Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination

by Peter Ackroyd

  There had been Anglo-Saxon hermits, celebrated in saints’ lives and in popular legend, who were so characteristic of English Catholicism that in the sixteenth century Holinshed remarked: “The heremeticall profession was onely allowed of in Britaine.” This is a pious exaggeration but it contains an important truth. One of the first prose works in Middle English, written in the late twelfth century, is known as the Ancrene Riwle or Ancrene Wisse; it is a manual of living for three female recluses who lived in “cells” a few miles from Wigmore Abbey in Herefordshire.

  It is an interesting work in many respects, not least for its erudition and for its incorporation of French “romance” elements within an overwhelmingly pious treatise. Like burgeoning Middle English itself, which in its exuberance manifests Latin and French influences as well as Anglo-Saxon repetition and alliteration, the narrative is of mixed tone. Female recluses were considered to be no longer of this world; the Mass for the Dead was celebrated before the anchorite was led in procession to her cell, whereupon all the ceremonies of the Burial Office were performed including the scattering of earth. She then lay prostrate upon her “bier” before being pronounced dead to the world. Yet the Ancrene Wisse is a moderate and gentle text, filled with the “sweetness” which has always been considered characteristic of English spirituality. It contains no ostentation or regimentation, and it is quite without extravagant piety; it is factual, intimate and domestic. There is an account of a child being comforted when his parent whips the object that hurt him, and of the way a man will tie a knot in his belt to remind him of a service he has promised to perform. Moderation is to be observed in penitential exercises, since the law of love is more important than the rigours of penance; you must pray, but you must also eat and dress properly. This shrewdness or practicality is wholly consistent with the great themes of English spirituality, and may even be said to characterise it.

  So it is that “moderation” and “a robust note of common sense” can be attributed to the mystical writings of Richard Rolle,2 who in his solitary state chanted the song of divine love. He was in many respects eccentric, and at the beginning of his devotional life was considered by many to be mad, but the workings of the English imagination are to be found in lives as well as in letters. He was born at Thornton Dale near Pickering in Yorkshire, around the year 1300, and at the age of thirteen or fourteen was enrolled at Oxford University. He did not complete the course of seven years’ study but instead, in his own words translated from the Latin, “longed for the sweet delights of eternity.” He returned home, where above all else he desired the life of a hermit. So he asked his sister to meet him in an adjacent wood and bring with her two of her “over-dresses,” one white and one grey, as well as their father’s rain-hood; on their encounter he clothed himself in the white dress, cut off the sleeves of the grey dress and donned that before putting on his father’s hood. It says much for the power of the visual and dramatic imagination that he instantly became the “figure” or “type” of the hermit. The sister cried out, “My brother is mad! My brother is mad!”—whereupon, according to one hagiographical account, “he drove her from him with threats, and fled at once without delay.” He eventually found refuge in the house of a local landowner where he became hermit in residence with his own “cell” in the grounds. His patrons would bring visitors to him, for their gratification or edification, and on one occasion “he proceeded to give them excellent exhortations while at the same time never ceasing his writing—and all the while what he was writing was not the same as what he was speaking.” He eventually left this refuge and began a wandering ministry, before settling down as a recluse in the county of Richmond, where he acquired a reputation for sanctity and for the power of healing. One commentator has suggested that he was always possessed by the landscape of his childhood, that of the North Yorkshire moors and marshes, and has compared him with the Brontë sisters.3 There is indeed the same fervour, the same expansive longings, and the same musical cadence within his writing.

  He wrote originally in Latin, but his prose is imbued with a powerful native and alliterative spirit: “fervebunt fetentes formidine futura; formosus et fortisin feno falluntur . . .” When he returned to writing in English in the latter years of his life, he employed an idiom no less powerful and idiosyncratic. “To me it semys,” he wrote, “that contemplacion is Ioyfull songe of godis lufe takyn in mynde, with swetnes of aungell louynge.” The words “sweetness” and “song” are never far from his lips in a prose filled with polyphony, so that his readers may feel a “swetnes in thaire hert of the lufe withouten ende.” In his solitude he finds a language of praise and joyfulness, as if in the silence he could hear English music. His metaphor and his practice are of speech becoming song, the spoken words turning into poetry, as the soul is irradiated so strongly by the fire of love that “he or scho that feles it, that has it, and that loves God, syngand tharwyth.” Once more the “sweetness” of English spirituality is celebrated, in a delicate line which hovers between poetry and prose. The line of English melody runs continually so that when Richard Rolle writes, “My hert, when sal it brest for lufe? Than languyst I na mare,” he anticipates the tone and cadence of George Herbert’s “You must sit down, sayes Love, and taste my meat: So I did sit and eat.” In The Oxford Book of English Mystical Verse only four pages separate Richard Rolle from John Donne and the great seventeenth-century religious poets, providing textual evidence of continuity. When Rolle writes, “I stand in still mowrnyng,” in motionless sorrow, he anticipates T. S. Eliot’s “still and still moving,” as if the cadence of English music were itself motionless and continuous.

  If the music of Rolle is characteristic, it simply reflects his spirituality. It has been described as affective individualism, marked by a “resolutely anti-intellectual character.”4 Thus, in his addresses to other solitaries, he avoids scholastic dogma and formal theology; he avoids, too, the penitential rigours of extreme pietism in favor of modest and moderate admonitions. His tendency is, if anything, towards dramatic re-enactment as if the spirit of the mystery play were abroad. With “the cros heuy & huge & so hard trust upon thi bak, that thou art cruyschid to hepe & schrinkist ther-vndir” we are led into the scene of the Crucifixion as by a guide. The practical event is more important than theological speculation, since “luf es hard as hel.”

  There are hundreds of extant manuscripts of Rolle’s spiritual writings; he was venerated as a saint, although he was never canonised, and his cell in Pickering became the object of pilgrimage. Yet if his holiness has faded, his importance has not. He established a tradition and a tone which encompass the work of Traherne and of Herbert, of Crashaw and of Donne, of Vaughan and of Eliot.

  Continuity is also to be found with the work of another medieval solitary, Walter Hilton, whose treatise on the stages of contemplative union with God has an image of music which is close to that of Rolle. The physical body is “bot as an instrument and a trumpe of the soule, in the whilke the sowle blowith swete notes of gostly louynges to Iesu.” It is an English music located beyond time in the mystic’s experience of eternity. Yet if there is one more significant image within the work of Walter Hilton, it is that of the journey or pilgrimage. It is an ancient topos, of course, but Hilton is the first to employ it extensively in English as a metaphor for spiritual enlightenment. He describes the dangerous and laborious journey of a pilgrim to Jerusalem, talking to others along the way, beset by evil spirits, resisting temptations, until he reaches his destination. It is hard not to recognize the resemblances between Hilton’s account and that of Bunyan in The Pilgrim’s Progress. In Hilton’s narrative the soul or pilgrim glimpses his destination in “smale sodeyn liytinges that glideren out thurgh smale caues fro that citee,” while Bunyan’s Pilgrim is greeted outside the same city by “Shining Men” or “Shining Ones”; the space of three hundred years, between Hilton and Bunyan, vanishes in a moment. It is the moment, as small as a nut or a grain of sand, that according to Blake “Satan cannot find.” It co
ntains the living imagination.

  It has sometimes been suggested that Walter Hilton also composed the mystical treatise known as The Cloud of Unknowing, although the attribution is in dispute. Yet that treatise shares, with the texts of other English mystics, a distaste for the formal organisation of the devotional life; the narrator believes that he writes childishly and, like Chaucer, casts himself as the simpleton. It is a very English device. His style is direct and practical with the emphasis upon plain speaking. “Bot now thou askest me what is that thing. I schal telle thee what I mene that it is.” His exhortations use domestic and familiar images which, together with his “humorously shrewd observations,”5 allow a great intimacy of address. The “good gracyous God” is as healthful and as “plat & pleyn as a plastre.” There are occasions, however, when the author strikes a more plangent note; we might then be in the company of John Donne or Gerard Manley Hopkins. “Look up now,” he demands, “weike wreche, & see what thou arte. What arte thou, & what has thou deserved . . .” It is the same music.

  CHAPTER 24

  The Inheritance

  The term “medieval” was not coined until the early nineteenth century, anticipating the strong affinities between Victorian sensibilities and the earlier Catholic civilisation, but the presence of the “old faith” never did wholly fade. How could its spirit be exorcised when the language itself was formed in the eleventh and twelfth centuries? If we wish to follow the traces of a Catholic culture, we need only examine the words and cadences of written literature. The metric variations in medieval religious verse such as “Conduct of Life” and “The Whole Duty of Man,” from the twelfth century, were described by Samuel Johnson as containing “the rudiments of our present lyrick.” The prosody of versified saints’ lives in The South English Legendary employs “verse patterns later found in [Coleridge’s] The Ancient Mariner”1 so that the theme of spiritual redemption in the late eighteenth-century poem is maintained by the ancient cadence itself. The consonance is also a form of resonance, whereby the old spiritual life of the language is harboured in contemporary settings. That inheritance may work in more elusive ways, also, with the physical horrors associated with the legends of martyred saints “providing the authentic frisson that Gothic novels later developed.”2

  It is difficult to know whether an interest in the medieval period represents an interest in medieval Catholicism also. There is evidence of a deep spiritual continuity, but that must be balanced against the fervour of Nonconformism and the moderate compromises of the Anglican settlement; one of the consequences of that moderation, for example, lay in the end of affective piety in favour of a more measured devotion to Christ the Redeemer rather than to Christ the Sufferer. The mysteries of the Passion, and the annual celebration of it, were replaced by the individual exigencies of conscience and the private path towards salvation. The dramas of popular faith were gradually displaced by the plainness of orthodox worship; just as the churches were stripped of their paintings and images, so the cults of the Virgin and the saints were abandoned in favour of attention to the translated words of the New Testament.

  Shakespeare does invoke, however, the Catholic doctrine of purgatorial fires in Hamlet. Thomas Carlyle, the great intuitive historical mind of the nineteenth century, described Shakespeare’s work, and the civilisation that sustained it, “as the outcome and flowerage of all which had preceded it . . . attributable to the Catholicism of the Middle Ages.” It could not be otherwise; the chronology allows no other conclusion. A more dramatic example, if the phrase may be allowed in this context, can be found in the life of one of Shakespeare’s contemporaries. John Donne, who preached at St. Paul’s Cross as dean of the cathedral, was a convert from Roman Catholicism. His own brother, a more steady Catholic, was imprisoned in 1593 and died in incarceration; the priest discovered with him was given the ritual execution of disembowelling and hanging. The nature of that death emphasises the mortal peril in which many Catholics found themselves after the Reformation; they were deemed to be traitors as well as heretics, servants of a foreign power and corrupters of the state. They were to be hunted down, imprisoned or executed—just as the Catholic authorities had hunted down Lutherans or “new men” before the Reformation.

  The penalties imposed upon Donne’s clandestine faith must have deeply oppressed his childhood and youth—he remained a Catholic until his early twenties—and this may help to account for the anxiety and uncertainty infused within his poems. One critic has suggested that Donne’s “habits of thought remain Catholic when he feels himself threatened”3 and that his Holy Sonnets are striated by Catholic devotion culled especially from the Advent Offices and the Hours of the Blessed Virgin. The conclusion may be, then, that his poems are “the work of a man who has renounced a religion to some manifestations of which he is still, at a profound level, attached.”4 That might almost be translated into a description of early seventeenth-century English culture in general.

  Donne’s theatricality, and his metaphors of power, might be adduced here as further evidence of his attachment. His conflation of sacred and secular love recalls the mingling of courtly love and religious fervour in Catholic England. When De Quincey refers to Donne as a rhetorician rather than a poet, he is referring to that earlier tradition. Donne’s antitheses, when two opposed ideas are yoked violently together, may in turn be a token of his own divided and divisive religious sensibility. They are part of the morbid intensity of his nature. It is perhaps not unexpected, therefore, that his poems circulated only in manuscript until after his death.

  The author of English Spirituality has remarked that between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, despite the fissure of the Reformation, a spiritual tradition was maintained. Between Margery Kempe and John Donne, between Julian of Norwich and George Herbert, there was “the same living stream, the same lineage”;5 the religious prose and poetry of the seventeenth century “grew directly from fourteenth-century doctrine” so that the “Caroline divines continue and develop this tradition.” 6 George Herbert’s work, albeit expressive of a life of ill health and retirement, has all the serenity of the early mystics. It may seem curious that Protestant devotion and expression should spring directly from medieval Catholicism, but it is part of a larger continuity. One of the arguments of this book is that a native spirit persists through time and circumstance, all the more powerful for being generally unacknowledged.

  Anecdotal evidence in any case suggests that a Catholic sensibility did not wholly disappear in the centuries subsequent to the Reformation; John Milton’s family were Catholic, and it has been supposed that William Shakespeare’s father was a Catholic recusant. The great composers of the sixteenth century, William Byrd and Thomas Tallis, were both unreformed Roman Catholics. In turn their plangent English music of loss affected twentieth-century English composers such as Frederick Delius, Ralph Vaughan Williams and Peter Warlock; Vaughan Williams’s Job and Warlock’s Corpus Christi Carol are, in particular, evidence of a strong religious sensibility even if it is expressed as “a plaintive liquescent chromatic harmony of unutterable desolation.”7 Is it advancing too incautiously to suggest that the chromatic harmonies attendant upon transition and loss, so central to the genius of English music, are affected by the work of those sixteenth-century English composers languishing in internal exile?

  Here may be mentioned the Roman Catholicism of Edward Elgar, whose declaration of faith in The Dream of Gerontius, “Sanctus Fortis,” is one of the most memorable and moving passages of twentieth-century music. All the yearning and nostalgia of Elgar’s passionate nature lie somewhere within it, and the best commentary upon the entire oratorio comes from William Byrd’s preface to his Psalms, Sonnets, and Songs of Sadness and Piety published in 1588: “To sacred words . . . there is such a profound and hidden power that, to one thinking upon things divine and diligently and earnestly pondering upon them, all the fittest numbers occur and freely offer themselves to the world.”

  In twentieth-century music, als
o, there has been an abiding interest in the nature of Catholic drama. Britten’s opera Noye’s Fludde was based upon a Chester mystery play and was first performed in a parish church in the summer of 1958; his canticle Abraham and Isaac was a setting of a miracle play from the same area. Peter Maxwell Davies’s Worldes Blis was inspired by a thirteenth-century song. This consummation of modern and medieval may be found in Harrison Birtwistle ’s opera Gawain, based on the story of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which like its medieval counterpart renders the scenes of physical dismemberment, in one of which a severed head sings, “comic . . . by their sheer theatricality.” 8