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DAVID FALLON
Blake, Myth, and

Enlightenment
The Politics of Apotheosis
Blake, Myth, and Enlightenment
David Fallon
Blake, Myth, and

Enlightenment
The Politics of Apotheosis
David Fallon
University of Sunderland, UK
ISBN 978-1-137-39034-9 ISBN 978-1-137-39035-6 (eBook)

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-39035-6
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016957727
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work
in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the pub-
lisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the
material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made.
Cover illustration: William Blake after Henry Fuseli, The Fertilization of Egypt. From
Erasmus Darwin, The Botanic Garden (London: J. Johnson, 1791).
Printed on acid-free paper
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

The registered company is Macmillan Publishers Ltd.
The registered company address is: The Campus, 4 Crinan Street, London, N1 9XW,
United Kingdom
Acknowledgements
This monograph began as a doctoral thesis supervised by Professor Jon

Mee, whose critical acumen, generosity, knowledge, encouragement, and
humour, both during and after the doctorate, have been inspiring. My
examiners Saree Makdisi and Fiona Stafford astutely identified areas need-
ing development. Rigorous comments from Palgrave’s reader forced me
to sharpen my argument, engage further with recent Blake criticism, and
clarify important issues.
I was lucky enough to receive an Arts and Humanities Research
Council doctoral award that made the project possible, and was assisted
in doctoral research with contributions from the University College Old
Members’ Trust and the English Faculty Meyerstein Fund. I carried out
additional work during a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at St
Anne’s College, Oxford. I am grateful to the Faculty of Education and
Society and the Culture and Regional Studies Beacon at the University of
Sunderland, which provided some much-needed marking relief during the
final revisions.
At University College, Oxford, I was fortunate to study alongside a
sociable cohort of doctoral students, with whom I enjoyed visits to The
Gardener’s Arms on Plantation Road. Mark Crosby, David O’Shaughnessy,
and Nandini Pandey all provided advice on this project. In Newcastle,
Claudine Van Hensbergen and Anton Caruana Galizia, Eliza O’Brien and
David Stewart, as well as the North East Forum in Eighteenth-Century
and Romantic Studies, have been great company and helped keep me in
touch with research.
v
vi Acknowledgements
I’m grateful to students at Oxford, Warwick, Bath ASE, and Sunderland,

during whose teaching many ideas bubbled up or simmered away. Thanks
to staff at the Bodleian Library, the British Library, the British Museum,
Cambridge University Library, the Huntington Library, Newcastle
Lit and Phil, Newcastle University Library, Tate Britain, the Society of
Antiquaries, and Sunderland University Library. Sadly Vera Ryhajlo, who
cheered my days in the Bodleian, cannot see the finished product.
My work benefited from many people’s generous help. They include:
Kate Barush, Helen Bruder, Luisa Calè, Steve Clark, Pamela Clemit,
Tristanne Connolly, Penelope Corfield, Keri Davies, Leon Day, Hermione
de Almeida, Sibylle Erle, Robert Essick, Mary Fairclough, Michael
Farrell, Joe Fletcher, Kevin Gilmartin, James Grande, Edmund Green,
Sarah Haggarty, Tim Heath and the Blake Society, Holger Hoock, Gavin
Hopps, Sebastian Kalhat-Pocicovic, Andrew Lambert, Kristin Lindfield-
Ott, Jeff Mertz, Dudley North, Karen O’Brien, Bronwyn Ormsby, Alex
Pheby, Michael Phillips, Chris Rowland, Jon Roberts, Jon Shears, Nick
Shrimpton, Susan Sklar, Angela Smith, Kate Tunstall, Susan Valladares,
Caroline Warman, Tim Webb, Andy Wells, Jason Whittaker, Angus
Whitehead, and David Worrall.
The editorial team at Palgrave were magnificently supportive. Ben
Doyle and Tomas René showed incredible patience as I struggled to finish
the manuscript in trying circumstances. Sections of the text appeared in
early form in Eighteenth-Century Life, Literature Compass, and Blake and
Conflict, and I am grateful to the editors and anonymous readers for their
advice. Jon Mee, David O’Shaughnessy, and Susan Matthews provided
helpful comments on draft chapters and gave much-needed pointers and
reassurance. Errors in the book are my own, or those of my poor Spectre.
Thanks to my family, Mum, Dad, Geraint, and Bethan, for all their
love, encouragement, inspiration, and support over the years. It has been
a pleasure to be accepted into a second family: Günter, Claudia, Ruth, and
Florian Gottmann. Finally, I dedicate the book to the wonderful Felicia
Gottmann, whose love and friendship enlighten every day. Clio Fallon
leapt into the dangerous world whilst I was finishing the book: sweet joy
befall thee!
Contents
1 Introduction: ‘A Saint Amongst the Infidels & a

Heretic with the Orthodox’ 1
2 ‘The Deep Indelible Stain’: Apotheosis in the Eighteenth

Century 31
3 ‘Spirits of Fire’: Ambiguous Figures in The French

Revolution 63
4 ‘Breathing! Awakening!’: Contesting and Transforming

Apotheosis in America a Prophecy 89
5 ‘The Night of Holy Shadows’: Europe and Loyalist

Reaction 123
6 ‘Serpentine Dissimulation’: Apotheosis in Urizen,

Ahania, and The Song of Los 163
7 ‘The Name of the Wicked Shall Rot’: Blake’s Oriental

Apotheoses of Nelson and Pitt 193
vii
viii Contents
8 Transforming Apotheosis in The Four Zoas and Milton 225
9 ‘Ever Expanding in the Bosom of God’: Deification

and Apotheosis in Jerusalem 251
10 Conclusion 285
Bibliography 299
Index 325
Abbreviations
BB G. E. Bentley, Jr., Blake Books. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977.

BD S. Foster Damon, A Blake Dictionary. London: Thames and Hudson, 1973
[1965].
BIB Joseph Viscomi, Blake and the Idea of the Book. Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1994.
BMC Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires in the Department of Prints
and Drawings in the British Museum. Edited by Fredrick George
Stephens and M. Dorothy George, 11 vols. London: 1870–1954.
Caricatures are identified by the catalogue number.
BPAE David V. Erdman, Blake: Prophet Against Empire, 3rd ed. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1977 [1954].
BR G. E. Bentley, Jr., Blake Records, 2nd ed. New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2004.
BT Leslie Tannenbaum, Biblical Tradition in Blake’s Early Prophecies: The
Great Code of Art. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982.
CP The Continental Prophecies, William Blake’s Illuminated Books, vol. 4.
Edited by Detlef W. Dörrbecker. London: William Blake Trust and Tate
Gallery, 1998.
DE Jon Mee, Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of
Radicalism in the 1790s. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992.
E The Complete Poetry & Prose of William Blake. Edited by David
V. Erdman with Commentary by Harold Bloom, rev. ed. New York:
Anchor, 1988 [1965].
ix
x Abbreviations
EI Morton Paley, Energy and the Imagination: A Study of the Development

of Blake’s Thought. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970.
FS Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1969 [1947].
IB David V. Erdman, The Illuminated Blake: William Blake’s Complete
Illuminated Works with a Plate-by-plate Commentary, red. ed. New York:
Dover, 1992 [1974].
J Jerusalem, William Blake’s Illuminated Books, vol. 1. Edited by Morton
D. Paley. London: William Blake Trust and Tate Gallery, 1996.
M Milton, William Blake’s Illuminated Books, vol. 5. Edited by Joseph
Viscomi and Robert Essick. London: William Blake Trust and Tate
Gallery, 1998.
N The Notebook of William Blake: A Photographic and Typographic
Facsimile. Edited by David V. Erdman and Donald K. Moore. Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1973.
PD The Paintings and Drawings of William Blake. Edited by Martin Butlin,
2 vols. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981. Numbers for Volume
I refer to images rather than catalogue entries, while those for Volume
II refer to the commentary page numbers.
RM The Riverside Milton. Edited by Roy Flanagan. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1998. All quotations from Milton are from this edition.
UB The Urizen Books, William Blake’s Illuminated Books, vol. 6. Edited by
David Worrall. London: William Blake Trust and Tate Gallery, 1998.
List of Figures
Fig. 1.1 William Blake, The Bard. From The Poems of Thomas Gray (1797).
Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection 22
Fig. 4.1 Cetus from John Flamsteed, Atlas Coelestis (1729). The Lit
and Phil, Newcastle 93
Fig. 4.2 America, Copy E, Plate 6. Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection,
Library of Congress. Copyright © 2015 William Blake
Archive94
Library of Congress. Copyright © 2015 William Blake Archive 107
Library of Congress. Copyright © 2015 William Blake Archive 109
Fig. 5.1 Europe, Copy A, Plate 6. Yale Center for British Art, Paul
Mellon Collection 129
Fig. 5.2 Virgo from John Flamsteed, Atlas Coelestis (1729). The Lit
and Phil, Newcastle 130
Fig. 5.3 Cassiopeia from Johannis Hevelli, Firmamentum Sobiescianum
sive Uranographia (1690). Linda Hall Library of Science,
Engineering & Technology 133
Fig. 5.5 Eridanus from Johannis Hevelli, Firmamentum Sobiescianum
sive Uranographia (1690). Linda Hall Library of Science,
Engineering & Technology 141
Fig. 5.6 Polus Antarcticus from Johannis Hevelli, Firmamentum
Sobiescianum sive Uranographia (1690). Linda Hall Library of
Science, Engineering & Technology 142
xi
xii List of Figures
Fig. 7.1 John Flaxman, Horatio, Viscount Nelson. St Paul’s Cathedral,
London. Conway Library, The Courtauld Institute of Art,
London204
Fig. 7.2 The Spiritual Form of Nelson Guiding Leviathan (c.1805–9).
Tate Britain. © Tate, London 2015 206
Fig. 7.3 The Spiritual Form of Nelson Guiding Leviathan. The
Burlington Magazine 26 (January 1915) 207
Fig. 7.4 Ophiuchus from John Flamsteed, Atlas Coelestis (1729). The
Lit and Phil, Newcastle 208
Fig. 7.5 The Spiritual Form of Pitt Guiding Behemoth (c.1806–9).
Tate Britain. © Tate, London 2015 214
Fig. 10.1 Laocoön, copy B (c.1826–27). Collection of Robert
N. Essick. Copyright © 2015 William Blake Archive. Used
with permission 289
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: ‘A Saint Amongst the Infidels

& a Heretic with the Orthodox’
In 1855, John Linnell recollected Blake’s paradoxical opinions on reli-

gion. Linnell believed Blake often made tactical responses depending on
the immediate context:
A saint amongst the infidels & a heretic with the orthodox[,] with all the
admiration for Blake it must be confessed that he said many things tend-
ing to the corruption of Xtian morals—even when unprovoked by contro-
versy[;] & when opposed by the superstitious the crafty or the proud he
outraged all common sense & rationality by the opinions he advanced occa-
sionally even indulging in the support of the most lax interpretation of the
precepts of the scripture[.]1
The first phrase captures the strange doubleness of Blake’s works. Two
aspects of his dubious attitudes are salient: firstly, his vehement opposition
to ‘the superstitious’, a consistent stimulus to irascible criticism through-
out his oeuvre; secondly, the connection of his contradictory piety and
infidelity with his approach to interpretation. Blake’s texts strategically
respond to the political, intellectual, and spiritual history of his own time
and, while conditioned by the context out of which they emerged, also
seek to transform it.
This book explores Blake’s tangled relationship to Enlightenment
thought, especially in his engagement with myth. On the one hand,
he employed Enlightenment critical practices which aimed to liberate
humans from myths that sustained superstition and tyrannical authority;
© The Author(s) 2017 1

D. Fallon, Blake, Myth, and Enlightenment,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-39035-6_1
2 BLAKE, MYTH, AND ENLIGHTENMENT
on the other, he remained positively invested in myth as an affirmation and

expression of the creative and active energies of a free people. These two
positions remain in tension throughout his oeuvre. The account of Blake’s
approach to myth that follows is informed by Paul Ricoeur’s model of the
‘conflict of interpretations’, in which interpretation involves productive
tension between a ‘hermeneutic of suspicion’ that strips away illusions
and ‘hermeneutics as the restoration of meaning’ associated with faith.
Ricoeur proposes that, ultimately, ‘extreme iconoclasm’ may be an inte-
gral part of a broader ‘restoration of meaning’.2 This book argues that not
only is there a rich heritage of Enlightenment critical thought in Blake’s
texts that can be equated with a hermeneutic of suspicion, but also that it
is in tension with (and even enables) his emphatic mythical and spiritual
vision. The productive coexistence of these two impulses is what makes
these works so distinctive and challenging.
‘Plac’d in the Order of the Stars’

The subtitle of this book brings a specific focus to Blake’s philosophy, art,
and politics. Samuel Johnson defined apotheosis in his Dictionary of the
English Language (1755) as ‘Deification; the rite of adding any one to the
number of the gods’.3 This definition allows for two related pagan beliefs:
firstly, the flight of the soul up to the heavens, usually after the body’s
death; secondly, the elevation of a human into a deity whilst living. The
latter is more technically termed entheosis, but during the long eighteenth
century apotheosis tended to denote both forms of transformation. The
classic form of apotheosis involved the soul of a deceased hero, leader, or
benefactor becoming a star or constellation. In Polymetis (1747), Joseph
Spence described an ancient Roman form of this belief:
There were great numbers of heroes that were supposed to have been
received into some part or other of the heavens, either as stars themselves,
or inhabiting or presiding over stars, and might very well all be considered
as divinities.4
More broadly, the term apotheosis comprises a philosophical and religious

idea, a genre in art, a trope in literature, and, especially, a mythological
object for critique. Focusing upon it helps to elucidate Blake’s engage-
ment with Enlightenment thought and its relation to his mythical mode
of expression.
INTRODUCTION 3
It may seem surprising to focus on the term ‘apotheosis’, which Blake

used just once. In advance of his 1809 exhibition, his advertisement
foregrounded three works, including ‘Two pictures, representing grand
Apotheoses of NELSON and PITT’ (E527). Nevertheless, apotheosis is
a recurrent image and idea throughout Blake’s oeuvre. As I will demon-
strate in Chapter 7 this apparently casual reference to his paintings actually
encodes a dense network of mythological and political meaning, realised
in his bizarre depictions of national heroes immortalised as constellations.
Ferber has observed that Blake ‘embodies many of his chief themes in
terms of stars, moons, meteors, clouds, and nearly everything else that
inhabits the sky “above” us’.5 Critics have usually regarded Blake’s astro-
nomical and astrological images as part of his demonisation of Newton’s
mechanical model of the universe, although Worrall, Miner, and Squibbs
have noted Blake’s attention to astronomical details, which he incorpo-
rates in his texts as components in their structures of meaning.6 I will
develop these insights further, by linking Blake’s celestial symbolism with
the contexts of eighteenth-century mythography and enlightened dis-
course on primitive religions, as well as the politics of his time.
The narrator of Milton (c.1804–11) warns his reader ‘Seek not thy
heavenly father […] beyond the skies’ (20[22]:32, E114). Nevertheless,
Blake associated his own prophetic visions with the firmament. Writing to
John Flaxman on 12 September 1800, he included a poetic intellectual
autobiography:
Now my lot in the Heavens is this; Milton lovd me in childhood & shewd me
his face
Ezra came with Isaiah the Prophet, but Shakespeare in riper years gave me
his hand
Paracelsus &Behmen appeard to me. terrors appeard in the Heavens above
And in Hell beneath & a mighty & awful change threatend the Earth
The American War began All its dark horrors passed before my face
Across the Atlantic to France. Then the French Revolution commencd in
thick clouds. (E707–8)
The perception of these political revolutions as ‘terrors’ in ‘the Heavens

above’ reflects Blake’s recourse to astronomical and astrological language
to describe momentous contemporary events. In his prophetic poetry of
the 1790s in particular, he used the tropes and figures of apotheosis to
represent the erosion of the elevated authority of kings, aristocrats, and
state priests by revolutionary forces. Notably, Blake connects his visionary
reading to his perception of global political upheaval. Mystical language

and metaphor, rather than ends in themselves, provided a repertoire of
mythological figures through which he could interpret and represent the
turmoil of his own time.
Blake’s critical engagement with apotheosis is, however, complicated by
a recurring sense of its transformative potential. This is exemplified when,
in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (c.1790–93), a proverb pronounces
that ‘He whose face gives no light, shall never become a star’ (5, E35). In
the chapters that follow, I will trace Blake’s attempts to incorporate this
potential in his poems, alongside their many critical deflations of regal and
aristocratic apotheosis.
Blake, Blake Critics, and Enlightenment

Traditionally, Blake is an exemplary Romantic opponent of the
Enlightenment. It is not difficult to find evidence for this. Jerusalem
(1804–c.1820) is full of vigorous assaults on England’s fathers of the
Enlightenment, ‘Bacon & Newton & Locke’ (70:15, E224). If for Blake
‘the Human Imagination […] is the Divine Vision & Fruition | In which
Man liveth eternally’ (32:19–20, E132), then it seems self-evident that he
would reject the Enlightenment’s sceptical philosophy and atheism.7 His
antagonism towards the Enlightenment has been a well-worn critical
touchstone, with its origins in nineteenth-century commentary. It became
especially prominent after Frye’s Fearful Symmetry (1947), which crystal-
lises its argument around Blake’s attack on deism and his transcendence
of ‘The Orc Cycle’, a recurrent narrative of revolution turning into tyr-
anny. Frye embedded Blake in a Romantic tectonic rupture from ‘the
Augustan millennium’, ‘an age of reason and common sense’: ‘He hated
its enlightened philosophers Locke and Voltaire’ and ‘its elegantly scepti-
cal historians Hume and Gibbon’.8 Some critics following in Frye’s wake,
especially Raine, have focused on tracing the mystical sources of Blake’s
myth. Despite fascinating insights, Raine’s approach has tended to attenu-
ate the social and political urgency of Blake’s mythical mode, in favour of
outlining ‘a coherent symbolic system’ derived from esoteric texts in the
Neoplatonic tradition.9 In reaction, Blake critics have often foregrounded
the social and political contexts of the poems at the expense of the socio-
political significance of their mythopoeic idiom.
Frye, however, was alert to the social significance of myth for Blake,
especially the way his mythopoeic narratives conceive of culture as funda-
mentally collective. For Jameson, Frye’s approach to myth in An Anatomy
INTRODUCTION 5
of Criticism (1957), originally part of his book on Blake, is distinctive

because of his ‘willingness to raise the issue of community and to draw
basic, essentially social, interpretative consequences from the nature of
religion as collective representation’.10 In their positive form, ‘religious
figures […] become the symbolic space in which the collectivity thinks
itself and celebrates its own unity’, with literature a form of myth to be
interpreted ‘as a symbolic meditation on the destiny of community’.11
Blake’s positive conception of mythopoesis relies upon its capacity to
transform readers and to contribute to their imagining, generation, and
participation in a communal social body.
In situating Blake’s texts and designs within their social, political, and
historical context and using this information to inform close readings, this
book is in the tradition of historicist scholarship inspired by Erdman’s
Blake: Prophet Against Empire (1954) and is frequently indebted to his
pioneering insights. As I will discuss further in the conclusion, however,
Erdman’s interpretations frequently approach the poems as naïve allego-
ries to be decoded into historical events and leaders: for example, he argues
that in Europe (1794) Rintrah stands for the Prime Minister, William Pitt
the Younger.12 While Blake’s poems stage an enlightened demystification
of political power, they are also resistant to the sort of allegories Erdman
produces. Blake’s own artistic practice was invested in a hermeneutic of
plenitude; while his works invite allegorical interpretation they also exceed
its capacity to account for them.
Critics have increasingly been willing to loosen Blake from the shackles
of counter-Enlightenment. This began in earnest with Visionary Physics
(1974), in which Ault argued that Blake’s relationship to Newton’s physics
was characterised by dialogue rather than simple opposition. Since Ault’s
book, the force of Enlightenment philosophy in Blake’s thinking and
writing has been more widely recognised. Clark, for example, has traced
Blake’s dialogic rather than simply hostile relation to Locke’s accounts of
the human mind and Green locates Blake’s epistemology at a point where
religious enthusiasm and philosophical empiricism collide.13
Blake’s approach to myth and history is also shaped by the Enlightenment.
Mee’s Dangerous Enthusiasm (1992) draws political significance from
Blake’s syncretic mythography, distinguishing it from the more orthodox
Christian approaches of William Warburton and Jacob Bryant and dis-
cerning affinities with the scepticism of radical writers.14 The influence of
Enlightenment ideas has implications for Blake’s approach to narrative.
Lincoln’s essay ‘Blake and the “Reasoning Historian”’ (1994) notes sur-
prising continuities between Blake’s ‘spiritual’ history and the conjectural
history practised by Enlightenment writers such as Hume, Gibbon, and

Voltaire, an argument eloquently elaborated in his Spiritual History
(1995). In his provocative Romantic Atheism (1999), Priestman even finds
connections between Blake and atheist elements of the Enlightenment;
at his most radical, Blake engages with infidel philosophy and Lucretian
atheism. Despite this body of research, even astute recent critics continue
to portray Blake as a heroic opponent of the Enlightenment, an enduring
account that this book will challenge.15
Lincoln observes that commentators who place Blake in a politically
radical tradition often evade the ‘narrative challenges’ posed by a writer
‘who thinks of the prophet as a teller of poetic tales’. They need to come
‘to terms with Blake the myth maker, whose (sometimes allegorical) nar-
ratives are means by which he participated in the radical thought of his
age’.16 I aim to contribute to this process by reconnecting Blake’s engage-
ment with his political and cultural environment to his mythical narratives.
Blake’s narratives mediate a religious vision. From the earliest theo-
logians, orthodox Christians have sought to distinguish their religion
from myth, insisting on the historicity of Jesus and following the classi-
cal understanding of myth as something false or fictional.17 Nevertheless,
there are affinities between the interpretative demands of myth and scrip-
ture; indeed, from a reductive point of view myth is merely ‘dead religion’,
no longer animated by the force of belief.18 Both myth and religion tend
to require a peculiarly intense form of interpretation at odds with modern
reading habits. Apocalypse is the most mythical mode and genre in the
Bible, and Blake’s fusion of apocalyptic figures and motifs, especially from
Isaiah and Revelation, with mythological material, drawn from sources as
varied as Hesiod, Ovid, Northern Antiquities, Ossian, and Milton, sug-
gests he perceived continuities between myth and religion.
Historians of the Enlightenment often emphasise this overlap. Cassirer
suggests that ‘in the development of human culture we cannot fix a point
where myth ends or religion begins’.19 Gay identifies a ‘family resem-
blance’, a style of thought associated with both classical and Christian
superstition, against which the philosophes revolted and thereby defined
their own modernity. From this point of view, ‘the Christian millennium
[w]as a return to myth’.20 For both Cassirer and Gay, and more recently
Jonathan Israel, the Enlightenment programme of criticism sought to
expunge primitive mythical thought from human culture.21 The limit to
Blake’s affiliation with this aspect of the Enlightenment is evident in his
conviction that myth remained a valid mode of thought and expression.
INTRODUCTION 7
Myth demands complex responses from readers. For Damrosch,

‘Blake’s emphasis is on the fundamental problem of interpretation, of
meaning itself’.22 His understanding of the Bible and his own output
are strongly invested in Christian hermeneutics. Tannenbaum and, more
recently, Ryan, Fischer, Rowland, Roberts, and Sklar have provided illu-
minating accounts of the relationship between Blake’s texts and Christian
interpretative traditions, especially those which are visionary and hetero-
dox.23 While Christianity is central to Blake’s thought, this book will argue
that his works feature distinctively varying combinations of religious vision
and an anti-authoritarian critical impulse.
During the 1780s in particular, Blake was sympathetically engaged with
Enlightenment thought. While physiognomy may now seem like Romantic
quackery, Johann Caspar Lavater’s aspiration to produce a universal study
of human nature that could become a science places him within the tra-
dition of the European Christian Enlightenment.24 Blake was probably
introduced to Lavater’s writings by their mutual friend Henry Fuseli, and
his annotations to Fuseli’s translation of Aphorisms on Man (1787, trans.
1788) reveal his allegiance to the term ‘philosophy’. Lavater asserts that
‘mankind agree in essence, as they do in their limbs and senses’ and differ
‘as much in essence as they do in form, limbs, and senses—and only so,
and not more’ (E583), to which Blake responds ‘This is true Christian
philosophy far above all abstraction’ (E584). Blake endorses such essential
universalism when, in All Religions are One (c.1788), he affirms that ‘As
all men are alike in outward form, So (and with the same infinite variety)
all are alike in the Poetic Genius’ (E1). The term ‘Poetic Genius’ signals a
different emphasis, but Blake shares with Enlightenment philosophers the
tenet of a basic human nature beneath variations produced by historical,
environmental, and social factors. There is an affinity with Hume’s pro-
nouncement that history reveals that ‘in all nations and ages […] human
nature remains still the same, in its principles and operations’.25 Yet Blake
also praises Lavater’s resistance to ‘abstraction’, a quality of thought con-
genial to Hume’s confidence in ‘principles and operations’. For Blake the
modifier ‘Christian’ reins in philosophy’s tendency towards destructive
abstraction:
Deduct from a rose its redness. from a lilly its whiteness from a diamond its
hardness […] & [chaos] rectify every thing in Nature as the Philosophers do.
& then we shall return to Chaos & God will be compelld to be Excentric if
he Creates O happy Philosopher. (E595)
The ‘happy Philosopher’ alludes to Democritus of Abdera, known as ‘the

laughing philosopher’, and a proponent of the atomistic philosophy later
developed by Epicurus and Lucretius. Blake’s obscure assertion that ‘God
will be compelld to be Excentric if he Creates’, refers to the Lucretian
clinamen, the swerve of atoms in the void which leads them to collide and
combine, thus setting in chain the generation of matter.26 Blake opposes
those philosophers who merely ‘rectify’ nature into uniform and equiva-
lent qualities and thus randomise and obscure rather than clarify divine
creative work. He also turns Enlightenment practice upon itself, applying
its suspicion of theories which rely upon speculative hypothesis to its own
reliance upon the hypothesis of the indivisible atom. My conclusion will
return to Blake’s critique of a strain of Enlightenment thought embedded
in this and other classical traditions. What is important here is that Blake is
not simply against Enlightenment thinking per se so much as opposed to
a particular direction in which it is taken, what he perceived as a blindness
in its application, tendencies, and self-consciousness.
Blake at the Limits of Enlightenment

Blake’s engagement with Enlightenment thought can be helpfully situ-
ated in relation to a line of critique, stretching from Herder, through
Hegel, to Adorno and Horkheimer, and later writers such as Kosselleck.
Despite important differences, these thinkers have tended to see in the
Enlightenment a predominantly negative use of critical thought. In The
Phenomenology of Mind (1807), Hegel asked ‘When all prejudice and super-
stition has been banished, the question arises: Now what? What is the truth
which the Enlightenment has disseminated in place of these prejudices and
superstitions?’27 He believed that the Enlightenment had mistaken its mis-
sion and risked destroying the positive realities of spiritual experience.
Blake came to vigorously oppose the sceptical philosophes, but more
for their unbelief, their premises, and their intolerance of Christianity,
than for their methods of critique. Historians of the Enlightenment have
repeatedly sought to defend it from charges of negativity, and writing it
off as merely destructive philosophy ignores its powerful contributions
to social and political liberty.28 Nevertheless, while Blake’s critique of the
Enlightenment’s telos indicates a limit to his investment in its critical proj-
ect, its interpretative and critical strategies remain important presences
in his texts and images. Cassirer and Gay claim that the Enlightenment
comprised two stages, the first destructive and the second positive and
INTRODUCTION 9
constructive. We might even wish to align Blake’s myths of fall and resur-
rection with this two-stage process, however different his premises and
idiom. As I will discuss, the Enlightenment was not a unitary or single
phenomenon but had a range of ramifications within which we can pro-
ductively explore Blake’s affiliations.
Blake seems attuned to ways in which Enlightenment thinkers could
believe that they had left behind mythical thinking, what Coupe calls
their ‘myth of mythlessness’.29 For Blake, the critical thought of the
Enlightenment loses its value when it becomes fetishised and detached
from a utopian vision. This has affinities with Adorno and Horkheimer,
who argued that, as it overlooks its own mythical tendencies and loses
its critical self-awareness, ‘enlightenment has relinquished its own realiza-
tion’.30 Contrary to Blake’s reputation as an outright opponent of ‘reason’,
it is more accurate to see him in this light, opposed to a passive or finalised
form of reason which unwittingly conspires with domination. In part B
of his early tractate There is No Natural Religion (c.1788), Blake affirmed
that ‘Reason or the ratio of all we have already known. is not the same that
it shall be when we know more’ (E2). Reason is renewed from the con-
straints of a ratio of past knowledge through the future-oriented activity of
the ‘poetic or Prophetic character’. Blake critiques Enlightenment thought
in order to liberate its positive form from what Adorno and Horkheimer
later call its ‘entanglement in blind domination’.31 Blake’s investment in
mythopoesis challenges this tendency of critique to become complicit with
authority. As Coupe argues, ‘myths work according to the imperative of
narrative dynamism and will always evade the stasis of doctrine’.32
To adopt an influential ancient Greek distinction, therefore, Blake is
most interested in myth as muthos rather than logos, that is, in the poetic,
creative, and narrative forms of myth he associates with the prophet Los,
opposed to the doctrinal myths of hegemony associated with priest-king
deity Urizen, with his ‘iron laws’ (23:26, E81) and ‘brazen Book’ (11:3,
E64).33 It is, however, typical of Blake’s complexity that these characters
are interdependent, with Urizen emerging from Los, being shaped by his
activity, and in turn influencing Los’s creative work. It is at the point where
critical thought becomes complicit with oppression, restrains imagination
and desire, and becomes a prescriptive logos that Blake resists it.
As I will demonstrate in the subsequent chapters, Blake came ultimately
to give precedence to mythopoesis over critical thought. Nevertheless, this
allegiance is qualified by his continuing investment in demystificatory cri-
tique, which aims at dissolving hegemonic myths, long reified from mythos
into logos, and revealing the imaginative and collective energy ossified
beneath the traditions of domination. It is this recurrent critical tendency
which enables Blake to be self-conscious in his mythical narratives, render-
ing them continually disruptive, resisting their abstraction into a stable logos.
In his concluding marginalia to Lavater, Blake conceived of himself
and the author as members of a broad, enlightened philosophical enter-
prise: ‘It does not signify what the laws of Kings & Priests have calld
Vice we who are philosophers ought not to call the Staminal Virtues of
Humanity by the same name that we call the omissions of intellect spring-
ing from poverty’ (E601). Blake’s perception of himself and Lavater as
members of a group of progressive, humane philosophers exemplifies
Edelstein’s definition of the Enlightenment as self-conscious modernity:
‘More than anything the Enlightenment seems to have been the period
when people thought they were living in an age of Enlightenment.’34
Opposing the restraints imposed by ‘Kings & Priests’, they were men
of their enlightened age, consistently opposing the exercise of power
through superstition.
That central term in Enlightenment thought recurs throughout this
book, but needs careful unpicking in relation to Blake. In Lavater’s
Aphorisms, Blake amended number 342, replacing ‘Superstition’ with
‘Hipocrisy’: ‘[Superstition] <Hipocrisy> always inspires littleness, religion
grandeur of mind: the [superstitious] <hypocrite> raises beings inferior to
himself to deities’. His annotations develop this distinction:
True superstition is ignorant honesty & this is beloved of god & man
I do not allow that there is such a thing as Superstition taken in the strict
sense of the word
A man must first decieve himself before he is <thus> Superstitious & so
he is a hypocrite
Hipocrisy. is as distant from superstition. as the wolf from the lamb. (E591)
Blake distinguishes imaginative, innocent folk superstitions from a

malignant false consciousness. What he redefines as ‘Hipocrasy’ here is
closely allied to what Thomas Paine later termed ‘political superstition’,
the people’s unreflective submission to traditional hierarchy and author-
ity against their own true interest and powers of resistance. I will discuss
Paine’s notion in relation to Blake’s Europe in Chapter 5. Here, Blake
gives ‘Hipocrisy’ a Protestant inflection. He alludes to the Sermon on the
Mount, in which Jesus warns of ‘false prophets, which come to you in
sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves’ (Matthew 7:15),
INTRODUCTION 11
and St Paul’s charge to the elders of Ephesus to carefully oversee the

church because ‘after my departing shall grievous wolves enter in among
you, not sparing the flock’ (Acts 20:29). Protestants, notably Milton in
Lycidas (1638), applied these texts to the rise of ecclesiastical hierarchy,
especially in Roman Catholicism.35
Blake often fiercely attacked superstition. In 1790 he objected to
Swedenborg’s view that ‘all the grandest and purest Truths of Heaven must
needs seem obscure and perplexing to the natural Man at first View’ with ‘Lies
& Priestcraft Truth is Nature’ (E609). As I will argue in Chapter 9, Blake
later shifted his position, investing in St Paul’s notion that the ‘Natural Man’
must be transformed into the ‘Spiritual Man’. He still, however, demonised
priestcraft as the superstition and cruel natural religion of Albion’s druid
sons. Blake was attracted to many modernising tendencies in liberal forms
of eighteenth-century Protestantism. Central to what Rosenblatt describes
as ‘The Christian Enlightenment’ was the reorientation of religious life away
from dogma, tradition, and ritual and towards scripture, practical piety, and
good works.36 This was an attraction of the Swedenborgian New Jerusalem
Church when Blake and his wife Catherine attended its general conference
in 1789.37 In his copy of The Wisdom of Angels, Concerning Divine Love
and Divine Wisdom (1763, trans. 1788), Blake responded to Swedenborg’s
assertion that ‘the whole of Charity and Faith is in Works, and that Charity
and Faith without Works are like Rainbows about the Sun, which vanish
and are dissipated by a Cloud’ by adding in the margin ‘The Whole of
the New Church is in the Active Life & not in Ceremonies at all’ (E605).
Blake was less interested in the theosophical system than the demystified
Christian praxis that Swedenborg’s visions allegorise. While it may seem
strange to regard Swedenborg as a figure of the Enlightenment, Garrett
notes his enduring scientific interests and his fundamental emphasis on ‘the
possibility of humanity’s improvement’.38 The articles signed by delegates at
the New Church conference include the belief that ‘All can be saved, even
the heathen, if they live charitable lives’, the belief that the ‘three-person
Trinity is dangerous’, and a striking assertion that ‘Miracles do not occur’.39
Indeed, one opponent singled out the New Church’s anti-Trinitarianism
and metaphorical readings of scripture as ‘approaching nearer than any oth-
ers to modern Infidelity’.40 Swedenborgianism posed an enlightened chal-
lenge to Anglican orthodoxy.
Freedom of thought is Blake’s fundamental basis for all other kinds of
freedom. In his annotations to Henry Boyd’s A Translation of the Inferno
of Dante Alighieri in English Verse with Historical Notes (1785), he opposes
Boyd’s backing for the suppression of Catholicism and criticism of Roman

religious relativism: ‘What is Liberty without Universal Toleration’ (E635).
Indeed, Blake’s understanding of toleration extends beyond Christians to all
races and creeds, allowing him to perceive ‘The Divine Image’ in ‘heathen,
turk or jew’ (E13). While scholars have linked Blake with Protestant sects,
whether the radical enthusiasts of the English Civil War, the Methodists,
Dissent, or the Moravians, he was suspicious of religious factionalism.41
Blake underlined the second part of Lavater’s aphorism ‘Who comes from
the kitchen smells of its smoke; who adheres to a sect has something of its cant’
(E590). When Lavater later asserts that none are ‘ever little, who, to obtain
one great object, will suffer much’, Blake responds ‘the man who does this
is a Sectary therefore not great’ (E593). Partial outlooks distort what is for
Blake a universally accessible religious principle. In All Religions are One
(1788), ‘all sects of Philosophy are from the Poetic Genius adapted to the
weaknesses of every individual’ (E1). Blake’s ‘Poetic Genius’ is as compre-
hensive as the Enlightenment’s universal human nature.
In addition, Blake’s enthusiasm for the passions and the stimulation
of the senses has much in common with progressive eighteenth-century
thought. Porter describes the ‘Enlightenment’s great historical water-
shed’ as ‘the validation of pleasure’.42 While the idiom of the Marriage’s
pronouncement that ‘The soul of sweet delight. can never be defil’d’
(9, E37) is visionary, its hedonism belongs with the liberal instincts of
the eighteenth century. Some critics have detected an ascetic strain in
Blake’s later work, in which the natural body often appears in horrific
vegetating forms.43 But when Blake figures human renewal, he tends to
emphasise bodily exuberance. Pleasure is not necessarily simple and Blake
uncompromisingly explored tangled and often perverse forms of sensual
gratification.44 Nevertheless, his suspicion of asceticism echoes that of
Enlightenment philosophers. Blake underlined Lavater’s aphorism which
began ‘The purest religion is the most refined Epicurism’ and praised it as
‘True Christian philosophy’ (E591). His Jesus is ‘a wine bibber’ (E634)
and even later in his career he was certain that ‘The Treasures of Heaven
are not Negations of Passion’ (E564).
Perhaps Blake’s most revealing alignment with progressive
Enlightenment philosophy comes in the Marriage. In the fourth
‘Memorable Fancy’, the narrator rebukes a self-righteous Angel for impos-
ing his ‘metaphysics’ on him in the form of a vision of eternal punishment
for following his energies. In turn he imposes a vision of the Angel’s opin-
ions in the form of chained cannibal monkeys and baboons, before leading
INTRODUCTION 13
them both out through a mill. He recalls that ‘I in my hand brought the
skeleton of a body, which in the mill was Aristotles Analytics’ and answers
the Angel’s objections by asserting ‘we impose on one another, & it is but
lost time to converse with you whose works are only Analytics’ (20, E42).
Blake’s jibe at Aristotle aligns him with the Enlightenment’s mockery of
Scholasticism and its traditional authorities and procedures. His attacks on
reason are not de facto evidence of counter-Enlightenment, but are often
aimed at reason as a form of traditional, superstitious thought, which ties
the present to the precedents, norms, and institutionalised ideologies of
the past.45
It is particularly important to re-evaluate Blake’s relationship to
Enlightenment thought because the traditional narrative of a Romantic
revolt against the eighteenth-century Age of Reason is based on a
now superseded historiography. The first volume of Gay’s incisive The
Enlightenment (1966) defines the movement as ‘The Rise of Modern
Paganism’, presided over by predominantly French deist and atheist philos-
ophes, who renewed ancient critical practices in order to free the moderns
from medieval Christian metaphysics. More recent accounts find it a less
unified phenomenon. Outram adopts many of the implications of Kant’s
seminal essay answering the question ‘Was ist Aufklärung?’ (1784), prefer-
ring to see the Enlightenment ‘as a series of interlocking, and sometimes
warring problems and debates’, ‘a process, not a completed project’.46
For S. J. Barnett, Gay overemphasises deist thinkers and underestimates
Christian reformers’ roles in diffusing enlightened attitudes and practices.47
Indeed, Gay’s polarisation of myth and enlightened reason is question-
able. He draws this opposition from Cassirer’s influential The Philosophy of
Enlightenment (1951), but Cassirer elsewhere describes myth with more
nuance. Myth and science are ‘symbolic forms’, modes of thought with
valid claims to distinct areas of the human experience of reality.48 Despite
some qualifications, Gay’s Enlightenment opposes all religious thought to
rational criticism. The complexity and dynamism of Blake’s writing and
art derive from their resistance to such a distinction and willingness to
endorse supposedly irreconcilable types of thought.49
Enlightenment as Practice
For Gay, Enlightenment philosophers glorified criticism and largely
repudiated metaphysics, meaning that ‘the Enlightenment was not an
Age of Reason but a Revolt against Rationalism’, the notion that every-
thing could be systematically explained.50 But whereas Gay focuses on

French philosophes, Porter has argued for a distinctively pragmatic English
Enlightenment. In Britain the movement was a more diffused phenom-
enon, with participants who shared goals of ‘criticism, sensibility or faith
in progress’ which ‘throve in England within piety’. Porter follows Pocock
in rejecting the definite article in favour of plural ‘enlightenments’ or the
verb ‘enlightenment’, which recognises the movement’s variety.51 More
recently, Schmidt has identified ‘Enlightenment’ primarily as a verb rather
than a noun in late eighteenth-century usage, denoting an unfolding pro-
cess rather than a historical period of philosophy.52
This emphasis on plurality and process follows Foucault’s essay ‘What
is Enlightenment?’ (1984). He describes the movement as ‘a set of events
and complex historical processes’, including ‘forms of knowledge’ and
‘projects of rationalization of knowledge and practices’. Rather than a
‘permanent body of knowledge’, Enlightenment is ongoing, ‘an attitude,
an ethos’ which interrogates and challenges the limits European societies
imposed on their subjects.53 For Foucault, the performance of new forms
and methods of understanding in society drives the Enlightenment’s lib-
eration of human potential.
If we approach Enlightenment in terms of critical practice, its relation
to myth can best be understood as a repertoire of techniques and proce-
dures which enabled the critique of superstition, both ancient and mod-
ern. Enlightened acts of interpretation yielded naturalistic explanations
of mysterious narratives. When Enlightenment is viewed in these terms,
rather than as a monolithic ‘Age of Reason’, Blake’s partial affiliation with
the critical thought of his day becomes more apparent.
Eighteenth-century critical approaches to myth were generally forms
of allegory. Moral allegorists followed Plato’s approach of interpreting
myths as personifications of abstract virtues and vices: Minerva stands for
Wisdom. Historical allegorists interpreted the gods as deified historical
individuals: Bacchus was the discoverer of wine or an ancient king of India.
Physical allegorists accounted for myths as descriptions of nature: accounts
of Apollo or Hercules described the progress of the sun. More modern
approaches became influential in the later century, such as Hume’s narra-
tive of myth and religion originating out of impulses of fear in the unstable
minds of primitive humans.54 These methods can be broadly reconciled
into varieties of ‘naturalism’. Pagan myths and idolatry were frequently
traced back to primitive origins, which had become distorted over time:
ancestor and benefactor worship, ethical practices, natural and astronomical
INTRODUCTION 15
phenomena. Apotheosis was widely understood as a major source of pagan

deities, with founders of states, political and military leaders, inventors, and
benefactors all regarded as divinities. The critical correlative to this practice
was Euhemerism, which will be a key term in the chapters which follow
and has received less attention from Blake critics than it merits.55
Chapter 2 of this book provides a fuller account of Euhemerist readings
of myth, but it can be defined briefly as the tracing of pagan divinities back
to historical individuals, accorded divinity by their descendants or com-
munities. As Manuel suggests, if Euhemerism ‘is broadened to include
those who recognized in most pagan myths the elaboration of ancient
political and other historical events of great moment’, then the term would
encompass most early eighteenth-century mythographers.56 As I explain in
Chapter 2, Euhemerism can be regarded as the most prominent modern
approach to myth in the eighteenth century. Even those who regarded
natural phenomena as the true source of religion believed that priests and
kings promulgated superstitious beliefs as a means to displace the deity’s
numinous qualities on to their own authority.
Alongside the philosophical drift away from myth, mainstream
eighteenth-century aesthetics charted a course of progressive realism and
disenchantment. In 1712, Joseph Addison complained of his contempo-
raries’ insistence on invoking ‘trifling antiquated Fables’:
Virgil and Homer might compliment their Heroes, by interweaving the

Actions of Deities with their Atchievements; but for a Christian Author to
write in the Pagan Creed, to make Prince Eugene a Favourite of Mars, or
to carry on a Correspondence between Bellona and the Marshal De Villars,
would be downright Puerility, and unpardonable in a Poet that is past
Sixteen.57
Only in deflationary mock-heroic poems was heathen mythology ‘not only

excusable but graceful’.58 In Peacock’s Headlong Hall (1816), the tradi-
tional pantheon had become decaying trash. Squire Headlong shows off
his grounds, in which ‘Atlas had his head knocked off to fit him for prop-
ping a shed; and only the day before yesterday we fished Bacchus out of
the horsepond’.59
At face value, Blake’s phantasmagorical poems seem at odds with
this tendency towards disenchantment. Nevertheless, like so much of
his treatment of myth, his texts subtly involve a hermeneutic of suspi-
cion. Although Blake is often accused of creating an obscure ‘private’
mythology, his sublime personifications tend to draw upon recognisable
mythological figures from the classical tradition, even while he deliber-

ately thwarts their conventional associations. Thus Orc can be identified
with the Greek Ares or the Roman Mars as a personification of war, but
with myriad additional associations making him troublingly elusive: Satan,
Prometheus, Jesus, sexual desire, revolution, a freed slave, fire, Oedipus,
to name but a few. Blake therefore stands in a complex relationship to
the disenchanting tendencies of polite eighteenth-century culture. He
saw himself as a modern, complaining that Rubens’s Luxembourg Gallery
was ‘the work of a Blockhead’, being full of ‘<Bloated [Awkward] Gods>
Mercury Juno Venus & the rattle traps of Mythology’ (E580). His own
aesthetic practice, however, suggests he retained a sense of the potential
value of traditional mythology. Blake’s conception of his own poetry as
‘Sublime Allegory’ (E730) is suggestive. Like allegory, it goes beyond a
literal level but, unlike allegory, which Blake seems to have believed merely
substituted literal denotation with another fixed level of significance, it
aims at an illimitable profusion of meaning.
As I will discuss in the second chapter, in terms of style of thought and
interpretative techniques, there were important continuities between the
critical hermeneutics of liberal Protestant and radical mythographers when
it came to pagan myth and corrupted religion. The distinctive differences
lay in the extent of inquiry and the objects to which criticism was applied.
It was only when the Protestant critique of pagan elements in Roman
Catholicism began to be applied to the Anglican Church in the 1780s and
political radicals adopted it to assail orthodoxy in the 1790s that this criti-
cal approach became heavily politicised and contentious. The close read-
ings of Blake’s writings and artworks that follow reveal the coexistence of
his demystificatory and mythopoeic sensibilities and their tensions within
the same aesthetic objects.
In his annotations to Richard Watson’s An Apology for the Bible (1796),
a rejoinder to Thomas Paine’s sceptical attack on state religion, The Age
of Reason (1794–95), Blake praises Paine’s assaults on priestcraft and
superstition as in line with true Christianity: ‘Paine has not Attacked
Christianity. Watson has defended Antichrist’ (E612). This is a strategic
alliance: Blake notes that ‘The Bishop never saw the Everlasting Gospel
any more than Tom Paine’ (E619). Blake leans towards Paine’s egalitari-
anism, but remains independent, exemplified in his reflections on the two
authors’ views concerning miracles:
The manner of a miracle being performd is in modern times considerd as an

arbitrary command of the agent upon the patient but this is an impossibility
INTRODUCTION 17
not a miracle neither did Jesus ever do such a miracle. Is it a greater miracle
to feed five thousand men with five loaves than to overthrow all the armies
of Europe with a small pamphlet. (E616–17)
Blake rejects the supernatural claims Watson used to buttress state religion
while pushing beyond Paine’s critical agenda to affirm collective resistance
as the proper arena of the extraordinary. Here, Blake echoes Voltaire, who
in the Philosophical Dictionary (1764) asserts that ‘A Miracle, in the ener-
getic sense of the word, means something wonderful; and thus every thing
is a Miracle.’ As opposed to the supernatural interventions so important to
Jesuits, ‘Some persons of latter times make the suppression of the Jesuits
in France a much greater Miracle than all those of Xavier and Ignatius
put together.’60 Voltaire’s irony and Blake’s sincere reverence for Paine’s
achievement are at odds, but both express confidence in the efficacy of
the public sphere and human agency in the pursuit of collective freedom.
While he may not have shared in all its premises or conclusions, Blake
could endorse the critical procedures of the Enlightenment when serving
that utopian aspiration.
Blake, Myth, and Utopia

In The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), Durkheim argues that
‘mythical thought’ is essential to religion, conceived of as ‘something emi-
nently social’. In any given society, ‘Religious representations are collec-
tive representations that express collective realities’.61 While critics often
refer to Blake’s ‘private’ mythology, he adopts myth as an appropriate
mode for representing communal dimensions of human thought and exis-
tence.62 Indeed, while Blake critically erodes myths that sustain hegemony,
with many of his personifications and characters he exploits traditional
figures and events from classical and other myths in order to represent the
collective psychological forces he saw at work in the momentous history
of his own time.
Blake’s dual approach to myth can be illuminated by strategies in biblical
hermeneutics which bring criticism into dialogue with faith. Bultmann’s
essay ‘New Testament and Mythology’ (1941) proposes an influential
version of this approach. For Bultmann it made no sense for modern
Christians to accept the Bible’s supernatural and mythical elements which
reflected the worldview of ancient peoples. Instead, scripture should be
interpreted anthropologically and existentially through ‘demythologisa-
tion’: not an elimination of myth, but rather the extraction of its deep
Another random document with
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THE FOUR FEARS OF OUR GENERAL
SOUVENIRS of CHILDHOOD
Adapted from the French by Adele Bacon.
THE SECOND FEAR.
The battle on the mountain had passed off much better than we
had dared to hope, and, although we had not found our enemies as
sound asleep as we had desired, our early morning attack had
never-the-less completely surprised them. We managed to seize
their recent position on the plateau with scarcely any loss. This
position, although a very exposed one, was worth a great deal more,
from the strategist’s point of view, than the valley in which we were
encamped the night before. Besides, in making war, it is always
desirable to occupy those places voluntarily selected and defended
by an opponent.
Our work, however, was by no means over; another sort of effort
lay before us.
Our foes, driven from their position on the heights, had succeeded
in forming another; and were strongly entrenched on the lower
extremity of the same plateau, from the loftier end of which we had
so lately dislodged them.
With a considerable amount of adroitness, they had succeeded in
placing a little river, called the Oued-el-Kebir, between our camp and
their own. We were compelled therefore to cross this river, in order to
force them to move farther on, and abandon to us the territory that
we both coveted.
We had resolved, once our morning’s work was over, to enjoy a
much needed repose on our hardly earned mountain; but, towards
noon, everybody was on foot, excepting several badly wounded
soldiers, and the little group of officers, who had chatted together
near the General’s tent the preceding evening, were invited to drink
a cup of coffee with him in the most picturesque smoking room that I
have ever seen, although the picturesque quality is by no means
rare in Algeria.
It was an enclosure walled in by rocks in the shape of heaps of
large pennies, arranged side by side, so as to form an amphitheatre,
the slope of which permitted us to see, by the aid of our glasses, the
new field on which we were soon to operate.
The country, which was beautiful so far as the scenery was
concerned, presented no insolvable military problems; it was
wooded, but not impenetrable.
We would of course have much preferred not to be separated from
the place of attack by a long, serpentine strip of water, which,
swollen by the recent melting of the snow, added materially to the
defence of our adversaries. It goes without saying that we
possessed neither artillery to protect our passage nor boats to effect
it. In pursuits such as now occupied us, a train of artillery could only
be an encumbrance, and the river which flowed sometimes in a
valley, and sometimes between high, steep banks, made it almost a
certainty that we should get a thorough wetting before we reached
the other side. We knew that the General had sent the necessary
men to measure the depth of that barrier of water, and to see if we
should have the good luck to find a place for fording it. In default of
this, we should be forced to make use of our temporary bridges, but
we did not wish to count absolutely on them. In making war, one can
usually tell best what to do on the spur of the moment. While waiting
for the necessary information to be brought in for making such
preparations as were possible, and for the night to come, fully half a
day must elapse. The General had thought that crossing at night was
less dangerous. Little Jacques, grown up, had no longer a horror of
shadows, and even liked to utilize them. When we had considered,
found great fault with, and speculated upon the meditated
expedition, we returned to our conversation of the preceding night.
The General had had the imprudence to speak to us of two
stories; we had heard one; what about the other?
Captain Robert,—the officer with whom the General sometimes
quarrelled, perhaps because he felt that he had an especial partiality
for him,—being slyly urged on by the rest of us, had the indiscretion
to ask him for it.
“Oh, as to that one, my children, you must not insist,” said the
General. “It is only a story of childhood, which has none of the
qualities which made the other acceptable to grown men. I have no
taste for failures,—you will cause me to be guilty of one.”
“General,” replied the obstinate captain, “you have just called us
your children, therefore a child’s story is quite suitable for us. It will
rejuvenate us. Children are amused by everything, you know, and if
by chance your second tale is a trifle more gay than the first, very
well,—we shall enjoy it.”
“Gay!” responded the General, “I don’t know about that. However,
it is not a tragedy. But you shall see. You wish it,—so here goes!”
“Perhaps all of you here are not fond of the water,” began the
General, casting a significant glance at the river which had
preoccupied our thoughts.
“That depends on circumstances,” responded the captain; “water
is very good, but there are times when one would rather do without
it.”
“Water, mingled with too many gun-shots, and after a difficult
march, might prove unhealthy,” interrupted a hoarse voice, that of
the doctor. “I should not recommend it as a remedy for my cold, but
the water of your story, General,—for I suppose by your
commencement your history is going to be a wet one,—will perhaps
do me good.”
“Good!” said the General, “here is the doctor who imagines I am
going to give him a tonic. But so long as you have wished for it
doctor, you must drink it. But no more interruptions:—I have already
forgotten where I was.”
“General,” replied the doctor, “you have just said ‘every one here is
perhaps not fond of water;’ and you were not contradicted.”
“Thanks!” said the General. “And silence in the ranks; I will
recommence.”
“Every one here does not like the water I said, very well, when I
was little it seems I was of that same opinion. I didn’t like water. Let
us understand each other fully as to the importance which you
should attach to my repugnance to this fluid, during these first years
of my life. I accepted water in many ways: I loved it sugared, and
even with a little orange flavor, but I hated it cold on my face in
winter, and only allowed myself to be washed willingly when it was
warm. I liked, too, to stand on a bridge, and watch the water flowing
underneath, and by a strange contradiction, I even enjoyed going on
it, in a boat—with papa. But I should have had a horrible fear to fall
in the water, or have it go suddenly over my head. To be frank, I
believe I should have been frightened to have it up to my ankles,
otherwise than in a foot bath. But then, one is not born perfect.
“This fear of the water was the despair of my father. He, like a
practical man, thought my love of boats and navigation, and my
horror of all actual contact with it, were contradictory if not
incompatible traits; that the liking for it on the one hand and the
dislike of it on the other argued as complete an absence of logic in
the brain of his little son as in his physical and moral organisms. He
was right. Aunt Marie and my mother were guilty of the sugared and
warm water, but my antipathy for it, otherwise than in these forms,
seemed to be a fundamental part of my nature.
“‘There is a reform for you to make in my absence,’ said my father
to his wife and his sister-in-law. ‘If I don’t find it accomplished when I
return, I agree in any way that you may find best, you will force me to
intervene myself, with a method perhaps a little brusque, but of
which I have more than once seen the efficacy.
“‘Understand that if I have to throw Jacques into the water like a
little dog, to teach him to save himself, I shall do it over and over
again, until he finds it agreeable, until he conquers his fright, and
learns to swim. Jacques pretends he wishes to become a sailor, like
his father, but I shall not allow him to become one of those sailors,—
and there are such,—who are actually afraid of the water.’”
“‘Afraid of the water? The child is not afraid of it,’ said mamma.
“‘It is only the cold which he dislikes,’ added my aunt.
“‘Really! And you can suggest no other remedy than to heat the
brooks and the rivers, the lakes and the seas, expressly for our little
darling? That would be, according to your ideas, a reform more
easily carried out than the correction of his fear of cold water!’
“‘Correction! Correction!’ replied aunt Marie impatiently. ‘One can
not “correct” one’s nervous system at will, my dear brother, one has
to cure it as one can. There are certain organisms which must be left
to correct themselves, with age. Our Jacques is brave in many ways,
as you well know; he has really only one fear,—that of contact with
cold water. Well, that will pass in time, as he grows older.’
“‘Time! time!’ returned my father, ‘time passes, but not our defects,
when, instead of correcting them, we leave them alone, or envelop
them in cotton. Sister Marie, do not change my boy into a little girl.’
“‘Your son,’ responded aunt Marie, ‘is as yet neither a boy nor a
girl: he is an angel, and you ought to be glad of it.’
“‘Glad!’ replied my father. ‘I can tell you about that better on my
return. However, I reserve the right of trying to find a young sailor in
your angel, some fine morning. I will not take you unawares. I have
warned both you and my wife. When I come back, I will take your
little Jacques with me in a boat, and whether he knows how to swim
or not, I will make him brave, in spite of himself.’
“This conversation made my aunt and my mother tremble.
Although they were apparently against me, they were really on my
side. They tried to encourage me, telling me I should be a sailor first,
and a brave one,—an admiral soon after. This delighted me. ‘What a
pity, though,’ I said to myself, ‘that water is so cold and wet, and that
one can not walk on it without sinking. Why should it be so?’”
“The moment has come, to speak to you of my uncle, my father’s

brother. This brother, who was older than my father by about ten
years, was a retired officer. What a wonderful man he was too! It
seems to me that I had known only great and heroic people, in my
childhood. It was hardly possible to turn out badly, in the midst of
such fine beings. What is good in me, I owe altogether to them. My
uncle had traveled extensively. He had taken part in all the
campaigns of the first Republic, and of the First Empire, and had
brought back from them a love of flowers which you may explain as
best you can. He loved the land as much as my father loved the sea,
but only for the purpose of covering it with flowers. He possessed a
charmingly situated property, on the outskirts of the town, where he
cultivated, with excessive care, a magnificent collection of roses,
celebrated throughout the entire horticultural world. This collection
contained more than four thousand varieties: I repeat, four thousand,
catalogued, numbered, each with a name and a history. Certain
people pretend to tell them apart at a glance, but I must say it was
easier to confound them in an equal degree of admiration. I should
have felt unjust in preferring one to another, and I admitted a
difference in them only in their colors. My father called his brother’s
place ‘the Garden of Roses.’ The Garden of Roses was for me the
only serious rival of the court of aunt Marie’s hospital, and do you
know why? Not because it was sweeter smelling, and richer in
flowers than any place I have ever seen elsewhere; not because I
always brought back beautiful bouquets for my mother, for aunt
Marie and for her chapel; not because it was bordered on one entire
side by a pretty little river, but because upon that river my uncle
Antoine, out of honor for his brother, the sailor, kept a small, but very
attractive looking, boat. In this boat, which appeared immense to me,
my father used to take me on short voyages, not in the water, but on
the water, which frightened me so much. When I was navigating on
the little stream, how many times have I imagined that I was on the
ocean, en route for America, India, the North Pole, or the Island of
Robinson Crusoe.
“At the time of which I speak, my father, after a year passed upon
the seas of China, returned to spend a three months’ holiday with us.
I felt that I must make the most of it. The year before, I had been
delighted to go with him on many little expeditions, both by land and
water. But this year, alas! I expected little pleasure on the latter. One
of the first questions he asked was whether I was still afraid of my
old enemy. I was obliged to confess that I still felt the same in regard
to it.
“‘What! But how old are you?’
“Brother,’ said aunt Marie, ‘he was just six years old when you left
us.’
“‘But according to that your pupil is now seven.’
“‘Yes, papa, seven,’ said I. ‘I am getting to be a big boy.’
“‘Big! Yes, that is possible. But the larger you are, my poor
Jacques, the less excuse you have for not knowing how to swim, for
having fear of the water.’
“‘He has tried,’ interposed my aunt. ‘I had uncle Antoine’s
gardener, who is an excellent swimmer, give him a lesson in the
river, but he came out so blue with cold that I dared not let him go
back again. Although he neither cried nor complained, I am certain
he would have died in less than five minutes.’
“‘You believe that, perhaps, my poor dear sister,’ replied my father.
‘It is, however, an experience which he will have to repeat. But I warn
Jacques that in the meantime, or until he is able to swim, at least a
few feet, there will no longer be a boat for him at the “Garden of
Roses.” The St. Jacques (which was the name given in my honor to
my uncle’s boat)—the St. Jacques must remain at anchor.’
“This was terrible, but it was irrevocable. It never entered my head
to try to make my father alter his decision.
“Then he said to me, ‘My boy, you love boats, but hate the water;
when you have rendered two such contrary propositions a little more
harmonious, when you are no longer afraid of wetting your precious
little skin, you may voyage all you like in uncle Antoine’s boat. Until
then, do not dream of doing so. One should never go in a boat
unless one is capable of taking care of one’s self in case of
accident.’
“The following morning we went to see uncle Antoine.
“My father and I at length set out. It was good to have him back, to
hold his hand, and our disagreement upon one point had not
seriously troubled our friendly relations. When we arrived, we found
uncle Antoine, who occasionally suffered from the gout, incapable of
taking a step in the garden. My father offered to give him his revenge
for the game of chess which he had gained from him the year before,
—the day previous to his departure.
“‘As for you, Jacques,’ said uncle Antoine, ‘as you have no gout,
run away, pick my cherries, eat my strawberries, look at my roses,
go and see your chickens and rabbits and feed them for me. You
would perhaps do well to take along a book, your ‘Swiss Family
Robinson,’ go and read it in the hammock. Take a nap, if that
pleases you, but whatever you do, be good. When one is not
watched, there is a double duty and a double merit in being good.’
“‘I will add,’ put in my father, ‘that you may go in the path by the
edge of the water, and you will do well to watch attentively what goes
on in the river. Flowing water is an instructive spectacle for a boy like
you.’
“‘Instructive?’ queried my uncle.
“‘Full of information,’ answered my father. ‘It is in the water that the
fishes swim. It is in the water also that Jacques will have to swim
very shortly,—like a fish.’
“‘Like a fish?’ said my uncle. ‘Then you will have to give him fins.’
“‘One doesn’t need fins to swim with,’ replied my father. ‘Frogs do
not have them, yet they manage to swim beautifully. If Jacques will
examine those which he disturbs when he approaches the bank, if
he studies the way they keep their heads out of the water in order to
breathe, and the art with which they manage their arms and legs, in
directing themselves about in that beautiful fresh water which so
frightens your nephew, he will receive from these little animals a
swimming lesson superior to any that your gardener can give him.’
“‘That is very true’, uncle Antoine replied. ‘Go, Jacques,—go take
your lesson. It has never before occurred to me what services my
frogs could render you.’
“I was about to start, when my father stopped me with a gesture.
“‘You understand, do you not Jacques, exactly what you are

permitted to do? I have still, however, to tell you what you must not
do: you are not to set foot upon the St. Jacques; this is forbidden
until I tell you otherwise. Do you understand?’
“‘Yes, father, I understand, but⸺’
“‘There isn’t any “but,”’ replied my father.
“Uncle Antoine threw me a compassionate look. However, this
look was only meant to say: ‘I am sorry, Jacques, but your father has
spoken. I have nothing to say.’
“I did, one after another, the things which were authorized. I ate
some cherries, I picked some strawberries, gave grain to the
chickens, and cabbage-leaves to our rabbits. I re-read, lying in the
hammock, two chapters of my ‘Swiss Family Robinson,’ but, far from
making me sleepy, this book awoke in me a longing for adventure. I
then directed my steps towards the river. I had, however, the wisdom
not to go in the direction of the boat,—that is to say, in the direction
of temptation. I regarded the flowing water curiously, and found real
pleasure in doing so. My uncle’s river was not one of those lazy
streams of which the movement is imperceptible. How could it rest
mute between its borders, when it was forced to carry its fresh water
past the lands of a hundred owners, which, from the right and the
left, cried to it—‘Wet us,’ ‘Refresh us,’ ‘We are dying of thirst.’
“It certainly was a spectacle well worth seeing, this continuous flow
of clear water over a bed of golden sand, dotted here and there with
flexible green plants, which, swaying with every movement of the
tide make such charming little retreats for the fish. The minnows and
gudgeon glided like shadows between the few large stones which
took the place of reefs on this miniature coast. Their goings and
comings amused me very much, and I made up my mind that some
day one could apply to me as to them the proverb, ‘Happy as a fish
in the water.’ All this would have been perfect, if little by little I had
not approached the spot where, under the boughs and between the
roots of an enormous willow, my uncle had anchored the famous St.
Jacques. Desiring not to disobey my father. I had made up my mind
not to look at the St. Jacques, not to take a step towards it; this was
prudent, but it was ordained that I should break my word that day.
Reasons for doing so were not lacking: first—the portion of the walk
by the water where I intended to stay being in the hot sun, I had not
seen a single frog; the hot herbage did not suit them.
“To take my swimming lesson it was necessary to go to the side
where the boat was moored. Only under the willows, and in the
damp grass which surrounded the Bay St. Jacques, could I hope to
find them. Second—as my father was anxious that I should study
how frogs swam, I had made a mistake in keeping away from the
only place where I stood some chance of finding them. I knew well
that there alone could they always be seen. Besides, going near the
St. Jacques was not the same thing as going on the St. Jacques.
Third—it is not difficult to refrain from getting into a boat, even when
one has a great desire to do so. So I pushed aside the long
branches of the great willow which hung down to the ground, and
found myself in the presence of the St. Jacques. What a beautiful
boat she was! Since I had last seen her my uncle had had her
repainted. Her new costume of mingled red and white suited her
marvelously; her mast,—there was a mast,—painted also, was even
more beautiful than one of those lovely paper wind-mills that one’s
parents never buy one. Her pennant had also been renewed. It was
certainly for my father’s return that uncle Antoine had gone to the
expense of this brilliant toilette. The hull hardly stirred. Its
imperceptible balancings on the water resembled the quiet breathing
of a sleeping person. Under the transparent veil of the drooping
branches of the weeping willow, no breath could reach it. The St.
Jacques had the air of a little potentate in repose, under a canopy of
verdure. If papa had not forbidden me to get in the little boat, it would
have been delightful to read my ‘Swiss Family Robinson’ out upon
the water. Sitting in the bow, leaning against the mast, one might
imagine one’s self on an island. But then, that which is forbidden one
can not prevent from being forbidden.”
“I tried at first to think of nothing but frogs. But, as if on purpose,
not one showed himself. I was sure they were hiding in the shadow
of the boat. I went up quite close to the St. Jacques, and still nothing
jumped into the water. Decidedly, and in spite of all my good
intentions, I was not to take my swimming lesson that day. But what
were those three green spots that I saw down there on the white
edge of the boat? They were,—yes, they were three frogs taking a
nap at their ease, as if the St. Jacques belonged to them.
“One could not tolerate a thing of that sort. I stepped gently over
the edge of the boat to chase away the trespassers. Paf, paf, paf,
with a single hop, each of them made one of those famous dives of
which my father had spoken. Now or never was the moment to ask
them for a lesson. I did not fail to do so. I was lost in admiration of
their talent. Papa was right; a frog swims to perfection. It swims so
correctly and elegantly that by its vigorous, regular movements, one
understands clearly what one ought to do if one happened to be in
its place. This sort of lesson, illustrated by an example, shows one
much better what movements to make than when the gardener holds
you under the stomach, and shouts you don’t know what in your
ears. If father should throw me into the water, I should think of the
frogs: I should do as they did, and I should certainly swim.
“What a beautiful boat she was!”
Drawn by Clinton Peters.
“I had reached this point in my resolutions, when the sound of

something heavy falling suddenly into the water made me raise my
head. The noise was followed by a cry, and this cry by five or six
others.
“That which made the noise was something which looked like a big
blue package, which was squirming and beating the water frequently,
across by the opposite bank.
“I looked with all my eyes, and was filled with horror in recognizing
the little boy—still in dresses—of the gardener across the stream
whom I had sometimes seen from the bank. The poor little one—I
should be more correct in saying the poor big one—had evidently
escaped from his mother, and had taken advantage of the occasion
to come alone to the river, and turning a summersault by mistake,
was now in danger of drowning. He was not exactly happy. He cried
like a little madman in the instants when his crimson face emerged
from the water, and, by a sort of instinct, beat the water with both
hands and feet.
“I noticed that his skirts held him up temporarily, but that could not
last long. I began to cry in my turn, and call,—‘Papa! uncle!’—but the
sound of my voice could not reach so far, and I felt that there must
be something better to do than cry. I said to myself that one must go
into the river to rescue the poor child. Yes, but in order to do that, it
was necessary to wet one’s self in the cold water, which was
particularly disagreeable to me, as you already know, and what was
worse, they would see, afterwards, by my wet clothes that I had
disobeyed, that I had not stayed in the path, but had broken my
word; that was the most terrible part. In a couple of seconds all views
of the situation flashed through my mind. Should I try to save the
gardener’s little boy? Then I must disobey. An idea came to me
which struck me as brilliant. I would take off my shoes, my stockings
and my trousers, and leave them in the boat; the water evidently was
not very deep, because I could see the bottom; I was quite large and
by rolling my shirt up under my vest, I thought I could go. In a
moment this was done. In another moment, and without stumbling, I
had descended into the water, which, alas! was far from, warm. But
that was not all. I had miscalculated the depth of the water and my
height, and, when I had taken two or three steps towards the child,
who still cried, I saw that if I went any farther I should wet my shirt
and my vest. That seemed to me impossible to do. I took one step
back toward the boat. The thought did not occur to me that I should
have undressed completely at first, and that I might do it even now.
Yes, I very nearly left the child to drown, for the sake of not wetting
the clothes which I still wore (which, it is true, were new ones) and of
not having to admit afterwards, that I had disobeyed.
“My hesitation did not last long. ‘Father will forgive me.’ I said to
myself, when he knows all about it, ‘and giving myself up altogether
to the sentiment of a duty which I felt was superior to all others, I
succeeded, scarcely knowing how, in crossing the river, in reaching
the little boy, who had already stopped crying, in pulling his head out
of the water first, and then, with infinite pains, in seating him on the
first step of a worm-eaten stair-case which mounted the sloping
river-bank, towards his father’s garden.
“No one appeared; no answer came to my cries. There were still
four steps to mount, to reach the garden: I finally contrived to climb
them with my burden. Once there, I laid the child down among the
cabbages. From violet, he had become quite pale, and much
frightened, I ran towards his parents’ house.”
VI.
“Then I found the little one’s mother, whom I knew by sight.
“She was a large, healthy-looking woman, and, as I rushed into
her presence, was working at her spinning-wheel, singing
meanwhile. When she saw me suddenly appear, scarcely half
clothed, and soaking wet, she was seized with a fit of anger, and
before in my trouble I could manage to explain myself, boxed me
vigorously on both ears.
“It was the first time in my life I had received such treatment.
Furious at this proceeding, I threw myself on her, calling her every
name I could think of, and holding her by the skirt, I cried to her that
out among the cabbages there lay a little boy who might be dead.
“The good woman, astonished, began to imagine from the little I
was able to tell her, that she had been too quick; she concluded to
follow me. I feared I was taking her to a dead child, all was so quiet
over in the cabbage garden. But I was wrong. The little fellow I had
pulled out of the water was in better condition than I. We found him
sitting tranquilly in his wet garments, his arm resting carelessly on a
fine large cabbage. Without saying a word, he was staring straight in
front of him. But at the sight of his mother he suddenly recovered his
voice, and commenced bellowing even louder than he had done
when he was paddling in the river. Why should he cry? I thought it
stupid to cry just when help had arrived. He was, however, not so far
wrong, poor, fat little fellow: he was a little man who had already
experienced many things in life; he knew well what awaited him. To
tell the truth, he knew that his mother’s first action, in moments of
excitement, was at once quick and varied.
“Seeing him in good condition, but wet from head to foot, mother
Brazon lifted him up by one arm, and pulling up his frock,
administered a spanking which considerably augmented the
loudness of the little boy’s shrieks. I was indignant. It appears that I
was wrong. I have since heard it said that, medicinally, the maternal
treatment was admirably suited to the occasion. Is that true, doctor?”
“Quite true,” answered the doctor, laughing.
“With all this going on, I was scarcely contented; on the one hand,
I was beginning to shiver with cold, and on the other, for the first time
in my life, I found myself with strangers far away from the remainder
of my clothes, and I had a terrible fear lest Madame Brazon should
profit by the occasion to administer to me (otherwise than on my
ears) the same treatment she had so recently applied to her own
son, and which the doctor, no doubt, would have approved. But
these two exercises had been sufficient to calm the good woman.
“We had no sooner entered the house than she proved herself a
loving mother to little Auguste, and very kind to me. Quick as a wink
she undressed us both entirely, and bundled us both, in spite of our
resistance, between the white sheets of her big bed.
“Three minutes later she made us each drink a glass of sugared
wine—very hot—which put Auguste in an extremely jubilant frame of
mind. I could not share it. The worst was perhaps over. All was
finished on our side of the river, but that which was soon going to
pass on the other side began to occupy my mind. I thought
alternately of papa, of mamma, of my uncle, of my wet clothes, of the
two boxes on my ears, of the boat, and of aunt Marie. All this was
very complicated for a childish brain, already confused. Little
Auguste, searching for a warm place, had curled up in my arms and
gone to sleep. Scarcely knowing it, I followed his example, and
became unconscious in the middle of my sad reflections. It seems
they let us sleep nearly two hours. When I awoke and found myself
in that room and in that bed, and felt the head of a chubby little boy
on my shoulder, I was, at first, much astonished. I opened my eyes
without daring to move. But soon my memory returned, I
remembered everything, and cried, ‘Papa! papa!’
“‘Present!’ replied my father. He had been there by my bedside,—
my dear father,—for one hour, and my darling mother was there also.
Aunt Sister Marie had been unable to leave, or she would have been
there, too.
“Madame Brazon, it appears, had at length succeeded in
recognizing in the small gentleman so scantily clad, whose ears she
had so lately boxed, the little boy she had often seen in the garden
across the river, and to explain the enigma, she had sent a neighbor
to uncle Antoine’s. It had suddenly interrupted the game of chess.
My father arrived soon after, bringing with him my uncle’s doctor. The
doctor, after looking at the pretty picture we made in Madame
Brazon’s bed, had said, ‘Let them sleep.’
“While waiting for us to wake up, father had sent to town for dry
clothes; my mother had brought them herself. When I was dressed,
my father took me between his knees and said to me:
“‘Tell me everything.’
“I gave him, in fewer words than I have just used, an exact
account of what had happened. My father listened to me. I saw
clearly that he was not angry. At one moment, however, I saw him
grow pale; it was when he realized from my explanations that to go
and undrown little Auguste (this was the word I used, and it has been
so well remembered by all the family that I have not forgotten it), it
was, I say, when he understood that I must certainly have crossed
the river to reach the child.
“‘It is incomprehensible!’ said he to mamma and the doctor. ‘The
middle of the river is every where at least five or six feet deep. What
did he do?’
“‘Papa,’ said I, ‘I did as I saw the frogs do.’
“‘But then, my child, you swam.’
“‘I do not know, papa; perhaps—’
“‘Did the water go over your head?’
“‘No, papa, surely not.’
“‘You got no water in your mouth while you were going across to
rescue little Auguste? You did not go altogether under water?’
“‘No, papa; no papa.’
“‘Very well, my wife,’ said my father to my mother, ‘that proves that
when one has to swim, one can swim. Jacques swam, because
occupied with something besides his fear of water, he thought only of
the end he wished to attain. I am sure that he is now cured of his
former fright, and that with a few good lessons he will become a
good swimmer. And to be a good swimmer is very useful: it enables
one to save one’s self as well as others. Without this baby, Madame
Brazon, without his courage and sang-froid, your child would have
been lost.’
“‘My God!’ she cried. ‘And I thanked him with two blows!’
“‘Yes, papa,—two hard ones!’
“‘Madame Brazon,’ said my father, ‘kiss my son on the two cheeks
that you treated so roughly. There is nothing like a kiss to repair an
injury. When one is kissed, all wounds are cured.’”
VII.
“My story,” continued the General, “should not give the idea to
children, or to grown persons either, that it is always wise to make an
abrupt debut in the art of swimming, but it shows that the movements
by the aid of which a man swims are as natural to him as to most
animals, and that if suddenly forced to do so, he has no fear of
wetting himself, and can, by not losing his head, and by thinking of
frogs, cross a little river in safety.
“If you have to make the effort to-night, remember this, and help
one another. To leave a comrade behind is not a creditable
proceeding. Many a time have I congratulated myself that I pulled
little Brazon out of the water.”
“Brazon! Brazon! General?” said the doctor. “But I have known
someone of that name in the army,—a lieutenant-colonel, a strong,
brave fellow. Wait! It was he whose arm I cut off after our expedition
against the Beni-Raten. He was forced to retire—brave fellow!—after
that. I shall always remember what he said to me when the operation
was over: ‘Thanks, doctor. I regret my arm, but don’t regret the
occasion that made me lose it.’”
“And did he tell you,” said the General, “what that occasion was?”
“Faith! no!” responded the doctor, “he needed sleep too badly.”
“Very well, I will tell you,” continued the General, in a voice full of
feeling. “I had had my horse killed under me and my leg broken. I
should have been left to the mercy of the Kabyles, but he rescued
me, took me on his shoulders, carried me to a place of safety, and
only when this was done, discovered that during the trip a ball had
shattered his elbow. Brazon lost his arm in saving my life.
“The story I have just told you made us good friends. Uncle
Antoine became interested in him, my father also: we were educated
together, and have had more or less the same career. Poor Brazon!
When he retired, he returned to ⸺ and lives in what used to be his
father’s garden, opposite uncle Antoine’s ‘Garden of Roses.’
“Since then we have joined the two properties by a bridge, under
which a boat can pass. When I retire, in my turn, I shall not have to
swim to go and see my dear Auguste.”
VIII.
“General,” said the young captain, “will you permit me to ask you
one question? Did not your family spoil you a trifle after this
incident?”
“Oh, yes!” replied the General. “I did not lack attention. Aunt Marie
and my mother both kissed me. My uncle declared I was a fine little
fellow, and Madame Brazon, about two weeks later, sent me the very
biggest pumpkin in her garden. She had found out that I adored
pumpkin soup.”

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Blake, Myth, and Enlightenment: The

Politics of Apotheosis 1st Edition David

Biota Grow 2C gather 2C cook Loucas

Michael Oakeshott and Leo Strauss: The Politics of

Liking Ike: Eisenhower, Advertising, and the Rise of

The Rise of Andrew Jackson Myth Manipulation and the

Narrating the Global Financial Crisis: Urban

Enlightenment in an Age of Destruction: Intellectuals,

Lonely Planet Panama Fallon

The Enlightenment of Bees 1st Edition Rachel Linden

Blake, Myth, and

Blake, Myth, and

ISBN 978-1-137-39034-9 ISBN 978-1-137-39035-6 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016957727

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

This monograph began as a doctoral thesis supervised by Professor Jon

I’m grateful to students at Oxford, Warwick, Bath ASE, and Sunderland,

1 Introduction: ‘A Saint Amongst the Infidels & a

2 ‘The Deep Indelible Stain’: Apotheosis in the Eighteenth

3 ‘Spirits of Fire’: Ambiguous Figures in The French

4 ‘Breathing! Awakening!’: Contesting and Transforming

5 ‘The Night of Holy Shadows’: Europe and Loyalist

6 ‘Serpentine Dissimulation’: Apotheosis in Urizen,

7 ‘The Name of the Wicked Shall Rot’: Blake’s Oriental

8 Transforming Apotheosis in The Four Zoas and Milton 225

9 ‘Ever Expanding in the Bosom of God’: Deification

BB G. E. Bentley, Jr., Blake Books. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977.

EI Morton Paley, Energy and the Imagination: A Study of the Development

Introduction: ‘A Saint Amongst the Infidels

In 1855, John Linnell recollected Blake’s paradoxical opinions on reli-

© The Author(s) 2017 1

on the other, he remained positively invested in myth as an affirmation and

‘Plac’d in the Order of the Stars’

More broadly, the term apotheosis comprises a philosophical and religious

It may seem surprising to focus on the term ‘apotheosis’, which Blake

The perception of these political revolutions as ‘terrors’ in ‘the Heavens

reading to his perception of global political upheaval. Mystical language

Blake, Blake Critics, and Enlightenment

of Criticism (1957), originally part of his book on Blake, is distinctive

history practised by Enlightenment writers such as Hume, Gibbon, and

Myth demands complex responses from readers. For Damrosch,

The ‘happy Philosopher’ alludes to Democritus of Abdera, known as ‘the

Blake at the Limits of Enlightenment

Blake distinguishes imaginative, innocent folk superstitions from a

and St Paul’s charge to the elders of Ephesus to carefully oversee the

Boyd’s backing for the suppression of Catholicism and criticism of Roman

thing could be systematically explained.50 But whereas Gay focuses on

phenomena. Apotheosis was widely understood as a major source of pagan

Virgil and Homer might compliment their Heroes, by interweaving the

Only in deflationary mock-heroic poems was heathen mythology ‘not only

mythological figures from the classical tradition, even while he deliber-

The manner of a miracle being performd is in modern times considerd as an

Blake, Myth, and Utopia

“The moment has come, to speak to you of my uncle, my father’s

“‘You understand, do you not Jacques, exactly what you are

Drawn by Clinton Peters.

“I had reached this point in my resolutions, when the sound of

You might also like

1 Introduction: ‘A Saint Amongst the Infidels & a

2 ‘The Deep Indelible Stain’: Apotheosis in the Eighteenth

3 ‘Spirits of Fire’: Ambiguous Figures in The French

4 ‘Breathing! Awakening!’: Contesting and Transforming

5 ‘The Night of Holy Shadows’: Europe and Loyalist

6 ‘Serpentine Dissimulation’: Apotheosis in Urizen,

7 ‘The Name of the Wicked Shall Rot’: Blake’s Oriental

8 Transforming Apotheosis in The Four Zoas and Milton 225

9 ‘Ever Expanding in the Bosom of God’: Deification