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WILLIAM BLAKE’S AESTHETICS IN THE MYTH OF THE ANCIENT BRITONS

Georgia Dimitrakopoulou

Abstract

William Blake’s aesthetic vision of the secular world is based on divine inspiration. In the myth of The Ancient Britons, he discusses the three aesthetic categories of the sublime, the beautiful and the ugly. These establish his theory of art, which is based on Jesus the Imagination. The sublime, the beautiful and the ugly are forms indicative of gradations of divine influx in every individual. In this sense, the myth explicitly describes and distinguishes the three aesthetic categories that shape the secular and eternal human existence. It also concerns art and the role of the artist. Art is imagination and communication, and the artist is the inhabitant of that happy country of Eden. [1]. The artist is motivated by creative imagination, whose aesthetic quest starts from divine inspiration and ends in eternity. The true artist is the man of imagination, the poetic genius and the visionary aesthete. For Blake, imagination is a sublime force, the major aesthetic category of his vision and relates to the Strong man of The Ancient Britons. In addition, beauty is a distinct aesthetic category essential and supplementary to the formation of the Sublime of Imagination, Jesus incarnated, the archetype of Blake’s Strong man. He [Blake] distinguishes the three aesthetic categories of the sublime, the beautiful and the ugly by their actions, which define man. As he claims: ‘The Beautiful man acts from duty, whereas The Strong man acts from conscious superiority, and The Ugly man acts from love of carnage.’ [2]. Starting from the conviction that antiquity and classical art provided obsolete models for emulation, Blake concluded that since the mathematic form is not art, it should not be the rule of the English eighteenth century art. Gothic, which is the living form, represents the union of the secular and divine worlds. The gothic artistic style is the incarnated Jesus, the Sublime of Imagination, Blake’s aesthetic apex, that is the supreme aesthetic category of his vision. The sublime and the beautiful are not contraries. They are supplementary aesthetic forms which contribute to the understanding of art. Beauty and intellectuality identify. Moreover, beauty is the power, the energizer of the true artist. Who is the human sublime? He is ‘The Strong man’ who acts from conscious superiority, according to the divine decrees and the inspired, prophetic mind. Who is ‘The Beautiful man’? He is the man who acts from duty. Lastly, ‘The Ugly Man’ is the man of war, aggressive, he/she acts from love of carnage, approaching to the beast in features and form, with a unique characteristic, that is the incapability of intellect. [3]. Undoubtedly, Blake’s aesthetic vision presents many difficulties in interpretation. In my opinion, the sublime is not an aesthetic category and/or a mere value that Blake uses randomly without artistic reference. His aestheticism is secular and aspiring to perfection. The secular sublime, which describes the fallen human state, suggests the masculine and feminine experience of the Fall. Consequently, the human situation appears doomed and irredeemable. If the sublime is the masculine and pathos the feminine forms, Blake assumes that the inevitability of reasoning and suppression of desire, whose origin is energy, brings about their separation and incompleteness. In a non-communicative intercourse, the sublime (masculine) and the beautiful (pathos) are apart. These are the fallen state’s consequences. As the masculine and feminine are not contraries but supplementary forms, so the sublime and pathos are potentially integrated entities. In eternity, the sublime and pathos are joined in an intellectual androgynous form. This theoretical idea is the core of Blake’s aesthetic ‘theory’. In fact, his aesthetic realism does not overlap his aesthetic idealism. He is optimistic, despite Urizen’s - reason’s predominance. The artist is the model of human salvation. Imagination is a redemptive force, ‘Exuberance is Beauty’, and the incapability of intellect is ‘The Ugly Man’. The three classes of men, the elect, the redeemed and the reprobate juxtapose to the sublime, beautiful and ugly. These are restored to their true forms and their qualities are reinstated in infinity. All human forms are redeemable states, not static but progressive, even if their fulfilment on earth is improbable.

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DOI resolver: doi.org/10.35603/sws.iscah.2022/s10.16

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