BOOKS
481
from Malkin through Tatham
to
Gilchrist, need
to
be far more carefully
scrutinized than they have been. Some years ago David Erdman exploded
the most famous of these fabulations, Blake's prophetic warning to Tom
Paine in 1792 that he should £lee
to
France to escape Government pursuit;
Ackroyd alludes to this as a "report" but does not actually deny it.
In the end, in the absence of significant original research or a fresh slant
on existing evidence, Ackroyd has not offered a genuinely new portrait of
Blake. A wealth of information, however skilfully deployed, does not quite
correspond to insight, and the multifarious details of his account do not
quite cohere into the compelling inner drama of Blake's life that speaks
through his poetry and painting. Indeed, Ackroyd's version, highly readable
though it is, seems oddly like updated Gilchrist with his picture of the
visionary child, the faithful husband, the hard-working painter and mostly
impenetrable poet, honest, pious, and sane. Blake the radical, the "danger–
ous" Blake whom the critic WJ.T. Mitchell has recently described as
incoherent, obscene, and qui te possibly mad, or "terrible Blake in his pride"
as he once described himself, is largely overlooked. And yet, in spite of his
shortcomings, Ackroyd has fashioned from the expanded store of our pre–
sent knowledge of Blake a more rounded and substantial picture of Blake
the man in his time than any previous biographer has done. Blake's favorite
word, as the Concordance shows, was "all," and one of his earliest apho–
risms was "Less than All cannot satisfy Man." Perhaps no biography can ever
do justice to his complexity and inclusiveness. Nevertheless, Ackroyd has
taken a large step in the right direction, and his lively and ambitious por–
trait should win new admiration with many readers for a very great man.
AILEEN WARD
Eliot on Trial
T.S. ELIOT, ANTI-SEMITISM, AND LITERARY FORM.
By Antony
Julius.
Cambridge University Press. $49.95
Antony Julius is not the first
to
find anti-Semitism in Eliot's poetry
and prose. Early readers of Eliot's work perceived, explained, discounted it
in various ways. Empson and Orwell, for example, saw it as a garden vari–
ety anti-Semitism, not to be taken very seriously. Orwell remarked: "Who
didn't say such things at the time," the time being
bifore
knowledge of the
Nazi Holocaust, but after the knowledge of a long history of persecution
