Romanticism and Ideology

Studies in English Writing 1765-1830

David Aers, Jonathan Cook, David Punter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317272212
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

First published in 1981.The primary purpose of this book is to serve as an introduction to writing in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In addition to major Romantic poets – Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Shelly – the authors discuss writers such as Austen, Hazlitt and Burke, who are usually studied in a different context, and genres such as fiction and political writing, which are often cut off from the central body of poetry.

An original and highly stimulated study, this book will appeal to all those who are dissatisfied with the conventional categories into which writers and literary movements are usually placed.

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Chapter 1Blake: ‘Active Evil and ‘Passive Good’

David Punter

DOI: 10.4324/9781315638836-2

In his ‘Public Address’ (c.1810), Blake comments: ‘I am really sorry to see my Countrymen trouble themselves about Politics’ (p.18), ⁽¹⁾ and by doing so he sets a critical problem which has absorbed students of Blake for many years. ⁽²⁾ It can be variously formulated, but centrally it has to do with Blake's concept of the relations between the individual and society. In so far as his texts are polemical – which they certainly were in the earlier years and which, I would contend, they substantially remained to the end of his life – what is the essential site of that polemic? Do the texts advocate a process of individual liberation, or one of revolutionary social action? If both are advocated simultaneously, what are the mechanisms by means of which the dialectical thrust of the argument is maintained?

This is a vast subject, and this essay can obviously provide only a small contribution to it. A useful gloss on Blake's use of the word ‘Politics’ is provided in Rousseau's ‘Emile’ (1757–60), where we find the statement that ‘society must be studied in the individual and the individual in society; those who desire to treat politics and morals apart from one another will never understand either’. ⁽³⁾ The widely accepted separation between the concepts of individual and society was an object of profound suspicion to many writers of the romantic period, and this suspicion in turn rests upon another emphasis within romanticism, which we can find expressed by Coleridge: ⁽⁴⁾

It is at once the distinctive and constitutive basis of my philosophy that I place the ground and genesis of my system, not, as others, in a fact impressed, much less in a generalisation from facts collectively, least of all in an abstraction embodied in a hypothesis, in which the pretended solution is most often but a repetition of the problem in disguise. In contradiction to this, I place my principle in an act – in the language of grammarians I begin with the verb – but the act involves its reality.

There is a certain amount of characteristically Coleridgean verbiage here, but the central distinction is clear: ‘fact’ and ‘act’, noun and verb, stasis and process. Elsewhere Coleridge writes that ‘thinking can go but half way. To know the whole truth, we must likewise Act: and he alone acts, who makes – and this can no man do, estranged from Nature’. ⁽⁵⁾ This reminds us of Marx's analysis of alienation in his ‘Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844’, ⁽⁶⁾ but more significant for our purposes is Coleridge's identification of activity and ‘making’: the kinds of act which he is thinking of, and which he is claiming to be the major constitutive factor in ‘human-ness’, in man's species-being, are forms of making, forms of work, even though any sense of agency is obliterated in the abstractness of his formulation. The link between Blake and this general emphasis within romanticism is provided by Hegel: ‘What man is, is his deed, is the series of his deeds, is that into which he has made himself. Thus the spirit is essentially energy and one cannot, in regard to it, abstract from appearance’. ⁽⁷⁾ What is particularly interesting here is Hegel's use in this context of the Blakean term ‘energy’: the human spirit, to Hegel, is not static but active, exuberant, continually in movement and flux.

If we see activity or energy – rather than reason, or any other abstract faculty of mind – as the basis of the human, then the question about relations between individual and society becomes transformed. There are no ‘mere’ individuals, existing in isolation, and there is, on the other hand, no ‘society’ in an abstract sense: what we have instead is a continuous process of activity and transformation, within which people work in relation to each other and in relation to the natural world. The study of these processes of work is too broad a matter to be confined within a concept like ‘politics’; thus in Blake we find, alongside the apparent rejection of the political category as such, an intense and continuing attention to areas of human life which are heavily politically charged: questions of social relations, of sexual behaviour, of the organization and role of the state and commerce. Although there may seem to be a contradiction here, it is by no means a confusion in Blake's mind: rather, Blake is choosing precisely to point to the inadequacy of conventionally accepted categories in order to advance an argument about the eventual imaginative unity of human life and, in doing so, to draw attention to the malevolent social purposes which are served by separating the realm of politics from other areas of social activity.

What I want to examine, then, in this essay is a number of aspects of Blake's attention to work. ⁽⁸⁾ Both as a London tradesman, and as a hater of rigid rationalist philosophy, Blake had every reason to be concerned with the everyday processes by which men transform nature, rather than with the ways in which they seek to explain the world abstractly to themselves; or perhaps more accurately, he was concerned with the distinctions and connections between those levels. I shall start by considering some of the early work, leading up to some comments on the well-known ‘Tyger’ poem from the ‘Songs of Experience’ (1789–94); I shall then look at one of the short early prophecies, ‘The Song of Los’ (1795), in which Blake's analysis of the relations between work and social organization deepens; then at ‘The Mental Traveller’, a lengthy ballad known to us from the Pickering Manuscript, probably written around 1803, in which is inserted a full-scale description and diagnosis of the history of industrialization and its social effects; and finally at several passages from ‘Jerusalem’ (1804–20), in which we can see in miniature the more complex vision which informs the late works.

The whole philosophical effort of Blake's early work, not only the poetry but also the various annotations and the tracts, is directed towards a central opposition between passivity and activity. ‘Active Evil is better than Passive Good’ (409), he writes in the margin of his copy of Lavater's rather saccharine ‘Aphorisms’ (1788); and again, in more detail: ⁽⁹⁾

Accident is the omission of act in self & the hindering of act in another, This is Vice but all Act is Virtue. To hinder another is not an act it is the contrary it is a restraint on action both in ourselves & in the person hinderd. for he who hinders another omits his own duty, at the time (pp.226–7)

The problem Blake found with the thinkers of the eighteenth century was that they assumed, first, that the nature of man was static, and thus, as a consequence, that all actions carried the same existential weight. What men did was merely to be considered as an accompaniment to what they centrally were. This, to Blake, was nonsense; one could paraphrase his opinion by saying that there is no way to know whether a person is good unless he or she, at least occasionally, does something which could substantiate that view. In Plate 4 of ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’ (c.1790–3), he discusses the role which religion has played in perverting what should be an obvious sense of connection between being and act, and claims that:

All Bibles or sacred codes, have been the causes of the following Errors.

1. That Man has two real existing principles Viz: a Body & a Soul.
2. That Energy, calld Evil, is alone from the Body, & that Reason, calld Good, is alone from the Soul.
3. That God will torment Man in Eternity for following his Energies.

In other words, religion has outlawed the body, and in doing so has in fact cut off the mind from the real source of its energies: ‘Energy’, writes Blake, in the statements which the Devil's Voice immediately puts forward as ‘Contraries’ to these religious ‘Errors’, ‘is the only life and is from the Body and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy.’

What follows from this is a revaluation of the physical, and of those forces which affect physical well-being, ⁽¹⁰⁾ The problems of philosophy become inseparable from social justice, for philosophy is conceived, not as dealing with an abstract, disembodied model of man, but as related to man himself, in all his complexity, body and soul, energy and reason, delusion and potential. It is therefore not surprising that, even in his early period when, on the whole, the issues at the centre of Blake's mind were largely to do with religion, philosophy and literary tradition, we none the less find him paying attention to those social phenomena which ideology most centrally sanctions, the processes of work. We find, for instance, the disturbing ironies of the first ‘Chimney Sweeper’ lyric, from the ‘Songs of Innocence’ (1789); here the child sweep, Tom Dacre, dreams about his own freedom from drudgery and ascent to heaven:

And so Tom awoke and we rose in the dark

And got with our bags & our brushes to work.

Tho’ the morning was cold, Tom was happy & warm,

So if all do their duty, they need not fear harm.

This final stanza opens up an enormous range of doubts in the reader: what exactly are we supposed to think of the apparent happiness which Tom has achieved? Is it merely an internalization of repression? Or is there something in religious promises which is genuinely satisfying? Or is Blake regarding religion cynically as at least a momentary panacea for social evil? Or, in fact, are we supposed to be laughing, very non-innocently, at Tom Dacre all the way through? Ironically, the interpretative problems raised by a so-called Song of Innocence are considerably resolved by the companion poem in the ‘Songs of Experience’, with its uncompromising final stanza which appears to lay the blame for misery squarely at the feet of the controllers of ideological repression:

And because I am happy, & dance & sing,

They think they have done me no injury:

And are gone to praise God & his Priest & King

Who make up a heaven of our misery.

But even this leaves us with a distinct problem, about whether we can justify our trust in the experienced voice. It might be, after all, that the sweeping attribution of causation in this stanza is the sign of paranoia, an indicator of a loss of trust so extreme that every manifestation of the social world appears as part of a perverted and threatening order.

Blake's attitude towards state involvement in institutional cruelty is bitter, and it is sometimes accompanied by an equally sarcastic emphasis on the superiority of practical philanthropy to intellectual speculation, as, for instance, in one of the songs included in the satirical ‘Island in the Moon’ (c.1784–5) (pp.12–13). The song ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Blake: ‘Active Evil’ and ‘Passive Good’
• 2 Blake: Sex, Society and Ideology
• 3 Romantic Literature and Childhood
• 4 Wordsworth’s Model of Man in ‘The Prelude’
• 5 Coleridge: Individual, Community and Social Agency
• 6 Social Relations of Gothic Fiction
• 7 Community and Morality: Towards Reading Jane Austen
• 8 Hazlitt: Criticism and Ideology
• 9 Shelley: Poetry and Politics
• Notes
• Index of Authors and Titles