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times as possible, as well as the facts of Blake's own life and working meth–
ods, then bring them to bear on the interpretation of his work.
Ackroyd's conception of Blake looks in both these directions. He pro–
vides a wealth of information about Blake and his milieu, especially from
recent sources, and from time
to
time he sketches in the historical back–
ground of the American and French Revolutions and the long war against
Napoleon, with its political repression and the sufferings it inflicted on the
London poor. Yet he hardly indicates how these events shaped Blake's life–
long hatred of the Establishment or figured in his work. He distances
himself from the view of Blake's radicalism advanced by Erdman and
recently elaborated in terms of intellectual and religious history by Jon Mee
and E.P. Thompson. Ackroyd's lack of interest in the political context may
explain the short shrift he gives to the four Continental Prophecies
America,
Europe,
and
The Song of Los
(including "Africa" and "Asia") except to praise
their magnificent illustrations. These works, which trace the growth of the
idea of revolution back to the beginning of time, are Blake's first venture in
writing the universal history that culminated in his last long
poemJerusalell1,
but Ackroyd views them as Ii ttle more than popular narrative in an Ossianic
idiom. While it may be too fanciful
to
see his dismissal of the continental
poems as a kind of insularity, it is striking how often Ackroyd stresses
Blake's Englishness and places him as a "Cockney visionary" within a line
of great London artists such as Turner and Dickens. He opposes Blake's
"English strain of moral seriousness and earnest spiri tuali ty" to the infection
of "sceptical and deistical" ideas presumably caught from the continent, and
he reads the conclusion of almost everyone of Blake's poems from
Tiriel
onward as a triumph of spirituality over materialism. But this downplays the
radical nature of Blake's religious thought from beginning to end (though
Ackroyd associates his liberated attitude toward nakedness with his
Dissenting heritage); it also oversimplifies Blake's religious development,
which is the ground base of his entire career as poet and artist.
Ackroyd's claim that Blake is "the last great religious poet in England"
and his stress on the formative influence of the Bible from his childhood
onward link him wi th the cri tical tradi tion of Frye and its insistence on
the centrality of the Bible and Milton in Blake's work. Yet he is not espe–
cially interested in Blake's relationship to Christianity, specifically the
Dissenting background of his religious thought, which he dismisses as "of
no consequence." He does not spell out the implications of Blake's anti–
nomianisnL-his hatred of the Moral Law, his denial of original sin, his
conviction that God exists only in individual men; and he hardly mentions
Blake's defense of "sensual enjoyment," from
The Marriage
if
Heaven and
Hell
onward, as the basis of spiritual freedom . Instead he describes Blake
simply as "imbued with a religion of piety, enthusiasm, and vision."
