Albion (10 page)

This is the closest English prose reaches to abstract learning, this wistful, pedantic, digressive, solicitous and magniloquent style not untouched by irony or condescension. Like John Donne and Francis Bacon, Burton is interested in the “new” philosophy only when it affords him fresh metaphors; but he still prefers the ancient wisdom of “
Robin
Goodfellows
” or “
Puck
in the Night” as well as the knowledge contained in biographical anecdote. This tendency, too, he inherits from the native genius. Is it a peculiar disposition, also, to feel compelled to include no less than everything—just as Dickens filled his novels with crowds and Shakespeare filled the world with his characters—before concluding that all is vanity and empty striving? Even in the act of reaching out to grasp the world, English writers are troubled by melancholy contemplations.

There is a native strain, too, in Burton’s false learning and in his concocted quotations, designed to confuse or tease the reader. Like the notebooks of Coleridge, his narrative endlessly repeats and anticipates itself. He quotes Chaucer and, like the poet, creates a strange embarrassed and understated persona—“But where am I? Into what subject have I rushed? What have I to do with Nuns, Maids, Virgins, Widows? I am a bachelor myself, and lead a Monastick life in a college.” But then, in the synopses of his books or “partitions,” he parodies the continental learning of the logician Ramus. Burton refers to Malory, Marlowe, Sidney, Spenser, and alludes to melancholy Hamlet. He copies the ecclesiastical histories of the medievals and the Anglo-Saxons with his accounts of visions and miracles. So “our Melancholy” is demonstrated by “that which
Matthew Paris
relates of the Man of Ersham who saw heaven and hell in a vision; of Sir
Owen
, that went down into St. Patrick’s Purgatory in King
Stephen’s
days, and saw as much; Walsingham of him that was showed as much by St.
Julian
.” Burton, having been raised in Leicestershire and educated at Brasenose College, Oxford, spent his life as a student of Christ Church, Oxford. He pored over the books of the Bodleian Library in order to write his treatise, with the purpose of relieving or reliving his own melancholy; yet it increased to the point that, according to an old account, “nothing could make him laugh but going to the bridge-foot and hearing the ribaldry of the bargemen, which rarely failed to throw him into a violent fit of laughter.” It is rumoured that he committed suicide, and on his epitaph in Christ Church it is recorded that “Melancholia” gave him both life and death.

Hobbes
was a flicted
with melancholy; in
Leviathan
he created a vision of the world born out of fearfulness and nourished by desperation. Sir Godfrey Kneller’s portraits of Hobbes’s noble contemporaries are distinguished by “sensitive penetration of character and melancholy.”
⁷
The portrait of Charles I at his trial depicts him dressed in “the uniform of Melancholy” with black coat and broad-brimmed black hat. Yet melancholy was as much at home among the Puritans as the defeated Royalists, leading one historian of the seventeenth century to suggest that it was “a cultural mode available to the whole ‘educated’ class.”
⁸
We know also of Milton’s “Il Penseroso.” When John Donne sat for a painting towards the end of his life, he chose to drape himself in a shroud and stand upon an urn. When he mounted the pulpit of St. Paul’s Cathedral he carried with him an hour-glass to remind the congregation that “from the first minute that thou beganst to live, thou beganst to die too.” He desired to die in the pulpit. It was indeed in the pulpit that he preached his funeral sermon known as “Death’s Duell”; a few days later, at the end of March 1631, he expired. He was killed by the power of his own oration.

He mused upon “a handful of dust” and truly became, in the Anglo-Saxon term, an avower of “
dustsceawung
.” He was a disciple of death and a voluptuary of decay. His was a fantastic melancholy, dwelling upon the surcease of breath with morbid and fascinated relish; he created an elaborate patterning of graveyard themes, an embroidery, an
opus anglicanum
. Like Burton, he proceeds by association and paradox, the whole panoply of words determined by consonance and contrast; it is a syllabic rhetoric in which tone and colour play as much part as argument. We are approaching once more the
genius loci
. And the familiar cry goes up. “They tell me it is my
Melancholly
; Did I infuse, did I drinke in
Melancholly
into my selfe? It is my
thoughtfulnesse
; was I not made to
thinke
?” As with so many other English artists and writers, his taste for the macabre and for the grotesque encouraged theatricality of various kinds. One of his predecessors as Dean of St. Paul’s, John Colet, insisted upon wearing mournful black rather than the required scarlet; the image of Donne wrapped in his winding sheet, facing east to greet the rising Christ, is perhaps sufficiently theatrical. There is sensationalism, too, within the melancholia of his sermons. “Between that excrementall jelly,” he wrote, “that thy body is made of at first, and that jelly which thy body dissolves to at last; there is not so noysome, so putrid a thing in nature.”

It is all of a piece with Jacobean tragedy, and the sensational Gothic drama of the eighteenth-century London patent theatres. With such a distinguished ancestry it is perhaps not surprising that the most successful exhibition of contemporary English art was entitled, simply, “Sensation.”

When John Donne stood upon his urn, the knots of the winding sheet clutched in his hand, he might have been anticipating Thomas Browne’s Hy
driotaphia,or Urne-Buriall
in which, as Browne intimates elsewhere, “I perceive I doe Anticipate the vices of age, the world to mee is but a dreame or mockshow, and wee all therein but Pantalones and Antickes to my severer contemplations.” Thus “ ’tis all one to lie in St. Innocent’s Church-yard, as in the Sands of Aegypt: Ready to be anything, in the extasie of being ever, and as content with six foot as the Moles of Adrianus.” And so “The Iniquity of Oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy.” Browne was born in 1605, but he continued his life apparently undisturbed by the vagaries of civil war, Commonwealth and Restoration. He was educated at Winchester and at Oxford, where he learned six languages, but he pursued his real studies in anatomy and medicine. He practised as a doctor in Halifax but most notably in Norwich, during which period he completed his most celebrated and erudite work. He was an expert in witchcraft and delighted in scientific experiments of any kind. “All places, all airs, make unto me one Country,” he once wrote, “I am in England everywhere and under any Meridian.”

Here, then, are the makings of a wholly English measure—this gravity, this grandiloquence, this sombre rhetoric always in peril of decay and dissolution into its component parts. The melancholy imagination has of course also been associated with the movement of German romanticism but, under English skies, it takes on a wholly native hue. In particular the delight in demonstration, the vast expenditure of energy into words, characterises this prose; there is no ontology, or metaphysic, but rather the plangent chords of a dying fall. From the discovery of Anglo-Saxon urns at Old Walsingham in Norfolk Browne divagates widely into burial rites and obsequies in a style at once gay and learned, comic and erudite. He digresses, and follows an argument fitfully through imperfect logic; he adduces many examples and enlists many anecdotes so that the effect, like that of Burton and of Donne, is of a garishly lit stage with too many scenes and too many characters. Yet there is nobility even within the stage-fire. “Life is a pure flame, and we live by an invisible Sun within us. . . . Time which antiquates Antiquities . . . that duration, which maketh Pyramids pillars of snow, and all that’s past in a moment.” It is a great triumph of English literature, more substantial and enduring than “the heaviest stone that melancholy can throw at a man.”

Samuel Johnson admired Browne’s prose, despite its tendency to prolixity; the haunted, shambling, melancholic figure of Johnson swallowed great draughts of such recondite learning in the attempt to sublimate his own disturbed genius. It might be otiose to place him within “the strains of sentiment, gloomy sublimity and melancholia that became a feature of British cultural life from the mid-century”
⁹
but in his company we can also see Laurence Sterne and Oliver Goldsmith. Johnson believed that he was growing melancholy mad and William Adams found him “in a desperate state, sighing, groaning, talking to himself and restlessly walking” up and down his chamber. In his diary for 18 September 1768 he wrote: “This day it came into my mind to write the history of my melancholy. On this purpose to deliberate. I know not whether it may not too much disturb me.” Like Cowper he believed himself to be in danger of being damned perpetually. He administered large doses of opium to himself in order to alleviate his mental and physical miseries. He wished to be confined and to be whipped, a predilection known upon the European continent as “the English disease.”

Stone portrait of John Donne in his shroud, St. Paul’s Cathedral, London

We may mark here the “melancholy poetry” of Richard Wilson’s eighteenth-century landscapes,
¹⁰
which are not unconnected with that current of nostalgia which plays so large a part in English painting; it is as if the English were born looking backwards. Melancholy lies within Tennyson and Swinburne, A. E. Housman and Christina Rossetti:

God strengthen me to bear myself; That heaviest weight of all to bear, Inalienable weight of care

We hear it, too, within the music of Emily Brontë:

O for the time when I shall sleep Without identity, And never care how rain may steep Or snow may cover me!

In twentieth-century poetry it can be glimpsed within the mournful embarrassment of Philip Larkin and the bleakness of Ted Hughes. And yet from what does it spring? Many historians and scholars have favoured the English landscape as the
fons et origo
of melancholy.

CHAPTER 10

The Rolling Hills

Much of that landscape
still rises and declines in ancient patterns, which hold their own stories of lives laboriously led. The lines of ditches and hedgerows represent an ancient order; even densely built urban areas can reflect an older reality. Nineteenth-century Nottingham, for example, was “largely determined by the medieval footpaths and furlongs of the open fields.”
¹
It is an open secret that the topography of the City of London is established upon Roman and Saxon divisions.

These affinities are not simply material for nostalgia, however. It is sometimes supposed that landscape shapes human perception and that the power of the earth, the ground upon which we stand and move, is greater than that of the heavens in determining human destiny. Milton himself suggested that climate and topography nourish wit and consciousness as well as fruit, and more recent studies have confirmed the associations between locality and behaviour. It is of course a piece of ancient wisdom, but the present author has noticed its workings in various districts of twenty-first-century London.

It is the wisdom D. H. Lawrence gathered, and used, from the novels of Thomas Hardy in which “there exists a great background, vital and wild, which matters more than the people who move upon it.” Lawrence also said that Hardy’s understanding of the world derived from his recognition of the territorial imperative and that “putting aside his metaphysic, which must always obtrude when he thinks of people, and turning to the earth, to landscape, then he is true to himself.” It can be a source of power, too, as well as vision. As John Constable said of another country, “the Dutch were stay-at-home people. Hence their originality.” But in England itself the source of that originality, or genius, may lie far back. The spires of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century parish churches, an example of a line of beauty in the English landscape, follow a geological stratum from Lincoln to north Somerset and seem ineluctably to rise out of oolite stone. Wordsworth pursues a similar course of enquiry when in his
Guide Through the District of the Lakes
he asks his reader to imagine a primitive landscape. “He may see or hear in fancy the winds sweeping over the lakes, or piping with a loud voice among the mountain peaks and, lastly, may think of the primaeval woods shedding and renewing their leaves with no human eye to notice, or human heart to regret or welcome the change.” In the north-west region Wordsworth experienced “low breathings coming after him”; in that same territory, five hundred years before, Sir Gawain felt “
etins
aneleden him
,” or giants blowing after him. The faint shudder of disquiet may be part of the landscape.

The
coming of the Anglo-Saxons
scarcely altered the vista of “primaeval woods,” with the ash and oak upon the claylands and beech upon the chalk. Part of the country possessed a settled agrarian regime, inherited from Romano-British or prehistoric farmers. And many of the great forests had already been cut back or burned down. But much of England was still a wilderness covered with thick woods or with cold moorlands broken by outcrops of stone, marshlands, fens and heaths; log huts with thatched roofs betrayed their presence with thin plumes of smoke rising into the vast English sky, while in certain places the ruins left by earlier settlers were visible among the weeds and scrubland. Here, except for the wind sighing among the trees and the rain falling upon the damp soil, was silence—silence together with the calls of the natural world. Earnwood in Shropshire signifies “eagle’s wood,” Yarnscombe in Devon means “eagles’ valley” and Arncliff in West Yorkshire “eagles’ cliff.” In these fastnesses we are not so far removed from the conclusion of
Wuthering Heights
with Heathcliff ’s head-stone “still bare” upon the moor. “I lingered round them, under that benign sky; watched the moths fluttering among the heath and hare-bells; listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass; and wondered how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers, for the sleepers in that quiet earth.” Here the protagonists have returned to the earth from which they came; after their fitful sojourn in the human world they have folded back into the landscape of which they were always a part.

This odd, silent and empty England in its earliest manifestations was one that haunted the Anglo-Saxon imagination. The opening encomia in the histories of Britain describe a landscape of springs and snow-white gravelled streams, of plains and hills and various flowers; but the imaginative work of the Saxons is possessed by cold and isolation and darkness. The female persona within one short poem laments her state of houselessness; she dwells within an ancient barrow among dark hills and dales. Guthlac finds a resting place upon a primeval mound or “hill” within the wilderness. Everywhere there are references to steep and rugged places, to black waters and ice-cold streams, to crags and mountain caves. When Bede describes Ely as “an island surrounded by watery marshes” and Grant-chester as “a small ruined city,” he is describing a waste land scarcely populated and meagrely cultivated, a darkly tangled landscape of wolves and boars. So it appears in
Beowulf
, too; the home of the monster race was the “
mor
” and the “
faestnes
,” the moor and the fastness where there is frost and darkness. It is the landscape of
King Lear
where “the wrathfull skies / Gal-low the very wanderers of the darke” and the setting of
Sir Gawain and the
Green Knight
:

Thay clomben bi clyffez ther clengez the colde . . . Mist muged on the mor, malt on the mountez

Wild England is the context of the opening dream within
Piers the Plowman
: “That I was in a wildernesse, wist I never where.” It is couched in Hardy’s
Far From the Madding
Crowd
where “the general aspect of the swamp was malignant. From its moist and poisonous coat seemed to be exhaled the essences of evil things in the earth, and in the waters under the earth.” It is the landscape that haunts the English imagination. Thus Egdon Heath, in Hardy’s
Return of the Native
, “had a lonely face, suggesting tragical possibilities,” while in “The Palace of Art” Alfred Tennyson depicts an equally bleak vista with

a foreground black with stones and slags, Beyond, a line of heights, and higher All barred with long white cloud the scornful crags

It is the internal landscape of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.

Within the English landscape there are hallowed places, sacred by event or by association. There is a path that leads through English literature; it is the path of human agency and human settlement, a pact with the earth leading the traveller forward. It is the forest path, the
wald-swathu
, in
Beowulf
; it is the trackway along which Jude Fawley walks, weeping, in
Jude the Obscure
. John Clare rejoiced in “those crooked shreds / Of footpaths,” of which Edward Thomas remarked that “the more they are downtrodden, the more they flourish”; they are themselves a sign or token of national feeling, like that long serpentine line which in
The Analysis of Beauty
William Hogarth named as the line of beauty. It is the line as curved or curling, in the sinuous grace of a reclining body or in a line drawn upwards around a cone. Hogarth simply called it “VARIETY.” Stanley Spencer’s
The Bridlepath at Cookham
has the same irregular beauty as Paul Nash’s
The Field Path
, both paintings showing narrow ways turning among fields and trees. The journey of Bunyan’s Pilgrim, of Spenser’s Red Crosse Knight, of Dickens’s Little Nell, all take on the allegory of the winding path.

Since these are immemorial ways a sense of custom is strongest; their presence may linger even after all outward marks have disappeared. The pathways of the Iceni lie beneath the crossroads of the Angel, Islington, in North London. These green lanes and narrow paths flourish in obscurity, sharing that privacy and inward shelter which are so much part of the English vision; they harbour, too, the sacredness of past associations which is also part of the vision. In E. M. Forster’s
The Longest Journey
the path moves towards a circle of standing stones, suggesting the primal thread linking past and present times. Yet how quickly, too, that track can degenerate from a lane into an overgrown footpath as if it longed to return to desuetude and forgetfulness; it is a return to origins, to the field-dung and to the ditch-mud which make up its being. John Cowper Powys, in the twentieth century, invoked the sensations of walking in such a secluded place where “the spirit of the earth called out to him from the green shoots beneath his feet” so that he was filled with the
genius loci
and sustained by it. Here also he experienced “the innumerable personalities of all the men and women who for generations have gone up and down” these tracks across the earth. So the path may encourage moments of vision. Thus, in Tennyson’s
In Memoriam
:

I know that this was Life,—the track Whereon with equal feet we fared

Keats knew in turn that “The poetry of earth is never dead.” To be surrounded by the melody of landscape is to be blessed, to rest in the sleep of origins in which there is no difference between humankind and the natural world.

The poetry and prose of the Anglo-Saxons are filled with the wonders of symbiosis. Bede, in his life of Cuthbert, relates how the saint walked down from his monastery to the adjacent sea; he knelt down upon the sand in prayer, whereupon two otters “bounded out of the water, stretched themselves out before him, warmed his feet with their breath, and tried to dry him on their fur.”
²
On another occasion some ravens pulled the straw from a hut which Cuthbert had built upon Farne Island, beside Lindisfarne; he reproved them and soon after one bird returned “with feathers outspread and head bowed low to its feet in sign of grief.”
³
The bird inhabited the small island also, and in the legends of English life power may reside in the most local circumstances. The site of the stream or “
borne
” beside which Langland slumbered has been identified as the fountain of Malvern water which springs out of the west slope of the Herefordshire Beacon; the “
toure
on the toft
” is then the Norman castle immediately above it. The scene of Constable’s Autumn
Sunset
is the footpath from East Bergholt Post Office to Stratford St. Mary Church, via Vale Farm. The “dark Satanic Mills” of Blake’s Milton can readily be identified with the ruins of the Albion Mills along the Blackfriars Road, a short distance from Blake’s house in Lambeth; he was the poet of eternity, but he identified himself with a local topography. These sites are irradiated by vision, but half their power derives from their particularity. Even the earth strewn across the bones of the saints was considered sacred, and believed to contain miraculous properties.

On a larger scale, too, the country of England was considered to be charged with power. Saxton’s county maps, published in 1579, provided the first complete set of visual images as fresh and illuminating to his first audience as photographs of the outer universe to a more recent generation. His work was complemented by Camden’s
Britannia
, published seven years later, of which the purpose was “to restore Britain to its Antiquities, and its Antiquities to Britain.” This was sacred soil indeed, hallowed by age and sanctified by association. Michael Drayton’s
Poly-Olbion
, completed in 1622, is a poetic exercise in chorography, a great choral epic composed from “the sundry Musiques of England.” In the twentieth century Edmund Blunden compared the English landscape to a symphony. But by whom? By Vaughan Williams? Or Havergal Brian? For Drayton the music flows from the streams and rivers, such as the Severn and the Isis, while echoing among its hills and valleys. In the twelve maps which accompanied the first edition of
Poly-Olbion
, various shepherds, fairies and deities consecrate the land with “every mountain, forest, river, and valley, expressing in their sundry postures their loves, delights and natural situations”; the song of the earth is divinely ordered, and supplants the authority of the monarch or the newly emerging state. The four thousand names inscribed upon Saxton’s wall-map of England are a holy litany; as Drayton puts it, the “varying vein” of his poetical celebration registers the nature of “the varying earth.” It is, once more, a highly localised vision like that of Blake or Langland.

Landscape
began to
emerge, in English painting, in the latter years of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth century when various significant personages were placed in specific settings; the
Wedding at Horsleydownin Bermondsey
is one such. Milton wrote about landscape as “lantskip”; and at the beginning of the seventeenth century Edward Norgate described it as “an Art soe new in England, and soe lately come a shore.” Yet this new imported form took so great a hold on the English imagination that it has ever since shared pre-eminence with portraiture as the great art of the nation. In a very English study of ruins Christopher Woodward has suggested that the “picturesque way of seeing is arguably England’s greatest contribution to European visual culture,”
⁴
which has dominated metaphors of sight in areas as diverse as Versailles and Central Park. Yet the “picturesque remains an inseparable element of English taste,”
⁵
dependent upon individual memory and association rather than a theoretical aesthetic or codified practice.