Blake as Teacher and Critic

/ REVIE\~/S BLAKE AS. TEACHER AND CRITIC* HE.LEN w. RANDALL HThe best way to approach Blake/' Professor Frye has said (Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, January, 1947), ('is to surrender unconditionally to Blake~s own terms.'' Farther on in this review of Professor Mark Scharer's WilHam Blake: The Politics of Vision and Mr. Alfred Kazin's The Po,-tablt Blake, he speaks of certain limitations he finds in these books as the "result of a defective ~ethod, a reluctance to come to grips with the whole Blake because of a fear that Blake is not intelJigent enough to withstand exhaustive scrutiny." We should thus expect Professor Frye's Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake, which was then in press, to offer an exhaustive analysis and to hold scrupulously to Blake's terms; we should also expect him to have no reservations about Blake's intelligence. These expectations are abundantly fulfilled~ To a degree that is little short of miraculous) the author h.olds his argument within the intellectual processes of his subject, even though the argument sometimes encompasses traditional Jiterature of which Blake may have had only a gJimmering notion and contemporary literature of which he could have had no notion at all. Fearful Symmetry is not open to the charge of F. L. Lucas' possibly unfair criticism of I. A. Richards: "Coleridge on Imagination contains, I feel, a certain amount of imagination on Coleridge." Fearful Symmetry contains a good deal of imagination, but it is Blake's im'agin.ation surprisingly and authentically working through Professor Frye. Nor is this statement as chimerical as it may sound; its meaning, or something like it, is an integr~l part · of the main argument which the book advances. For the author contends that ~lake offers the key to "a lost art of reading poetry," a "doctrine that all symbolism in a_ll art and aJI religion is mutually inte11igible among all men, and that there is such a thing as an iconography of the imagination .» Once one has mastered the difficult "grammar" of this iconography , as Bla~e taught it, one can read the Prose Edda, the Bible, Chaucer, and Milton as Blake did, or Keats, Baudelaire, Rim baud, and Joyce as he would have done. By the same token, Professor Frye can give us Blake's reading of Blake and (so far as he chooses) all other literature as well. Unconditional surrender to the terms of Blake means that the cr1tic must proceed according to Blake's theories of knowledge, religion, ethks and politics, painting, and poetry; and these subjects are presented, as critical premises, in the first five chapters of the book. The account begins with Blake•s rejection of Locke: his llcloven fiction" of separated subject and object, his preference for abstraction over perception, and his acceptance of the mediocrity as the criterion of reality. The opening chapter is eiajtJed "The Case against Locke," but where die historian of ideas *Fearful Symmetr_,.: A Sltldy of William Blake. By NORTHROP FRY£.. Princeton: Princeton University Press [Toronto : S:~.undcrs}. 1947. Pp. vii, 462. (:/>6.00) 204 REVIEWS '205 would have given at least a summary account· of the Essay concerning Human Underslanding1 Professor Frye gives only a bare skeletal account of that which is not Blake (i.e., that which is not p.erception, vision, unity of subject-obje.ct> creation, synthesis, genius). Since he is presenting Blake's reading of Locke, however, this "skeleton" takes on flesh, and blood as the book progresses, signifying a "consolidation.. of the error t~~t is to be cast out. The "cloven fiction," for example, is incrementally repeated in connection with deism, tyranny and mob rule, artistic imitation, and ''false" atlegory in the four succeedi.ng c-hapters, turns up significantly in the interpretation of Blake's poetry, and is most fully exp,ressed as the "lower" half of the doctrine of analogy which is implicit in the last of the Prophecies, jerusalem. Since everything in Blake goes back to his theory of knowledge and, consequently) to the " unholy trinity" of Bacon-LockeNewton which is not his theory of know)edge~ Professor Frye relentlessly insists that we recognize these things whenever...