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Colby Quarterly

Volume 19

Issue 1

March

March 1983

Article 4

"The Eye Altering Alters All": Blake and Esthetic

Perception

Nicholas O. Warner

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Colby Library Quarterly, Volume 19, no.1, March 1983, p.18-28

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Warner: "The Eye Altering Alters All": Blake and Esthetic Perception

"The Eye Altering Alters All":

Blake and Esthetic Perception

by NICHOLAS O. WARNER

THE current climate of critical diversity and methodological exper-

imentation, it is natural to speculate on the value of various critical

theories in approaching the notoriously recalcitrant work of William

Blake. Among the plethora of such approaches, two that reveal a strik-

ing affinity with Blake's own esthetic theories and practice are E. H.

Gombrich's concept of "the beholder's share" and Wolfgang Iser's

phenomenologically based theory of reader-response. Blake's work is,

of course, in no way reducible to the concerns of these or any other criti-

cal methodologies. But the two approaches to be discussed here provide

a useful theoretical framework for studying Blake, in addition to the

critical perspectives that have already been applied to his work.

The in-

sights of both Gombrich and Iser, those of the former applied to Blake's

art, those of the latter to his writing, are particularly helpful in achiev-

ing the "energy of response" that Blake, as Northrop Frye long ago

observed, demands.

Their specific connections to Blake lie in an anti-

Lockean epistemology which affirms the active nature of perception,

and in their emphasis on the artist's transformation of traditional mate-

rial. Before going on to a closer examination of these connections, we

would do well to begin by looking at the clues that Blake himself gives

us for probing his work and our relationship to it.

BLAKE repeatedly seems to call for a critical approach geared to creative

perception and response: "A fool sees not the same tree that a wise

man sees"; "The Sun's Light when he unfolds it / Depends on the

I am grateful to the American Philosophical Society for a grant from the Penrose Fund which made

completion of this article possible.

1. Among recent studies to view Blake through critical lenses other than the archetypal one developed

by Frye, the most notable are, to my mind, Anne Mellor's

Blake's Human Form Divine

(Berkeley:

Univ. of California Press, 1974), which discusses Blake's work in terms of WOlfflin's theories of open

and closed form; W.

T. Mitchell's

Blake's Composite Art

(Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1978), a

study of visual-verbal connections in Blake that often employs a structuralist perspective; Diana Hume

George's

Blake and Freud

(Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1980), in which each of these figures is read in

terms of the other; and Leopold Damrosch,

Jr.

Symbol and Truth in Blake's Myth,

a densely allusive

work that draws heavily on French linguistic and structuralist criticism. Gombrich partially informs

Mellor's and Mitchell's discussions of Blake, but Iser's work, as far as I know, has never been related to

Blake.

2. Northrop Frye,

Fearful Symmetry

(Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1969), p. 7.'

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Colby Quarterly, Vol. 19, Iss. 1 [1983], Art. 4

NICHOLAS O. WARNER

Organ that beholds it"; "the Eye altering alters all"

(E.,

pp. 35, 257,

476).3 Again and again Blake insists that what our eyes behold is partly

the product, as well as the object, of our own perception. This view of

the relativity and creativity of perception forms one of the most impor-

tant themes of that central work in the Blakean canon,

The Marriage of

Heaven and Hell

(still one of the best glosses on Blake's thought). Ger-

mane to the whole work is the paradox that one angel's heaven is an-

other's hell, or perhaps that one angel's hell is a devil's heaven. Even

humanity's fall is seen from two entirely different viewpoints: "It in-

deed appear'd to Reason as if Desire was cast out, but the Devils ac-

count is, that the Messiah fell.

formed a heaven of what he stole from

the Abyss"

(MHH, E.,

p. 34). And, in one of the Memorable Fancies

from

The Marriage,

Blake gives his theory of perception a humorous

twist in the narrator's description of his encounter with a pompous

angel. After showing the narrator a vision of Leviathan, "advancing

toward us with all the fury of a spiritual existence," the angel fearfully

. . . clim'd up from his station into the mill; I remain'd alone,

then this appearance

was no more, but

found myself sitting on a pleasant bank beside a river by moon-light

hearing a harper who sung to the harp,

his theme was, The man who never alters his

opinion is like standing water,

breeds reptiles of the mind.

But

arose, and sought for the mill,

there

found my Angel, who surprised asked

me, how

escaped?

answerd. All that we saw was owing to your metaphysics. . . .

(MHH, E.,

pp.

40-41)

This parable of the relativity of perception demonstrates Blake's

belief that seeing is not mere sensation, but a process contingent on

expectations and preconceptions as well as on sensory data. In matters

of perception, as in so much for Blake, "One Law for the Lion

Ox is

Oppression"

(MHH, E.,

p. 43). The eye contributes to the reality it per-

ceives, as Blake never tires of asserting, most notably in his famous

letter to the Reverend Dr. Trusler, and in

A Vision of the Last Judg-

ment.

In the letter to Dr. Trusler (August 23, 1799), Blake answers the rever-

end's charge of obscurity. His response turns into a manifesto affirming

the relativity of perception and the importance of perceiver involvement

in the comprehension of art: "You say that I want somebody to eluci-

date my Ideas. But you ought to know that What is Grand is necessarily

obscure to weak men. That which can be made Explicit to the Idiot is

not worth my care. The wisest of the Ancients considerd what is not too

Explicit as the fittest for Instruction because it rouzes the faculties to

act"

(E.,

p. 676).

A few sentences later, Blake gives us one of his fullest statements on

3. All references to Blake's writings are taken from David V. Erdman's

The Poetry and Prose of

William Blake

(Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1970), cited in the text as

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Warner: "The Eye Altering Alters All": Blake and Esthetic Perception

COLBY LIBRARY QUARTERLY

the significance of individual differences in perception and on the im-

portance of the inner eye in determining what the outer eye beholds:

I see Every thing I paint In This World, but Every body does not see alike. To the Eyes of

a Miser a Guinea is more beautiful than the Sun,

a bag worn with the use of Money has

more beautiful proportions than a Vine filled with Grapes. The tree which moves some to

tears of joy is in the Eyes of others only a Green thing that stands in the way . . . As a

man is So he Sees. As the Eye is formed such are its Powers.

(E.,

p. 677)

From Blake's letter, we can see that what troubles him is not a simple

difference of opinion or perspective, but rather the arrogant, positivistic

denial of the existence or validity of his own visions. Blake contemptu-

ously rejects the assumption that perception is a passive and objective

affair, the mere registration of stimuli on an inactive observer. "As a

man is, So he Sees," Blake tells Trusler; the perception and evaluation of

beauty (the sun above a guinea, a vine of grapes above a sack of money)

reflect the inner condition of the perceiver. Yet Blake could just as easily

have said, "As a man sees, so he is," and, in fact, he comes close to

saying just that in

Jerusalem:

Los rolled, his Eyes into two narrow circles, then sent him

Over Jordan; all terrified fled: they became what they beheld.

If perceptive Organs vary: Objects of Perception seem to vary:

If the Perceptive Organs close: their Objects seem to close also

(30:53-56,

E.,

p. 175)

For Blake, perception involves creation. Thus, by looking only through

the narrow chinks of his cavern, Dr. Trusler creates a frighteningly nar-

row sense of reality in which he himself is trapped; because he refuses to

look beyond the confines of "This World," he can know no other

reality than that which "This World" offers.

The reader will have noticed that Blake's statements on the general

nature of perception in his letter to Dr. Trusler are fused with his theory

of perception on the esthetic plane. Without transition or qualification,

Blake's ideas of perceptual activity carryover to a consideration of

works of art and their perceivers. By placing so much emphasis on the

role of the audience, Blake makes the work of art depend on the per-

ceiver for any meaningful existence. The work comes into being only

through the consciousness of the reader or viewer whose faculties are

sufficiently roused. By the same token, that "which is too Explicit" in a

work of art precludes the kind of esthetic engagement Blake calls for. In

part, this explains how Dr. Trusler, at the sanle time that he condemns

Blake's work as fantastic, refuses to rouse his own faculties to meet the

challenging difficulty (by Blake's own admission) of that work. By so

doing, Trusler merely perpetuates the limited reality he perceives, and

ends up resembling the angel in

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,

de-

tecting in Blake's work not the sublime songs of a harper, but only a

chaotic, fearsome Leviathan.

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Colby Quarterly, Vol. 19, Iss. 1 [1983], Art. 4

NICHOLAS O. WARNER

One of the more striking contrasts in Blake's letter, that between sun

and guinea, reappears in different form just over a decade later, when it

plays a significant role in the conclusion to Blake's

A Vision of the Last

Judgment

(1810), a highly important document in Blake's theories of

perception:

Error or Creation will be Burned Up

then

not till then Truth or Eternity will appear It

is Burnt up the Moment Men cease to behold it I assert for My self that I do not behold

the Outward Creation

that to me it is hindrance

not Action it is as the dirt upon my

feet No part of Me. What it will be Questiond When the Sun rises do you not see a round

Disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea 0 no no I see an Innumerable company of the

Heavenly host crying Holy Holy Holy is the Lord God Almighty I question not my

Corporeal or Vegetative Eye any more than I would Question a Window concerning a

Sight I look thro it

not with it.

(E.,

p. 555)

In these last sentences of

A Vision of the Last Judgment,

far from being

the disoriented dreamer occasionally depicted both by admirers and

detractors, Blake demonstrates his awareness of what we generally call

the "real world" precisely through the very comparison he uses to dis-

miss the ultimate importance of that world. Blake knows full well that

to most of us the sun indeed looks like a fiery yellow coin in the sky, but

what is more important to Blake is how his imagination and the sun fuse

to produce a vision of divinity emerging through the physical. Like

Pliny before him, Blake considered the mind to be the "real instrument

of sight and observation," while "the eyes act as a sort of vessel receiv-

ing and transmitting the visible portion of the consciousness."4 The

truest kind of perception is a senli-receptive, semi-creative state in

which, as another Romantic poet was to put it, "we receive but what we

give" (Coleridge, "Dejection: An Ode").

of the statements we have examined so far are echoed in E. H.

Gombrich's masterpiece of esthetic analysis,

Art and Illusion.

Blake, and like members of the modern phenomenological school such

as Ernst Cassirer and Aron Gurwitsch,5 Gombrich challenges the

Lockean split between sensation and perception: "The whole distinction

between sensation and perception, plausible as it was, had to be given

up in the face of evidence from experiments with human beings and

animals. Nobody has ever seen a visual sensation, not even the impres-

sionists, however ingeniously they stalked their prey."6 One may be

MANY

4. Pliny, quoted in E. H. Gombrich,

Art and Illusion

(Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1972), p.

15.

5. See, for example, Cassirer's "The Concept of Group and the Theory of Perception," in

Philoso-

phy and Phenomenological Research,

V (September 1944), 1-35, and Gurwitsch's "The Phenomenol-

ogy of Perception: Perceptual Implications," in James M. Edie, ed.,

An Invitation to Phenomenology

(Chicago: Quadrangle, 1965), pp. 17-29.

6. Gombrich, p. 298.

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