Albion (34 page)

In the English Tradition

The Pillars of Hercules. Title page of Francis Bacon’s
Instauratio Magna
, 1620

CHAPTER 33

The Song of the Sea

The island is filled
with the sounds of the sea. In Anglo-Saxon poetry, the metaphor of the ship was used as a token of movement and of composition itself, the narrative becoming a vessel which had to be driven across the face of the deep. The ship also became the frail form of the human being tossed on the ocean of life, with faith and hope and charity as its three anchors. King Alfred continually resorted to nautical imagery, and his own experience of the sea in peace and in war informs his writing; he declares, for example, that “a good steersman, by the raging of the sea, is aware of a great wind ere it come. He bids furl the sail and sometimes lower the mast, and let go the cables, and by making fast before the foul wind he takes measures against the storm.”
¹
He uses many compound variants for the sea—
egorstream, bronmere, laguflod, fifelstream, merestream
—as if its reality could only be understood as shifting and multitudinous. It rises, too, in other Anglo-Saxon prose: in Byrhtferth’s invocation of “the salt sea-strand,” for example, and in Werferth’s description of “the person who approaches land in a frail ship.”
²
In The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle we read of “the tossing waves, the gannet’s bath, the tumult of waters, the homeland of the whale,”
³
this fervent litany calling up the spirit of the deep. The poetry of the sea is deeply implicated in the Anglo-Saxon imagination with its
“sealte saestreamas ond
swanrade,”
the salt sea-currents which are the swans’ path, running into all subsequent English verse. The sea is also
“cald
waeter”
with lines which vary “the emphasis on the ‘depths’ to ‘space’ to ‘terror’ ”
⁴
suggesting the English fear of the ocean. In Anglo-Saxon poetry it is as if the island of Britain were truly the home or harbour. This in turn has informed the pastoral dream of England as a calm and tranquil haven. The exile or wanderer, in contrast, is customarily depicted as surrounded by “the sea booming—the ice-cold wave.”
⁵

The depths of the sea are used as the image of privation and isolation, even of hell itself, “that bottomless swell beneath the misty gloom.”
⁶
The answer to one Anglo-Saxon riddle, invoking the “ocean bed” and “the vast depths of the sea,” is presumed to be “submarine earthquake.”
⁷
In the fourteenth century Dame Julian of Norwich is taken in vision “downe into the see-ground, and there I saw hill and dalis grene, semand as it were mosse begrowne, with wrekke and gravel.” The same vision was also vouchsafed to William Blake, who depicted Newton on the floor of the sea, sitting upon a moss-stained rock with his compasses spread out before him. We can put with it Blake’s lament:

The Corse of Albion lay on the Rock the sea of Time & Space Beat round the Rock in mighty waves & as a Polypus That vegetates beneath the Sea . . .

So an image created in the eighth or ninth century casts a shadow for many hundreds of years. The sea is both margin and mystery. The historian Gildas describes how the Britons were driven to the sea’s edge by their oppressors, until the sea drove them back again. In medieval fable there are many departures by sea, with erstwhile companions left weeping by the shore. Layamon, in his epic poem
Brut
, changes his French source in order to concentrate upon storm and shipwreck; the alliterative
Morte Arthure
resonates with all the qualities of the sea, the ancient measure of the verse summoning up some instinctive and native response to the delights and perils of the encroaching waters. We might even be inclined to believe that the Saxons rode over “the sea’s bath” and “the whale’s road” to the chanting of alliterative song, its measures mingling with the beat of the waves.

English writers, employing continental models, continually enlarge their source material with national tales of ships and of the sea. Of John Gower, that most representative of medieval English poets, it has been written that “the idioms and technical terms of shipmen and the sea are amongst the most distinctive features of his language.”
⁸
It is a national preoccupation, evinced no less in painting and in music than in poetry.

The fashion for marine painting
had its origins in the eighteenth century, and the great master of the English sea was J. M. W. Turner. He was the painter of storms, effortlessly able to convey the huge movement of waters; he was the poet of rain-clouds and winds, tracing on canvas the gusts of turbulent light. Once he had himself lashed to a mast so that his own breath and the breath of the sea might be mingled and surely here, if anywhere, there is some native or atavistic spirit at work; it is as if this Cockney boy, who felt the romance of the ocean, were becoming once more the seafarer of the Anglo-Saxon lament. He painted the sea in all its manifestations and conditions, from the turbid magnificence of
The Fighting Téméraire
to the quiescence of the
Evening Star
. Of
Snow Storm
, where a steam-boat is seen in a vortex of mist and swirling water, Ruskin wrote that it is “one of the very grandest statements of sea-motion, mist, and light, that has ever been put on canvas, even by Turner.” In
Sta fa, Fingal’s Cave
all the yearning of Turner’s nature is to be found in the evanescent glow of the sun setting upon the face of the deep while all around great clouds of mist and darkness cast their shadows over the heaving waters. When human figures are introduced into his sea-scapes, fishermen or mariners, they are frail things; they are bowed before the immensity. Turner has often been compared or associated with the “romantic” poets, particularly in his understanding of natural sublimity, but in truth his instinct and inspiration lie much farther back in a physical or physiological response to the movement of great waters.

In The Enchafed Flood W. H. Auden, who had himself been so mightily stirred by the Anglo-Saxon imagination, remarked that the sea represents “that state of barbaric vagueness and disorder out of which civilisation has emerged.” In similar spirit, some trace memory of original Saxon migrations lies, perhaps, within the fascination and horror of Turner’s seas. For Auden the sea represented the true condition of humankind, the setting of all great choices and decisions, so that even in this twentieth-century poet there is the residue of some strange atavistic passion.

But if there is one contemporary who matches Turner in his preoccupation with the sea, it is Charles Dickens. Both artists of London lived by a huge tidal river, and became entranced by the waters. Many of Dickens’s novels have settings by the sea’s edge, and few of them are not haunted by its presence. There is the sea that Paul Dombey stared into, looking into the ancient fashion of the waves before his impending death; there is gentle Mr. Toots wandering by the shore where “The waves were hoarse with repetition of their mystery; the dust lies piled upon the shore; the sea-birds soar and hover; the winds and clouds go forth upon their trackless flight; the white arms beckon, in the moonlight, to the invisible country far away.” There is the sea upon which Martin Chuzzlewit, and little Emily, and Mr. Micawber, variously depart. There is the storm at sea in which Steerforth dies, where “high watery walls came rolling in, and, at their highest, tumbled into surf . . . a rending and upheaving of all nature.” There is the sea of David Copperfield’s memory with “the sun, away at sea, just breaking through the heavy mist, and showing us the ships, like their own shadows. . . . I have never beheld such sky, such water, such glorified ships sailing away into golden air.” It is the poetry of light and water, equivalent to what Kenneth Clark called the “chromatic fantasies” of Turner’s seascapes, and in the consonance between the writer and the painter we may glimpse some stirring of the English genius.

The sea is
a constant presence in nineteenth-century poetry, moving within Byron’s
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
:

Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean—roll!

and within Tennyson’s verse:

Break, break, break, On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!

It also flows within Matthew Arnold’s threnody of loss:

The sea is calm to-night. The tide is full, the moon lies fair

There the waves of the tide beat:

With tremulous cadence slow, and bring The eternal note of sadness in

The waters gather in Rossetti’s “sad blueness” and “the murmur of the earth’s large shell.” The deep peace of the sea is celebrated by Hardy, “And over a gate was the sun-glazed sea,” almost as if it were a rolling landscape, with its own hills and valleys reproducing the soft curves of the English countryside; it is a vision of rest, or perhaps of oblivion. The sea is, perhaps, the true landscape of the English imagination. In Hippolyte Taine’s capacious survey of English literature, there suddenly emerges a great paean to the sea “ever intractable and fierce.” Thus he suggests that “not in vain is a people insular and oceanic, especially with this sea and these coasts . . . its waves leap with strange gambollings, and their sides take an oily and livid tint . . . here and there on the limitless plain, a patch of sky is shrouded in a sudden shower.” The mystery and melancholy of England itself are exemplified in passages such as this.

In
the cadences
of the most nostalgic and sorrowful music, the sea can also be heard. “O past, O happy life” are the plangent words that accompany the epilogue of Delius’s
Sea Drift
in 1908. Two years later, Ralph Vaughan Williams’s
A Sea Symphony
was first heard. Both of them were based upon the poetry of Walt Whitman but they are filled with what can only be called “a recognisably English idiom,”
⁹
matched by Henry Newbolt’s Songs of the Sea and John Masefield’s Salt-Water Ballads of the same period. Two song cycles, Stanford’s Song of the Sea and Elgar’s Sea Pictures, suggest the constant awakening presence of surrounding waters. Vaughan Williams composed
Riders to the Sea
while Arnold Bax wrote
The Garden of Fand
, which is the sea, and
Tintagel,
“in which enormous breakers may be imagined crashing against the coast of Cornwall.” In Bax’s work the tinctures of myth subtly irradiate the composition, so that the mystery of the sea is deepened and strengthened. The opening bars of his Fourth Symphony “are said to represent a choppy sea at floodtide on a sunny day,”
¹⁰
and he died looking out over the Atlantic “burnished to beaten gold in the rays of the setting sun.”
¹¹
The principle of “melodic stability” and “harmonic changeability,”
¹²
so profound a duality in English music, might have been prompted by the sound and movement of the sea.

Vaughan Williams collected folk-songs about the sea, and their melodies inform his own music. Benjamin Britten wrote two celebrated operas concerning the sea,
Peter Grimes
and
Billy Budd
. In
Billy Budd
, based upon a story by Herman Melville, the swell of the sea is musically associated with the murmurs of mutiny on board ship.
Peter Grimes
, inspired by a poem of George Crabbe’s, is redolent of the sea in every note but especially in the orchestral interludes which link the separate acts. The score of
Peter Grimes
has been characterised as “the grinding of surf against shingle,” “the gulls” cry,” “the jangle of rigging against masts in the storm” and the deep sea-fog.
¹³
It is impossible not to hear, in this litany of effects, the echoes of the Anglo-Saxon poetry of the sea. There is a continuity.

CHAPTER 34

A Brief Excursion

The course
of
an adventurous sea-voyage represents one of the endur-ing myths of the English imagination. It is charted in the pages of
Utopia, Robinson Crusoe
and
Gulliver’s Travels;
the fact that all are fiction has not mitigated the effect. Islanders pride themselves on their ability to travel through inhospitable regions of the earth. When Abbot Brendan and his cohort of monks sailed across the cold and lonely ocean, “and all the while they had nothing to look at but the sea and the sky,”
¹
they are anticipating the plight of English seafarers everywhere; in particular they are the harbingers of
The Ancient Mariner
.

One of the earliest travel books in the English language was written between 754 and 768, and related the journey of Willibald to Jerusalem. In a sea-locked island such expeditions smack of the marvellous. That is why the Norwegian Ohthere and the Dane Wulfstan were taken to King Alfred’s court, so that they could inform him at first hand of their adventures in the White and Baltic Seas. There are beasts called reindeer in the land of the Lapps; in Estonia the dead are “refrigerated” for six months before the ceremonies of cremation. These may be deemed factual accounts, while Anglo-Saxon productions such as the
Letter of Alexander to Aristotle
and the
Wonders
of the East
are filled with centaurs and man-monsters, dragons and satyrs. Other accounts, such as the
Voyage
of St. Brendan himself, hover characteristically and ambiguously between “fact” and “fiction.” As in many other English narratives, the comparative status of reality and vision is fundamentally in doubt.

This will help to explain the popularity and success of Mandeville’s
Travels
; it was written in Anglo-Norman French but by 1400 it had been translated into a number of European languages. The “insular version” of the text was confined to England, however, from where its author was generally supposed to have come. He claimed to be “Sir John Mandeville” but this was an assumed or fictitious name. It is sometimes suggested that the
Travels
is the work of a Frenchman, but then why did he adopt the pose of a rusted old English knight who was born and bred in St. Albans? In its preface the anonymous compiler insists that he has translated the book out of Latin and French “into Englyssch, that every man of my nacioun may understonde it.” There was a great deal to “understonde.” Its principal focus is Jerusalem and the immediate neighbourhood of that sacred area. In that context travel books could become manuals of devotion, but that was not Mandeville’s intent. In true English fashion he borrowed and adapted sections from earlier and more authentic travels, most notably from William de Boldensele and Friar Odoric of Pordenone, before conflating them within his own homely style. His most daring innovation, however, lay in his suggestion that he himself had participated in the travels and voyages which he disclosed to a no doubt credulous public. He has “cerched manye full strange places.” He has travelled the land of the Amazons and entered the Imperial Palace at Constantinople; he has been a guest in the household of the Great Khan, and describes the mythological dominions of Prester John. He has seen diamonds that sweat in the presence of poison; he has seen gourds of fruit that, when opened, reveal the bodies of creatures like “a lytill lomb, withouten wolle.” He was given a thorn from the Crown of Thorns worn by Jesus and with thirteen other travellers had entered the Vale Enchanted, otherwise known as the Vale of Devils or the Vale Perilous, “but at our going out we were but nine.” This fictional valley later re-emerged as the Valley of the Shadow of Death in Bunyan’s
Pilgrim’s Progress
.

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.