[PROGRAM LISTING NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] & his two sons Satan & Adam.(Critical Essay)

Publication: Studies in Romanticism

Publication Date: 22-JUN-02

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SOME TIME IN 1815 AN OBSCURE ARTIST AND ENGRAVER CAME TO THE Royal Aacademy's antique school for the purpose of drawing from a cast of the Laocoon group, in preparation for an engraving he had been commissioned to make. Henry Fuseli, Professor of Painting and Keeper, recognized an old friend. "Why! Mr Blake," he said, "you a student! You ought to teach us!" Alexander Gilchrist, who had this anecdote from Blake's much younger friend Frederick Tatham, continues: "Blake took his place with the students, and exulted over his work ... like a young disciple; meeting his old friend Fuseli's congratulations and kind remarks with cheerful, simple joy." (1) However cheerful William Blake may really have been in doing this commercial job, he produced at least two drawings of the Laocoon, and then an engraving that was, with three others by Blake, published illustrating John Flaxman's article on sculpture in Abraham Rees's The Cyclopaedia; or Universal Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, and Literature. (2) The drawing that has survived (3) corrects the position of the right arm of the younger son, bending it back over the figure's head in a manner similar to that of the second restoration that would be completed in 1960, and the stomach muscles of the father are more contracted than in the Royal Academy cast that Blake copied (or in the original it was taken from). (4) The stippled line engraving that Blake produced for The Cyclopaedia was first published in 1816. Doing this work evidently put him in mind of the Laocoon as a possible subject for one or more of his own works.

One of these was a large pen, pencil, and watercolor drawing that Martin Butlin has dated as being "stylistically close to the Dante illustrations of 1824-27" (no. 681, 1: 489-90). The bearded central figure is fully clothed, unlike the one in the Laocoon sculpture, although his garment is, as so often in Blake, diaphanous, revealing the body beneath. Again unlike the sculpture, his mouth is opened in a cry. His two sons, more lightly sketched, are on either side of him, almost of the same height as each other. His left foot, emerging from his gown, has been outlined and the toes delineated in pen and ink. Perhaps not all bearded patriarchs in Blake's works are to be identified with Urizen, but the anguished expression and the prominent left foot of this figure (compare Urizen's left foot in the frontispiece to Europe) make such an identification likely here, as Keynes suggests (33-34). The fact that the serpents tower over the figures and that the central figure is crying out suggests that the subject is Virgil's description of the scene in the second book of The Aeneid. In Dryden's translation, this reads in part:

We fled amaz'd; their destin'd Way they take, And to Laocoon and his children make: And first around the tender Boys they wind, Then with sharpen'd Fangs their Limbs and Bodies grind. The wretched Father, running to their Aid With pious Haste, but vain, they next invade: Twice round his waste their winding Volumes rowl'd, And twice about his gasping Throat they fold. The Priest thus doubly choak'd, their crests divide, And towring o're his Head, in Triumph ride. With both his Hands he labours at the Knots; His Holy Fillets the blue Venom blots: His roaring fills the flittering Air around. Thus, when an Oxe receives a glancing Wound, He breaks his Bands, the fatal Altar flies, And with loud Bellowings breaks the yielding Skies. (5)

Blake may have begun this drawing in opposition to eighteenth-century aesthetic theories which, as we shall see, praise the Laocoon sculpture precisely because it did not express extreme pain or other violent emotion. He did not, for reasons unknown to us, complete his large drawing; but he had not yet done with the subject of the Laocoon.

Near the very end of his life Blake printed at least two examples of a large separate plate combining a reproductive engraving of the Laocoon group with a welter of aphorisms. (6) This work may be considered a statement of his very late views on subjects of lifelong interest to him--art, the imagination, the divine and the human, and empire. It is in more than one respect an extraordinary work, even for Blake. Blake had of course created many works of composite art in which his words and designs interacted, but this is the only example of his featuring a substantial amount of his own text and an image not of his own invention. (7) Furthermore, the texts that Blake inscribed on this plate, unlike those of Blake's illuminated books, cannot be read in a linear fashion. In considering some of the issues of interpretation regarding this extraordinary work, we should consider the history of the sculptural group and its status as a cultural object before and during Blake's time.

The locus classicus for the discussion of the Laocoon in the eighteenth century was the Abbe J. J. Winckelmann's Reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks, first published in English in a translation by Henry Fuseli in 1765. (8) Blake is believed to have owned this book, (9) and he probably had Winckelmann's discussion of the Laocoon in mind when he wrote of one of his pictures in 1809: "I understand that my Costume is incorrect, but in this I plead the authority of the ancients, who often deviated from the Habits, to preserve the Manners, as in the instance of Laocoon, who, though a priest, is represented naked." (10) This is evidently an echo of Winckelmann, who wrote "Had Laocoon been covered with a garb becoming an antient sacrificer, his sufferings would have lost one half of their Expression." (11) However, we must not imagine that this means that Blake would necessarily have agreed with Winckelmann in other respects. To the German scholar it was of the greatest importance that Laocoon did not give vent to his torment. It was, indeed, this sculpture that gave rise to the famous statement that "The last and most eminent characteristic of the Greek works is a noble simplicity and sedate grandeur in Gesture and Expression" (Reflections 30). In a memorable simile, Winckelmann continued: "As the bottom of the sea lies peaceful beneath a foaming surface, a great soul lies sedate beneath the strife of passions in Greek figures." The purpose of great art is to reconcile the viewer with suffering through the transmutation of the suffering subject into an aesthetic object:

'Tis in the face of Laocoon this soul shines with full lustre, not confined however to the face, amidst the most violent sufferings. Pangs piercing every muscle, every labouring nerve pangs which we almost feel ourselves, while we consider--not the face, nor the most expressive parts--only the belly contracted by excruciating pains: these however, I say, exert not themselves with violence, either in the face or gesture. He pierces not heaven, like the Laocoon of Virgil; his mouth is rather opened to discharge an anxious overloaded groan, as Sandolet says; the struggling body and the supporting mind exert themselves with equal strength, nay balance all the frame. (12)

Winckelmann goes on to remark that "Every action or gesture in Greek figures, not stamped with this character of sage dignity, but too violent, too passionate, was called `Parenthyros,'" and that such excess was at all costs to be avoided. "In Laocoon," he continues, "sufferings alone had been Parenthyros; the artist therefore, in order to reconcile the significative and ennobling qualities of his soul, put him into a posture, allowing for the sufferings that were necessary, the next to a state of tranquillity: a tranquillity however that is characteristical: the soul will be herself--this individual--not the soul of mankind; sedate, but active; calm, but not indifferent or drowsy" (Reflections 32). If we think of the many expressions of suffering in Blake's works--the howling face of Los on plate 7 of The [First] Book of Urizen, (13) for example, or the anguished giant of Jerusalem 62, we can see that Blake is unlikely to have shared this neoclassical view of the sublimity of repressed suffering. Indeed, to Sir Joshua Reynolds' statement that "No one can deny that violent passions will naturally emit harsh and disagreeable tones" Blake replied in his Annotations: "Violent Passions Emit the Real Good & Perfect Tones." (14)

At an earlier time Blake may have been more sympathetic to Winckelmann's views. He had been trained as an artist when Neoclassicism was at the cutting edge of art theory and practice, and as late as 1799 he could declare that his aim as an artist was "to renew the lost Art of the Greeks." (15) But in the early years of the nineteenth century, while living at Felpham and immediately after his return to London, Blake underwent a series of conversionary experiences that led him to embrace an immanent Christianity and to reject Classical art and literature. (16) The artistic consequences of this can be seen in the letter that Blake wrote to William Hayley, on 23 October 1804, the day after visiting the Truchsessian picture gallery and finding himself "again enlightened with the light I enjoy in my youth":

For now! I Glory! And O Delight! I have entirely reduced that spectrous Fiend to his station, whose annoyance has been the ruin of my labours for the last passed twenty years of my life. He is the enemy of conjugal love and is the Jupiter of the Greeks, an iron-hearted tyrant, the ruiner of ancient Greece. (17)

Blake began his Milton a Poem with a prose address contrasting "The Stolen and Perverted Writings of Homer and Ovid: of Plato & Cicero. which all Men ought to contemn" with "the Sublime of the Bible"; and he concluded: "We do not want either Greek & Roman Models if we are but just & true to our own Imaginations, those works of Eternity in which we shall live for ever; in Jesus our Lord" (E 95). Passages such as these, along with the denunciation of classical literature in the single plate On Homers Poetry and On Virgil provide a background for the aphorisms with which Blake surrounded his engraving of the sculptural group that Winckelmann has taken as the paragon of classical sculpture.

The Winckelmannian approach to the Laocoon was continued in the Encyclopedie of Diderot and d'Alembert. (18) The Chevalier de Jaucourt's article on the group is, indeed, mostly a translation and paraphrase of the exposition in the Reflections. The expression of the figures is declared to be superior to the passage in Virgil. Laocoon does not utter terrible cries--the opening of his mouth shows this. His character is as firm as it is heroic. He sighs profoundly, as Sandolet describes him. The pain of his body and the grandeur of his soul combine. Laocoon suffers like the Philoctetes of Sophocles and we are moved to support misfortune as he does. "The expression of a soul so sublime much surpasses the representation of nature." (19) This approach, emphasizing Laocoon's superiority to his suffering in the statue as opposed to Virgil's passage, is continued in a book we can be confident that Blake read, William Hayley's Essay on Sculpture (addressed to John Flaxman), to which Blake contributed three engravings and which was published in the year that Blake moved to Felpham. (20) Hayley wrote:

Hail, thou sublime resemblance of the sire, Excruciated to see his helpless sons expire! Though Fate's fierce serpent round thy manly frame Wind its vast volumes, and with deadly aim Dart its impetuous poison near the heart; Though thy shrunk shrank announce the wounded part; To selfish pangs superior thou art seen, And suffering anguish, more intensely keen ... (21)

Also heavily indebted to Winckelmann's discussion was that of August Wilhelm Schlegel, in A Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, published in English in 1815 (as it happens, the year in which Blake drew the Royal Academy's cast). "Beauty," Schlegel wrote, "is the object of sculpture, and repose is most advantageous for the display of beauty." (22) We do not know whether Blake ever read Schlegel on the Laocoon, but if he did he would have found that Schlegel praised the statue for turning suffering into beauty. Schlegel wrote:

In Laocoon the conflicting sufferings and anguish of the body, and the resistance of the soul, are balanced with the most wonderful equilibrium. The children calling for help, tender objects of our compassion, and not of our admiration, draw us back to the appearance of the father, who seems to turn his eyes in vain to the gods. The convolving serpents exhibit to us the inevitable destiny which unites together the characters in so dreadful a manner. And yet the beauty of proportion, the delightful flow of the attitude, are not lost in this violent struggle; and a representation most frightful to the senses is yet treated with a degree of moderation, while a mild breath of sweetness is diffused over the whole. (1: 86)

All these views take the Laocoon group as an exemplum of classical virtue. We know what Blake thought of such virtue. In Milton Los conducts spirits to Golgonooza, free of the four traditional Classical virtues: "the four iron pillars of Satans Throne / (Temperance, Prudence, Justice, Fortitude, the four pillars of tyranny)" (29:49, E 128). Blake's rejection of the classical virtues and of the idea of works of art as virtuous exemplars is of course part of his rejection of the classics as part of the culture of the British Empire.

There was at least one other contemporary view of the Laocoon with which Blake may very well have been familiar. It was that of a major literary figure with whom he has seldom been associated--Goethe. Nevertheless, Goethe's "Observations on the Laocoon" appeared in English in the Monthly Magazine in 1799. (23) The venue is important, because it is one with which Blake had several associations. The first was as an engraver: Blake contributed a portrait of Joseph Wright of Derby to the Monthly's issue for October 1797. (24) In 1800 Blake wrote a letter, beginning "Your Magazine being so universally Read," to the Monthly Magazine supporting George Cumberland's plan for a national gallery. Blake's letter was not published, but has survived because Blake transcribed it for Cumberland. (25) In 1806 the periodical did publish a letter by Blake defending the art of Henry Fuseli, and Blake wrote yet another letter to the editor of the Monthly on October 14, 1807. (26) There is therefore a strong likelihood that Blake was familiar with Goethe's ideas about the statue. If that is so, he might have found interesting Goethe's attempt to universalize the subject: "... Laocoon is only a simple name; the artists have taken from him his priesthood, all that is national and Trojan in him, all the poetical and mythological accessories; all in fact that mythology has made of him is done away ..." (351). Blake might not have been sympathetic to Goethe's reduction of the situation to a domestic drama in which "A father sleeps at the side...

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