave, kindly-natured, worthy persons, who would be pleased if they could. I hope that these Volumes are not without some recommendations, even for Readers of this class, but their imagination has slept; and the voice which is the voice of my Poetry without Imagination cannot be heard." [The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, 2nd ed. rev. Mary Moorman and Alan G. Hill [Oxford: Clarendon, 1970], vol. II, p. 146, letter of 21 May 1807]. The underlying metaphor is biblical: "Awake thou that sleepest" [Ephesians 5:14] is the cry of the prophets to an audience whose spirits have been hypnotized by the world. In the Preface to Milton Blake had called on the "Young Men of the New Age" --who seem to be the younger generation of artists-to "Rouze up" [E 94]. But he begins Jerusalem with the admission that he himself has spent three years slumbering on the banks of the ocean. His admission is a call for a reciprocal admission from the public. He begins chapter one of Jerusalem with the epic announcement of his subject: "Of the Sleep of Ulro! and of the passage through/ Eternal Death! and of the awaking to Eternal Life" [J pl. 4:1-2; E 145]. Presumably the sleep is both the narrator's and the audience's. Reciprocality is a theme of "To the Public": "The Spirit of Jesus is continual forgiveness of Sin . . . . I am perhaps the most sinful of men! I pretend not to holiness! yet I pretend to love, to see, to converse with daily, as man with man . . . . Therefore Dear Reader, forgive what you do not approve, & love me for this energetic exertion of my talent" [J pl. 3; E 145].

The assumption is that acts of imagination, to be complete, must be mutual. The conditions for them are the same as for any profound human relationship--the forgiveness and love that assure mutual commitment and engagement--because complete human relationships are also imaginative acts. If mimetic arts, tending toward the condition of performance, envision an audience of spectators and judges, expressive arts, tending toward the condition of personal relations, envision an audience of loving friends. A work of art is one kind of profound human relationship and in essential ways a model for all others. Wordsworth recognizes this as early as the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, where he calls for the reader to resist the judgments of others and to "decide by his own feelings genuinely," to "abide independently by his own feelings." [(Version of 1800), Prose Works, ed. Owen and Smyser, I, 154.] Wordsworth is not merely calling for unprejudiced reviewers. He is asking the reader to react to poems as persons, with the emphasis on "feelings." In his extensive analysis of the relationship between poets and their audiences, the Essay Supplementary to the Preface of 1815, he spends considerable effort categorizing bad readers much as a father might categorize bad prospective husbands for his daughter: they may be young with strong but undependable enthusiasm, older but jaded and in search of strong stimulation, religious but cold and doctrinaire, and so on. The basis for an imaginative relationship between poet and reader must be mutual love. Thus he warns of the religious reader whose interest is less in the poet expressed in the poem than in the search for erroneous doctrines, with the result that "love, if it before existed, is converted into dislike; and the heart of the Reader is set against the Author and his book." [Prose Works, ed. Owen and Smyser, III, 65.] This is the line of thought leading to Mumford's requirement that the audience give works of art "warm-hearted attention and loving cooperation" and to Blake's request that the audience love him for the energy it took to turn his talent into a work of art.

The ideal reader for both Blake and Wordsworth is someone with a fully developed mind and heart whose powers of intellect and passion are equal to those of the poet. The reader is not a passive receptacle or an impassive judge; the poem is not an instrument of stimulation or an object to be judged by a set of external standards. To judge a poem, the reader must enter into an intimate relationship with it. [In "The Ideal Reader: A Critical Fiction," PMLA, 93 [1978], 463-74, Robert DeMaria, Jr. rightly contrasts the "profoundly judgmental" reader implicit in Johnson's criticsm with Coleridge's ideal reader, who "enters into a kind of collaboration with the poet" [p. 468]. DeMaria also points out that while Johnson's reader is part of an "external tribunal" [p. 467], Coleridge's is a reelection of himself.] [p. 191]

. . . . Taken seriously--or, as philosophers say, carried far enough--such principles assume their ultimate imaginative shapes in visions of individual, social, and universal coherence such as this one:

"And they conversed together in Visionary forms dramatic which
bright
Redounded from their Tongues in thunderous majesty, in Visions
In New Expanses, creating exemplars of Memory and of Intellect
Creating Space, Creating Time according to the wonders Divine
Of Human Imagination, throughout all the Three Regions immense
Of Childhood, Manhood & Old Age[;] & the all tremendous
unfathomable Non Ens
Of Death was seen in regenerations terrific or complacent varying
According to the subject of discourse & every Word & Every
Character
Was Human according to the Expansion or Contraction, the
Translucence or
Opaqueness of Nervous fibres such was the variation of Time &
Space
Which vary according as the Organs of Perception vary & they
walked
To & Fro in Eternity as One Man reflecting each in each &
clearly seen
And seeing; according to fitness & order.
[J pl. 97:28-40; E 255]

Epilogue
In a way Blake's artistic principles are like his poetic narratives, most of which seem to have a single simple action at the center, or at last a simple pattern, which is made as hard to locate as that moment in each day that Satan's Watch-Fiends are always looking for but never finding. It is only a paradox to say that Blake's narratives are so difficult as a direct result of simplification so great that our minds resist it. Fall and redemption organize Blake's narratives. Since the pattern occurs at all levels, it organizes Blake's artistic ideas as well. The creative moment that Satan cannot corrupt is the expressive moment defined in these pages: the moment in which the artist's imagination expresses itself in clear outline; the moment in which readers find themselves in those outlines; the moment that reveals the potential integrity of artist, artistic work, and audience. Seen properly, any one of the three can be seen from the perspective of the others; as, in Coleridge's formula, multeity in unity, unity in multeity. [p. 205]