Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination

by Peter Ackroyd

  This joy in the arcane places of the earth is shared by other writers. In a Cosmography published in 1652, reference is made to a hill of “Amara”; it is “a day’s journey high, on the top whereof are thirty-four palaces.” The high and sacred spot then emerges in the fourth book of Paradise Lost as

  Mount Amara, though this by som suppos’d True Paradise under the Ethiop Line

  Amhara is the name given by Samuel Johnson to the country of the “Happy Valley” in his short novel Rasselas, itself a fine addition to the English delight in fictional travel-writing. This valley was “in the kingdom of Amhara, surrounded on every side by mountains.” There is an element of snugness, or cosiness here, which is the obverse side to the passion for the dangers and hardships of imagined travel. If the same region helped to inspire Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” where in a vision the poet sees a maid “singing of Mount Abora,” then the fantastic mountain is a truly distinctive feature upon the map of English literature.

  Many medieval romances included long passages of description upon the perils and marvels encountered by heroes wandering in far-off lands, but this attraction to enchanted or distant ground may be part of a larger desire for escape. There may be some atavistic longing among islanders to “get away.” England was from the Anglo-Saxon period an intensely governed country; if it has also been at various times an over-administered one, the desire of many travellers may have consisted in a flight from the conditions of English civilisation itself. The English penchant for the dream and the vision may in turn be part of a general escape from the conventions of practicality and common sense which make up so much of the native psyche. The tradition of empiricism or pragmatism is not in contradiction to the equally large inheritance of ghosts, dreams and visions; they are opposite sides of the same coin of the realm. The evidence may be found in the surviving examples of English cartography; these maps are replete with detailed and accurate information but of course they are flanked by angels, gods, and only semi-human figures.

  The traveller depicts all that England is not. Thus Raleigh invokes “the most beautiful country that ever mine eyes beheld” along the Orinoco, with “plains of twenty miles in length.” Another traveller, Peter Martyr, confessed that “Smooth and pleasing words might be spoken of the sweet odors, and perfumes of these countries, which we purposely omit, because they make rather for the effeminating of men’s minds.” There are dangers, as well as delights, in these new-found worlds. The women “be very hot and disposed to lecherdness . . . they live commonly 300 years.” In Sierra Leone resides “an empress of all these Amazons, a witch and a canniball who daily feeds on the flesh of boys.” The appetite for the marvellous is sufficiently powerful to need no explanation but, in addition, the English affection for such literature springs in part from the need to comprehend and master that which is not English. We may say that English travel-writers define their nationhood by describing other nations; it is an instinctive form of reassurance.

  It also reflects, of course, the native passion for seafaring. The title page of Francis Bacon’s Instauratio Magna contains the engraving of a ship setting forth upon unknown waters beyond the Pillars of Hercules; it is the ship of knowledge, sailing upon strange seas of thought, and is the emblem of an island race which sees water as the natural frontier. Hawkins and Drake, Davis and Frobisher and Raleigh have entered the national consciousness because of their association with the things of the sea; their adventures as pirates, explorers and masters of the burgeoning English empire became the staple material of English fiction and English poetry. These Elizabethan adventurers were joined in later years by Scott and Oates, representative English heroes who faced an uncharted and inhospitable wilderness of ice.

  Richard Hakluyt’s compilation The Principall Navigations, Voiages and Discoveries of the English Nation was enormously influential from its first publication in 1589. These sea-works “created a taste for exotic lands across the sea which in time would become more familiar to English people than the heart of Europe.”2 J. A. Froude described The Principall Navigations as “the prose epic of the modern English nation,” in which England itself becomes the principal actor or character. Hakluyt indeed knew that he was fashioning an epic, and deliberately introduced epic material, but in the words of Richard Helgerson in Forms of Nationhood, his principal purpose was “to reinvent both England and the world to make them fit for one another.”3 He achieves this feat of collation in a very English spirit, in his own words by attempting “to bring antiquities smothered and buried in dark silence, to light” and by creating “this homely and rough-hewn shape” of a discourse. Amateurism and antiquarianism are thus aligned in an embarrassed but spirited apology.

  His is not a moral or heroic venture, however, but one established upon profit and commerce. His first work was entitled A Discourse of the Commodityof the Taking of the Strait of Magellanus, and is an account of putative damage to the English cloth trade; his is a highly pragmatic and practical apologia for sea-travel. Hakluyt’s “later collections are compendia of information . . . organised by geographical region for the easy use of travellers and strategic planners,”4 and he regards “England as an essentially economic entity, a producer and consumer of goods.”5 So in this sense tales of travel become shop-windows for putative purchasers; The Principall Navigations is a prose epic of commerce. Its two thousand pages, its 216 voyages, its hundreds of supporting documents, are witness to England’s “great trade and traffic in merchandise.” There are no high sentiments or noble rhetorical flourishes; the work is sensible and practical. Where there are two headings on the virtue of spreading Christianity, for example, there are twenty-eight upon the details of trade. Hakluyt himself disparaged the ornate aspirations of the Spanish and Portuguese “pretending in glorious words that they made their discoveries chiefly to convert infidels to our most holy faith (as they say)” when essentially they were seeking “goods and riches.” This is the true voice of an English writer who retreats in the face of high sentiment or high language. Instead of quoting books of divinity and scholarship, he employs the archives of the great trading companies. His principal characters are not saints or heroes, or even military adventurers, but London merchants. This is of great significance in any account of the English imagination, where the work of tradesmen is continually being amplified. Even Robinson Crusoe is a kind of merchant. The greatest English enterprise of the age was the East India Company.

  The style of Hakluyt’s narrative does nothing to dispel this impression; letters of wares and lists of prices are printed in the same “black-letter folio with decorated capitals”6 as dedicatory poems. The three volumes contain an “extraordinary variety of documents ranging from epic fragments of Parmenius and Chapman to commercial lists like Newberg’s.” 7 It has been said that the sea-voyages of the sixteenth century were primarily concerned with colonisation and subsequent plunder; the same acts of piracy may be recognised within the English imagination itself, which appropriates the vocabularies of strange lands only to engorge them within its existing structure.

  Yet the emphasis in collections of travel literature of the seventeenth century shifted from the marvels of Mandeville to the poetry of fact. William Dampier’s A New Voyage Round the World, published in 1697, pledges “the Truth and Sincerity of my Relation.” In “this plain piece of mine,” Dampier has chronicled “such Observables as I met with.” In his insistence upon “observable” particulars and circumstantial detail Dampier manifests the English preoccupation with living truth, most profitably to be glimpsed in minute particulars. The pose of the narrator is that “of the ordinary man of common sense whose personal observations may be trusted by virtue of his lack of specialist skills (especially literary ones).”8 In a later volume, Voyage to New Holland, Dampier prefaces his narrative with the claim that it is “a Plain and Just Account of the true Nature and State of the Things described”; the fact that he dedicated this book to the President of the Royal Society suggests his emphasis upon the
practicality and usefulness of the information he was concerned to impart. He also had an interesting habit “of eating most of the strange animals he describes,” 9 which might be considered as the height of English pragmatism.

  It is also worth noting here that the inventions of English technicians such as the wind gauge, and the discovery of English scientists concerning the properties of magnetism, materially assisted the capacity of sea-voyaging. Volumes such as William Gilbert’s De Magnete (1600) and Edward Wright’s Certaine Errours in Navigation (1598) can be said to have “set the seal on England’s supremacy in the theory and practice of navigation.”10 In that sense travel literature can be understood as an example of native triumphal-ism. The narratives of eighteenth-century travel, for example, included volumes by explorers and by natural scientists, by clerics and by scholars, by archaeologists and by novelists. The voyages of Cook, Bligh and Vancouver were documented. Fielding described his journey to Lisbon, while Sterne embarked upon “a sentimental journey” through France and Italy, and William Beckford dallied in Portugal. Tobias Smollett composed his own Travels through France and Italy. We might include Samuel Johnson’s journey to the Western Islands of Scotland in this company, if only because the great arbiter of English letters had an especial fondness for travel literature. His first published work was a translation of Father Lobo’s A Voyage to Abyssinia , which helped to fashion his own image of that exotic culture in his subsequent novel The History of Rasselas, the Prince of Abissinia. Johnson owned an atlas, for which he compiled his own index at the back, and sustained an enormous appetite for travel literature of every description. Rasselas, despondent in the “happy valley,” finds his amusement in portraying “to himself that world which he had never seen”; this might be considered as one of the principal delights of travel literature itself, especially for those immured upon an island. The prince’s guide, Imlac, had travelled to Agra, the capital of Indostan, as well as Persia and Syria; he had resided in Palestine and Egypt, and sailed upon the Red Sea. Like Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver, however, he was also an explorer of human nature. In one suggestive passage Imlac, on surveying the Red Sea, confessed that his “heart bounded like that of a prisoner escaped. I felt an unextinguishable curiosity kindle in my mind, and resolved to snatch this opportunity of seeing the manners of other nations.” Here is exemplified the passion of the English mind. The depths of insular melancholy have already been sounded, and in this passage from Johnson we may glimpse another fount and origin of English travel literature.

  CHAPTER 35

  A Miniature

  The English a fection for miniatures has a long history. It may be that those who live upon a small island take a delight in small things; it may also reflect a preoccupation with the details of practical work-manship.

  In the Anglo-Saxon period there was a distinctively English school of miniature painting, which can profitably be aligned with the extraordinary attention to detail in certain Anglo-Saxon poems; even the mythological bird the phoenix is depicted in the form of the miniaturist’s art. “His head is green behind, exquisitely variegated and shot with purple. Then the tail is handsomely pied, part burnished, part purple, part intricately set about with glittering spots. The wings are white to the rearward.” 1 In the tenth-century manuscripts executed in the “Winchester style,” the miniatures are characterised by “the fluttering draperies, and the heavy colours and magnificent gold”2 where the native passion for ornament is exercised in a small space. In the late Anglo-Saxon miniatures, too, can be found that “interest in exact detail and love of pattern”3 which continued over the centuries of English painting. The point may be that miniatures are the appropriate medium for such interests, and that as a result they are more likely to become components of a national art. In the twelfth century there were “great miniaturists” 4 who travelled round the country, visiting scriptoria and other centres of monastic production, and who in the process created a genuinely national style.

  The tradition continued in the illuminations of the thirteenth century, with vigorous human figures “fitting admirably into the tiny space allotted to them”;5 the notion of general activity within constricted bounds may of course have been a social principle before it became part of an aesthetic. A survey of painting of the thirteenth century has also drawn attention to the prevalence of “small fantastical initials” of a “decorative nature” as “a central and inherent part of the artistic development of the time”;6 many tiny monstrous figures within them derive from “deep obsessions in their creators’ minds,” and possess an “intensity” which reveals them to be “a central preoccupation of the creative imagination.” 7 This desire to miniaturize obsessions, or to reduce “grotesques” in size and scale, is interesting if perplexing. Could it possibly be related to the pattern of English detective stories in the twentieth century, when evil and murderous wickedness were seen to operate in small and cosy country villages? In the thirteenth century itself the vogue for the miniature was transposed to other arts and other disciplines; we may note the taste of Edward I for “miniaturised, encrusted architecture”8 and in the literature of the period for the “thumb-nail sketch” and for scenes “visualised like a miniature.”9

  In the fourteenth century “English medieval painting at its best was never monumental in scale” but found its finest expression in manuscript illumination.10 The embroidery known as opus anglicanum, the psalters, the small diptychs in ivory or alabaster, and tomb sculpture “essentially miniature in its feeling,”11 are all aspects of the same living tradition. One historian of painting has suggested that “the products of the Gothic Age in England . . . are most impressive on a small scale,” and that there was “no such tradition of monumental scale as steadily developed elsewhere”;12 this may of course represent some diffidence or embarrassment in the native artistic temperament inhibiting the grand or glorious gesture. It does not preclude vitality of form, or liveliness of detail, but exhibits rather “a sense of what can be done in a small space.”13 It is an insular art.

  Certainly it is the context for an extraordinary flowering in the art of the miniature portrait. The miniaturist Nicholas Hilliard has been designated as “the central artistic figure of the Elizabethan age” and “the only painter . . . whose work reflects, in its delicate microcosm, the world of Shakespeare’s earlier plays”14 where wit and fancy strive for mastery. Hilliard confessed that he wished to capture and to evoke “these lovely graces, these witty smilings and these stolen glances which suddenly, like lightning, pass and another countenance taketh place.” The expressiveness of line, the ornamental pattern of the surface, and the brilliance of colour, all bespeak a native purpose. In this sixteenth-century art, “the English had no rivals”; 15 its loveliness and delicacy materially affected larger compositions, and it has been well said that “the miniature set the style for oil painting and started a typically English school”16 where ornate decorative effects and flat linear patterning are once more the characteristic elements. The dominance of portraiture, in this “English school,” need scarcely be emphasised.

  It is no surprise, either, that in the seventeenth century “the art of the miniaturist flourished.”17 Courtiers, according to Sir Kenelm Digby, “are ever more earnest to have their Mistresses picture in limning than in a large draft”—a limner, derived from luminer, having originally been an illuminator of manuscripts. The achievement of Nicholas Hilliard was followed by that of Isaac Oliver and John Hoskins, and that of Samuel Cooper, who for miniatures “was esteemed the best artist in Europe.”

  The obsession with the miniature continued well into the eighteenth century, when “miniatures were in fact by far the most numerous kind of portraits produced.”18 It is entirely appropriate that they became a profitable branch of commerce, and this practical benefit may be adduced from the fact that miniatures sprang as much from the skills of goldsmiths as from the art of the manuscript illuminators. It is again characteristic that the miniature, perhaps “because of its
commercial nature . . . rarely shows any form of complex psychological exploration.” Here is a further definition of the English imagination. It has been said that when Delacroix arrived in London, in the spring of 1825, “English painting he found admirable when on a small scale.”19 The fidelity to minute detail, so redolent in the paintings of the Pre-Raphaelites, found its counterpart in the poetry of Rossetti and Tennyson with its concentration “on minute details of the natural world.”20 And then of course the twentieth-century Australian-born composer Percy Grainger wrote a suite for orchestra entitled “In a Nutshell.”

  One of the most poignant and powerful images within English literature is that of the mustard-seed, or the grain of sand, or the hazel-nut, as an emblem of the spiritual universe. Blake afforded it immortal status in “Auguries of Innocence”:

  To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour

  It might be described as the prophetic credo of the English miniaturist. But intimations of that vision were vouchsafed to English mystics of an earlier date. In The Ladder of Perfection the fourteenth-century Augustinian canon Walter Hilton is intrigued by the “kernel hidden within the shell of a nut” only to bypass it as an image of divine intercession; Julian of Norwich is shown “a littil thing” no bigger than a hazel-nut “in the palm of my hand” and knows it to be an emblem of the universe for “it is all that is made.” In “The Prioress’s Tale” of Geoffrey Chaucer, the Virgin Mary places “a grayn” upon the tongue of a murdered infant, allowing the child to sing sweetly; this “grayn” or seed has been variously interpreted as a “grain of Paradise” or a rosary bead, and later commentators have disputed whether it be “the smallest, least valuable object” or “a symbol of immortality.” In truth it is both. In a less sacred context Robert Burton’s Anatomy prepares a disquisition on the nature of eternity with the sentiment that “if you did but first know how much a small cube as big as a mustard-seed might hold. . . .” In David Copperfield “the complete idea of snugness . . . lay in a nut-shell.” The same preoccupation can be glimpsed within Marlowe’s “infinite riches in a little room” and the cry of Shakespeare’s Hamlet that “I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myselfe a King of infinite space”; the soul of Chaucer’s Troilus gazes upon “this litel spot of erthe” as if in the English imagination there is some affection for that which is small and yet also infinite. Blake saw the little fly “Withinside wondrous & expansive” and in Richard Dadd’s visionary painting The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke, the little figures are grouped among hazel-nuts which might have fallen from the hand of Julian of Norwich.