Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination

by Peter Ackroyd

  Then ouer them Change doth not rule and raigne; But they raigne ouer change, and doe their states maintaine

  Keats described Spenser’s verse as “charmed sleep,” with which state the young poet was himself familiar, and William Hazlitt extolled his “lulling the senses into a deep oblivion of the jarring noise of the world, from which we have no wish to be ever recalled.” Those who study the nature of contemporary dreams, with their condensations and elisions, have found in the latent and manifest content of Spenser’s epic all the workings of oneiric drama. It is a form of sleep.

  Dreams float freely through the English imagination. John Milton described even the history of his country as one of “smooth or idle Dreams.” In Paradise Lost Adam is despatched into a divine trance:

  Mine eyes he clos’d, but op’n left the Cell Of Fancie my internal sight . . .

  Whereupon his rib is turned into Eve. Sir Thomas Browne, in Religio Medici, confesses: “I am as happy in a dreame, and as content to enjoy happiness in a fancie, as others in a more apparent truth and reality.” The Pilgrim’s Progress is an encyclopedia of dreams, not least the dream-literature of the medieval poets. Its first sentence, concluding “and, as I slept, I dreamed a dream,” might have emerged from Piers the Plowman or The Dream of the Rood. John Bunyan’s dream is couched in the same vein as that of William Langland. The pilgrim meets Mistrust and Timorous, Hypocrisy and Civility, while Langland encounters Fraud and Flattery, Hunger and Imagination; the three hundred years between them pass in a moment, as if their dreams were truly outside time. Yet The Pilgrim’s Progress is associated, too, with a dream of another kind. The concluding verse of its first part—

  But if thou shalt cast all away as vain, I know not but ’twill make me dream again

  —bears a more than fleeting resemblance to the final poem of Through the Looking-Glass:

  Ever drifting down the stream— Lingering in the golden gleam— Life, what is it but a dream?

  The notion of embarrassment will emerge in the course of this narrative as a peculiar if elusive aspect of the English imagination. But in this potent mood may lie one of the uses of dream. The dream may conceal damaging or subversive themes without endangering the psychic health of the language; it may act as a diversion or cover by means of which potentially explosive material is smuggled into discourse. Langland can thus assault the established order, and Carroll advertise his sexual proclivities, without the least danger of being “found out.” It is a feature of English understatement that it is literally under the statement.

  That is also why the great moral and social satires have employed a landscape at once intense and unreal, thus approaching the condition of dream: More’s Utopia, and Orwell’s Animal Farm, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Samuel Butler’s Erewhon, are among these oneiric tracts which must be interpreted as carefully as Langland’s first allegory.

  John Keats dreamed Adam’s dream on 22 November 1817, as if he were “surprised with an old Melody.” The young poet’s The Fall of Hyperion is called “A Dream”—

  For Poesy alone can tell her dreams—

  and the murmur of the dream resounds throughout the unfinished cantos. In “The English Mail-Coach,” De Quincey evokes “something of the grandeur which belongs potentially to human dreams.” And at the close of this majestic essay he composes a “dream-fugue” like the pavane executed by John Dowland and entitled “Lachrimae Pavin,” or like some wild addicted vision enshrined in his Confessions of an English Opium Eater. “In dreams,” De Quincey writes in the same essay, “perhaps under some secret conflict of the midnight sleeper, lighted up to the consciousness at the time, but darkened to the memory as soon as all is finished, each several child of our mysterious race completes for himself the treason of the aboriginal fall.” In the fifth book of Wordsworth’s The Prelude a friend of the poet is seized by sleep “and he pass’d into a dream” of a “drowning world” from which he “wak’d in terror.” How strongly the English poets have been drawn to that state of dreaming, suspended between two worlds, is manifested in a letter which Coleridge wrote in the same period—“I should much wish . . . to float about along an infinite ocean . . . & wake once in a million years for a few minutes—just to know I was going to sleep a million years more.”

  So dreams are interwoven within the fabric of the English imagination. One of Keats’s first poems, “Sleep and Poetry,” takes its epigraph from Chaucer and expresses a desire to “die a death /Of luxury”; in the face of that death he must struggle to awake, to free himself from what Byron dismissed as Keats’s “Bedlam Vision.” The image of Frankenstein appeared to Mary Shelley in a dream where “My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me” towards the “hideous phantasm of a man.” Browning’s fearful “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” emerged within “a kind of dream” invoking the earlier dream-landscape of Beowulf:

  This was the place! Those two hills on the right Crouched like two bulls locked horn in horn in horn in fight—

  Sometimes it seems that these English dreamers are all within the same dream, the dream of origin, from which they are trying desperately to awake. We need not invoke the names of Freud and Jung in order to understand these ancient images. Charles Dickens believed that he always lived partly in a dream, and his Richard Carstone at the close of his fitful life in the dream-world of Bleak House asks whether “it was all a troubled dream.” At the end of his own life Charles Dickens was found “in dreamland with Edwin Drood.”

  There is also a continuity of another kind, as the ghosts of dead poets appear to the living in dream or vision. Robert Herrick saw Anacreon in vision. Homer appeared to Chapman, while Milton manifested himself to William Blake. Francis Thompson saw Chatterton, and the dead poet saved the living from an attempt at suicide. Chaucer and Gower appeared to Robert Greene, consoling Shakespeare’s rival, while Thomas Hardy saw the ghost of Wordsworth “lingering and wandering on somewhere alone in the fan-traceried Vaulting” of King’s College Chapel, Cambridge. In that same university Wordsworth was himself moved by the invisible presence of Milton and of Spenser: �I call�d him Brother, Englishman, and Friend.�

  Photograph of Charles Dickens dreaming, 1861, by John and Charles Watkins

  At the end of his great epic of the night, The Four Zoas, Blake wrote in triumph: “End of the Dream.” But it has not ended yet.

  CHAPTER 9

  A Note on English Melancholy

  There is a word in Old English which belongs wholly to that civilisation— “dustsceawung,” meaning contemplation of dust. It is a true image of the Anglo-Saxon mind, or at least an echo of that consciousness which considered transience and loss to be part of the human estate; it was a world in which life was uncertain and the principal deity was fate or destiny or “wyrd.”

  There are six extant poems in Old English which are governed by this vision of decay and desolation; they have been given titles, where none existed before, and they have been called “elegies” for the reason that they anticipate and indeed help to fashion a body of subsequent English poetry. The laments of “The Wanderer” and “The Seafarer” are filled with the sorrows of exile and isolation; the singers have left the warm halls and contemplate the “hrimcealde sae,” the rime-cold sea. “The Seafarer” recalls his life upon the wilderness of the waters, and it becomes clear how the cold waste of the ocean has entered the Anglo-Saxon soul. Everything “toglideth,” glides away like the waters; nothing endures; I depart while friends are left weeping by the shore’s edge; the music of harps and the sound of horses must fade; I am alone, but I must endure, this is my “wyrd.” “Wyrd” in its literal sense signifies “what will be” and this covers the accomplishment of all destinies; the judgement is executed, or the dream fulfilled. Many scholars have considered such works to harbour the keening of Celtic lament, but embedded within them are elements of endurance and reticence which arise from the Old English tradition. The poetry has an impersonal force, eschewing place-names or perso
nal names, guided by litotes and understatement towards a powerful compression of feeling.

  There is another poem, entitled “The Ruin,” which throws a curious light upon the elegiac tendencies of the Anglo-Saxons. It is a topographical poem—a much loved genre in the eighteenth century—concerning a ruined city; written in the eighth century, it is some fifty lines in length and is itself a ruin or, rather, a fragment. It describes an ancient city where now the walls have fallen, the roofs decayed and the pillars crumbled into heaps of stone. Once it contained bright halls and majestic houses, but a hundred generations have passed leaving only silence and decay. These ruins represent “enta geweorc,” the work of giants. It is a familiar phrase in Anglo-Saxon poetry, appearing in both sacred and secular contexts; it is alike a tribute to the past inhabitants of this island and a homage to transience itself. It does not reflect any vainglory of the victorious invader but, rather, a genuine and sophisticated awareness of passing civilisations.

  The critical and technical term “elegy” did not enter the language until the early years of the sixteenth century but it quickly acquired a peculiarly English tone; the lament is part of the tradition, with Milton’s Lycidas and Tennyson’s In Memoriam, Spenser’s “Astrophel” and Shelley’s Adonais as quite different and unusual demonstrations of its power. The “graveyard” school of Anglo-Saxon poetry also has its own specific lineage. The homiletic sequence known as Soul and Body, in which the spirit addresses the decayed or decaying corpse, rehearses what one scholar has called the “macabre emotionalism” and “unmitigated pessimism”1 that are associated with Anglo-Saxon poetry. That tone dominates much medieval English poetry, also, and continues well into the eighteenth century.

  It would also be possible to elaborate, in this context, upon the argument which Bishop Percy advanced in one of the editorial comments in his collection of Reliques of Ancient English Poetry published in 1765. “It is worth attention,” he wrote, “that the English have more songs and ballads on the subject of madness than any of their neighbours.” This might be connected with the madness portrayed upon the Jacobean stage, and the popularity of the eighteenth-century “graveyard” school of English poetry; but there are more elusive associations. In the nineteenth century London became known as the “suicide capital” of the world but, even before that date, there was a more general belief that the English were a race subject to melancholia. The prevailing gloom was variously ascribed to the damp climate of the island or to the diet of beef, but we need only turn to the prevalence of elegies in the English tongue to suggest that melancholy may have found its local habitation.

  It has always been there. That long sweet note of pathos can be heard equally in the music of Delius and the poetry of Keats, in the plangent harmonies of Purcell and the stately threnodies of Spenser, in the funereal meditations of Donne and the lachrymose comedy of Sterne. When the Anglo-Saxon poet of “Judgement Day” uttered a complaint against “this gloomy world,” he was the harbinger of a powerful and sustained emotion. It has often been remarked that Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country ChurchYard,” composed fitfully between 1746 and 1750, was the most popular English poem for some two hundred years. What other nation would cherish such mournful music?

  The earliest English lyrics are suffused with melancholy. “Ey! Ey! What this night is long!” comes from the early thirteenth century, so that the transition from Old to Middle English is not without its continuities. The songbook, of which it is a part, survives still and a scholar of English music has noted that “its sense of weary desolation”2 resounds across the centuries. In similar fashion another early song, with its complaint “Blidful biryd on me thou rewe,” is indeed a “highly pessimistic” fragment3 with its own successors. The woefulness of Chaucer’s Reeve has all the sad music of seasonal change which seems so integral to the English genius:

  Deeth drough the tappe of lyf and leet it gon, And ever sithe hath so the tappe yronne Til that almoost al empty is the tonne

  There have been periods in which melancholy became the prevailing mood or the spirit of the age. The first surviving English morality play takes as its theme the advent of death. It is an abiding preoccupation, this terror of mortality, aligned with a yearning towards transcendence. As one fifteenth-century writer expresses it,

  Me thynk thys world is wonder wery And fadyth as ye brymbyll bery

  The great national epic of that century, Malory’s Le Morte Darthur (as its printer, William Caxton, named it), is charged with intimations of transience and filled with plaintive passages of nostalgia. “Then there was wepyng and dolour out of mesure.” One medievalist has spoken of its “haunting elegiac undertone,”4 which is in part related to the simplicity of a prose which has not divested itself of its Anglo-Saxon origins: “And syr Lancelot awok, and went and took his hors, and rode al that day and al nyght in a forest, wepyng. And atte last he was ware of an ermytage and a chappel stode betwyxte two clyffes, and than he harde a lytel belle rynge to masse.”

  There is something within the language itself which propels the writer towards plangency; if we were to compare one of Macbeth’s soliloquies with the Anglo-Saxon monologues of “The Wanderer” or “The Seafarer,” we would notice the same open vowel sounds which create the syllabic equivalent of a long protracted “oh”—“ geond lagulade longe sceolde,” “To morrow, and to morrow, and to morrow.” In Edmund Spenser, too, the melody engages the themes of loss and decay, as if the words themselves were tokens of transience; perhaps it represents the nostalgia for Adam’s unfallen language, before the babble of other voices. There is nothing more splendid, however, than Spenser’s “Two Cantos of Mutabilitie” which are appended to The Faerie Queene, where the old alliterative line is charged with the awareness of frailty and loss: “What man that sees the euer-whirling wheele . . .” The alliteration of Old English may indeed be the “pure well head of Poesie,” to which Spenser alludes in the same poem. The language that speaks of decay falls back into its original patterns, like the countenances of those about to die.

  For the melodic expression of grief, however, John Dowland bears the palm. His first songbook of 1597, containing compositions for the accompaniment of the lute, expresses what one musical historian has called his “disposition to melancholy,” his “feelings of isolation” and his “emotional sensitivity.”5 In songs such as “Go Crystal Tears,” “In Darkness Let Me Dwell,” “Forlorn Hope” and “Sorrow Stay,” the full flood of English melancholia can be experienced, with all the sonorous languour of its pathos and all the chromatic range of its grief. In an air published in the third volume— “Time can abate the terror of every pain/But common grief is error, true grief will still remain”—the “ ‘dropping’ refrain seems . . . to annihilate time itself.”6

  It is the strangest coincidence that Dowland was for some time resident musician at the court of Elsinore, upon whose walls Hamlet walked; melancholy indeed was so favoured and so familiar a theme that in the late sixteenth century it became an English device for which only the barest signification was necessary. The melancholic was a stock figure of tragedy and even, sometimes, of comedy. He could be a malcontent, a rebel, or a scholar; he would be dressed in black, with solemn visage, his arms folded and his eyes cast down. There was the melancholic of love, like Orsino sighing for music in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, or the melancholic of learning, who like Hamlet enters reading a book. That book might be one of many learned English tomes written in the period, such as George Gascoigne’s The Droomme of Doome’s Day, John Moore’s A Mappe of Man’s Mortalitie, or George Strode’s The Anatomie of Mortalitie. Childhood is foolish, youth vain; maturity a cause of pain, and old age a cause of mourning. Thus Hamlet becomes one of the central figures of English drama.

  Yet melancholy served many purposes in the sixteenth century; the melancholic was often a man of learning, and could serve as a target for the predominant bias towards anti-intellectualism in England. The sick man could also be the epitome of a sick world, and the
matter of satire. Those who feigned melancholy could also adopt a number of “mad” poses, as did Hamlet, and thus play the chameleon. As Edmund expresses it in King Lear: “My cue is villainous melancholy, with a sigh like Tom O’ Bedlam.” It was also often an excuse for that morbid sensationalism so close to the English imagination. This delight in what has been called “English Gothic” suffuses the work of Robert Burton, whose The Anatomy of Melancholy, published in 1621, is a formidable digest on the pleasures and perils of that condition. Samuel Johnson declared that “it was the only book that ever took him out of bed two hours sooner than he wished to rise,” and Charles Lamb referred to Burton himself as “that fantastic great old man.” Byron acquired all his classical learning from it, and thus became the melancholy Manfred; Keats used the book as a form of personal diary, and thereupon composed an “Ode on Melancholy.” In this compendious volume, too, is the story of Lamia which directly inspired Keats to write his long poem of the same name. The treatise is indeed fantastic. Although Burton disclaims “big words, fustian phrases, jingling terms, tropes, strong lines, that like Alcestes’ arrows caught fire as they flew, strains of wit . . . elogies, hyperbolical exornations, elegancies etc. which many so much affect,” he employs all of these devices in a great phantasmagoria of prose. It is an opéra bou fe of paraphrase and quotation, as Burton whispers to the great authors across the centuries or overhears them murmuring in his Oxford library. His own book is “a rhapsody of rags gathered together from several dung-hills, excrement of authors, toys and fopperies confusedly tumbled out . . . thou canst not think worse of me than I do of myself.” So it is that “we weave the same web still, twist the same rope again and again.” It is a line and a sentiment which more than a hundred years later, in the mid-eighteenth century, Laurence Sterne borrowed for the pages of Tristram Shandy, thus proving the truth of the dictum in an eminently witty manner. But it is also one of the sources of Burton’s melancholy, this belief that the fine lines of the imagination may become a web or a prison— “we skim off the cream of other men’s wits, pick the choice flowers of their tilled gardens to set out our own sterile plots.” We can write nothing that has not already been written, only rearrange the inheritance in a pleasing pattern.