Under Another Sky

by Charlotte Higgins

  Nowhere, I think, is this anxiety expressed more clearly, and harnessed more knowingly, than in the opening passages of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The novel begins with the narrator and his companions aboard a boat on the Thames. The river is a grand and, in its way, comforting sight – over the centuries, it has done ‘unceasing service’ for those who ply it. But then dusk falls. The landscape changes. As the light fails, so does the familiarity of the terrain, which quite suddenly appears brooding and unknowable. Now comes Marlow’s immortal line: ‘And this also has been one of the dark places of the earth.’ Marlow, recalls the nameless narrator, says he is thinking of the days of old, when the Romans came to Britain ‘nineteen hundred years ago – the other day …’ Imagine what it was like for a military commander posted here, he continues: ‘No Falernian wine here, no going ashore. Here and there a military camp lost in a wilderness, like a needle in a bundle of hay – cold, fog, tempests, disease, exile, and death, – death skulking in the air, in the water, in the bush. They must have been dying like flies here.’ Or imagine some young Roman citizen arriving to trade, he says. ‘Land in a swamp, march through the woods, and in some inland post feel the savagery, the utter savagery, had closed round him, – all that mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the jungles, in the hearts of wild men.’

  Marlow goes on to enumerate differences between the Roman and British empires: what saves the British project is ‘efficiency’; whereas the Roman, lacking a redeeming central idea, is simply ‘aggravated murder on a grand scale’, a phrase that Tacitus could almost have written. Conrad is using the Thames as an introductory foil to his main narrative to come, which concerns the savage, barbaric landscape of the contemporary river Congo – a landscape that will both cause, and form the backdrop to, Kurtz’s mental disintegration. But despite the superficial insistence on the difference between the two rivers, there is, as the novelist and critic Chinua Achebe put it, ‘a lurking hint of kinship’ – for if the Thames too had once been one of the dark places of the earth, with its ‘jungles’ and ‘wild men’, could it not become so again? Could it not, as Achebe wrote, fall ‘victim to an avenging recrudescence’?

  What Conrad recognised was the fatal fragility of human affairs. And all this, he seems to be saying, will fall away. Like Horsley, he saw that the Romans’ lesson to us is ‘the vanity of this world, and of all that is in it’. For Conrad was wise, and he knew that ‘nineteen hundred years ago’ was ‘the other day’.

  10

  Cumbria and the Lakes

  Obscure provinces, like Roman Britain, always rather appeal to me. Their obscurity is a challenge; you have to invent new methods for studying them.

  R. G. Collingwood, 1939

  One hot June evening, Matthew and I brought the camper van north from Ribchester, a beautiful little Lancashire town on the Ribble, with an ancient churchyard dotted with solemn table-tombs. The town also has Roman columns to support its pub doorway, the remains of a Roman bathhouse near the banks of the river, and a lovely little museum of antiquities, containing, among other things, an altar dedicated to Apollo and his Celtic counterpart, Maponus, for the safety of a cavalry unit from Sarmatia, in modern Hungary. We drove from there up to the estuary of the river Esk in Cumbria, where we found an empty campsite on a low-lying farm near a bend in the river, with friendly dogs nosing around. Later, under a midsummer-evening sky, we went for a stroll, along a lane tunnelling through deep hedgerows. They were thick with dog roses and honeysuckle that we could smell before we saw the elegant, curlicued blooms. Foxgloves – the interior of each thimble-flower freckled and downy – stood unbending amid the scrambling profusion of campion, vetch and Queen Anne lace. In the east, as the sky darkened to mauve, a swollen moon rose and paused heavy over the skyline. The night was so clear, and the moon so bright, that I could still write in my notebook at half past ten. Behind us rose the hills of the Lakes: Ulpha Fell, Whitfell, Stainton Fell. There was no sound but for a mournful curlew’s cry, till the creeping night stilled all.

  The next morning we drove a few miles north to the estuary at the little village of Ravenglass, once an important Roman harbour, long ago silted up, though a few bright-painted fishing boats bobbed around. A short walk through a copse of birch brought us to a Roman bathhouse, so well preserved that the walls stood nearly four metres tall, some still with their Roman rendering. We wandered through the grass-carpeted rooms, our only company a couple of cyclists who asked us to take their photograph by the high red walls. These are the best-preserved Roman remains in the north of England: there was even a wall-niche intact, perhaps where a statue had once stood. From there we took the van and set forth along the line of the Esk. We stopped at a petrol station where, miraculously, they sold fresh Muncaster crab and local strawberries, which we bought for our lunch. We climbed and climbed along the route of the Roman road that runs from Ravenglass to Ambleside. Eventually the camper van began to complain at the steepness of the incline, and to stagger unnervingly at each change down of the gears, so we continued the climb on foot until we reached the Roman fort of Hardknott Castle.

  It was one of the most beautiful places I had ever encountered in England. To the west, the road ribboned back down to the sea, over hills whose harsh contours were muffled by bracken that collapsed down the slopes like green snowdrifts. To the east, the road unfurled higher and higher again, curling through a mountain pass into the peaks of the Lake District, which were lightly laced with clouds against a flawless sky. The camper van was a comforting blue rectangle a considerable distance below us. Around us stood the low remains of the fort walls, presiding over the pass. Lambs sheltered in their scanty shade; the sharp, hard stone of them looked as if it had been dressed yesterday. Near the ruins was a patch of artificially levelled-off turf, a parade ground 140 metres by 80 metres, built for the execution of military exercises. Around most Roman forts have been discovered the traces of a ‘vicus’, or civilian settlement. No such evidence exists in this isolated spot. A fragmentary inscription, now in Tullie House Museum in Carlisle, tells us that the fort was built during the reign of Hadrian by a cohort of Dalmatians from what is now Croatia, and abandoned perhaps twenty years afterwards, its building presumably relating to the consolidation of the northern frontier at Hadrian’s Wall. Camden described Hardknott as ‘an high steepe mountaine, in the top whereof were discovered of late huge stones and foundations of a castle, not without great wonder, considering it is so steepe and upright that one can hardly ascend up to it’. It was here that R. G. Collingwood had his first experience of archaeology. It was the spring of 1889; he was three weeks old and his father was excavating the north-west gate of the fort. ‘They took me in a carpenter’s bag,’ he wrote in An Autobiography.

  Collingwood is a significant, but in many ways curious figure in the history of British scholarship. He was a major contributor to the study of Roman Britain: with J. N. L. Myres, the Anglo-Saxon expert and sometime youthful admirer of Tessa Verney Wheeler, he wrote the first volume of the Oxford History of England; and he collated much of the material for the exhaustive collection of epigraphic material called The Roman Inscriptions of Britain (published posthumously, it remains an essential resource for historians of the period). But he was also the Waynflete professor of philosophy at Oxford; a metaphysician; a writer on philosophical method; a philosopher of art and, most significantly, of history. Such was the breadth of his learning that many people now working in one of his disciplines barely know of his work in the other; or even, sometimes, realise that Collingwood the philosopher was the same person as Collingwood the Roman Britain expert.

  In 1938, not yet aged fifty, he suffered a stroke. In some ways this appalling experience was the defining moment of his academic career. It was the first of several; the same complaint had carried off his father. From this point onwards, until his death five years later, Collingwood wrote as if he were living on borrowed time. Granted leave from Oxford, he poured out writings, and i
t is the work from this period that is now his most influential, including the posthumously published The Idea of History, which, although its ideas have been superseded in many respects, still stands as a classic. The year after that first stroke he also produced his rather startling autobiography – not a conventional story of a life at all, but an account, barely concealing the enormous passions stirring beneath its rigorous, donnish prose, of the development of a mind. Distilling his most important ideas, it announced his intention to redeploy his intellectual powers in a single direction: the defeat of Nazism. By turns noble and arrogant, it also accused his fellow philosophers of being stooges of fascism, and condemned the wider establishment and media of an unforgivable indifference to the cause of Spanish republicanism.

  Collingwood was a child of the Lakes. Born at Cartmel, he soon moved with his family to Coniston, to a comfortable house called Lanehead, a mile away from Brantwood, where John Ruskin lived. Both houses overlooked the grand heights of the Old Man of Coniston. His father, W. G. Collingwood, a painter, writer, local historian and archaeologist, had been Ruskin’s pupil, biographer and devoted last secretary. His mother, Dorrie, was a painter of miniatures and a wonderful pianist. The young Robin and his sisters would wake up every morning to the sound of her playing Beethoven or Chopin before breakfast. A painting by Burne-Jones – Two Angels – hung in the drawing room. Robin was taught at home by his father until the age of thirteen. He read his way through his father’s library. Aged eight, he picked up a copy of Kant’s Theory of Ethics, and was ‘attacked by a strange succession of emotions. I felt that things of the highest importance were being said about matters of the utmost urgency … then, with a wave of indignation, came the discovery that I could not understand them … Then, third and last, came the strangest emotion of all. I felt that the contents of this book, although I could not understand it, were somehow my business … I felt as if a veil had been lifted and my destiny revealed.’ By the age of thirteen, he had excellent Greek and Latin and ‘spoke and read French and German almost as easily as English’. He was a prolific writer of stories and poems, and edited a family magazine for private circulation. He was, too, ‘a neat-fingered boy, skilful at making all sorts of things; active in walking, bicycling, or rowing, and thoroughly practised in sailing a boat’. His father wrote a children’s story, Thorstein of the Mere, set among the Vikings who settled at Coniston. It was dedicated to his son, with a verse inscription including the lines: ‘Thanks, Robin: for the wide world o’er/ A writer asks no finer flattery,/ No kinder fate of all in store,/ Than Five-years-old’s assault and battery/ Demanding more and more.’ When R. G. advocated home-schooling in his Hobbesian work of political philosophy The New Leviathan, published in 1942, one can see why. He was utterly miserable at Rugby, and seemed to regard his undergraduate days at Oxford as an opportunity for long bursts of private reading, relatively undisturbed by actual teaching. Everything that he regarded as important about his education had begun at home.

  If his Lakeland upbringing sounds almost too idyllic to be true, at least one outsider was also caught up in its spell. One day, W. G. Collingwood, walking home from a painting trip up on the Old Man, saw what he thought was a body washed up on a wide flat stone in Copper Mines Beck. He called out and was relieved when the apparent corpse lifted its head. The young man in question later recalled: ‘He asked me what I was doing and I told him I had been trying to write poetry. Instead of laughing, he seemed to think it a reasonable occupation, and we walked down to the village together.’ This was the young Arthur Ransome, who had caught the train north ‘with Hazlitt in one pocket, Keats in the other’ to take his first holiday from his job at a London publisher’s. Ransome fell in love with the whole family. His favourite children’s book had been Thorstein of the Mere, and he immediately felt that his own literary efforts would be taken seriously by this family of writers, musicians and painters; in his own father, now dead, he had prompted nothing (he felt) but exasperation and disappointment.

  The elder Collingwoods became the ‘touchstones by whom to judge all other people that I met’. This was the life creative and the life of the mind; a kind of paradise for Ransome. Recalling W. G.’s study, he wrote: ‘I can see it now, the books from floor to ceiling, the enormous long table piled with books and manuscripts, the unfinished canvas on an easel, the small table at which he was writing and, over the fireplace, his lovely portrait of his wife, in a small boat with two of the children.’ Here art was made for its own sake. ‘He wrote and they both painted with complete disregard of possible sales.’ Soon Ransome was out on Coniston Water, sailing with the Collingwood girls, Dora and Barbara. ‘In the afternoon we went down to their boathouse and out in the Swallow, a one-time fishing-boat, monstrously heavy to row but not bad under sail, the first of a long dynasty of Swallows in my sailing life.’ The two boys, Robin and Arthur, would race Swallow, and a friend’s ‘half-decked, sloop-rigged’ boat, the Jamrach, across Coniston Water. When Ransome was issued with a writ for libel by Lord Alfred Douglas, after the publication of his Oscar Wilde: A Critical Study, R. G., by then a young don, offered up all his savings to his friend. Fortunately his (presumably meagre) resources were not needed, since the jury at the 1913 trial found in Ransome’s favour. Ransome was not the only young man to receive the warm hospitality of the Collingwoods. Wilfred Owen, a devotee of Ruskin, ‘blew in upon them one stormy night’ from Keswick, where he was staying in the summer of 1912, ‘and as soon as I had warmed myself in their geniality, blew out again and over the moors’. He had been ‘a little drunk on Ruskin’, he recalled. Perhaps Owen and the Collingwoods also spoke of their shared love of archaeology.

  R. G. Collingwood did his First World War service in London, in naval intelligence. In common with Mortimer Wheeler, he felt a sense of profound responsibility after the conflict. He was the only one of Francis Haverfield’s students to survive, and the great historian himself died in 1919. Haverfield’s work, wrote Collingwood, had to be continued ‘in piety to him’.

  Collingwood’s efforts as a practical archaeologist on his home turf of Cumbria are often overlooked, or regarded as a mere vacation pastime compared with his ‘real’ work as a philosopher in Oxford. But his bibliography records publication after publication on archaeological matters, many for the Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian Society, for which his father served as president. By Coniston Water and in Eskdale his mind was forged. It was his ‘great good place’, to borrow Auden’s phrase. It was here that he returned to write his autobiography when invalided out of academic duties; it was here that he died; it was here that one feels he was happiest and most truly himself. ‘Of all the valleys of England there is none lovelier than Eskdale, from its wild beginnings among the precipices of Scafell to its quiet ending in the land-locked harbour of Ravenglass,’ he wrote in his little guidebook, Roman Eskdale, published in the late 1920s. Of Hardknott, he wrote: ‘The fort commands a splendid view. To the visitor who cares for magnificence of scenery, the sudden revelation of the Scafell range, as he reaches the edge of the spur and looks over the precipices and the valley below him at the mountains beyond, is an unforgettable experience.’ In the scholarly R. G. there still clung the traces of the schoolboy Robin, romping by the lake and demanding more of his father’s stories. Recalling Camden’s remark that there were some who thought the old bathhouse at Ravenglass to be the court of the legendary King Eveling, Collingwood expanded in his guidebook: ‘… people thought it was the Lyons Garde of the Arthurian romances, the Castle Perilous beside the Island of Avillon, where dwelt the Lady of the Fountain; or they said it was the castle of King Eveling or Avaloc, the husband of the sea-fairy Morgan le Fay, who was king over the island in which lived the blessed dead’.

  Collingwood was one of the first to argue that archaeology should be precise and directed. One should dig in order to discover the answer to specific questions, not simply as a speculative exercise or as a search for beautiful things. Intellectually, it was also the pl
ace where his academic interests met. His Cumbrian digs became the crucible for his philosophy of history, the place where theory could be put to practical test. At his most likeable – at least in so far as he emerges from his own writings – he was a person who thought matters through in the doing of things: as a violinist, a sailor, a walker, and most importantly as a digger. In his autobiography he described himself as the sort of person who, ‘when I read … the beautifully illustrated handbook that tells me how to look after a certain kind of motor, my brain seems to stop working. But … leave me alone with the motor and a box of tools, and things go better.’ Archaeology was the box of tools that helped him formulate his philosophy of history.

  The strongest example, in his view, of the way this worked was through his views on the history of art – here was the ‘rapprochement’ between the two sides of his scholarship, between history and philosophy. His writings on art, he wrote, he would ‘gladly leave as the sole memorial of my Romano-British studies, and the best example I can give to posterity of how to solve a much-debated problem in history, not by discovering fresh evidence, but by reconsidering questions of principle’. His particular theory related to what he believed was the suppression of Celtic art during the Roman period and then, as the evidence suggested at the time, its revival after many centuries. The history of man, he argued, was the history of thought, of purposive thought. The job of the historian was to recapture, or re-enact, these past thoughts. The past never truly went away; it lay ‘incapsulated’ in the present. As he saw it, the artistic habit of the Celts had not died out under the Romans, but had been passed down by ‘the transmission by example and precept of certain ways of thinking and acting from generation to generation’. The Celts’ skills and their desire to make art had lain dormant – ‘incapsulated’.