Emanations and Negations of Blake in Victorian Art Criticism

Abstract

Browning’s poem is a kind of extirpative monologue in which the unnamed painter appears to imagine the conditions in which experience spills into and replenishes art to create a benign fullness of presence, a perfect expression of aesthetic life. And yet this image of graceful and harmonious completion is forced into place and momentarily glimpsed through the thicket of fragments at work in the self-cancelling structure of a poem where the operations of consciousness intrude into the work to block the flow of cohesive action and narration. Its subject does not develop; instead it is enmeshed in the problem of the relationship between conception and execution, as the increasingly nervous and rebarbative thoughts of the artist enter into and become the subject of the poem. Its monological nature is analogous to a condition of creative life where the artist is imprisoned by the images of freedom he imagines — or where the associative plentitude of imaginative life sustains the illusion that to think ideas into being is to produce art, or the conditions for the production of a total art work. In other words, the poem battles to make the unknown painter something more than an unknowable subject.

On the fly-leaf of Alexander Gilchrist’s seminal The Life of William Blake (1863), we find these lines from Browning’s Pictor Ignotus:

The sanctuary’s gloom at least shall ward vain tongues from where my pictures stand apart