The Devil as Muse: Blake, Byron, and the Adversary

1 Prologue. Kierkegaard, Don Giovanni, and Doctor Faustus: The Artist as Faust

s 1 Kierkegaard, Don Giovanni, and Doctor Faustus The Artist as Faust PRologue 1 Shortly before his death, Keats wrote Shelley a letter of friendly criticism. He had just received Shelley’s tragedy, The Cenci: There is only one part of it I am judge of; the Poetry, and dramatic effect, which by many spirits now a days is considered the mammon. A modern work it is said must have a purpose, which may be the God—an artist must serve Mammon—he must have “self concentration” selfishness perhaps. You I am sure will forgive me for sincerely remarking that you might curb your magnanimity and be more of an artist, and “load every rift” of your subject with ore.1 To be “more of an artist” is, it seems, to turn away from ethical purpose . If Shelley curbed his “magnanimity,” that greatness of soul which for Aristotle gathers together all the virtues, he could better develop the quality that the artist needs: “self concentration,” which is “selfishness perhaps.” For an artist must serve Mammon. Keats is suggesting that Shelley could work more intensively at making his poems into rich and beautiful things, and that to do so will involve a profound indifference to, perhaps even violation of, ethical considerations. It is Spenser’s house of Mammon that is “with rich metal loaded every rift”; it stands next to the gate of hell.2 “The poetical Character,” Keats wrote to his friend Woodhouse, “has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the virtuous philosopher, delights the chameleon poet.”3 In that formulation, the emphasis falls 2 The Devil as Muse s on inclusiveness: evil as well as good, Iago as well as Imogen, the opposite principles brought into a kind of equivalence by the chiming of the names. But even there, Keats recognizes an antagonist perspective , that of the virtuous philosopher, which this inclusiveness stands over against; and the advice to Shelley implies something fundamental about the creativity of the artist and what it must exclude or deny. “No man can serve two masters,” says Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, “for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.” (Matt 6:24). Mammon is there the antagonist principle to God: it also becomes, as any reader of Milton knows, the name of a devil. This book explores the notion of a radical tension between the ethical and the aesthetic—the virtuous philosopher and the chameleon poet—through the idea of the Devil as Muse, whereby the creative artist is seen as diabolically sponsored or inspired. Its central figures are Blake and Byron. “The very grandest Poetry is Immoral the Grandest characters Wicked. Very Satan,” wrote Blake polemically in the margin of a moralizing commentary on Dante. “Cunning & Morality are not Poetry but Philosophy the Poet is Independent & Wicked the Philosopher is Dependent & Good.”4 Much of Blake’s own poetry can be read as an intensive working out of the implications of his statement that Milton was a true poet and of the Devil’s party. Byron’s genius was widely perceived by his contemporaries as satanic, a perception he was not greatly inclined to contradict. His poetry engages intimately not only with Milton’s Satan, as has often been noticed, but also with the other great Devil of European literature, Goethe’s Mephistopheles, the mocking nihilist “who always denies.” Byron embodied the figure of the Devil’s-party poet more influentially than any other writer and gave that idea cogency throughout Europe. The Devil has many titles. The emphasis in this study falls on the Adversary, the supreme figure of opposition, in a multiple sense: as the opponent of God; as the accuser, who brings the knowledge of good and evil, that divisive polarity which structures most ethical thought; and as the figure who tells us that our habits of reflective consciousness , with the opposition of mind to world which they presuppose , are alienated, fallen, the mark of our exile from the garden. To think how the Devil might function as the Muse will be to explore how s Prologue: Kierkegaard, Don Giovanni, and Doctor Faustus 3 artistic creation works with and through such oppositions, to reconceive or remake them in a more open relationship, at once fruitful and dangerous. Blake...