Blake’s Tone

Letters

Vol. 15 No. 4 · 25 February 1993

From John Grant

E.P. Thompson’s judiciously favourable review of Jon Mee’s Dangerous Enthusiasm (LRB, 28 January) is a bracing performance. Thompson found it necessary to remind readers of such tones as the seven forms of ‘humour and humour’s neighbours’ used by Blake – ‘polemic, irony, expostulation, mockery, hyperbole, provocation, abuse’. As Thompson says, these tones are too little acknowledged or emulated in academic writings such as Mee’s book. It was odd, though, that Thompson should have endorsed a pronouncement in the now twenty-year-old disquisition by F.R. Leavis, ‘Justifying one’s valuation of Blake’. This egregiously-titled essay declared ‘none of [Blake’s] elaborated prophetic works … a successful work of art’. Thompson indicated he has never heard anything that would persuade him otherwise.

Any attempt to vindicate Blake’s art in The Book of Urizen requires recognition of the differences between illuminated books and text-poems that lack a visual dimension; the ear, however acute, cannot by itself discern the tone of the Lambeth Book. Even at his best, Leavis would not have known where to begin such a discussion. Whether Thompson will be able to do better in his forthcoming Blake book we shall have to see. His review is reassuring insofar as it demolishes Mee’s claim that Blake was ‘a bricoleur’.

Some of Blake’s illuminated writings, however, can stand even when divested of their accompanying designs. Given his responsiveness to humour and its congeners, Thompson might be expected to exempt The Marriage of Heaven and Hell from the Leavisite strictures – though there was no dication that Leavis himself knew how to recognise tins ‘elaborated’ work as successful satire and, it must be added, there is no sign in Mee’s book that he is able to recognise satire when he sees it. Interested readers will find that Michael Ferber’s The Poetry of William Blake contains an honest Left-originating analysis of The Marriage that is not tone-deaf to the text and is also aware of the pictures. Ferber reads the brilliant book that Blake wrote.

I find it difficult to believe that Thompson himself has recently re-read ‘Leavis’s remarkable essay, “Justifying one’s valuation of Blake’ ”. Whether some of Blake’s prophecies are successful works of art might still be debated, but what justification can there now be for putting forward Leavis’s awful self-indulgent oration as an effective work of criticism? By representing himself, FRL the Great, as ‘one’ for pages on end, that author projected himself as a very model of donnish presumption, issuing value judgments he wouldn’t condescend to support. There was also pathos in the spectacle of the author of Revaluation being manifestly over-the-hill. For Leavis it was then too late to do more than argue with T.S. Eliot, read aloud a few good lyrics, and make pronouncements. Thank goodness Thompson remains sensitive to important elements of ‘Blake’s Tone’ and says things about it that haven’t yet entered the consciousness of younger academic critics.

John Grant
Iowa City, Iowa

From Keith Flett

It is thirty years since Edward Thompson first published The Making of the English Working Class, and while the phrase he uses to criticise what Post-Modernism has tried to do to William Blake, ‘the somewhat attenuated discourse of analytic academicism’, is perhaps not quite on a level with ‘the enormous condescension of posterity’, we may give thanks that Thompson’s brain is razor sharp still and that, unlike some of his contemporaries, he has never been bought off by academic life or cheap fame in the press. Where, however, are the Edward Thompsons for the Nineties and beyond?

Keith Flett
London N17

Vol. 15 No. 5 · 11 March 1993

From Kenneth Muir

I was present when Leavis delivered his lecture on Blake at a conference in York and I asked him if he would not allow that The Marriage of Heaven and Hell was an artistic success (Letters, 25 February). He agreed, but continued to dismiss all the other prophetic books. This shocked me. In 1930 John Masefield had arranged a celebration of Blake in his Boar’s Hill Music Room. It included a performance of The Ghost of Abel and a dramatic recital of the last section of Jerusalem, in both of which I was lucky to take part. To everyone’s surprise the latter was a great success and the audience found it as comprehensible as the Bible to which it owes so much.

Kenneth Muir
Birkenhead

Vol. 15 No. 6 · 25 March 1993

From Jon Mee

In the light of recent comments on my failure to read the humour in Blake (LRB, 28 January and 25 February), your readers may be amused to find out that I am presently working on an anthology of popular satire and parody 1792-1822.

Academia: it’s a larf, innit.

Jon Mee
Australian National University, Canberra