Vital Heat and the Organized Body: Burke, Blake, The French Revolution and The [First] Book of Urizen

ABSTRACTDuring the French Revolution, it had become apparent that the conventional metaphor of the body politic, framed around a stable hierarchical relationship between the monarchical head and the subservient body, was no longer fit for such a purpose. Indeed, in the late eighteenth century, medical understandings of the body were far more sophisticated than ever before. This article puts Blake in intimate dialogue with Burke, Sieyès, and other revolutionary and reactionary writers who evocatively updated the body politic metaphor to describe a radically changing political landscape. Reading The [First] Book of Urizen against Blake’s neglected, unpublished The French Revolution, this article demonstrates how Blake’s biological myth, though obscure, was deeply embedded in contemporary revolutionary discourse. In doing so, this article contests assumptions in recent Blake criticism that Blake found images of freedom in the organic phenomenon of self-organization (a logic of form taken up in Burkean conservatism), emphasizing instead Blake’s indebtedness to the Hunterian doctrine of vital heat. Notes1 After all, Paine thought that political revolution was no more than the “consequence of a mental revolution priorly existing in France,” for since “the mind of the nation had changed beforehand … the new order of things has naturally followed the new order of thoughts” (93).2 Both brothers occasionally employed Blake’s engraving master James Basire (Kreiter 113–14). At one point John Hunter and Blake lived in the same vicinity (Erdman 101–02), and it is likely that Blake would have attended William Hunter’s lectures on anatomy at the Royal Academy (Connolly 35).3 Blake would have encountered the juxtaposed metaphors of growing and consuming flames as virtuous and selfish love respectively in Swedenborg’s Conjugal Love (1768). In this work, Swedenborg identifies love with vital heat: “Love therefore is the heat of the life of man (hominis), or his vital heat; the heat of the blood, and also its redness, are from this source and no other; this is an effect of the fire of the angelic sun, which is pure love” (41). This heat could also develop into more dangerous emotions: “man is enkindled, grows warm, and is set on fire, whilst his love is exalted into zeal, anger, and wrath” (362). The difference between good and evil desire is that while the one sustains and unites, the other consumes: “[T]he zeal of evil love is as an infernal flame, which of itself bursts forth, and rushes on, and is desirous to consume another” (349). Conversely, virtuous love brings us together, and “considered in itself [it] is nothing else but a desire and consequent tendency to conjunction” (43).4 The morphological similarities are particularly apparent in the 1794 copy housed at the British Library. Images of this copy can be accessed through the online Blake Archive: 5 Urizen, described as “surging sulphureous,” has been identified as the metal etching plate (Mann 52), while the “pitch & nitre” in which Urizen rages has been identified as the stop-out varnish and nitric acid involved in the etching process (Kozlowski 419).6 As Tristanne Connolly writes, “The ‘secret’ character of the contents of Urizen’s books may be related to the appearance of the developing child as seen by the preformationists, its fully-formed parts initially invisible to the limited human eye” (82).7 As Oliver W. Lembcke and Florian Weber, editors to Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès’s essential political writings, observe in their “Introduction,” in Sieyès’s thought, “[i]t is circulation itself, not the head or heart, which defines the life of a state. Sovereignty is not a matter of hierarchy, but collaboration” (23).8 Blake was not the only one to draw on the Christian connotations of regeneration in thinking about the French Revolution. Circles associated with what would become the Constitutional Church, welcoming the Revolution as the restoration of ancient Jerusalem, used the term’s Christian connotations to juxtapose the regeneration of France through spiritual enlightenment against the “regeneration of Lycurgus” (i.e. regeneration through legislation) (Ozouf 782).Additional informationFundingThis work was supported by a studentship funded by the AHRC Doctoral Training Partnership at the University of Oxford [grant number 1909128].