Albion (52 page)

The garden is also an exercise in utility and practicality; the earliest gardening books were “essentially practical”
³²
and gardening itself was “purposeful”
³³
in the cultivation of herbs and vegetables. We may also introduce the English philosophical tradition here, in the words of William Lawson’s
A
New Orchard and Garden
published in 1618. “We must count that art the surest, that stands upon experimental rules gathered by the rule of reason,” under the guidance of “mere and sole experience.” The elements of English diffidence or embarrassment may also be deemed to be present, since gardening may encourage the displacement of passion and even of sexuality itself. In her study of gardening Jane Brown has commented upon the fact that gardens are “constantly demanding sweated exertions and a tender touch” while at the same time “constantly offering sensual arousal.”
³⁴
The innocence of children is therefore often conceived in the setting of an English garden, most notably in the animals and birds of Beatrix Potter. With their tales for children A. A. Milne, James Barrie, Kenneth Grahame and Lewis Carroll also linger in English gardens as if they had escaped into a refuge or a sanctuary.

Travel has also been seen, in this study, as a form of escape. The English gardener may also be a traveller, and has ranged from Japan to Central America, from China to Australia, from Borneo to South Africa, in pursuit of new or rare species. The Michaelmas daisy comes from Virginia, the convolvulus from Barbary, the tulip from Turkey. The fact that they have now been thoroughly acclimatised, and treated as native plants, is farther testimony to the assimilative power of the English genius. It may be that the language of flowers takes as its model the English language itself. At Fulham Palace, for example, there are “more than a thousand tender exotics”
³⁵
which like the importations into the language flourish in a mild and accommodating climate. Jane Brown’s insight into botanical practice uncannily echoes most other commentaries upon the English imagination itself. “All plants and ideas which came home,” she writes, “became instantly English, transmogrified as if they had no native roots at all: conversely
le jardin anglais
was exported and mysteriously became the rage.”
³⁶
No better or more significant example could be found for the essential unity of English cultural practice. In the gardens of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries “we modified the new French style . . . in accordance with our traditional custom we adapted them to our insular taste.”
³⁷
The emphasis rests upon a pattern of immigration and adoption, succeeded by ever renewed diversity. The Elizabethan chronicler William Harrison remarked that “strange herbs, plants and annual fruits are daily brought unto us from all parts of the world.” A more recent commentator, Miles Hadfield, has remarked in his
Gardening in Britain
that “our island was rapidly and readily absorbing theory and practice, as well as material, in the form of plants, from overseas. Thus it came about that our gardens, which we like to think of as singularly British, are in fact the most cosmopolitan in the Old World.”
³⁸
The appetite for variety, and diversity, is thus very strong. One history of English gardens has in fact claimed that “there is no part of the earth’s surface as small in area as these islands where such a diversity of plants can be grown”
³⁹
—smallness, heterogeneity and temperate accommodation have also been the grace notes of the present study.

It is therefore natural that the literature of gardens, and the gardens of literature, should be harmoniously united. Some of the best English prose has been preserved in gardening books, where communion with the spirit of place releases a note of native lyricism. William Kent in turn declared that “he caught his taste in gardening from reading the picturesque descriptions of Spenser”; yet Spenser derived his plant names from
The New Herbal or
History of Plants
, translated by Henry Lyte in 1578. The pre-eminence of translation, as an aspect of the English imagination, has already been outlined; it need only be noted that the first gardening book in English,
A Most
Briefe and pleasant treatyse teachynge how to dress, sowe and set a Garden . . . by
Thomas Hyll, Londyner
(1563), was a translation and compilation of classical or continental European sources.

The legend of the twelfth-century “Rosamond’s Bower,” described by Addison as a sacred spot where “Amaranths and Eglantines with intermingling sweets have wove the particolour’d gay Alcove,” evokes the enchantment which the English garden has cast upon poetry and prose. “Of Gardens” is one of Francis Bacon’s longest essays, with its delighted litany of plants and perfumes in “gardens for all the months in the year.” He extols the delights of the English lawn, too, since “nothing is more pleasant to the eye than green grass kept finely shorn.” In this setting Pepys remarked that “the green of our bowling alleys is better than any they have.” This native pride, asserted here against the French and the Italians, is complemented by an instruction in
The Solitary Gardener
that “A Bowling Green should be incompassed with Great Trees” to ensure privacy and seclusion. The sports and pastimes of the English—among them bowling itself as well as cricket and snooker—take place upon “greens,” where an intricate game is played in a confined space.

It is the
hortus inclusus
of Chaucer’s poetry—“A gardyn saw I ful of blosmy bowes”—and in
The Legend of Good Women
he extols the virtues of the simple daisy “of alle floures flour.” Violets scent the poetry of Shakespeare, and it has been calculated that the dramatist dilates upon the fairness of roses in some sixty separate passages. It has been asked of the Elizabethan poets, “in what foreign literature can one gather such handfuls of flowers?”
⁴⁰
—through the cowslips of A Midsummer Night’s Dream to the “daffadowndillies” of Spenser. There were so many garden publications in the seventeenth century that one might conclude that England itself was one large garden. Abraham Cowley’s “The Garden” celebrates the “blessed shades” and “gentle cool retreat” of a secluded place, and much of Marvell’s poetry is of course set among the prospect of flowers and gardens:

Annihilating all that’s made To a green Thought in a green Shade

Thus the English imagination is forever green.

Looking Backwards

Title page of William Byrd’s “Psalms, Sonnets, and Songs of Sadness and Piety,” 1588

CHAPTER 51

Forging a Language

The art of forgery
did not fully flower and prosper until the eighteenth century. It has been associated, in particular, with the emergence of the relatively new phenomenon of professional authorship as well as with the contextual arrangements of trade publishing and commercial marketing. But the single most important alignment has gone largely unremarked. The most significant connection is to be found between forgery and the burgeoning movement known as “romanticism.” The forged document and the “romantic” personality are manifestations of the same change in taste. We might advert here to Boswell’s
Life of Samuel Johnson
, in which the first “romantic” hero emerges out of faked conversations and dramatically staged encounters.

But there are more suggestive parallels. It is not inappropriate that the two greatest literary forgers of the eighteenth century, James Macpherson or “Ossian” and Thomas Chatterton or “Rowley,” have been said to herald or inspire the new romantic movement in letters; with their transcription of a respectively Celtic and medieval past, they created that enchanted landscape which became a dominant influence upon the romantic poets.

James
Macpherson was
a Scottish poet and teacher who in 1758, at the age of twenty-two, published a long poem entitled
The Highlander
in part as a response to the intense interest in Celtic literature and mythology. That burgeoning movement of taste has been denominated “the Celtic Revival” and can be taken to include Thomas Gray’s ode upon the “Bard,” Mason’s
Caractacus
and Evans’s
Specimens of the Poetry of the Ancient Welsh Bards
. It has been estimated that in the forty years from 1760 one volume was published each year upon Celtic myth. It is also the context in which James Macpherson perpetrated his forgeries. He was a Jacobite with a profound instinct, and love, for his native culture. It took only the enthusiasm of another literary nationalist, John Home, to unleash his powers of historical imagination and creative reinvention. His first faked production was “The Death of Oscar,” which he claimed to be a translation from the manuscript of a Gaelic original in his possession; it was immediately recognised as a work of primitive genius. A year later Macpherson was able to publish
Fragments of Ancient Poetry
, the preponderance of which were also his own inventions. The appetite for Celtic folklore and verse already existed; it was only natural that it should be fulfilled. Two years later, therefore, Macpherson brought to light six books of
Fingal, An Ancient Epic Poem
composed by a bard named “Ossian” in the more remote stretches of Scottish history. A specimen of Ossian reads, “Our youth is like the dream of the hunter on the hill of the heath. . . . Her steps were the music of songs. He was the stolen sigh of her soul. . . . The horn of Fingal was heard; the sons of woody Albion returned.” Such plangent writing exerted an immediate and powerful effect, and Ossian was extensively quoted by Goethe in
The Sorrows of Young Werther
. A cult sprang up closer to home, too, and various eminent literary tourists explored Ossian’s territory. Thomas Pennant discovered various Ossianic landmarks in the Scottish landscape, and the guide for Sir Joseph Banks on the island of Staffa pointed out “the cave of
Fiuhn
” or “
Fiuhn
Mac Coul
, whom the translator of Ossian’s works has called
Fingal
.” Oyster shells were dated with reference to the Ossianic fragments. So the forged poetry of Macpherson engendered caves and rocks and crustacea. Pennant wrote also of the local songs, which “vocal traditions state are the foundation of the works of
Ossian
.” A skilful faker had created a living communal tradition. It is testimony to the credulity of scholars and general readers alike, but it is also tribute to the creative power of Macpherson’s imagination. His forged words forged— in another sense—a new reality.

In his “Essay, Supplementary to the Preface” of
Lyrical Ballads
Wordsworth records that “Having had the good fortune to be born and reared in a mountainous country, from my very childhood I have felt the falsehood that pervades the volumes imposed upon the world under the name of Ossian. From what I saw with my own eyes, I knew that the imagery was spurious” and from the lips of a “Phantom . . . begotten by the snug embrace of an impudent Highlander upon a cloud of tradition.” At some point after his childhood, however, Wordsworth seems to have changed his opinion. The first lines of his poem entitled “Glen-Almain; Or, The Narrow Glen” reflect that:

In this still place, remote from men, Sleeps Ossian, in the NARROW GLEN;

The poem ends thus:

And, therefore, was it rightly said That Ossian, last of all his race! Lies buried in the lonely place.

There is some ambiguity within the poem itself whether “Fancy” creates the presence of death, but Wordsworth’s overall ambivalence or confusion about Ossian reflects the general romantic sensibility. James Macpherson created a wild and sublime landscape of vision, from which emerged an ancient bard instilled with all the primitive simplicity of passion; here were romantic archetypes indeed. But if they were all faked or forged, what then? Could the products of the romantic sensibility themselves be fraudulent? Or, to put it in another manner, that which seems most genuine may be the most artificial.

In the same decade as James Macpherson was forging “fragments of ancient poetry . . . translated from the Gaelic or Erse Language,” Thomas Gray was in fact compiling his own authentic translations from Norse and Welsh poetry to add to his
Poems
of 1768; under these circumstances it is hardly surprising that Gray enthusiastically accepted the work of Ossian as that of a true original. Thus he joined William Blake and Johann Wolfgang Goethe in celebration of a notorious hoax which at the time satisfied the taste for the visionary sublime. The other most influential lyric poet of the period, William Collins, composed an “Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands” ten years before Ossian himself furnished precisely those superstitions to an admiring public. As Samuel Johnson wrote of Collins, “the grandeur of wildness, and the novelty of extravagance, were always desired by him”; but of course they were also desired by the two generations of romantic poets who professed their own debt to Gray and to Collins, to “Ossian” and to Chatterton’s Rowley. If forgery or fakery seems endemic to the whole enterprise, we will find it also in Collins, whose “Persian Eclogue” is composed in the “pretense that he was translating from the Persian.”
¹
His “Song from Cymbelyne” has also been described by his editor as a “skillful pastiche.”
²
In the same context Horace Walpole, the quondam friend and admirer of Thomas Gray, published his novel The Castle of Otranto as a relic of the sixteenth century some four years before the youthful Chatterton tentatively began his own forgeries.

It ought to be recalled that in the early years of the eighteenth century forgery could be celebrated as a form of masquerade or carnival, part of the endless shifting game of identities. It was nothing against the work of Defoe or Swift that they faked the character of the “authors” of
Robinson Crusoe
or
Gulliver’s Travels
; in that ostensibly more stable and assured world, the notion of identity was neither precarious nor ambiguous. Daniel Defoe can plausibly and happily become “Robinson Crusoe” in 1714 and “Moll Flanders” in 1722; in the last decades of the century the subterfuge involved in such impersonations would become a matter for camouflage or indignant denial.

The latter half of the eighteenth century, however, the seed-bed from which the romantic movement emerged into the full light of the English imagination, has been well described as “An Age of Forgery.”
³
The crime of forgery itself reached its apogee in the period 1750–80 but of more significance, in a literary context, was the passing of a Copyright Act in 1709 which confirmed the individual ownership of words as “intellectual property.” Since the notion of individual ownership led in turn to the development of the literary personality and to the affirmation of the romantic selfhood, this act of legislation had aesthetic as well as economic consequences. It is often supposed that part of the “irritability” of the romantic genius sprang from its immersion in the literary market-place, and its prostitution in commercial trading, but this disquiet can be traced back to the recognition of individual “property” itself. It has been suggested by Paul Baines, an astute historian of forgery, that the new monetarism of the eighteenth century “threatened basic ideas of value, and the security of human exchanges and interactions.”
⁴
Did not this new legislative sense of the individual, owning certain words and sets of words as private property, in turn threaten the old and more established ideas of selfhood as residing in a commonality of expression and perception? If the romantic self was first deemed to be a legal and financial unit, its origin might provoke deep unease and ambiguity in those who professed it. We will notice this in subsequent pages. If one anonymous discourse of the period can refer to “that chimerical ill-founded Medium, Paper Money,” then perhaps the individuality written upon paper might also possess a “fluctuating, abstract and possibly evanescent value.”
⁵
As one historian has put it, “Once property was seen to have a symbolic value, expressed in coin or credit, the foundations of personality themselves appeared imaginary or at best consensual: the individual could exist, even in his own sight, only at the fluctuating value imposed upon him by his fellows.”
⁶
It is interesting to observe in this light the assertion of personality in Wordsworth’s poetry, which emerges only to be assailed by doubt and anxiety as to its true nature. If there did indeed run “the need for a perfect, unassailable touchstone of human identity against which all falsifications could be measured,”
⁷
the romantic “I” offered only a tentative solution. If words as well as property have only “a symbolic value” expressed in the “coin or credit” which they obtain for their owner, then they too possess only a “fluctuating value” dependent upon the manner in which they are recognised or received as the true coin of feeling or imagination.

Yet of course the rise of the “individual author” long predates the work of Wordsworth and his contemporaries. Both Langland and Chaucer deliberately introduce themselves into their own narratives. The notion of individual authorship at this later time, however, extended beyond textual matters. It was also implicated in the relatively original notion of originality exemplified by Edward Young’s
Conjectures on Original Composition
(1759), published two years after Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the
Sublime and the Beautiful
, to which it remains a natural and faithful companion. As one study of poetics has put it, the concern for sublimity of expression, that artistry beyond the familiar reach of art, “played no small part in the drift towards subjectivism . . . and ultimately in the rise of romanticism in poetry.”
⁸
The obscure and the dark, the aweful and the mysterious, became legitimised by Burke’s enquiry in ways which he would have neither anticipated nor approved. They had a particular bearing, for example, upon Young’s affirmation of “original” composition. “Our spirits rouze at an
Original
; that is a perfect stranger, and all throng to learn what news from a foreign land. . . . All eminence, and distinction, lies out of the beaten road.” In a similar spirit he enjoins the writer, “Thyself so reverence as to prefer the native growth of thy own mind to the richest import from abroad.” Young’s own interest is clearly aligned with the material and financial imperatives of his culture, with the encomium upon the original writer whose words “will stand distinguished; his the sole Property of them; which Property alone can confer the noble title of an Author.” But his sentiments are no less clearly related to the burgeoning romantic movement in which spontaneity and originality are to be preferred over laboured imitation. The nature and nurture of Thomas Chatterton may be invoked here.

Some three years before Wordsworth composed his encomium upon Ossian he completed a poem, “Resolution and Independence,” which paid tribute to that paradigm of the romantic movement:

I thought of Chatterton, the marvellous Boy, The sleepless Soul that perish’d in his pride

Thomas Chatterton was the most celebrated faker of the eighteenth century, and he shares with James Macpherson the palm also of being the most successful. Chatterton was born, in Bristol, in the winter of 1752; his father, an antiquarian and a collector of old trifles, died before his son was born. That death had a crucial effect upon Chatterton, since all his life he was searching for his patrimony. It would be easy to say that he had inherited his father’s antiquarian passion, or that he identified antiquarianism with the invisible presence of his father. More significantly, however, he considered the past itself to be his true father. He learnt to read from sundry old folios scattered in his little house in Pyle Street, opposite the church of St. Mary Redcliffe; his passion for antiquity was such that, even before he left his charity school, he had started to compose “medieval” poetry. He may have been partly inspired by Percy’s
Reliques of Ancient English Poetry
, published when Chatterton had reached the age of thirteen; it is ironic, too, that upon closer examination certain of Percy’s own ballads were shown to be less than the genuine article. But the essential truth is that Chatterton was inspired and animated by the past; he devoured texts like a library cormorant and, when not reading or writing, devised genealogies and created heraldic emblems. He invented a fifteenth-century monk, Thomas Rowley, who had resided in St. Mary Redcliffe and had written much poetry duly transcribed by the young Chatterton. On being challenged about the provenance of “Rowley’s” poems, Chatterton confessed that he had found them in an old chest within the muniment room of the church; he even managed to produce some stained antique documents to prove his assertions. His case was so plausible that, well into the nineteenth century, there were many who believed that no boy could have fashioned such masterpieces of an early date. But create them he did; the language of the past spoke through him, as it were, and his was a genius of assimilation and adaptation.