Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination

by Peter Ackroyd

  This tendency to look backward, in the act of historical retrieval, emerges also in the eighteenth-century rediscovery of ancient music. An “Academy of Ancient Music” was established in 1731, and became “the first organisation to perform old works regularly and deliberately”; 9 it was joined in 1776 by the “Concert of Ancient Music,” and one historian has noticed that “no other country rivalled it in the amount and diversity of old music performed during the eighteenth century; no other went so far in building up significant social roles for such works in public ritual, or in defining them as a canon.”10 The antiquarian tradition had existed before; the term “ancient music” emerged at the turn of the seventeenth century, and before that date Elizabethan “anthems and services”11 were performed in many English cathedrals. But in the eighteenth century “ancient music” became a key phrase for any understanding of English culture. The academy published a series of letters upon musical subjects, addressed nominally to Italy, in one of which it was stated that “when you cast your eyes upon those pieces [by Tallis and Byrd], you will clearly perceive that true and solid music is not in its infancy with us, and that, whatever some on your side of the Alps may imagine to the contrary, the muses have of old taken up their abode in England.” It is of some significance that in 1728 Daniel Defoe was one of the first to propose an Academy of Music; William Hogarth, too, was one of its members. It would seem that the notion of ancient music was remarkably congenial to the English imagination. It has even been claimed that the “tradition of ancient music was the foundation of the canon of musical classics in England,” 12 where antiquarianism becomes the standard both of taste and of performance.

  The same predilections are also to be found in the arts of architecture. William Kent and John Vanbrugh were enchanted and influenced by medieval architecture, and did not hesitate to reproduce ogees, quatrefoils and fan vaulting. Batty Langley published a volume entitled Gothic Architecture Improved by Rules and Proportions in 1747, but in fact it was the irregularity and eclecticism of Gothic which most appealed to the English imagination. Vanbrugh himself summarised this native inclination when he wrote that there “is perhaps no one thing which the most polite part of mankind have more generally agreed on; than in the value they have set on ancient times.”

  It is no paradox, therefore, that the culture of nineteenth-century England, which witnessed the development of an entirely new metropolitan civilisation, should itself have been similarly preoccupied with “ancient times.” It is nonetheless curious that the Victorian age of innovation should also be the age of restoration, that a fervent belief in progress should be accompanied by a deep need for revival, and that a period of unprecedented industrial and commercial expansion should also be a period of unremitting nostalgia. Yet the vagaries of the human and social constitution are such that apparently irreconcilable forces can work together. There was some comfort to be derived, after all, from the close identification of Victorian architects and poets with medieval England; it offered a vision of permanence in the face of constant change, and a monument of faith in an age when scepticism and unbelief were everywhere apparent. The vogue for Pre-Raphaelite painting is part of the same movement of taste.

  The close association with medievalism also provided an image of organic unity, of a civilisation established upon firm religious and cultural principles, in a period when every aspect of society was being called into doubt. Between 1821 and 1823 Augustus Charles Pugin published Specimens of Gothic Architecture, which may be seen as equivalent to Sir Walter Scott’s Kenilworth, composed in the same period. Nineteenth-century architecture itself is marked by a conflation of antique styles, from the early Gothic of Pugin himself, most thoroughly exemplified by the interiors of the Palace of Westminster, to the high Victorian Gothic of Butterfield and Burges. Even a pragmatist such as George Gilbert Scott realised that the English imagination was thoroughly backward. “I am no medievalist,” he wrote in Remarks on Secular and Domestic Architecture, Present and Future:

  I do not advocate the styles of the middle ages as such. If we had a distinctive architecture of our own day worthy of the greatness of our age, I should be content to follow it; but we have not; and the middle ages having been the latest period which possessed a style of its own . . . I strongly hold that it has greater prima facie claims to be used as the nucleus of our developments than those of ancient Greece or Rome.

  Once more emerges the peculiar fact that an old style is considered more appropriate for a new civilisation; peculiar, that is, to the English imagination. Gilbert Scott’s own attempts to restore the churches of medieval England were not altogether popular and prompted accusations of vandalism. His endeavours, however, led to the establishment by William Morris of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, an institution which reflected Morris’s own intense medievalism, which in turn was exemplified by such writings as The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems.

  It was suggested, even at the time, that the language and attitudes of the past presented the best medium for understanding the forces of the present. The obliquity is always apparent in John Ruskin’s writing, for example, where in The Seven Lamps of Architecture and The Stones of Venice he becomes a fiery prophet, loud in his denunciations and lavish in his celebrations, his own rich and multivalent prose levelled against the abuses of modern English culture. The same historicism was at work in Charles Lamb, albeit in milder vein, when the phantoms of an evanescent past are invoked to obscure or shade the horrors of modern civilisation. This nostalgic antiquarianism affected the work of poets also. Tennyson explained that “It is what I have always felt even from a boy, and what as a boy I called ‘the passion of the past.’ And it is so always with me now; it is the distance that charms me in the landscape, the picture and the past, and not the immediate to-day in which I move.” Here is a clear exposition of one aspect of the English imagination which wishes to walk in the veiled distance and in remembered days. Even those writers most concerned with what in the nineteenth century was called “the condition of England question” veiled their fictions in the subdued light of the past; Dickens is only the most obvious and formidable example. Shakespeare was never moved to address the social problems of his period and preferred, instead, to re-create a legendary English past. There are many English writers of genius who have been unwilling, or unable, to insert their work into the present moment or to sketch the outlines of the “modern” condition. It is in part a matter of reticence and embarrassment, but it also represents a signal tendency within the national temperament.

  John Stow

  CHAPTER 31

  The Conservative Tendency

  Just as a medicine is “conseruatyr of strength,” there must necessarily exist a connection between antiquarianism and conservatism, in its ancient sense of preservation.

  The fabric and structure of Anglo-Saxon building embody “a clear impression of simplicity and veneration for the past: there seems to have been an unwillingness to sweep away old buildings to make way for modern innovations.”1 In the building of the great fourteenth-century cathedrals, “the English move was in the direction of more discipline and greater sobriety”2 in opposition to that of her continental neighbours; in England rococo was renounced in favour of classicism, and the “Flamboyant” style was ignored for the Perpendicular. English medieval painting consistently followed traditional principles, while the music of the thirteenth century manifested “an inherent conservatism” principally “by putting old techniques to new uses.”3 Note values stayed the same for two centuries. The tradition of organ music remained unchanged from the Restoration to the late nineteenth century. Even in the twentieth century Benjamin Britten was celebrated for his ability “to revitalise older elements in the musical language.” 4 Gerard Manley Hopkins and W. H. Auden revived the practice of alliteration in their various and different poetries.

  It has been said that the “New Towns” constructed after the Second World War represent “extraordinary testimon
y to the continuities in English culture.”5 The architectural styles of the era, particularly that known generally as “Tudorbethan,” testify to an innate conservatism or nostalgia for antiquated architectural form, where an allusion to “the past” is supposed to convey substantiality and a measure of dignity to otherwise meretricious dwellings. The same pattern of permanence exists within other English structures; medieval halls become long galleries which in turn become picture galleries; Jacobeans copied Elizabethans, who in turn copied medieval floor-plans. There are certain regions of the country where “it is impossible to date buildings even roughly on style alone,” so persistent is one type of building.6 In districts where stone can be quarried, late seventeenth-century houses are “indistinguishable even in detail” from those of the early sixteenth century and, in the northern counties, the long and narrow houses have “grown out of the common type of hall with upper and lower ends,”7 thus emphasising the common medieval inheritance.

  But the conservative imagination is still best exemplified by the plain or common English house, a territorial interest “unique among Europeans.”8 English family homes, in particular, are remarkable for their conservatism and ubiquity. An observer of London has noted that “the uniformity of the houses is a matter of course and has not been forced upon them”;9 it suggests some organic law of growth and being, as if the houses themselves reflect the spirit of their occupants. The same observer, Steen Eiler Rasmussen, has also noted that “the common little house of which there have been thousands and thousands is only sixteen feet broad. It has probably been the ordinary size of a site since the Middle Ages.”10

  English streets often follow ancient trackways. The lanes and alleys within the City of London were first laid at the time of the Roman settlement. “Knight Rider Street,” south of St. Paul’s Cathedral, is believed to contain the line of an old circus used for gladiatorial and equestrian display. The present Guildhall, in the City of London, is established on the site of the Roman amphitheatre where administrative matters were debated and which in turn the Saxons employed for their folkmoots. There is a continuity here of some two thousand years. The administrative units of the City of London, too, were first established in Saxon times; that air of good governance, which has always been characteristic of the City and indeed of the larger country, has ancient properties. The curve of an old field path is duplicated in the shape of West Street, beside Cambridge Circus, and the cross-roads at the Angel, Islington, are a simulacrum of the crossing of tribal paths many thousands of years before. It has often been said that London, vandalised by fire and architects equally, has lost its history. The powers and forces of past time, however, are not easily destroyed; they remain visible beneath the surface of the earth.

  CHAPTER 32

  A Short History Lesson

  In England history has always been considered a manifestation of literature rather than of scholarship. There has been a blurring of formal boundaries, quite unlike the more disciplined or theoretical historical enquiries of France and Germany.

  The sixteenth-century theatre, for example, witnessed the particularly English manifestation of the “history play,” and the models for nineteenth-century history painting were derived as much from fiction (Walter Scott) as from history (Lecky). No account of the English imagination is complete without an understanding of this strange yet very practical conflation in which myth or fiction is mingled with observed facts and details. It is the most expeditious way of creating a narrative, nobly exemplified by John Milton, who, in his History of England, declared “that which hath received approbation from so many, I have chosen not to omit. Certain or uncertain, be that upon the credit of those whom I must follow . . . I refuse not, as the due and proper subject of story.” There is so strong a consonance in the English language between story and history that no one seemed able or willing to distinguish one from another. Indeed Milton also declared: “I have therefore determined to bestow the telling over ev’n of these reputed Tales; be it for nothing else but in favour of our English Poets, who by their Art will know, how to use them judiciously.”

  Bede is the father of English historiography, but he also possesses the moral and literary intent which shapes his historical imagination. “If history records good things of good men,” he wrote, “the thoughtful reader is encouraged to imitate what is good . . .”1 There is a story of a “Briton” named Lucas who, in the twelfth century, incited an army “to fight to avenge their fallen comrades by relating history to them”;2 this must represent one of the most practical instances of the historical imagination at work. As one historian has put it, “History was fundamental to medieval English experience and thought,”3 whether in the form of verse or chronicle.

  The verse fiction concerned with Arthur, Layamon’s Brut, became “the standard vernacular history text-book of late medieval England,” 4 and the human past itself became a repository of stories and adventures of an exemplary nature. As C. S. Lewis has remarked in his study of the medieval period, The Discarded Image, “the question of belief or disbelief ” was not of paramount concern; the true significance of reading history was simply “to learn the story.”5 If the historical past differed from the present, it was only in the fact of its being better and more glorious. These habits of thought may change their forms, but they do not wholly die.

  In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, for example, the resources of English history were considered material for tragedy rather than heroic fable. Sir Walter Raleigh’s History of the World includes the passage “Thou hast drawn together all the far-fetched greatness, all the pride, cruelty, and ambition of man, and covered it over with those two narrow words, Hic Jacet”; the historical imagination is united here for a moment with English melancholy. That private note, almost one of self-communing, persists in seventeenth-century historical writing, most notably in Clarendon’s The True Historical Narrative of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England and Gilbert Burnet’s History of My Own Times where autobiography, biography and historical narrative are effortlessly mingled in what are truly literary texts. The historian duly recorded events that occurred, according to his discrimination and judgement, but the dry exactitude of continental accounts was singularly missing.

  It has often been said that “pure” history began to be composed in the eighteenth century, but this is to overlook the mixed nature of the enterprise. Historians of the Whiggish tendency were eager to create a history of progress and gradual enlightenment, particularly in social and governmental affairs, and were, albeit unconsciously, translating into institutional terms Bede’s injunction to record “good things of good men” so that “the thoughtful reader is encouraged to imitate what is good.” Other historians of the period sought for general “laws” of society and human activity, which could then be transmitted in didactic fashion; their emphasis is not so different from that of medieval saints’ lives, where the exemplary patterns of history are considered of most importance. Eighteenth-century history has in fact been described as “philosophy, teaching by example.”6 Clarendon and Gibbon both wrote autobiography as well as history; the novelists Tobias Smollett and Oliver Goldsmith both composed histories as well as fictions. Gibbon’s great work, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, shares with Johnson’s Dictionary the general desire for moral education, to elevate and to purify the reader, but the creative impulse is as pervasive and as significant as the didactic or historical.

  In eighteenth-century England history painting was considered to be the highest and most noble of painterly genres. Sir Joshua Reynolds, in his Discourses at the Royal Academy, defined it as the summation of all art. It was the “Great Style” which, in its emphasis upon significant and virtuous form, covered epochs as disparate as the classical and the medieval; if the subject was in any way ancient, it was creditable. Of course the preoccupation with historical themes was not unique to England, but in this country it was taken up with most enthusiasm. As an eminent historian of English
art has put it, “historical painting was more in accord with the Anglo-Saxon temperament”;7 indeed there were many compositions upon specifically Anglo-Saxon subjects such as Alfred and Vortigern. The eighteenth-century painter James Barry expressed the national ideal when he suggested that history painting and sculpture “should be the main views of any people desirous of gaining honours by the arts. These are the tests by which the national character will be tried in after-ages.” It is a broad statement but, in a period when the power of history had seized the English imagination, it was considered to be no less than truth.

  The young artists of the second half of the eighteenth century were possessed by the ideas and ideals of the past; one need only look at the records of the Royal Academy exhibitions to comprehend the extraordinary confluence of taste. In 1763 Robert Edge Pine received a hundred-guinea prize for his painting of Canute, while in the same year John Hamilton Mortimer completed his portrait of the humiliation of Queen Emma. There were portraits of Edward III, Earl Godwin, Cymbeline and Ethelred; there were historical engravings executed on a subscription basis such as Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery and Bowyer’s Historic Gallery. The obsession was in turn aligned to a movement in theatrical taste, with the introduction of “period costume” upon the stage, and the production of such dramas as John Brown’s Athelstan, Richard Glover’s Boadicea and Thomas Arne’s Alfred.