Blake and the ‘Reasoning Historian’

Abstract

Blake’s declared hostility to ‘The reasoning historian, turner and twister of causes and consequences, such as Hume, Gibbon and Voltaire’ (DC, E543) might lead us to conclude that he learned little from Enlightenment historians. And the prophetic form of his narrative might seem to reinforce this conclusion. The historical perspective adopted by writers ‘such as Hume, Gibbon and Voltaire’ was secular, and tended to make social evolution seem partially dependent on impersonal causes. In contrast, Blake’s mythical narratives consistently remind us of an eternal reality from which humanity has fallen, and they locate the mainspring of history in human consciousness, especially in limited visions of destiny. In this way they emphasize that the causes of historical change are spiritual, and they affirm the possibility of escape from fallen existence through a clarification of vision. But in spite of these differences, Blake’s vision of history in some respects parallels that of the ‘reasoning historians’ of his age. He shares the philo-sophical historian’s interest in exploring relationships between economic, social and religious developments, and he shares the ‘conjectural’ historian’s interest in reconstructing the major stages of social evolution.1 In this essay I shall argue that in The Four Zoas Blake adopts a number of ideas and patterns that had become familiar in historical writings in the latter half of the eighteenth century, and attempts to reconstitute them on the basis of spiritual causes.