Chatting With The Devil, Dining With Prophets

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The beautiful survey of prints and drawings by William Blake (1757-1827) on view at New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art through June 24 sets before us an artist who is widely loved but, in a curious way, only narrowly known. Of course, he is the very archetype of the artist-poet: self-taught in most respects, brimming over with lyrical visions and grandiose fantasies. A childhood education that left out his exquisite Songs of Innocence and Experience would be a poor one indeed.

Yet there is something difficult to grasp about Blake: an obsessive personal mythology that is intensely vivid and yet hard to see as a whole. As he put it, he had to devise his own system or be enslaved by another's. Its roots are Puritan, dissenting, millenarian--and very English; Blake never traveled abroad. But English antiquity and especially English medievalism mattered enormously to him. They were the meat and milk of his imagination. Even if we didn't know that James Basire, the engraver to whom his father apprenticed him, had sent him to study and draw the monuments of Westminster Abbey, we could see how deeply the form-language of medieval art penetrated a marvelous watercolor like Christ in the Sepulchre, Guarded by Angels, circa 1805.

Blake was deeply anticlerical; to him, organized religion meant oppression--"As the catterpiller chooses the fairest leaves to lay her eggs on, so the priest lays his curse on the fairest joys." His relation to Christian belief was both saturated in the imagery of the Bible and extremely nondoctrinal. He was trained as an engraver, not a "high" artist, which meant that a certain resentment of official art and its newly founded instrument, the Royal Academy, was built into him. Like many other such craftsmen at the time, he was possibly a Mason. Certainly he felt like an outsider, and was fascinated by the ideas of the 16th century alchemist Paracelsus, the mystic Jakob Bohme and his contemporary, Emanuel Swedenborg. He was not, of course, the only Englishman to be caught up with these visionaries and cranks, but there was no major artist on whom their ideas had more influence. Blake's imagery of transcendence and spiritual transformation through direct "knowing" owed nearly as much to them as it did to the Bible.

Strangely, given his pursuit of ecstatic insight, he had no connection to the Romantic poets of his day, such as Coleridge and Wordsworth. But others he revered: John Milton, especially, whom he valued even above Dante. (He illustrated both.) Not only was Milton a republican and a sympathizer with regicides, but he also knew that the devil was beautiful, and so did Blake. Blake saw how insipid even Milton's descriptions of Paradise were compared with his visions of Hell, and pointed out that "the reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it." Just like me, you can hear him adding sotto voce. Blake could and did draw monstrous demons, but Milton's beautiful Lucifer, son of the morning, was never far from his mind. Lucifer's greatest manifestation is as the idealized Apollo-like form of Isaac Newton, emblem of the cold reason Blake abhorred as against divinely granted perception, seated naked on a rock and beginning to schematize the universe with a pair of dividers.

To Blake, heavenly characters were entirely real. You could run into them on the street and speak of them casually. "I always thought that Jesus Christ was a snubby," he remarked--Blake had a snub nose--"or I should not have worshipd him if I had thought he had been one of those long spindle-nosed rascals." He spoke to angels, chatted with the devil and dined with the prophets Ezekiel and Isaiah. The latter told him that "my senses discover'd the infinite in everything, and as I was then persuaded and remain confirm'd that the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God, I cared not for consequences but wrote." This, of course, was Blake himself speaking through the mask of Isaiah, for if a creative mind was ever suffused with "honest indignation" it was his.

The man who wrote that "one law for the Lion & Ox is oppression" was also a passionate democrat, a republican. His views as a workingman (which printers were) aligned him with the most radical tenets of English working-class thought. He was as much a traitor to Georgian belief as the execrated Tom Paine. He contemptuously referred to George III as "old Nobodaddy" and eagerly awaited his death. In an age when any utterance of disloyalty to the Crown could be and was severely punished, Blake was fearless in expressing his views. His sympathies flew to the weak and the downtrodden. He was always on the side of liberty and instinct. "The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom," he wrote in the Proverbs of Hell. And also: "Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires." (The latter sounds more like Sade than the gentle poet of Lambeth, who wouldn't have hurt a hair on a child's head.)