Volume 41, Number 9 · May 12, 1994
Lord of Unreason
By Richard Holmes
Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law
by E.P. Thompson
The New Press, 234 pp., $30.00
The first graffiti I ever encountered was 'Billie Blake Lives' sprayed on a large green rubbish bin outside 'everweeping Paddington Station. That was thirty years ago now, and you do not see 'Billie' so often in London; yet Blake's peculiar living presence in the British counterculture remains assured. Anyone who has met (and maybe conversed with) his visionary bronze head, as powerful as any cannonball, in the slumbering upper chamber of the National Portrait Gallery, will recognize his disturbing force. It was cast, from a life mask of 1823 by the phrenologist James Deville, 'as representative of the Imaginative Faculty.' The huge eyes are closed, but apparently all-seeing; the smooth round skull seems to hum with 'eternal Energy'; the whole thing looks as if it will explode at any minute. The Portrait Gallery assistants, in their official blue uniforms, patrol around it with a certain care.
Review, 2720 words
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