Albion (31 page)

The abiding tendency towards eclectic and heterogeneous ostentation is discussed by Nikolaus Pevsner in his
The Englishness of English Art
, where he notes that the mixed effect applied also to the mingling of past and present; he infers that in the sixteenth century “funeral monuments were self-consciously made to look medieval,”
¹³
and that eighteenth-century gentlemen’s clubs were designed to resemble Renaissance palaces. He characterises it as “this English quality, the quality that has made England the land of Follies.” He relates it to the reticence or detachment of the English artist, so that the “mixed” mode comes naturally to those who cannot take seriously, or consider very long, one feeling or one style or one theory. He notes also that “England was the first country to break the unity of interior and exterior and wrap buildings up in clothes not made for them but for buildings of other ages and purposes.”
¹⁴

In nineteenth-century architecture, too, the “mungrell” tendency is everywhere apparent in edifices which took traditional eclecticism and pastiche to even greater levels. There were four standard styles available— Greek, Italian, Tudor and Gothic—and they could be mixed in any proportion to guarantee the effects which we now call “Victorian.” But there was also the “Flemish Renaissance” style, and the “Queen Anne” style; the New Scotland Yard building combined the modes of the Dutch and French Renaissance, while the Natural History Museum in South Kensington took Romanesque architecture as its model. The Brighton Pavilion was based upon “Hindoo” originals. We may add that breaking “the unity” has always been an English obsession. Alexander Pope thus describes, in English verse

How Tragedy and Comedy embrace; How Farce and Epic get a jumbled race

These just representations of general nature begin with the beginning of life itself. In the sixteenth chapter of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, just after Tristram’s mother has suffered a phantom pregnancy, “my mother declared, these two stages were so truly tragicomical, that she did nothing but laugh and cry in a breath.”
Tristram Shandy
itself is a “medley” or “gallimaufry” taken to its widest and wildest extreme; it is a sterling example of that rambling, wayward, inconsistent and inconclusive native temper which Charles Dickens described as “streaky well-cured bacon.”

The novels of Dickens himself have been alternately praised or blamed for their reliance upon the concatenation of farce and tragedy, pathos and romance. Dickens was much influenced by the conventions of nineteenth-century theatre, and in one speech declared that “every writer of fiction, though he may not adopt the dramatic form, writes in effect for the stage.” The “stage” of his period was characterised by extravagant plots and exaggerated performances, where tragedy and melodrama jostled each other for attention; he had as a child read the great works of eighteenth-century fiction, with their strange mixture of formality and farce, elegance and violence. The “tragicall comedie” of urban life was compounded by his personal experience; he suffered violent changes in his own childhood, particularly when he was set to work in an old blacking factory. Hence the scrap of dialogue in
Nicholas Nickleby
:

“There were hyacinths there this last spring, blossoming in—but you’ll laugh at that, of course.”

“At what?”

“At their blossoming in old blacking bottles.”

As a young man he wrote a parody of Othello with an Irish hero, O’Thello, and he knew already that he possessed a gift for subverting “high” drama; in his early journalism he could mimic “all the voices” from the judge and the beadle to the thief and the vagabond. While writing the comic and picaresque narrative of
The Pickwick Papers
he began the solemn and pathetic story of the orphan introduced to London servitude in
Oliver Twist.
But then
The
Pickwick Papers
contains its own sorrowful mysteries, such as the powerful scenes set in Fleet Prison, and
Oliver Twist
is filled with a wild and hysterical humour. Once more we witness the workings of the native genius, in what Dickens described as “the tragic and the comic scenes . . . sudden shiftings of the scene, and rapid changes of time and place.” All of his subsequent works are characterised by the violent transition of moods and themes, so that even in the description of wretchedness and despair he will find a detail which is inimitably comic.

There is another element here which is less easy of definition. Many contemporaries noticed a certain “hardness” in Dickens’s temperament and demeanour, and it may be that the heterogeneity of his style came from an unwillingness or incapacity to express wholly genuine feeling; every sentiment must be extravagant, and every emotion contrived. The mixed style, after all, was theatrical in origin. Yet it may also be aligned to a national character which, in previous centuries, was known for its violence and insensitivity to suffering.

It is difficult to express that which is amorphous. Englishness is the principle of appropriation. It relies upon constant immigration, of people or ideas or styles, in order to survive. This “mungrell” condition was perhaps best expressed by Daniel Defoe, of all writers the most various and adaptable. In his poem “The True Born Englishman” the heterogeneity of the English imagination is lent its proper context:

From this Amphibious Ill Born mob began That vain ill-natured thing, an Englishman . . . By which with easie search you may distinguish Your Roman-Saxon-Danish-Norman English.

Antiquarianism and English History

“Britannia”: frontispiece illustration to William Camden’s
Britannia,
1600

CHAPTER 30

Among the Ruins

In his twenty-ninth year
John Milton wrote in a letter that “my genius is such that no delay, no rest, no care or thought almost of anything, holds me aside until I reach the end I am making for, and round off, as it were, some great period of my studies.” In Bread Street, London, he studied as if for life.

Milton is in all respects a profoundly English writer, and became an iconic representative of England for poets as diverse as Blake and Wordsworth. His first great ambition was to compose an epic upon the “Matter of Britain”; in 1639, two years after composing the letter upon his genius, he wrote a poem in which he entreats his pastoral pipe, if “
patriis
mutata camoenis
” (if transformed by native songs), to play a British melody. In another poem of the same period, “Mansus,” he speculates upon the commemoration of English kings in his own native verse. He was aware of his inheritance. The mystical vision surrounding
Paradise Lost
and
Paradise Regained
is conceived within the vast apparatus of the miracle plays; as one critic has put it,
Paradise Lost
is “the last of the medieval attempts to write the history of Everyman, to survey the whole course of events from the Creation to man’s final ascent into Heaven, and to relate this course to the universal plan of Divine Providence.”
¹

Paradise Lost was itself immensely influential. The resourceful and melodic verse of that poem revived, for all practical purposes, the role of blank verse in English poetry. Wordsworth’s
Prelude
, for example, could not have been written without Milton’s example. He became “
the
English author who could be presented as a classic to a burgeoning middle-class readership.”
²
Handel set his poetry to music, and scenes from that poetry were depicted by Blake, Fuseli and a host of other artists aspiring to the sublime. In the year of Milton’s death John Dryden composed an opera of
Paradise Lost
entitled
The
State of Innocence
, thus inaugurating two centuries of Miltonic imitation.

Even as Milton still wrote, his was known as an “antiquated” style. This could be a term of celebration—“ancient liberty recover’d to the Heroic Poem,” as a 1688 edition of
Paradise Lost
asserted—or a term of mild opprobrium. One early eighteenth-century history claimed that “Mr. Milton chose to write (if the Expression may be allow’d) a hundred Years backward.” In the 1730s it was suggested by William Warburton that Milton’s archaic style was “best suited to his ‘English History’; his air of the antique giving a good grace to it.” Here Warburton touches upon a presiding element of Milton’s genius and, by natural extension, of the English imagination itself; it lies in the nature, and nurture, of antiquarianism.

Goethe mocked the English obsession with the ruined fabric of the past. In his
Faust
Mephistopheles asks:

Are Britons here? They go abroad, feel calls To trace old battle-fields and crumbling walls . . .

In the fifth act of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, a soldier remarks that:

from our troupes I straid, To gaze vpon a ruinous Monasterie, And as I earnestly did fixe mine eye, Vpon the wasted building suddainely . . .

And in Webster’s
The Duchess of Malfi
Antonio claims that

I do love these ancient ruines: We do never tread upon them, but we sette Our foot upon some reverend history

The prospect of ruined walls seems to provoke some inward delight and to release some natural fervour. We are greedy for times past. Consider Byron drinking wine out of a monk’s skull in the ruined quarters of his ancestral dwelling, Newstead Abbey, where “Thy yawning arch betokens slow decay.” Shelley composed
Prometheus Unbound
among the ruins of the Baths of Caracalla and among scenes of “sublime and lovely desolation.” Edward Gibbon conceived his
Decline and Fall
within the broken Capitol. Fatalism and melancholy are here mingled in characteristic fashion, but some pleasure may also be derived from the prospect of destruction and extinction; it is part of the curious English love affair with death itself, as if only that quietus can effectively destroy feeling. When this is conflated with an admiration for all things antique, then a rich mixture indeed is being concocted.

It may help to elucidate the mysteries of the native passion for artificial ruins, which was known throughout Europe to be a particularly English obsession. Picturesque ruins, constructed out of brick or painted on canvas, were first recommended in Batty Langley’s
New Principles of Gardening
published in 1728; the enthusiasm spread so rapidly that forty years later there were books concerned with the principles of their composition. “In wild and romantic scenes,” Thomas Whateley wrote, “may be introduced a ruined stone bridge, of which some arches may still be left standing.” Lord Kames in
Elements of Criticism
(1762) remarked that these melancholy objects manifested “the triumph of time over strength,” which might be described as a characteristically Anglo-Saxon sentiment. Kames also suggested that their effect was picturesque since “each of the emotions is most sensibly felt by being contrasted with the other”; this in turn might be considered a sufficiently native expression of that familiar appetite for heterogeneity and variety.

Classical ruins were agreed to be delightful, especially if adorned with ivy and judiciously arranged cracks, but it was believed that ancient British monuments were more suitable in an English landscape as “an object to be seen at a distance, rude and large, and in character agreeable to a wide view.” There is a curious atavism at work here, manifested also in the desire to re-create thirteenth-century castles in the grounds of eighteenth-century stately homes. “Mr. Lyttleton,” the poet and landscape gardener William Shenstone wrote, “has near finish’d one side of his castle. It consists of one entire Tow’r, and three stumps of Tow’rs, with a ruin’d Wall betwixt them.” Shenstone himself assisted Bishop Percy in his collection of ancient British poetry, which demonstrates, perhaps, the ubiquity of these antiquarian restorations. Horace Walpole said of Lyttleton’s edifice that “it has the true rust of the Baron’s wars” but, since its window tracings were taken from a minor thirteenth-century abbey at Halesowen, the nostalgia felt for the past was not unmixed with a certain delight in vandalism.

The Anglo-Saxon word “aergod” means literally “as good as the beginning,” and thus the most excellent or the very best. It is the antiquarian temper in miniature. The Anglo-Saxons themselves cultivated antiquarianism in a refined and learned spirit, and indeed the past of the Anglo-Saxon imagination was much more elaborate and more intense than any current model. To them, history was of pressing social and religious significance, and began at the moment of Creation. It was deeper and darker than our own misty sense of origin. King Alfred engaged enthusiastically in historical research, and his imagination ranged like an eagle over the kingdoms of the past. Bede loved to write of “earthworks and walls, of ruined churches.”
³
The yearning for ruins is of long duration.

The English landscape itself seems to harbour ruins as if in an embrace, but their cultivation may also be an aspect of English melancholy. In the Anglo-Saxon poem “The Wanderer,” there is an invocation of the ruined walls which are “standing beaten by the wind and covered with rime. . . . He then who in a spirit of meditation has pondered over this ruin and who with an understanding heart probes the mystery of our life down to its depths. . . . How that time passed away, grown shadowy under the canopy of night as though it had never been!” Another Anglo-Saxon poem is an elegy upon the same theme, and has been entitled “The Ruin”; it is the harbinger of a flood of English writing devoted to the power of old stone.

I
n
the early Middle Ages,
too, there was a consciousness of what one literary historian has described as “the fierce glory of the past”;
⁴
it is evident in the romances as well as in the histories, in verse as well as prose chronicle. That past was seen as better and brighter than the present, furnishing examples of liberty and heroism all too manifestly absent from a contemporary England. The Arthurian romances, which many of the English imbibed as children, were a token of this lost inheritance. Yet here, too, there is an arresting connection. Is it not possible that this longing for the past was in part a longing for childhood itself? From this latent infantilism, too, may spring all the exuberance and violence of the early English character.

The conventions of antiquarianism were continued in verse history, monastic compilations, chronicles such as the
Gesta Regum Anglorum
and
Historia Novella
, as well as in the millions of charters prepared by scribes throughout the medieval period. Yet it was really only in the sixteenth century that antiquarianism became a recognised or at least recognisable pursuit, which as a result obtained institutional status. In 1586 the Society of Antiquarians was formed, with several distinguished members meeting regularly to read papers on various aspects of England’s history. Tudor scholars were obsessed with genealogy and historiography, partly as a way of confirming contemporary dynastic politics within the myths and legends of the country and partly as a way of reclaiming the past in imminent danger of destruction at the hands of the religious reformers.

John Leland, who flourished in the first half of the sixteenth century, was the first Englishman to style himself an “Antiquarian” and thus can lay claim to being the begetter of what became a significant national pursuit. He was educated at St. Paul’s School and at Cambridge, after which he studied for several years in Paris; the Erasmian humanism which he imbibed in his earlier years was, therefore, amplified by his studies in the texts of the ancients. But his antiquarianism itself was of specifically native growth. He became a royal librarian and, in 1533, was commissioned by Henry VIII “to peruse and diligently to serche at the libraries of monasteries and collegies of this yowre noble reaulme, to the intente that the monuments of auncient writers as welle of other nations, as of this your owne province mighte be brought owte of deadely darkenes to lyvely lighte.” So he embarked upon a long journey across the realm, searching for ancient works which “lay secretely yn corners” of old libraries and scriptoria. It is quite clear, from his notes and written records, that his passion for antique learning was matched only by his fascinated preoccupation both with the landscape of England and with the myths that sprang from it. In an account of the library of Glastonbury Abbey, Leland remarks that he “paid my respects to the deity of the place.” In his
Itinerary
Leland divined the nature of English place, and bequeathed to the nation a tradition of sacred topography which has never wholly been lost; it is perhaps appropriate that, on his gravestone, his name is spelt Leyland in anticipation of the “leylines” later traced across the English soil. In the words of one commentator, he became “the forerunner of every travel writer on the subject of England from Defoe and Cobbett to H. V. Morton, Arthur Mee and Pevsner.”
⁵

But the understanding of place was only one aspect of Leland’s endeavours. As he makes plain in his published work
The Laboriouse Journey and
Serche for Englandes Antiquitees
, he was intent upon reclaiming and recovering the relics of the history of this island, and was in the process able “to herald the establishment of a new kind of scholarship.”
⁶
He was passionately concerned with “all the remains of most sacred antiquity,” while “the mere sight of the most ancient books took over my mind with an awe or stupor of some kind.” Among those books were the histories and chronicles compiled by the great scholars of the past. The antiquarian met his peers and colleagues in the course of his grand pursuit, and became aware of the longevity of historical enquiry in England. It was his good fortune to enter these libraries just two or three years before their destruction and dispersal at the time of the Reformation. This was a period when monasteries and convents were plundered by the agents of Thomas Cromwell, and when abbeys and other old foundations were destroyed for reasons of avarice and in order to signal the power of Henry VIII over the religious life of the nation. It was an act of wholesale devastation.

That is why ruins have always had an especial significance in England, where they are a visible token of an ancient civilisation extirpated in the early sixteenth century. The landscape of England was considered to be “haunted with strange intimations from shadowy vanished worlds,” while ruined abbeys and monasteries, abandoned chapels and hermitages, were the shipwrecks of an old storm. “Amidst the gloom arose the ruins of an abbey,” William Gilpin wrote, “. . . a profusion of rich Gothic workmanship.” This was another meaning of “Gothic” itself, as a synonym for a lost Catholic past. It might have sinister implications, since in “Gothic” novels of the eighteenth century dark nuns and murderous monks pass by night, but the term was often touched with veneration and nostalgia. There has always been an organic need among the English to connect the present and the past, and the forced disassociation from a thousand years of Catholic history provoked in some a profound unease.