William Blake vs The World Chapter 5 THE TYGERS OF WRATH

William Blake vs The World Chapter 5. THE TYGERS OF WRATH

Author: John Higgs Publisher: New York, NY: Penguin Random House. Publish Date: 2021 Review Date: 2023-2-24 Status:📚

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In 1749, for example, the Genevan philosopher and musician Jean-Jacques Rousseau visited his friend Denis Diderot, who was then held captive in the fortress of Vincennes in Paris. Idly thumbing through a book as he walked, Rousseau was overwhelmed by a wave of inspiration. ‘Suddenly I feel my spirit dazzled by a thousand brilliant insights,’ he later wrote. ‘A host of ideas crowd in upon me all at once, troubling my mind with a force and confusion impossible to express. I feel my head spinning with a giddiness like intoxication. A violent palpitation oppresses and expands my breast.’

The key insight in his vision was that man was born good, and that it was the abuses of our society and institutions which turned him bad. This was a denial of the teaching of the Church, which claimed that we were born in a state of original sin. If it was true that there was no such thing as original sin and that people were born good, it logically followed that the world could be turned into paradise, if we just fixed or replaced our corrupting institutions.

After his vision under the tree in Paris, Rousseau wrote a series of books in which he attempted to express what he had understood in those moments of inspiration. He later lamented that he had only managed to convey a quarter of that revelation, but it was still enough to cause huge upheavals in European politics. ‘Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains,’ began his book On the Social Contract (1762). ‘One thinks himself the master of others, and still remains a greater slave than they.’

As the idea of man’s innate goodness spread through culture, the old established class systems began to appear flawed, and people found themselves entertaining the spectre of revolution. Rousseau’s ideas could not help but impact on Blake, although it should be no surprise by now to learn he would view them from a very different perspective to his contemporaries.

Rousseau died in 1778, over a decade before the French Revolution. He was honoured as one of the great thinkers of the Age of Enlightenment and an architect of the Revolution, and his remains were disinterred and placed in the Panthéon. But for all that he became seen as a great rationalist, and would be mocked by Blake for this reason, his arguments came to him in a single, blinding vision. As he wrote in Emile (1762), ‘The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless.’

In the summer of 1780, at the age of twenty-two, Blake encountered King Mob. He was walking in the vicinity of Basire’s house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields when he found himself engulfed by an angry, violent crowd. This was made up, in Gilchrist’s telling, of ‘boys, pickpockets and “roughs”’, who were ‘flushed with gin and victory’ after destroying a number of Catholic chapels. Swept along by the mass of rioters, Blake found himself at the front of the mob as they surged towards the imposing prison at Newgate. The rioters attacked the gates with sledgehammers and pickaxes. The building was set on fire and the prisoners inside screamed in terror, fearing that they would be burnt alive. Fortunately, the mob swarming the building managed to rip open the roof and drag the prisoners out of their smoking cages. Three hundred convicts were set free, many shuffling off to liberty with their legs still bound in heavy chains. As the historian Christopher Hibbert described the chaos: ‘Showers of sparks and pieces of red-hot metal shot up into the sky as iron bars and flaming beams and great hunks of elaborate masonry tumbled with a “deafening clangor … on to the pavement below.” While all the time the screaming, wild, triumphant figures of the “demoniac assailants” added the final touch of horror to the inferno-like scene.’

On 2 June, around 50,000 Protestants had descended on the Houses of Parliament, to protest at a Catholic relief bill that allowed Catholics to serve in the armed forces. Events quickly turned ugly as protestors abused and beat members of the House of Lords and attacked their carriages. This was the start of a week-long period of the most destructive rioting in London’s history. Catholic churches and the houses of establishment figures were methodically looted, burnt and destroyed, while the prisons and breweries were opened and Irish communities attacked. Each night the flames around the capital ‘got to such a height that the sky was like blood with the reflection of them’, as Lady Anne Erskine wrote in a contemporary letter. By the end of the week, hundreds of bodies had washed up in the Thames and the army were attempting to calm the protests by methodically shooting into crowds.

For Blake, what was significant about the Newgate burning was not the politics that drove it, but the terrifying adrenaline rush of the experience. He knew that the fire of revolution burns to some extent within all of us. It is the will to overthrow, to destroy, and to wipe the current situation from the face of history. King Mob usually sleeps, but he still dwells within our psyches.

Blake’s response was to personify this aspect of us. He gave this spirit the name Orc. Orc plays a prominent role in the work Blake produced during the revolutionary 1790s, from his illustrated manuscripts to watercolours such as Los and Orc (c.1792–3).

Orc’s arrival coincided with an important development in Blake’s art. Like other artists and writers of the time, his early work relied heavily on established mythology and characters taken from classical or biblical sources. From around 1790 onwards, however, a new mythology of his own devising starts to emerge. Although he is not specifically named, the ‘new born terror howling’ born in the last section of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790) is usually interpreted as Orc. It is not hard to imagine that Blake’s experience at Newgate had a profound influence on how he was depicted. He describes how a king was confronted by the newly born spirit of revolution and:

[…] hurl’d the new born wonder thro’ the stary night.

The fire, the fire, is falling!

Look up! look up! O citizen of London […]

The fiery limbs, the flaming hair, shot like the sinking sun into the western sea.

Wak’d from his eternal sleep, the hoary element roaring fled away:

Down rushd beating his wings in vain the jealous king: his grey brow’d councellors, thunderous warriors, curl’d veterans, among helms, and shields, and chariots horses, elephants: banners, castles, slings and rocks,

Falling, rushing, ruining! buried in the ruins […]

crying

Empire is no more! and now the lion & wolf shall cease.

Orc is fire, violence and destruction, because that is what is needed to overthrow the ‘lion & wolf’, or the king and his armies. In a few short years the French ruling dynasty would find this out for themselves.

Orc appears in several of Blake’s works written or begun in the 1790s, including America, Europe, The Book of Urizen and The Four Zoas. Like the rest of Blake’s mythology, the story of this character must be pieced together from multiple different works which can often be contradictory. It is not the case that Blake conceived of his immense mythology as a complete, perfect thing, and then spent decades recording it. Rather, he was constantly trying to understand the energies that these characters represented. He did this by placing them in differing combinations, to observe and record their conflicts.

Orc was frequently explored as the contrary of Urizen, because the engine of progress was often powered by the dynamic struggle between ordered convention and the fire of revolution. Orc was also the serpent in the Garden of Eden, tempting Eve by recognising her repressed desire for power and knowledge. Orc is deeply anti-authoritarian. He justifies his furious destruction on the grounds that it is the only way we can overthrow what keeps us down and prevents us from reaching our true potential.

In The Four Zoas (1797–1807), Orc was bound by his parents on top of a mountain with a ‘Chain of Jealousy’. His limbs, the rock, the chain and the vegetation all knotted together, permanently trapping him physically, but leaving his fiery imagination free to spread throughout the world. The binding of an energy was, for Blake, always a tragedy, but he recognised and understood the necessity of suppressing Orc’s revolutionary fire. He also knew that an energy like Orc would always burn itself out in time.

Blake’s examination of Orc in his writing was an attempt to discover where the desire for revolt came from. Orc was the child of Los, who represents the imagination, and Enitharmon, who represents spiritual beauty. In theory, Orc should be the creation of something new and wonderful. But Orc, having been bound by those ‘chains of Jealousy’, was repressed or in shadow. As a result, he is the process by which love turns to war. In one account, the children of Los and Enitharmon are said to be characters representing wrath, pity, frustrated desire and logic. These, Blake suggests, are the constituent elements of Orc, the fiery spirit of revolution.

It wasn’t that Blake was against revolution; he was delighted to see the people of France take power from King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. On one occasion he wore a red bonnet to show support for the republican cause, a risky act in those paranoid times. As he wrote, ‘The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.’ But for all that revolutions can sweep away the unjust and the tyrannical and can be necessary and unavoidable, they also have a dark aftermath. In practice, revolutions typically lead to a power vacuum which results in bloodshed and the rise of a powerful military leader, such as Napoleon or Cromwell. From Blake’s accounts of Orc, we see that he understood this process clearly.

Blake had a far more profound and nuanced understanding of revolution than most of his contemporaries. The young Wordsworth visited Paris and famously eulogised the French Revolution: ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive / But to be young was very Heaven!’ Enraptured, Wordsworth looked at the political upheaval with only hope and excitement. As a result, he was entirely unprepared for the Reign of Terror that followed. He responded by rejecting his earlier politics and came to value tradition and stability over calls for social justice that might lead to revolution.

Blake’s understanding was different. He was not as concerned with the immediate political results of revolution, seeing it, like everything else, as the expression of mental energies. His primary interest was in the root causes of this part of our minds. Having a deeper understanding of its cause, he was more prepared for the darkness of its fallout.

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The result of looking to the Bible as the source of authority turned out to be the creation of countless different sects. Amid this confusion, some radical thinkers started to argue that the Bible itself shouldn’t be thought of as the ultimate authority. Instead, we needed to look to the divine light within us for guidance. Because we needed to be free to listen to our hearts if we were to hear the Word of God, liberty of conscience became an issue of fundamental importance. For some groups, such as the Quakers or the Family of Love, this meant that the scriptures could only be properly understood by believers for whom the spirit of God lives within. Others went further and argued that, so long as you were moved by the divine spirit, the scriptures were not necessary and neither were priests and bishops. The visionary preacher Theaurau John Tany burnt the Bible at St George’s Fields in the winter of 1654, arguing that ‘the people say it is the Word of God, and it is not’. It is here, in the arguments of seventeenth-century theology, that the spark of individualism took hold.

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To believe in individual conscience and to experience the light within was to realise that you were free. For the first time, people no longer had to worry about priests, magic, hell or even sin. A person who experiences the nature of Christ, this argument claimed, was incapable of sin. They were no longer bound by the ‘Moral Law’ of the Ten Commandments. Before Christ, people needed this Law in order to understand how to behave because they did not know any better – or so the thinking went. The Moral Law may have been a blunt tool, but it was a necessary part of Old Testament society. But once Jesus had entered the hearts of men, they knew what was good and how to behave without being told. At this point, the Moral Law became irrelevant. Some argued that for a true believer all law was irrelevant, both religious and secular. This position was called antinomianism, which means ‘against law’. There is a strong antinomian streak in the work of William Blake.

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Once theologians set off down this road, it led to some radical conclusions. Some denied the existence of sin altogether and claimed that it had been invented by priests and kings in order to keep men subjugated. Others practised what they preached and took the antinomian argument to the logical extreme. Being free from law and incapable of sin, they were free to indulge in as much drinking, sex, feasting, smoking and sport as possible, and made a point of doing so publicly. In this tradition, religious gatherings were frequently held in taverns. ‘To be called a libertine is the most glorious title under heaven,’ wrote the London-born antinomian clergyman Tobias Crisp. ‘If you be freemen of Christ, you may esteem all the curses of the law as no more concerning you than the laws of England concern Spain.’ As Crisp saw things, ‘sin is finished’. A similar attitude is found in the introduction to Blake’s epic poem Jerusalem. Here he writes, ‘The Spirit of Jesus is continual forgiveness of Sin: he who waits to be righteous before he enters into the Saviours kingdom, the Divine Body, will never enter there. I am perhaps the most sinful of men! I pretend not to holiness! yet I pretend to love, to see, to converse.’

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In the words of the Lancashire preacher Lawrence Clarkson, ‘There is no such act as drunkenness, adultery and theft in God […] What act so ever is done by thee in light and love, is light and lovely, though it be that act called adultery […] No matter what Scripture, saints or churches say, if that within thee do not condemn thee, thou shalt not be condemned.’ It is possible that there were some who made this argument who did not genuinely feel the light of Christ within themselves.

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Although the name is very loosely defined in theological terms, those who favoured these extreme views were referred to as Ranters – usually by their enemies. They were frequently held up as a warning against heretical thought, even if a grudging admiration can sometimes be detected among the criticism. ‘They are the merriest of devils for extempore lascivious songs […] for healths, music, downright bawdry and dancing’, explained one Puritan with perhaps a hint of jealousy. Blasphemy and swearing were great favourites of the Ranters, for they were a symbolic expression of freedom from social constraints and the liberty of conscience. The Ranter and writer Abiezer Coppe is said to have sworn for a solid hour in the pulpit. In 1652, a lady stripped naked during a service in the chapel at Whitehall while shouting, ‘Welcome the resurrection!’ In the heady atmosphere of the times, pigs and horses were heretically baptised. The Wiltshire rector Thomas Webbe, who had long shaggy hair and enjoyed music and mixed dancing, is said to have declared that ‘there’s no heaven but women, nor no hell save marriage’. He made this claim in his defence during his trial for adultery, for which he faced the death sentence.

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It is in the ideas of the Ranters and their ilk that we find a tradition for the political views of Blake. Many historians have been confused to find those concepts still in circulation well over a century after their time. Much of our knowledge about these radical beliefs comes from a period between 1640 and 1660, when censorship broke down and subversive ideas were able to be published as cheap, popular pamphlets. After the monarchy was restored in 1660 and Charles II took the throne, extreme ideas like these seem to drop away from the historical record.

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There are many reasons for this change, most obviously the desire for calm after the bloodshed of the civil wars. In the late seventeenth century, those listening to their inner light were unsurprised to find that it began to counsel pacifism. Unlike other religious heretics, the Ranters and radicals who were arrested and tried proved to be quite willing to recant their beliefs, if it meant they would not be put to death. Theirs was not a philosophy that pushed people towards martyrdom.

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Some groups, such as the Quakers, moved away from their radical roots and gradually became respectable. Most Ranters were anarchistic individuals only loosely tied to established organisations, so it was easy for them to disappear. Society moved on from the austere Puritan years, for example by reopening the theatres, and Britain became more liberal and less judgemental. In this atmosphere, it was easy for ex-radicals to rejoin the established Church of England, which did not concern itself too deeply with the actual beliefs of its members. The Toleration Act, which became law in May 1689, granted a whole range of nonconformists the freedom to worship as their conscience dictated, just so long as they weren’t atheists or Catholics. English Protestantism concluded that it would be better to be a broad church than a shattered and divided one. After the Restoration, the English radical tradition, at least as far as the establishment was concerned, simply faded away.

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And yet, we find those ideas alive and well in the work of Blake over a century later. For example, the Family of Love, who were founded by the sixteenth-century mystic Henry Nicholas, preached that heaven and hell were to be found in this world, not the next. A group called the Family of the Mount rejected prayer and also thought that heaven and hell only existed in life. As far as they were concerned, heaven was when people laughed, and hell was sorrow, pain and grief. Groups such as the Anabaptists and the Diggers believed that all men were alike and that any differences between masters and servants were essentially manmade delusions with no religious support. The fourteenth-century English preacher John Ball was enthusiastically quoted during this time. In a sermon during the Peasants’ Revolt, Ball had asked, ‘When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?’ The Digger Gerrard Winstanley equated heaven with mankind. As he wrote: ‘There is no man or woman who needs to go to Rome nor to hell below ground, as some talk, to find the Pope, Devil, Beast or power of darkness; neither to go up into heaven above the skies to find Christ the word of life. For both these powers are to be felt within a man, fighting against each other.’ These are all profoundly Blakean ideas.

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The English radical tradition itself makes a good analogy to this situation. Many British people who were educated about history at school, and consume stories of British history through books and television, have never heard of the English radical tradition. It sits in the blind spot of establishment media, which is far more enthused about Tudors, Victorians and the Second World War. Yet it continues to this day, and can be found wherever politics and spirituality intersect, especially regarding issues of land ownership and popular authority. The writer C. J. Stone has traced the English radical tradition from the Diggers and Levellers of the seventeenth century, through Blake, and onwards through individuals like the socialist druid George Watson MacGregor Reid in the early twentieth century to the counterculture festivals founded in the 1970s.

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The spirit of open-minded exploration and freedom of thought that Johnson’s circle promoted was not of great interest to Blake. He did not need debate and conversation to help form his opinions. He already knew exactly what his position was. Socially he could be blunt or stubborn. He believed wholeheartedly in his own truth and did not see the need to discuss, test or refine his ideas. As he later explained, ‘When I tell the truth, it is not for the sake of convincing those who do not know it, but for the sake of defending those that do.’

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As far as Blake was concerned, the external world was an echo of the internal world. If you wanted to understand the politics of the material world, it was necessary to understand the energies of the mind. His works that appeared at first to analyse global history, such as America a Prophecy (1793) or Europe a Prophecy (1794), were as much concerned with his own mythological personifications of mental states as they were with actual history. Blake was focused on his own reactions to global politics, rather than the details of the events themselves. To an extent, this is true of all political commentators, whether they recognise it or not. There are, however, degrees to which people focus on the outer and inner worlds. When Mary Wollstonecraft decided to write about the French Revolution, she travelled to Paris and risked her own life to observe events as they were happening. When Blake wrote about the French Revolution, he stayed home and looked inside himself. It may be tempting to mock his approach, but it produced some remarkable insights. His analysis of the impulses behind revolution, in the form of his character Orc, is a good example.

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Blake toiled away with his metal plates, acid and printing presses. He alludes to this practice in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, explaining his vision ‘by printing in the infernal method, by corrosives, which in Hell are salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid. If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.’

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As Blake saw it, his printing technique was a way to bring text from the eternal realm into the world of man. By dissolving the metal, he was revealing the infinity hidden within. In the same work he describes a ‘mighty Devil’, who we can easily interpret as Blake himself, using this technique to give infernal wisdom to humanity: I saw a mighty Devil, folded in black clouds, hovering on the sides of the rock: with corroding fires he wrote the following sentence now perceived by the minds of men, & read by them on earth. How do you know but ev’ry Bird that cuts the airy way, Is an immense world of delight, clos’d by your senses five?

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Steeped in the antinomian tradition, Blake had escaped from the belief that other people had authority over him. He referred to such societal constrictions as the ‘mind forg’d manacles’ which keep so many of us down. Those who recognise no masters or leaders must lead themselves and take responsibility for their own life. By taking control of every aspect of the creation, production and publication of his works, Blake was free from compromise. He could express himself freely, constrained only by his own abilities.

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Because the exercising of his creative abilities was so important to Blake, it is not surprising that a personified form of it has such a prominent role in his personal mythology. In his work, the character who represents the expression of the imagination in this world is known as Los. Typically portrayed as a blacksmith, Los is said to be endlessly labouring with his hammer at the furnace, constructing a city of art known as Golgonooza. This sense of creative effort as hard physical labour without end, forged by sweat, fire and determination, stands in contrast to images of refined aristocratic poets being visited by the graceful muses. It is, however, an apt description of Blake spending his entire life working with metal and acids.

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The creation of art, as Los represents it, is not a pleasing pastime or mild entertainment. It is hard and necessary; it is the only way in which our world can be redeemed. In Jerusalem, Blake describes both himself and Los when he writes:

Trembling I sit day and night, my friends are astonish’d at me.

Yet they forgive my wanderings, I rest not from my great task!

To open the Eternal Worlds, to open the immortal Eyes

Of Man inwards into the Worlds of Thought: into Eternity

Ever expanding in the Bosom of God. the Human Imagination

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Los can be seen as the hero of many of Blake’s works, and his selfless labours are ultimately the cause of mankind’s redemption, as we shall see. Los is smart and insightful, and he understands the nature of all, including himself. He knows, for example, that he exists in the human mind. In The Four Zoas, Los states that:

Tho in the Brain of Man we live, & in his circling Nerves.

Tho’ this bright world of all our joy is in the Human Brain.

Where Urizen & all his Hosts hang their immortal lamps

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Blake’s politics were encapsulated by Los. They existed in what he created. He may have had great empathy with the poor, but he did not spend his days working to better their situation. Instead, he believed that the imagination was the tool needed to improve society, and that the labours of Los would do more to liberate people than canvassing or protesting. To do this would take integrity, self-belief, and effort.

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It is here that we find the strongest expression of Blake’s politics. True politics are not ideologies to discuss, but an attitude to your relationship with the world which is enacted in your daily life. Your politics are not what you tell yourself you believe. They are not the set of ideas that you identify with, or look to for personal validation of your goodness as a human being. Your politics are expressed in the choices that you make, the way you treat other people, and the actions you perform. It is here that hypocrisy and vanity fall away, as the reality of your politics is revealed in the countless decisions that you make every day. Who you work for, whether you volunteer for charity work, if you become a landlord, whether you eat meat, the extent to which you pursue money and consumer goods – these are the types of decisions in which our true politics are expressed.

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On a practical level, Blake needed commercial engraving work to keep a roof over his head. But he also needed to be free of compromise when it came to his own work. He produced his art as an individualist antinomian, asking no permission, answering to nobody – a position that we have come to understand better over the past couple of centuries. In Blake’s time, however, these were radical politics indeed.

Notes

Amount: 3

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