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PARTISAN REVIEW
Indeed, except for his passing involvement wi th Swedenborgianism,
Ackroyd has less to say about Blake's Christianity than his interest in mes–
merism, alchemy, Freemasonry, and other contemporary forms of
occultism. About Blake's own mythological system, which originated as
an alternative not only to classical mythology but to Christianity itself, he
provides little more than a cursory introduction to seven or eight of the
main characters-Orc, Urizen, Los, and others. Central concepts such as
the Divine Humanity or fourfold vision, or even such phrases as "the
Hermaphroditic Satanic world of rocky destiny," are left unexplained.
Blake's gradual conversion from a kind of imaginative deism to an evan–
gelical faith in Christ as "the Friend of Sinners" and his final acceptance
of Jehovah as a loving and forgiving Father go almost unnoticed. In the
religious dimension as in others, Blake developed and changed; yet
Ackroyd gives little sense of this evolution.
Blake's ideas on the subject of art had both religious and political im–
plications, and here again one l1ught question some aspects of Ackroyd's
analysis. Blake's early drawings and paintings, like his early poetry, show a
striking preference for historical subjects over religious ones–
predominantly subjects with radical and anti-monarchical implications
drawn from early British history, such as "The Making of Magna Carta"
or "The Penance of Jane Shore," rather than from the classical myth and
history sanctioned by Establishment taste or the traditional themes of
Christian art. At the same time the style of his paintings up to about 1800
conforms for the most part to the classical modes he had learned as a stu–
dent at the Royal Academy. Ackroyd, however, sees Blake as committed to
a spiritualized Gothic ideal from the time of his apprentice days when he
sketched the royal tombs in Westminster Abbey for his master Basire. But
it is hard to find any evidence of a "spiritual revelation" in Blake's metic–
ulous and impersonal renderings of the effigies of the Norman kings
(whom he in fact despised), and Gothic motifs are almost entirely absent
from his painting till about 1804. To overlook this fact dilutes the impor–
tance of the turning point in his artistic career that came in 1804, when he
experienced a sudden insight that the true way to art was to be found in
the austere Gothic style he had encountered years earlier in Westminster
Abbey rather than in the opulence of the grand style exemplified by Sir
Joshua Reynolds. This crystallized his hostility to academic painting, or
what he called "Venetian and Flemish ooze," and set him on a path that
led farther and farther away from contemporary acceptance.
For more specific discussion of Blake's work, Ackroyd makes good use
of recent research on Blake's methods as painter and printmaker in an
appreciative account of his art in general. He gives a perceptive description
of the two series of Biblical paintings Blake executed for Thomas Butts,
