Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination

by Peter Ackroyd

  CHAPTER 46

  Ghosts

  In “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” a scholar finds a bronze whistle among the buried fragments of a Templar church; it bears a legend in Latin, “Quis est iste qui venit?,” “Who is this who is coming?” What comes is an indistinct figure, a dim presentiment of human form, with a “face of rumpled linen.” One character in these macabre proceedings remarks, at the end of the short story, that they “served to confirm his opinion of the Church of Rome.” The scholar himself “cannot even now see a surplice hanging on a door quite unmoved.” The author of this story, M. R. James, is acknowledged to be the pre-eminent master of English ghost fiction; in this particular tale, many of his characteristic themes and devices are to be found.

  His “heroes,” or rather those to whom the ghostly visitants are drawn, tend to be of scholarly or antiquarian temper. His first volume was entitled Ghost Stories of an Antiquary. M. R. James was himself a noted scholar and palaeographer, who made a particular study of the apocrypha of the New Testament. He had a thoroughly English mind, steeped in bibliography and iconography. Yet the apparatus of his remarkable historical knowledge is presented in his stories as a “faintly ironical, at times almost self-mocking image of himself as a scholar and an antiquary.” 1 This ironic diffidence, so much part of the native imagination, permeates his fictions.

  There are other characteristic touches. In that parody of learning which seems endemic among the English learned, James manufactures references to British Museum manuscripts and alludes in one particularly nasty haunting to “the publications of the Swedish Historical Manuscripts Commission.” Many of the stories are concerned with libraries and with the ancient volumes buried therein. The antiquarian and the hunter after ghosts is, therefore, a twin being intent upon gathering the living presence of the past. The English tradition may itself then be glimpsed as a revenant, reaching out to the living with uplifted arms. That is why the ghost story is recognised to be a quintessentially English form. It has been calculated that “the vast majority of ghost stories (around 98 per cent) are in English and roughly 70 per cent are written by English men and women.”2

  The genre or medium of the ghost story emerged in the 1820s, but of course the island has always been filled with ghosts. The legionaries of the Roman Empire reported that this remote place was inhabited by spirits; England was once characterised as a land of dreams and visions. There are ghosts in Dickens and in Chaucer, in Shakespeare and in Emily Brontë, in Webster and in Wells. They may be said to haunt the English sensibility. English translations of continental romances typically added elements of magic and of supernature; the appetite for violence was equalled only by that for the mysterious and the grotesque. The English tone has been described as one of “romantic strangeness.”3

  M. R. James wrote that certain places had been “prolific in suggestion”; he was particularly enamoured of the ancient landscapes of East Anglia. In “A Neighbour’s Landmark” the landscape itself seems haunted with “stretches of green and yellow country . . . and blue hills far off, veiled with rain. Up above was a very restless and hopeless movement of low clouds travelling north-west.” Like Sherlock Holmes in The Valley of Fear, James was “a believer in the genius loci.” It is the sudden silence in a wood, or the sound of footsteps in an empty street; it is the English sense of being haunted by place and by a specific history associated with it. A country so preoccupied with its past, and with the traditions of that past, cannot help but be haunted by time itself. As Rudyard Kipling said of the countryside around his house “Batemans,” in Burwash, it harboured a “long overgrown slag-heap of a most ancient forge, supposed to have been worked by the Phoenicians and Romans and, since then, uninterruptedly till the middle of the eighteenth century. . . . Every foot of that little corner was alive with ghosts and shadows.” Kipling was an expert writer of ghost stories and, in Puck of Pook’s Hill, he re-creates “an earth spirit, and, for Kipling, specifically that of the English earth.”4

  There are sites in the natural world which also become sites of the imagination. In English ghost stories these include ancient churches, abandoned churchyards and ruined monasteries. In “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” the ghost or shape is specifically associated with a Catholic past. This is in fact a central motif in the work of M. R. James. In “Canon Alberic’s Scrap Book” an Englishman or “North Briton” of Presbyterian faith inadvertently raises the spectre of a Catholic canon. In “Number 13” a spectral chamber and its occupant are intimately related “to the last days of Roman Catholicism” in Jutland. In “Casting the Runes” an evil protagonist is described, in a cancelled passage, as “formerly a Roman [Catholic].” In “Count Magnus” another spectre is reported to be “a Roman priest in a cassock.” The presence of the great medieval cathedrals is acutely felt in the ghost stories, as if the stripping of the Catholic altars and the weight of all that rejected knowledge had somehow created a flaw in time through which spectral visitors could still move. As a child M. R. James had studied Church history, and in particular “the martyrdom of the saints,”5 so he was not untouched by intimations of the Catholic past. In many of his stories a Latin inscription is revealed, in words which amount to a curse.

  M. R. James was a skilful pasticheur, able effortlessly to reproduce the language and cadence of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; like Chatterton’s, it was a gift which he first employed as a schoolboy, and represents once more an instinctive turning towards the past. In his life and in his art he practised restraint and detachment. Horror and malevolence were necessary in ghost stories, he wrote, but “not less necessary . . . is reticence.” One critic has remarked of his stories that they are “strongly impersonal, as if the teller in no way wishes to commit himself to his tale.” 6 In particular he was dismayed by any allusion to sexuality—“sex is tiresome enough in the novels; in a ghost story, or as the backbone of a ghost story, I have no patience with it.” Here is the general English embarrassment at sex and, indeed, at physicality itself. Most of James’s spectres are touched before they are seen, and there is such an emphasis upon noisome tactility that his editor has suggested “this repulsive moment of intimacy perhaps exteriorises a fear of sexual contact in James himself.”7 “I was conscious,” one protagonist remarks, “of a most horrible smell of mould and of a cold kind of face pressed against my own and moving slowly over it.” And another of James’s characters observes of a ghost or apparition “how the mouth was open and a single tooth appeared below the upper lip.” These are the limits of frightfulness, fuelled by many different fears. “What he touched was, according to his account, a mouth. With teeth and with hair about it, and, he declared, not the mouth of a human being.” James is a miniaturist in horror; he is alert to the small detail and to the significant fact. He is interested, too, in physical circumstance. On another occasion “wet lips were whispering into my ear with great rapidity and emphasis for some time together.”

  Here, once more, we may trace elements of that morbid sensationalism everywhere encountered. The English sense of mystery, beyond the sphere of the practical and the pragmatic, is, however, perhaps best summarised in the following exchange. “Do you believe in ghosts?” “No. But I am afraid of them.”

  M. R. James himself remarked that “the recrudescence of ghost stories in recent years,” by which he meant the 1920s and 1930s, “corresponds, of course, with the vogue of the detective tale.” The assumption of some natural connection is perhaps explicable; the detective story, like the ghost story, was considered to be a characteristic English genre suffused by a native conservatism of form and address. Both share a delight in death, albeit from different perspectives, which has been seen to be an aspect of the English imagination. Both characteristically deal with small communities or groups of people—the inhabitants of a village, or a house—upon which strange forces or unsettling passions descend. But there are perhaps more interesting parallels. The great English fictional detectives�
�Sherlock Holmes, Miss Marple, Father Brown—are curiously sexless figures, while sex itself is the instigator of crime and iniquity. It is a very native displacement of passion.

  If we take one of the classics of the genre, The Body in the Library by Agatha Christie, we may note with surprise that it opens with a dream sequence in which the vicar’s wife wanders “dress’d in a bathing suit.” It is already being suggested that the furtive lusts of the unconscious mind may be dangerous. The dreamer, Mrs. Bantry, had been reading a detective story entitled The Clue of the Broken Match; like some Chaucerian protagonist, in an earlier English setting, the book had provoked the dream. The amateur detective is soon introduced as Miss Marple, a “prim spinster”; her neighbours in St. Mary Mead include an “acidulated spinster,” “a rich and dictatorial widow” and of course a vicar. It is almost as if the pent-up rage of repression in a small space had created the crime, the murder of a blond woman whose body had been left in a library which itself “spoke of long occupation and familiar use and of links with tradition.” It is, in other words, a very English murder.

  The mind of Miss Marple is described as one “that has plumbed the depths of human iniquity” and is depicted by the lady herself in no very complimentary terms. “I have a mind like a sink . . . most Victorians have.” The remark is made in the context of a particularly unpleasant child-murder, and we enter that morbid and faintly musty world of perverse passion entirely congenial to the Victorians themselves. “One does see so much evil in a village,” as Miss Marple maintains.

  Despite the morbid and manifest “evil” within Agatha Christie’s novel, however, there is little interest in the discovery of emotion or the exploration of character. This is as entirely characteristic as the emphasis upon plot and action. The serpentine line of the story is of the utmost importance, and the principal character is concerned with observation and deduction. The fiction is the purest expression of the practical English imagination, therefore, concerned with the pragmatic solution best achieved by the exercise of uncommon common sense.

  Ronald Knox established a Detection Club in 1929 for the sole purpose of excluding “Divine Revelation, Feminine Intuition, Mumbo-Jumbo, Jiggery-Pokery,” an antipathy which represents an index of the English sensibility itself. As a consequence the detective story “stays in line with the basic storytelling requirements of straightforward progression and a proper finale.” 8 It is indeed a curiously linear way of dealing with human desire, as if the “evil” could best be arranged in those two-dimensional patterns employed by English painters and miniaturists. And yet a reading of these stories might suggest that the English imagination sometimes resembles the “mould” upon M. R. James’s spectre, harbouring the living remnants of death itself.

  Philosophy, Mockery and Learning

  Thomas Hobbes. Engraving by Wenceslaus Hollar, after J. B. Caspar

  CHAPTER 47

  Practice Makes Perfect

  The prose style of Alfred, father of the English nation, was “verbal and concrete,” filled with “concrete examples”1 of law and governance. A greater number of texts, denominated as “practical,” “survives from Anglo-Saxon England than from any other Western European country.” 2 Anglo-Saxon scientific writings, for example, “constitute a large corpus of writings—far beyond anything produced contemporaneously on the continent.”3 That curiously English heretic Pelagius asserted that Christian worship lay in the sphere of practical and moral action rather than in the cultivation of a more exalted spirituality. We read of the Anglo-Saxon theologian Eadmer, who manifested a “practical working simplicity in religious matters [which] was characteristically Anglo-Saxon” together with “a turn of mind which to some extent has remained a feature of the English way of thought.”4

  That there is a spiritual continuity cannot seriously be in doubt. One contributor to the Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature has noted that French scholars believed “English spirituality before 1300 . . . to have been pragmatic and particularist” and one which “generated little by way of complex abstract reflection.”5 When Julian of Norwich is described as evincing a “very practical and common-sense outlook,”6 and in another context Wycliff is claimed as “a realist philosopher,”7 the associations and affiliations become clear.

  When Roger Ascham composed The Schoolmaster he was intent upon a highly practical course of learning to create a “Civil Gentleman” in whom learning would be utilised to instigate a right course of action. At a slightly later date Gabriel Harvey “was urging young wits in 1593 to leave poetry for studies of more ‘effectual use.’ ”8 The burgeoning publishing industry of the sixteenth century satisfied the taste for efficacy, too, with books upon medicine and husbandry, navigation and arithmetic. John Dee may now be remembered only as a magician or mystic, but he also wrote treatises upon navigation and mechanics. John Aubrey lists him as a mathematician. In the English imagination, scholarship is applied and learning utilised. Even the finer arts came within the same orbit of practical taste. Sir Philip Sidney suggested that the poet, eschewing the “wordish description” of philosophy, was in truth “a right popular philosopher.” Of sixteenth-century English composers it has been written that “their approach was pragmatic; what was congenial, they used, adapting it to native traditions,”9 where pragmatism can be seen to have a double perspective; it creates a tradition, but is also applied to it.

  The history of English philosophy is also the history of empiricism, from the writings of Duns Scotus in the thirteenth century to the logical positivism of the twentieth century. W. R. Sorley’s A History of British Philosophy might in fact be described as a text-book of pragmatism. As the German philosopher Hegel summarised the matter, “abstract and general principles have no attraction for Englishmen.” In The German Ideology Marx and Engels distinguished between French “philosophical system” and English “registration of fact.” Duns Scotus was himself “critical of all intellectual arguments in the domain of theology”10 and thus may be described as the harbinger of that anti-intellectualism which has always been so prominent an aspect of the English sensibility. His successor and follower in more than one sense, William of Ockham, propounded the theory that “all knowledge is derived from experience,”11 a native sentiment which now needs no introduction or interpretation.

  In the sixteenth century William Temple’s logic “had the advantage of clearness and practicality,”12 and Francis Bacon can be claimed as the first significant proponent of experimental science. “The matter in hand is no mere felicity of speculation,” he wrote in Novum Organum, “but the real business and fortunes of the human race, and all power of operation.” The swipe against mere “speculation” may have been instinctive, a manifestation of native taste, since Bacon’s method “had affinities with the practical and positive achievements of the English mind.”13

  The first English philosopher of empiricism was Roger Bacon, an English Franciscan of the thirteenth century whose speculations upon science were maintained by the “high value” he placed “on experiment, with numerous but odd concrete illustrations.”14 Yet there is no doubt that his namesake, Francis Bacon, set the seal upon the superiority of empirical knowledge. He believed that a vast reformation in the understanding of nature could be effected only by a resolute and rigorous empiricism in matters of experiment or methodology. The pre-eminent method was to be that of induction, by which specific particulars were scrutinised in order to discover their form. Axioms were to be understood, therefore, only in terms of experience and of experiment; the investigator should then “be able to meet the test of practice and bring about purposeful effects in the actions of nature.”15

  Bacon’s reliance upon practical detail and purposeful experiment seems to breathe an English spirit. He has been described as the originator of experimental science, and his critical empiricism heralded the native aptitude for scientific craftsmanship. He was the direct progenitor of the Royal Society, and his influence can also be traced in the Benthamism of the
nineteenth century. A whole cluster of English attitudes and activities seems to form around his name. In his essays, too, he presents himself as an eminently practical scholar, collecting together many aphorisms or apophthegms and compressing them within a small space; he called it “broken knowledge,” just as English music divided into many parts for different instruments was known as “broken music.” Two metaphors come to mind in any illustration of his prose. One is that of the Elizabethan miniaturist, who packs so much exquisite detail within so small a space. “Ambition is like choler. . . . Virtue is like a rich stone, best plain set. . . . Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man. . . . Fortune is like the market; where many times, if you can stay a little, the price will fall.” His essay “Of Adversity” is less than 500 words in length. The other metaphor may be taken from English architecture, since Bacon’s is an aggregate learning; he collects his sources and places them side by side, just as retro-chapels and cloisters were erected next to existing buildings without any formal or general design. In similar spirit Jacobean grand gardens were in fact “small gardens linked to one another.” 16 This arrangement reflects a linear imagination, accustomed to consider matters in sequence rather than in system.