Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law. - book reviews

The first need of a revolutionary is a set of respectable ancestors. To break "the mind-forg'd manacles" which enslave us to state or church, economic despotism or lying media, we need hallowed slogans affirming our ancient rights, great tales of heroic vision and resistance, a precise and evocative language in which to express our anger and desire, the whole extent of that lovely oxymoron "revolutionary tradition." Many of us have sensed that William Blake, the very odd and very great poet, painter, and mystic of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, was such an ancestor. By locating the protean Blake as precisely as possible within the amorphous and sometimes underground currents of prophetic dissent in his time and by outlining the confluence and clash of radical religious and political themes which form the argument of Blake's work, the last book of the late British historian E.P. Thompson has done the revolutionary tradition a considerable service.

Thompson was the most seminal historian, Marxist or non-Marxist, of our generation in the English-speaking world. His 1955 biography of William Morris, revised in 1976, was a landmark in the study of the relationship of aesthetics to politics. His masterpiece, the 1963 The Origins of the English Working Class, which gives a detailed account of the political currents around William Blake in its opening section, gave historians on both sides of the Atlantic new tools for studying the history of groups previously considered unchronicled and voiceless. He interrupted his career as scholar and teacher in recent years to wage a trenchant campaign against the arms race. This final book, an expansion of the Alexander Lectures delivered at the University of Toronto in 1978, brings his remarkable career full circle. Witness Against the Beast, delayed by the exigencies of public affairs and failing health, was published just a few weeks before Thompson's death in August 1993.

The book was dedicated to David Erdman, author of Blake: Prophet Against Empire (1954, revised 1965, 1969, and 1977), and largely accepts Erdman's conclusions as to the origin and importance of Blake's radical political beliefs. This is not to say that either Thompson or Erdman consider Blake a proto-socialist. Indeed, they do not even go as far in that respect as the late Jacob Bronowski in his 1944 book A Man Without a Mask. Blake was a proud artisan, disdainful of patronage, defiant against repression, a dissenter from the doctrines of many establishments and sometimes astonishingly sane on the subject of women and sexuality, but the struggle for the control of the means of production was not at the center of his concerns. If Blake can be considered a forerunner of the socialists, his mystical and prophetic utterances are not logical or analytical, but might be considered socialist inspiration for the right side of the brain. Blake's vision, although strongly rooted in images of this world, was essentially religious. He scorned the doubting philosophes of the Enlightenment and filled his poetry and hand-colored engravings with symbols from the tradition of Christian mysticism. He was strongly influenced by the writings of Jacob Boehme and Emmanuel Swedenborg. However, Thompson makes a powerful case that he was much less influenced by the genteel tradition of neo-Platonist mysticism than by the legacy of the radical fringes of the Puritan Revolution, which was at its height a century before Blake's birth in 1757.

Thompson carefully traces the currents which flowed from sects like the Levellers, who believed in political equality, and the Ranters, who believed in sexual equality, all of whom represented the longings of common people who expressed their desire in religious language because they had no other vehicle for public discourse. Groups like these were forced underground after the Restoration in 1660, but they continued to develop and mutate. These groups were largely antinomian: that is, they believed that faith alone was necessary for salvation and that the saved were not bound by the conventional moral law, much less the laws made by what they considered illegitimate institutions. Such groups tended to have an antipathy toward ruling classes in state or church. They were frequently persecuted. Thompson does an admirable job of recovering their doctrines and symbols from the faint traces of the squabbling pamphlets and erratic congregational records of the age. His thesis is that Blake was strongly influenced by a group called the Muggletonians, who turn out to be a good deal less ridiculous than their name makes them sound.

These followers of Ludovic Muggleton and John Reeve, according to Thompson, "arose within the whitest heats of the vortex around which Ranting, Quakerism, egalitarian, Behmenist, and sexual liberationist notions turned. While they quarrelled most fiercely with their most proximate neighbors, as is the way of sects, a great deal of the imagery which turned in that vortex was gathered into their doctrine." It is a process familiar to many readers of this journal. The Muggletonians believed in "a singular God/Christ in the image of man"; numbered their followers only in the low three figures; wrote hymns to the tunes of popular ballads of the day, much in the manner of the IWW; and kept a low profile in comparison to the evangelicals of the day. Thompson makes a case that Blake's mother and members of her family were probably Muggletonians, but he goes no further in his surmise; he does not need to do so. Blake's vision was too large and constantly changing to be contained within the doctrines of any sect, but the source of his powerful symbols and peculiar notions is obviously in the neighborhood that Thompson has surveyed with such exemplary scholarship. Thompson's account of his discovery of the Muggletonian archive and its last believing custodian is quite touching.

Having pinpointed the sources of Blake's ever shifting mythological framework, Thompson goes on to analyze Blake's early masterpieces, Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, especially the poems "The Divine Image" and "The Human Abstract." These are enough to reaffirm that Blake speaks directly to the concerns of radical politics in both his time and our own, but it is regrettable that Thompson did not have time to continue his analysis to cover some of the later prophetic books like Vala or The Four Zoas or Milton, which is the source of the well-known hymn of the British Labour Party:

And did those feet in ancient time Walk upon England's mountains green? And was the holy Lamb of God On England's pleasant pastures seen?

And did the Countenance Divine Shine forth upon our clouded hills? And was Jerusalem builded here Among these dark Statanic Mills?

Bring me my Bow of burning gold! Bring me my Arrows of desire! Bring me my Spear! O clouds unfold! Bring me my Chariot of Fire!

I will not cease from Mental Fight, Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand, Till we have built Jerusalem In England's green and pleasant Land.

This complex language sometimes defies analysis, but it is language from an unbroken tradition, immediately intelligible to the vast majority of working people in English-speaking countries, a manner of speaking familiar to Eugene Debs and Kate Richards O'Hare, Martin Luther King and Fannie Lou Hamer, indeed to every American radical and socialist with a real mass following in this century. This language of prophecy which has been the chief vehicle of mass protest throughout history is worth the careful study of even the most rational among us. It is not only a beautiful thing in itself but an essential tool for full communication. Thompson's closely reasoned study of Blake's heritage and his early poems is a good place to begin.

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