Blake's Material Sublime

Abstract

1. Kantian Blake IN AN ESSAY OF 1833, ENTITLED THE BARRENNESS OF THE IMAGINATIVE in the productions of Modern Art, Charles Lamb lambasts what he calls the (1) of John Martin's paintings. In an argument that passionately privileges spirituality over materiality and imagination over visual presentation, Lamb criticizes Martin's panoramic canvas Belshazzar's Feast (1820) for being too material. Although Lamb considers the towered structures of Martin's art as belonging the highest order (Elia 259) of the the term itself--invented, it seems, by Coleridge--is not an honorific. In Table Talk, Coleridge uses the term describe the furious images of Schiller's dramas, the sheer sensual tumult of Schillerian theatricality: its excess of effect over spiritual meaning. Schiller has the sublime, he remarks; to produce an effect, he sets a whole town on fire, and throws infants with their mothers into the flames.... Shakspear drops a handkerchief, and the same or greater effects follow. (2) For Coleridge, the sublime of Schiller's drama is mired in materiality and sensation; Shakespeare's, however, rises effortlessly into the region of mind. For Lamb, too, the sublime designates a privative attachment materiality, a fixation on sense that in Martin's case discloses a defect of [the] imaginative faculty (Elia 262). Wedded matter over mind, sublimity seeks present in a pictorial, corporeal form ideas that should properly, according Lamb, have a poetic (Elia 264), supernatural or imaginative denotation. In the case of Belshazzar's Feast, the fearful judgment of God upon the self-regarding King Belshazzar at his table in his stupendous palace is too material because Martin presents the written judgement of God in a blaze of flight on an immense wall: a brilliant blaze that is seen both by the crowds at the feast and by the spectators of the canvas. Lamb insists, however, that this divine writing is seen only by the King in the Biblical account, and not by the spectators. For this reason, the sublimity of the scene resides in the immateriality of the King's terrified, phantasmal reception of God's sentence, and not in any gaudy materiality of blazing light on a panoramic, architecturally immense structure. In the way Lamb sets it up, Martin's painting sustains only a perilous hold on the sublime. For this kind of art is, he says, the product of a [d]eeply corporealized mind, enchained hopelessly in the grovelling fetters of externality. Against this, the sublime for Lamb belongs the intellectual (Elia 264), not the eye. The sublime is, in this sense, well on the way being engulfed in--and identified with--a kind of debased spectacle: specifically, with crude theatricality and sensationalism. Effecting an erasure of mind and of the imaginative faculty, sublimity becomes a vitiating, privative and expropriatory simulacrum of the sublime. Lamb's formulation of the sublime belongs, of course, that broad shift in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-centuries that saw the displacement of sublimity away from the materiality of the external object, and its relocation in the self-conscious interiority of the subject. If the eighteenth-century sublime variously staged a crisis in the subject's relation an overwhelming externality--whether figured as nature or God--the romantic which received its privileged philosophical formulation in Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgement (1790), installed the scene of that sublime in and as an agon of the subject's mental faculties. The empirical, physiological emphases of Burke's sublime in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) were themselves, indeed, part of this resituating of the sublime in the passions of the subject rather than the qualities of the object: part of what Thomas Weiskel calls the eighteenth century's nascent psychological aesthetics. …