William Blake, Capitalist
William Blake cries out for biographical treatment. His writings are among the most profound and powerful in the English language. Even though they are often difficult to the point of obscurity, nearly two centuries after his death his poems still command an audience while more accessible classics go unread. Moreover, Blake is increasingly winning recognition as a graphic artist. His striking and often startling paintings, water colors, engravings, book illustrations, and other forms of visual art are now hung proudly on walls everywhere, the originals in the great museums of the world, reproductions in college dormitories. But for all the exposure, Blake remains an enigma, perhaps the most unfathomable figure in the history of literature and art.
With all sorts of basic questions about him still unanswered, it is tempting to turn to biography to try to get a fix on Blake's identity and the meaning of his works. In Blake: A Biography (Knopf, 399 pages, $ 35.00), Peter Ackroyd offers a richly detailed account of the great visionary's strangely simple and yet strangely complicated life. Ackroyd's book is not a work of scholarship; he has not done much in the way of original research into Blake's life, and is content with synthesizing the existing work of Blake scholars. But it is useful to have a readable new biography that takes into account recent scholarly discoveries about the poet and artist.
Ackroyd's biography reflects the shifting academic perception of Blake in the past two decades. For much of this century he has been studied as a literary man who also happened to illustrate his own books and work in other visual media. Ackroyd places Blake's activity as a visual artist at the center of his career. In particular, Ackroyd stresses the fact that by profession Blake was a commercial engraver. He was apprenticed early in his life to an engraver; he earned his living (such as it was) largely as an engraver; to the extent that he was known in London during his lifetime, it was chiefly for his work as an engraver.
Thus Ackroyd forges a new image of Blake as a tradesman, a freelance entrepreneur in the world of art. This runs counter to the highly romantic image of Blake that is fixed in the 20th-century mind -- the lonely genius who scorned the marketplace and developed his vision in stark opposition to all that was going on around him. This is linked to the image of Blake the proto-Marxist, whose interest in radical politics and the French Revolution, together with his scathing indictment of the early signs of industrialism in his day, are taken to indicate that he was a critic of capitalism and perhaps even a proponent of socialism (though no such thing existed in Blake's lifetime).
Ackroyd shows that Blake was a bit of a capitalist himself. His capital consisted chiefly of a small printing press, together with supplies of paper and engraving plates, which he and his wife dutifully lugged with them whenever they changed domiciles. Here Ackroyd draws upon Joseph Viscomi's monumental study, Blake and the Idea of the Book with all its painstaking research into Blake's career as a printer. (Ackroyd repeatedly acknowledges his debt to Viscomi in his notes, though he does not quite let on just how derivative of Viscomi his central thesis really is.) Blake did reject the nascent world of mass marketing already taking shape in 18th-century publishing, Ackroyd (echoing Viscomi) says, but not in favor of a romantic return to medieval craftsmanship that would involve the utter rejection of technology and mechanical reproduction. Blake was in fact highly skilled in bookmaking techniques, and prided himself on having invented a new and (he believed) cheaper method of printing. Ackroyd accepts and develops Viscomi's view of Blake and his wife Catherine as boutique publishers, producing for a distinct (though small) niche in the market.
Viscomi shed new light on Blake by viewing him in the context of the burgeoning English market for graphic art in the second half of the 18th century, a market spurred by technological developments like the invention of lithography. In his remarkable illuminated books -- most familiar to us in the beautifully illustrated Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience -- Blake was catering to new forms of artistic connoisseurship, trying to capitalize on market trends. The childlike lyrics of his Songs of Innocence may well have been an effort to cash in on the demand for children's books that had made the Mother Goose and Goody Two Shoes stories into 18th-century bestsellers. In Ackroyd's account, Blake time and again is drawn into get-rich-quick schemes, seeking to hop on one marketing bandwagon after another ("If illustrated copies of Milton are selling, why not try illustrating Dante?"). To be sure, Blake's schemes generally failed miserably in financial terms, but that means he constantly misread the market; he didn't ignore or abjure it.
Indeed, Blake had the temperament of the entrepreneur. Rather than work for someone else, he was continually willing to venture whatever little capital he had in a variety of publishing projects, accepting the risk of failure for the sake of reaping the financial rewards of success. Above all, he valued his independence. In one of the most telling anecdotes Ackroyd reports, Blake's friend, the painter Henry Fuseli, found him one day making do with cold mutton for a meal and commented: "Ah by God! This is the reason you can do as you like." In Blake's willingness to accept a lower standard of living in order not to have to take orders from anybody, we recognize the dogged spirit of the English small businessman.
Of course the fact that Blake was himself a kind of capitalist does not prove that he was in favor of capitalism, but it does raise doubts about his supposed proto-socialism. He did support radical causes in politics, but, as Ackroyd shows, in Blake's time that meant that he favored policies that would today be labeled libertarian rather than socialist. Blake inveighed against collusion between the rich and the powerful in his day, but, then again, so did Adam Smith. Indeed, much of Blake's polemic against the unholy alliance between government and business in support of empire resembles Smith's attack on mercantilism, rather than a critique of free-market economics (which, after all, had not been put into practice in Blake's day).
Ackroyd keeps emphasizing that from his home environment on, Blake was shaped by the attitudes of the religious dissenter tradesmen of 18th-century London. But he fails to draw the full consequences of this view. The watchword of Blake's politics was liberty; all he wanted was to be able to pursue unhindered his art and his business (Ackroyd showsf that ultimately the two were inseparable for Blake), and for him that meant primarily to be free of government intrusion in the arts. He objected to suppression of free thought and speech, whether in the form of censorship, licensing of publication, or persecution of writers. He also objected to government- sponsored monopolies (such as the Royal Academy of Arts) and other forms of interference with commercial art. In Blake's most comprehensive statement on art, his "Public Address," his quarrel is not with the free market but with what he calls "the Monopolizing Trader."
To be sure, one cannot go so far as to say that Blake was opposed to public support of the arts. He certainly wished that the public had supported him better, and sometimes advocated grand public artistic projects (he proposed, for example, making frescoes for the walls of Westminster Hall at public expense). But on the whole Blake seems to have been convinced that any artist who accepts patronage from a government or a political figure will be corrupted. His vision remained fundamentally individualistic and anarchistic, and he always gave the arts a central role in supporting society rather than society a central role in supporting the arts ("let it no more be said that Empires Encourage Arts for it is Arts that Encourage Empires").
But Ackroyd's justifiable quarrel with romantic images of Blake as an isolated genius leads him to question the very idea of Blake as a Romantic poet, and here the biographer goes too far. For Ackroyd, Blake must be viewed as a product of the 18th century and thus should be categorized with poets such as Thomas Chatterton (subject of a previous Ackroyd biography) and James Thomson, rather than with Romantics like Wordsworth and Coleridge. True, Ackroyd's argument has solid critical foundation, but it compels him to downgrade the ways Blake participated -- in very Romantic fashion -- in all the new currents of thought and feeling unleashed by the French Revolution, above all the effort to rethink human nature itself and thereby liberate the creative potential long held in check by the old regime in Europe.
Ackroyd's argument that Blake was not a Romantic largely rests on the claim that he was in touch with the marketplace, whereas Wordsworth and the other Romantic poets were not. This is an odd claim, since Wordsworth was much more successful in the literary marketplace than Blake ever was. Byron, the arch- Romantic, was the bestselling poet of his day. In trying to show Blake's link to popular culture, Ackroyd makes much of his interest in the London theater. Yet Byron served on the management committee of one of the London theaters (Drury Lane) and wrote plays for it, one of which (Werner) became a box- office hit. In fact, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats all at one time or another eyed the London stage as the road to literary and financial success.
Important recent scholarship on the Romantics has taught us that they were all deeply implicated in the literary market of their era. Even when a Romantic poet adopted the pose of the isolated genius or cultivated the seemingly backward-looking role of the medieval bard, he was appealing to the prevailing middle-class nostalgia for the pre-modern world. In the early 19th century, poetry allowed a troubled public to escape from the ugliness and tensions of the industrial world. Scholars have become obsessed with showing that all the Romantics were creatures of capitalism and more or less shrewd participants in the new mass market for literature. The irony of this neo- Marxist scholarship (called the New Historicism) is that it is supposed to lower the Romantics in our esteem, but it ought to improve the reputation of capitalism. The New Historicist critichave unwittingly documented the benefits of free market competition, even in the realm of literature, by showing how the new economic situation in the realm of publishing in early 19th-century England spurred the Romantic poets on to their creative achievements.
Ackroyd's attempt to deny Blake classification as a Romantic is thought- provoking and a healthy reminder that all such critical categorizations have an element of arbitrariness in them. But it is one example of how his attempt to correct earlier images of Blake will have to be corrected in turn. One of the most suggestive features of Ackroyd's account is his effort to present Blake as a Londoner through and through, and to show how many of the odder moments of his poetry can be explained just by looking at a map of the neighborhoods in which he lived. But as valuable as this emphasis on the local in Blake's poetry may be, it does tend to make us lose sight of Blake's extraordinarily modern ability to envision Europe as a whole, indeed his ability to embace the earth and even the cosmos in his poetry.
Similarly, Ackroyd does an excellent job of documenting the ways Blake was influenced by occult and esoteric traditions, especially the writings of Swedenborg, Paracelsus, and Jacob Boehme. But the result of this emphasis is to downplay (though not completely ignore) the major literary influences on Blake that he himself acknowledged: Shakespeare, Milton, and above all, the King James Bible. For example, at one point Ackroyd makes it seem as if Blake did not really engage with Milton's poetry until after he met his patron William Hayley and began work on his poem named Milton. But in fact, Milton was always on Blake's mind as an author and he confronts him directly as early as his seminal work The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (which Ackroyd discusses largely in relation to Swedenborg).
Ackroyd is to be commended for in fact having written a new biography of Blake, one that usefully highlights aspects of his career earlier biographers have tended to ignore or neglect. But despite the wealth of detail in Ackroyd's biography and his many local insights, he seems to lose sight of what is centrally important in Blake. I wonder if someone coming to this book with only a passing knowledge of Blake would be able to understand the greatness of his major literary works: The Four Zoas, Milton, and Jerusalem. Ackroyd discusses them in a cursory and superficial fashion, at no greater length than he devotes to Blake's minor works. He makes little effort to explain the complicated private mythology Blake developed (though there are some excellent passages on the figure of Urizen) or to analyze how his mythic system hangs together as a whole precisely the kinds of issues that have preoccupied such great Blake critics as Northrop Frye and Harold Bloom.
In reading Blake: A Biography, I was struck by many moments at which Ackroyd's careful attention to biographical details seems to offer sudden illumination of some of Blake's most difficult poetry, as when Ackroyd explains a mysterious reference to Apollo in Milton by the fact that Blake's house in Lambeth was located near an establishment named Apollo Gardens. But does this passage become any less mysterious just because we can now locate it on a map of London? At several points Ackroyd himself registers his concern that his explanations may be reductive. Ackroyd's account is of value as long as readers remember that, like the biography of any great artist, his Blake raises more questions than it answers.