Blake and Bloomsbury: Mental Warfare

Blake and Bloomsbury: Mental Warfare DIANE F. GILLESPIE Washington State University BLAKE CONTINUES TO FASCINATE both writers and painters in the twentieth century.1 Members of the Bloomsbury Group were no exception, though there were exceptions within the Group. Although his brother, Geoffrey Keynes, was a noted Blake scholar and collector, John Maynard Keynes bought valuable editions of Blake's unholy trinity (Bacon, Newton, and Locke).2 Yet Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell, Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Lytton Strachey, and E. M. Forster, in their own ways and always with some reservations, used Blake as a touchstone.3 As he rebelled against English empiricism, Neoclassical poetry, and the painting of Reynolds, Rembrandt, and especially Rubens,4 so they rebelled against materialism in the novel and storytelling in painting. As he denounced the cold, rational religiosity of his day, so they rejected Victorian prudery and pomposity. Like Blake, Bloomsbury sometimes played the devil's advocate and, by defending the unpopular side, challenged the blinkered vision that obliterates glimpses of wholeness and leads to psychological repression and social oppression. Like Blake, they asserted the importance of individual inner lives and of the artist's vision which creates another world. Bloomsbury shared some of these concerns with earlier writers, thinkers, and painters other than Blake. Some contemporaries of the Bloomsbury friends, like D. H. Lawrence,5 perhaps exhibited a greater affinity with Blake than they did. Nevertheless, his dual abilities in verbal and visual media and his challenges to both the writing and the painting of his age had more appeal to members of a group containing painters as well as writers. Most of these people discovered Blake independently when they were young. Among the poems, they liked the Songs of Innocence and of Experience, the other short poems, and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. His long prophetic poems interested them less. Nor were they uncritical of what they knew of his work, especially as they matured. ELT: Volume 33:1, 1990 Bloomsbury ultimately saw Blake as a philosophical Idealist whose vivid imagination caused him to lose contact with the material world. Educated at the Cambridge of G. E. Moore, the male members of the group, while attracted to the validity Idealism gave to the imagination, distrusted a view they thought confounded the object perceived with the perception of it.6 Partly because Blake was an artist, not a philosopher, his statements on such matters were not always consistent, nor were those of his interpreters. My primary purpose, therefore, is neither to defend Blake against Bloomsbury^ criticisms, nor to detail the degree of Bloomsbury^ distortions. Just as Blake admired and admonished his predecessors while he recreated them in his own image, so the Bloomsbury artists admired, selectively scrutinized, argued about, and sometimes refashioned Blake. My interest is in the way he became, to many of the Bloomsbury friends, a provocative, stimulating artist whose extremes helped them define their own aesthetic theories and practices and whose motifs are woven, with variations, into their work. While Roger Fry appreciated both the visual and verbal aspects of Blake's art, eventually he gravitated towards the pictures. Vanessa Bell's interest in Blake, however, was almost exclusively visual. Like Fry, Virginia Woolf initially recognized Blake's dual creativity but, unlike Fry, she gravitated towards the poems. Lytton Strachey, Leonard Woolf, and E. M. Forster, however, looked at Blake almost exclusively as a writer. Bloomsbur/s interest in Blake began at Cambridge with Roger Fry, who knew both the poetry and the painting and who sounds most of the keynotes that reverberate among his later friends. Not long after Fry went up to King's College, he read a paper on Blake, probably to the Fine Arts Society. "It will not be good," he wrote to his friend C. R. Ashbee on 28 November 1886, the day before he read it. He also included in his letter "Some Blake proverbs" he thought his friend would enjoy. "One thought fills immensity" and "Whatever is possible to believe is an image of truth," he quoted from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.7 Another of the quotations also deals with the power of the imagination: "The emmet's inch and...