[New York Peasant by Wilfrid: October 26, 2009]
The Morgan is not especially devoted to blockbuster shows, and the meticulous, detailed engravings and works on paper of William Blake do not lend themselves to Guggenheimish grandstanding. Nevertheless, a good stream of citizens was flowing through the gallery when I visited.
The Blake show is in the West Wing - appropriate in that Blakean cosmology identifies the west as the ground of creative imagination; inappropriate perhaps when one reflects on the irony of Blake's work coming to rest in what was the private office of a powerful and wealthy banker.
Radical Blake, born in Soho, scratched a living through his skill as a commercial engraver, never found an audience either for his lyric poems or his weighty prophecies, produced and distributed relatively few copies of his illustrated books, and was generally regarded - by those who knew his work - as eccentric, perhaps somewhat loony, anachronism. But the work - most of it anyway - was never lost. Among the images, a few - The "Ancient of Days" and "Glad Day" for example - became iconic, and by now must have sold millions as posters. Several of the lyric poems established themselves in classrooms and anthologies as among the best known and loved (if hardly understood) in the English language. "Tyger, tyger burning bright..."; "Little lamb, who made thee?..."; "I was angry with my friend..."; "I wander thro each chartered street..."; "'Twas on a Holy Thursday..."; "For Mercy has a human heart..." All easily memorable. Not to mention his big hit record, "And did those feet...?"
Blake, almost despite himself, became a classic - albeit a marginal classic. Repetition of these deceptively simple poems conjured an image of Blake as a writer of compassionate, common-sensical, Christian, almost childlike homilies about innocence and forgiveness. And yet there were rough edges. In what way was the rose "sick"? Didn't comments about "aged men, wise guardians of the poor" have a slightly sarcastic edge? Wasn't there something restless in lines about "mind-forg'd manacles" and soldiers' sighs running "like blood down Palace walls"? What sense is there in asking whether Jerusalem was built in England? And who let that scary tiger in here?
Twentieth century scholarship has, for the most part, explicated this tangle of pity and righteous anger by deciphering the relationship between the short lyrics and the prophetic books (dense, lengthy incantations which Blake laboriously engraved on copper plates - writing the texts backwards so that they could be printed. The propecies relate also to the drawings, to manifestoes like "There is no Natural Religion" and "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell" and to the copious notes Blake left in the margins of books which fascinated or infuriated him.
What emerged was a largely consistent, obsessively detailed cosmology. After several false starts and changes of attitude, Blake finally set out a complete account of this world's origins, conceptual and historical development, and final purpose, intertwined with an account of who we are, where we come from, and whither - if I may - we go (that he was a contemporary of Hegel can never be over-emphasized). Credible or not, it's a remarkable achievement. Fortunately, it isn't necessary to assimilate this vision in order to enjoy this extensive exhibition of the Morgan's priceless Blake holdings. It is always worth bearing in mind, though, that Blake is the most counter-intuitive of writers and artists. When you see an engraving of God in Blake's work or a drawing of Satan, set aside all assumptions deriving from the Christian tradition of the holy and the fallen, because Blake's meaning is almost always completely opposite. His Christianity, by the way, would be regarded by mainstream churches as profoundly blasphemous. But then he didn't he like them much either.
Great treasures are displayed here. The Morgan often holds one of only two or three extant copies of the illustrated books - sometimes the only complete copy or the only copy colored by the artist. Comparisons will Andy Warhol might not seem obvious, but just as the commercial drawings (mainly of shoes, I think) which Warhol executed during his apprenticeship evidence his application and professionalism, engravings Blake executed solely for commercial purposes show his skill as a craftsman. There are engravings from Watteau here and even comic illustrations (a funny picture about a pig, engraved when he was twenty-six). There are several autograph letters on show, and two major series of illustrations which fallmore or less outside Blake's original canon - for the Book of Job and for Milton's poems "L'Allegro" and "Il Pensoroso". More or less, because the Job pictures powerfully illustrate Blake's revisionary reading of the Bible.
Finally, be sure to pause outside the gallery and look at a small notebook which stands alone in a small glass case. This is no other than the "Pickering Manuscript," one of the great treasures of English literature. Written by Blake as a fair copy of several poems, it passed through several hands before being published by one B.M. Pickering in 1866. It contains some of Blake's finest writing.
To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour...
Every night and every morn
Some to misery are born.
Every morn and every night
Some are born to sweet delight.
Some are born to sweet delight,
Some are born to endless night.
We are led to believe a lie
When we see not through the eye
Which was born in a night to perish in a night,
When the soul slept in beams of light.
God appears, and God is light
To those poor souls who dwell in night,
But does a human form display
To those who dwell in realms of day.
"A New Heaven is Begun" is at the Morgan through January 3, which gives you time to visit three or four times I should think.
