ROMANTICISM DURING THE LATE XVIIIth CENTURY

Studying William Blake , as a romantic poet, as a painter and also as a provocative artist represents for us the possibility to discover the English literature and especially the English poetry. His poetry is radiant and Blake affirms original points of view for instance about religion and we have the intention to show you how provocative and actual is William Blake’s work. We think that studying an English poet constitutes a real open minded subject especially with Blake who produced an alternative poetry. The first part of our study concerns the romantic movement because Blake belongs to it and his work is easier to explain after a presentation of the main romantic characteristics. We have tried to sum up Blake’s philosophy and to make it actual and pertinent in regards to the current events.

William Blake is an English poet and artist, born in London in 1757. He exerted a great influence on English romanticism. Blake defied characterization by school. At the same time no poet has been more sensitive or responsive to the realities of the human condition and of his time. His poetry must be situated in an exceptional place concerning English literature. He is a pre-romantic and also a visionary author.
   It is important to say a few words about his early life and work.  During his childhood, Blake was a mystic who saw and conversed with angels and Old Testament prophets. He was not interested by concrete reality but was seeking  a mystical life of the spirit. On the contrary, reality, whose centre was human life, was for Blake inseparable from imagination. The spiritual was an expression of the human.
    Blake's father, a prosperous hosier, encouraged young Blake's artistic tastes and sent him to drawing school. At 14 he was apprenticed with an engraver, with whom he stayed until 1778. After attending the Royal Academy, where he rebelled against the school's atmosphere, he set up as an engraver. In 1782 he married Catherine Boucher, whom he taught to read, write, and draw. She became his inseparable companion, assisting him in nearly all his work. Except for three years preparing illustrations for an edition, he was spent in London.
   Poetical Sketches (1783), his first book, was the only one published conventionally during his lifetime. He engraved and published all his other major poetry himself (the rest remained in manuscript). William Blake produced books in a total act of self-publishing. He wrote the text, made relief and the illustrations, printed and hand coloured the pages. He originated a method of engraving text and illustration. Until long after his death, his poetry did not enjoy commercial or critical success. Blake's paintings and engraving are realistic in their representation of human anatomy and other natural forms. They are also imaginative, often depicting fanciful creatures in exacting detail. Unknown during his life, Blake was generally dismissed as an eccentric long thereafter. His following has gradually increased, and today he is appreciated as a visual artist and as a poet.   
   In Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience (1794) the world is seen from a child's point of view, directly and simply but without sentimentality. The poet made his intention clear: showing the two contrary states of human soul. Innocence and experience are symbolised in the tiger and the lamb, which are described poems that reveal a consciousness of cruelty and injustice in the world, for which people are responsible.
   Finally, Blake's Prophetic Books combine poetry, vision, prophecy, and exhortation. They include The Book of Thel (1789), The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (c. 1790), The French Revolution (1791), America (1793), Europe (1794), The Book of Urizon (1794), The Book of Los (1795), Milton (1804-8), and Jerusalem (1804-20). They are a vision of the whole of human life, in which energy and imagination struggle with the forces of oppression both physical and mental. Blake exalted love and pure liberty and a rationalist philosophy that served to justify the political and economic inequities during the industrial revolution. The Prophetic Books are founded in the real world, as are Blake's passions and anger. They are ordered by a mythology devised by the poet and other mystical sources.

William Blake must be considered as a representative personality of Romanticism, a huge European movement, which is characterized by the exaltation of the artist, always in quest of the absolute . As a supreme creator, he is depicting a mythology of modern world, especially in his work on the marriage of heaven and hell.

Romanticism is a wild movement which overthrew the conception of arts in the XIXth century. The passion of the absolute constitutes the main convergence between all romantic trends. Nevertheless there are many different expressions of Romanticism through European countries.

We will present you, in this first part, the romantic trend and its characters in order to explain how Blake is a romantic and how his work surpasses the romanticism.

The adjective romantic was used in English and French at the beginning of the 18^th century to describe extraordinary events or characters, which were idealized in novels. During the 19th century the word characterised the picturesque in landscapes and then a new poetry, separated from the classical one. Romanticism points out a new way of sensitivity.

It was a huge European movement during the late 18^th century and the early 19^th, which upset literature, music and also painting and philosophy. To be romantic, according to A. Malraux, "c’est prendre au sérieux ses rêves" this blending of dream and reality is a fundamental characteristic of romanticism. Resulting in part from the libertarian and egalitarian ideals of the French Revolution, the romantic movements had in common only a revolt against the prescribed rules of classicism. The romantic novelists or poets refuse their society, which integrates only rich and conformist people. They choose rebellion, the claiming of their differences and the passion of the absolute.

The basic aims of romanticism were various; a return to nature and a belief in the goodness of humanity; the rediscovery of the artist as supreme creator; the development of nationalistic pride and an exaltation of the senses and emotions over reason and intellect. In addition, romanticism was a philosophical revolt against rationalism.

Those characteristics are visible in the romantic literature, painting and also romantic music.

In the visual arts romanticism is built on the avoidance of classical forms and rules, emphasis on the emotional and spiritual, representation of the unattainable ideal, a nostalgia for the grace of past ages and a predilection for exotic themes. Romantic artists developed precise techniques in order to produce specific associations in the mind of the viewer. To convey verbal concepts they would for instance endow inanimate objects with human values. You can see it in the painting of Caspar David Friedrich with the use of wild trees and shimmering moonlight to suggest an infinity of human longing.

Caspar Friedrich:

The result was often sentimental or ludicrous. In the case of Delacroix, however, his painterly style and colour sense exalted the romantic attitude in a singularly effective fashion.

Liberty leading the people.1830 Delacroix

Cleopatra and the peasant.1838 Delacroix

Romanticism in music was characterized by an emphasis on emotion and great freedom of form. It attained its fullest development in the works of German composers. Although elements of romanticism are present in the music of Beethoven, Weber and Schubert, it reached its zenith in the works of Berlioz, Mendelssohn, Schumann , Chopin , Liszt and Wagner. Many romantic composers worked in small forms that are flexible in structure for instance prelude ,intermezzo, nocturne and ballad especially in solo music for the piano. Another romantic contribution was the art song for voice and piano, most notably the German lied. Romantic composers, particularly Liszt, in combining music and literature, created the symphonic poem. Berlioz also made use of literature; much of his work is described as program music. Romantic opera began with Weber and culminated in the work of Wagner, who aimed at a complete synthesis of the arts in his idea of " Gesamtkunstwerk" ( total work of art).

2. A huge European movement

The romantic movement is often misunderstood: it is compared with other simple literary movements and systematically opposed to classicism. Moreover there are a lot of romantic trends, mainly three, an English one, a French one and finally a German movement.

Although in literature romantic elements were known much earlier, as in Elizabethan dramas, many critics now date English literary romanticism from the publication of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads (1798). In the preface to the second edition of that influential work (1800), Wordsworth stated his belief that poetry results from "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings", and pressed for the use of natural everyday diction in literary works. Coleridge emphasized the importance of the poet’s imagination and discounted adherence to arbitrary literary rules. The romantic trend is represented by English poets as Byron, Shelley and William Cowper , in Thomas De Quincey’s autobiographical Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1822). The author explores the themes of pain, of renunciation, of sin and also of dream. The interest of romantics in the medieval period as a time of mystery, adventure, and aspiration is evidenced in the Gothic romance and the historical novels of Sir Walter Scott. English romantics are protesting against the modern civilization and they try to understand the human condition, above all the poor classes which were the main victims of capitalism. Nevertheless they abandon the idea of giving solutions, as the French romantics.

In Germany the Sturm and Drang School, with its obsessive interest in medievalism, prepared the way for romanticism. Friedrich Schlegel first used the term romantic to designate a school of literature opposed to classicism, and he also applied the philosophical ideas of Kant and Fichte to the "romantic ideal". Major German writers associated with romanticism include Holderlin, Schiller and particularly Goethe, who had a mystic feeling for nature and for Germany’s medieval past.

The credo of French romanticism was set forth by Victor Hugo in the preface to his drama Cromwell (1828) and in his play Hernani (1830). Hugo proclaimed the freedom of the artist in both choice and treatment of the subject.

In the United States romanticism had philosophic expression in transcendentalism, notably in the works of Emerson and Thoreau. Poets such as Poe and Longfellow produced works in the romantic vein.

The romantic trend is also a huge movement, which upset many countries in Europe and the United States. William Blake belongs to the first romantic generation and he was in my opinion the most singular of the English romantics. His poems and paintings are radiant, imaginative, and heavily symbolic, indicating the spiritual reality underlying the physical reality. Blake is for us a perfect example of the romantic trend.

Creating was for William Blake a supreme act, able to free the creator from the prejudices of the materialistic chains. He called himself "a mental prince"; and was one.

Wiilliam Blake is one of the first romantics.

For sure he is a romantic poet and artist in all his attributes : lyric expression, power of imagination, revolution against reason…

But his genius, his conviction, his syncretistic theories raise him at the rank of a supreme creator. For us, meeting his work is still a strong, magic encounter … One of his commentators, Alfred Kazin, compares his loss, in 1827, with that of Beethoven as he considers both are "two plebeian Europeans of supreme originality", underlining "how alike they were in the quality of their personal force, their defiance of the age, and the fierce demands each had made on the human imagination."

Throughout his life of damned poet, Blakes expressed his own, violent, mythology.

In his total rejection of false knowledge (religion and science) he appears as the modern man, very close to our condition, our doubts…in a meaningless world. Not only does Blake prefigure romanticism, but also Art Nouveau, surrealism, and in literature : Nietzsche…and even some rock or metal groups, inspired by his poetic vision of the world.

William Blake is an inspired rebel ( 1757-1827) and we can present an introduction to his work by his painting.

Son of a draper, autodidact in everything except engraving, he was considered mad throughout his life for his excessive rebellion and total non-conformism.

He lived rejected, hard-working with his wife, publishing himself his books only to receive little admiration from his contemporaries.

As much as his poetry, his graphic art reveals his scorn for the 18^th century's conventions. He mainly produced engraving or tempera, as he refused to use the noblest medium : oil-painting, which lacked transparency. He studied neoclassic art (and learnt Michelangelo's science of painting the human body) but rejected the neoclassic prejudices and prefigured romanticism claiming perfect forms can only be found by mystic intuition and not after the observation of nature (reason). Like his poetry, his painting is disconcerting and symbolist, primitive, the lines are due to emotion, to a proper rhythm, sometimes neglecting the real form, in order to submit better form to idea : body and form being only reflections of our spirit.

He mainly painted allegories inspired by various literary sources, with which he constituted his mythology .

Mainly developed in his painting and in "prophetic books", it is a strange mythology, exploiting various wide spread sources to create allegories which he used to communicate his ideas : the bible (mainly the Old Testament : Adam and Eve, Cain, Joseph, Jesus ), old English legends (Albion), or real men he took as icons (Newton). He invented some (Orc, Urizen…). In a really personal vision, he used them to develop his prophetic visions : denouncing the recently born positivism, the enslaving Church, promoting imagination, energy, reconciling Evil with heaven.

He fights against science and Catholicism. To summary his constant rebellion some commentators declare William Blake fought against "society in toto". That is not exactly right but we must admit Blake rejected any kind of prison, repression. That is why he hated the church’s dogma, money, the oppression of minorities and despised science. For Blake the only restrictions over man are always in his own mind—the "mind-forg'd manacles." He violently resents these manacles repressing the human possibilities : "Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with stones of Religion" he wrote.

Blake fights against the science of the "Enlightenment" which is limited Reason .Blake despised the "so-called" Age of Enlightenment. Only based on Reason, this science results in being unable to see "infinity in a grain of sand" and "eternity in a while". In Newton, Locke and Bacon's science, Blake only saw an stupid reasoning laughing from the imaginative man. When painting, Blake represents Newton as closed to the world except his little science.

"I must create a system or being enslaved by another man's" affirmed Blake. At the end of his life, he provoked by asserting he was certain the Earth was plate.

Far from neglecting science, Blake proposed a critical intelligence facing the "Lights", lacking depth. He thinks the lights are killing imagination and religion (we will see later his very peculiar conception of religion). But for Blake , in the eyes of the imaginative man, Nature is nothing but imagination. That is why he proposes a marriage between science and imagination.

Blake fights against the Church of oppressive hypocrisy. Blake also fought against the chains of Christianity, the religion of Law, and "Reason reasoning". He symbolizes this with "Urizen" , vision of the Old Testament’s repressive God (Jehovah). Urizen is a personification of Reason, Repression an Authority. He keeps the people down, restraining their will for freedom and justice, he condemns sexual desire.

Moreover, the Church is corrupted with gold and Christian Pity is only the church's hypocritical self-justification as :

"Pity would be no more,

if we did not make somebody Poor :

and Mercy no more could be,

if all were as happy as we"

In Blake's opinion, people must resist this enslaving system. In his point of view, people live enslaved in a dead world, that is why it is so easy for the New Priests of the materialist religion (church as well as modern science) to impose their aggressive and meaningless ideology.

Blake's criticism was highly inspired : he described the contradictions of his society with an incredible advance, like a stranger just glancing at a dead word.

But was his rage, as it has been said, only the reaction of someone misunderstood by the world?

I don't think so, as Blake not only proposed sterile criticism. His goal was often an humane one : Blake encouraged the American revolution, he expressed himself against the bad treatments of children, against slavery and monarchy, and for women's rights. (which was very rare a position in the England he knew)

He replaces all the wrong ones with "real" religion : energy, imagination, childhood.

William Blake had a very personal approach to religion. In fact, after the early death of his brother, he confessed often to talking with him and with angels living around us.

As an independent spirit, he never admitted false religion, as for him : religions are one and he is a syncretist.

According to him, we must stop separating Evil and Good, the only real opposition is between Active and Passive. " Energy is eternal pleasure" and beautiful, even if it is an evil one. Blake dignifies childhood as an selfish and non depraved (by religion) age.

He exalts the beauty of Lucifer in his original glory : all power and liberty, spreading a soft heat around him. Apparent paradox, the example Blake gives of human' achievement is …Jesus, but seen as radically different from the official exegesis .

For Blake, "Jesus was all virtue, and acted from impulse, not from rules." Free and even evil, the Blake's Jesus is not inhumane, cruel. Remember he protects little children.

One question remains : Was Blake an extremist ?

He is a romantic poet in all his glory : misunderstood, poor, tortured by the conviction of a luminous knowledge able to save the world. Misunderstood, despised, convinced he was mad, he screamed his positions, he was excessive. But wasn't it the only way to be listened to?

As a supreme creator, he is depicting a mythology of modern world, especially in his work on the marriage of heaven and hell

                             

2. THE MARIAGE OF HEAVEN AND HELL

In 1824, Blake’s friend the artist John Linnell commissioned him to make a series of illustrations based on Dante’s Divine Comedy. Blake made many pictures from hell, Purgatory and paradise. The pictures reveal that Blake believed in the primacy of imagination and that the gothic world has influenced his art, imagination and ideals.
   

Dante running from the three beasts

Hell, canto 1

The Divine Comedy opens with Dante lost in a dark wood in a fearful valley. Finally he sees a hill on which the sun is shining, and his heart fills with hope. But he is confronted by three beasts.

First comes a leopard that blocks his path. Then comes a lion followed by a wolf. Dante is terrified and is losing all hope when a man appears. It is Virgil, the Roman epic poet. He has been sent by Beatrice (the woman Dante loved and who inspired him to write) to lead him on a journey of discovery through Hell, Purgatory and Paradise.

We can try to explain the allegory: Dante, busied about the affairs of the world, has wandered from the path of righteousness. He tries to find the path back but is diverted by worldly pleasure , symbolized by the leopard, worldly ambition (the lion), and by avarice (the wolf). Virgil, who represents reason, has come to lead Dante to Beatrice who represents Divine revelation and the state of grace.

You can notice the Christ-like pose and appearance of Virgil, and the exaggerated "terror pose" of the fleeing Dante, and also that the three beasts hardly look terrifying at all. Blake, in fact, seemed to have difficulties depicting wild animals.

Dante is being led by Virgil, the Roman poet, through Hell, Purgatory and Paradise. Here they are shown entering the Gate of Hell. Once inside, they shall first pass through the region where the souls of the uncommitted (those who lived their lives without doing anything notably good or bad) reside. They shall then be ferried by Charon across the river Acheron into Hell. Virgil is the right-hand figure in blue, Dante the left-hand one in grey.

You can notice how the greenery framing the outside of the gate contrasts with the bleak panorama of fire and ice inside. If you look carefully you can see tiny figures in torment on the hills. These successive hills represent the different circles of hell, where the souls of people guilty of different sins are punished. Those guilty of the sin of lust, for example, are buffeted about by the winds of passion and desire in the second circle.

In this circle people guilty of the sin of lust are whirled round and round in an unending storm. The storm, of course, represents irresistible passion. You can see in the storm mythic and historical queens such as Helen of Troy and Cleopatra of Egypt. Dante, however, chooses to speak to Paolo and Francesca, famous lovers from Rimini.

Notice that above Virgil’s head a sun-like disc contains a sketch of a couple embracing, while the wind-blown lovers themselves seem to be flying up and out of the picture to freedom. Blake disapproved of Dante for depicting God as a vengeful judge, whose role was to inflict ingenious punishment (similar to his own Urizen, you can see in the previous part who is this figure ), and these details are his subtle protest. As we can see in poems such as The Garden of Love, Blake himself believed that suppressing desire was a crime.

Cerberus is a monstrous three-headed dog who is guarded the Hell in classical mythology. Here in the Divine Comedy he stands guard over the third circle of Hell. He is always hungry, and it is the gluttons who are punished in this circle.

The Simoniac Pope

Simony is the sin of exploiting one's position in the church to make money, and the eighth Circle of Hell is a chasm containing the popes guilty of this sin. Their punishment is to be thrust upside down in a stone hole, with the soles of their feet on fire.

This picture depicts Pope Nicholas III. Dante has just been ranting against the corruption of the church, and against Nicholas in particular.

Notice how Dante seems to have literally shrunk from fear. Notice also the blue-lighting that gives an atmosphere of unworldly horror to this dynamic picture.

In this picture Dante (standing in the right hand corner) finally meets Beatrice, who is the figure on the chariot. Beatrice was the love of Dante's life, and was the subject of his first collection of poems, Vita Nuova. She died when she was only 25 years old - hence her presence in the afterlife as the central figure of The Divine Comedy.

In the scheme of the poem she is divine revelation and grace.

The rich and bright colours used here express Dante's double delight. He is reunited with his lady-love, and at the same time is experiencing a revelation of the divine.

Vision of the deity

In Paradise Beatrice has replaced Virgil as Dante's guide. They are now close to God, and so nearly at the end of their journey.

This picture shows the angels arranged in concentric circles of light around the deity. Beatrice explains to Dante that the closer to God they stand, the brighter and the more powerful they are. God at the centre is depicted as a bearded old man resembling Urizen .The angels grow older as they get closer to God, although immediately beside Him are the younger Cherubim and Seraphim.

Blake died while working on this commission, so this picture, which comes from the end of Dante's trilogy, remains an unfinished sketch. The loss is less than it might be since Blake (like Gustave Dore and other artists who have illustrated Dante) found that Purgatory and Paradise offer much less interesting subject matter than Hell with all its perverse and bizarre punishments.

Considering the whole work of William Blake, it is difficult to sum up his entire philosophy in a few words. He is a precursor and a visionary author who exerted a great influence on the romanticism movement and also on fantastic literature that appears in the late 19th. More recently we find some noticeable relations with some famous American poets like James Douglas Morrison, more famous as the singer of the rock band The Doors or even with some stories like The Lords of the Rings by Tolkien which offers a fanciful atmosphere very familiar to Blake. Most of all, William Blake is the instigator of the famous novelist Aldous Huxley, well known for his novel Brave New World, whom he inspired an essay called "the doors of perceptions" which is an extract of one of the most famous of Blake’s "proverbs of hell".

His poetry also reveals an extraordinary timeless experience because of its incredible ability to adapt to our times. The struggle between good and evil is a continuing human problematic which is not about to be resolved, especially in regards to the unilateral definition of the "axis of evil" given by Bush’s Administration.  
 

Complete writings, ed. by G. Keynes (rev. ed. 1966)
Letters, ed. by G. Keynes (2d ed. 1968)
Notebook, ed. by D. V. Erdman (1973)
Complete illuminated books, ed. by D. Bindman (2000)
Biographies by M. Wilson, ed. by G. Keynes (3d ed. 1971), and P. Ackroyd (1996)
Studies by K. J. Raine (2 vol., 1968), D. V. Erdman (2d ed. 1969), G. Keynes (2d ed. 1971), D. G. Gillham (1973), D. Wagenknecht (1973), A. K. Mellor (1974), G. E. Bentley, ed. (1975), and J. Witke (1986)
N. Frye, Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (1947)
A. Blunt, The Art of William Blake (1959)
D. V. Erdman and J. E. Grant, ed., Blake's Visionary Forms Dramatic (1970)
R. J. Bertholf and A. S. Levitt, ed., William Blake and the Moderns (1982).