Afterword: Sincerity and Self-Similarity

Asking a professional Romanticist to comment on a volume like this one might seem either redundant or, depending on one's sympathies, like inviting a delegate from the devil's party to debate the limits of ethical criticism. On the one hand, Romantic poetry is popularly synonymous with sincerity, the "man speaking to men," spontaneously and with feeling. On the other hand, while—as David V. Urban contends—Paradise Lost compels us to identify insincerity with sin per se, the Romantics turned the tables by casting Satan as the authentic rebel against a divinity both unjust and hypocritical. In fact, Satan is the only character in Paradise Lost who is capable of sincerity in the terms adduced by Lionel Trilling, for whom sincerity presumes an individual selfhood to which we can be true. Matthew J. Smith suggests that Milton's epic represented something of a shift in the theological understanding of sincerity, with Satan "caught between ontological and agonistic models." But it remained for the Romantics to call Milton himself an adherent "of the Devils party without knowing it." And while not all Romanticists assent to this description, I announced my own party allegiance ten years ago in a book, Fictions and Fakes, devoted to the proposition that Romantic authenticity—whether understood as a moral, ontological, or aesthetic concept—was forged in the spectacular hoaxes, ballad scandals, popular impostures, and indeed forgeries of the late eighteenth century. Tempting as it might be to mount a similar case against sincerity, however, I will content myself for the nonce by asking how we might judge the sincerity of William Blake's famous aphorism.

In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Blake not only declares that Milton was of the Devil's party, but that this unsuspected bias proves Milton "a true Poet."¹ Blake is accusing Milton of insincerity, albeit unconscious insincerity: the poet does not truly admire the God whose ways he has set out to justify. Not only does he betray an incongruence "between avowal and actual feeling"; the sincerity of his actual admiration for Satan is gauged by the fact that he does not know he feels it.² (This is a sufficiently familiar paradox in the post-psychoanalytic intellectual climate, and one way to describe the project of psychoanalysis, Trilling suggests, is as a modernist rehabilitation of sincerity.) For Blake, it is Milton's very insincerity—his self-division—which proves him "a true Poet": the real deal, the brass ring, the authentic artist. Blake is performing the dialectical move of positing a gap between intention and execution which must be repaired by the critic, who restores the word's transparency to its true meaning. But does Blake sincerely believe that Milton sympathized with the Devil? The assertion and the longer argument in which it is embedded bear many of the rhetorical signs of sincerity, from their bluntness to their propositional form (the numbered statements may recall Luther's ninety-five theses) to their disregard for logical consistency. Yet this argument may not be "Blake's" but that of Milton's "fraudulent impostor foul," since there is no clear formal division between "The Voice of the Devil" announced on plate four of the Marriage and the critique of Paradise Lost offered on plate six.³ Readers are thus invited to interpret this critique ironically and to categorize the Marriage as a satire, not altogether unlike Swift's Argument as described by Jeffrey Galbraith. The fact that The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is an "unauthorized" text (William Blake's name appears nowhere in or on it) offers an easy way out for those wishing to distance Blake from an influential but misguided reading of Paradise Lost. But then again: what reader of Blake has ever doubted that he really meant what he, or the Devil, said of Milton in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell? He meant it, but he did not simply mean it. To regard Blake himself as a true Poet, and not just a polemicist, requires that we invest his work with the same doubleness of intention that Blake attributes to Milton...