Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination

by Peter Ackroyd

  Burton wrote one book for the rest of his life, expanding it in the course of several editions, and it came to a conclusion only at his death. Yet this melancholy Englishman did not believe that mortality broke the charmed circle of his melancholic imagination. “We keep our madness still, play the fools still . . . we are of the same humours and inclinations as our predecessors were, you shall find us all alike, much at one, we and our sons.” That is why the melancholy man understands the great globe itself:

  thou shalt soon perceive that all the world is mad, that is melancholy, doting: that it is (which Epicthonius Cosmopolites expressed not many years since in a map) made like a fool’s head (with that motto, Caput helliboro dignum) a crazed head, cavea stultorum, a fool’s Paradise or, as Apollonius, a common prison of gulls, cheaters, flatterers, etcetera.

  This is the closest English prose reaches to abstract learning, this wistful, pedantic, digressive, solicitous and magniloquent style not untouched by irony or condescension. Like John Donne and Francis Bacon, Burton is interested in the “new” philosophy only when it affords him fresh metaphors; but he still prefers the ancient wisdom of “Robin Goodfellows ” or “Puck in the Night” as well as the knowledge contained in biographical anecdote. This tendency, too, he inherits from the native genius. Is it a peculiar disposition, also, to feel compelled to include no less than everything—just as Dickens filled his novels with crowds and Shakespeare filled the world with his characters—before concluding that all is vanity and empty striving? Even in the act of reaching out to grasp the world, English writers are troubled by melancholy contemplations.

  There is a native strain, too, in Burton’s false learning and in his concocted quotations, designed to confuse or tease the reader. Like the notebooks of Coleridge, his narrative endlessly repeats and anticipates itself. He quotes Chaucer and, like the poet, creates a strange embarrassed and understated persona—“But where am I? Into what subject have I rushed? What have I to do with Nuns, Maids, Virgins, Widows? I am a bachelor myself, and lead a Monastick life in a college.” But then, in the synopses of his books or “partitions,” he parodies the continental learning of the logician Ramus. Burton refers to Malory, Marlowe, Sidney, Spenser, and alludes to melancholy Hamlet. He copies the ecclesiastical histories of the medievals and the Anglo-Saxons with his accounts of visions and miracles. So “our Melancholy” is demonstrated by “that which Matthew Paris relates of the Man of Ersham who saw heaven and hell in a vision; of Sir Owen, that went down into St. Patrick’s Purgatory in King Stephen’s days, and saw as much; Walsingham of him that was showed as much by St. Julian.” Burton, having been raised in Leicestershire and educated at Brasenose College, Oxford, spent his life as a student of Christ Church, Oxford. He pored over the books of the Bodleian Library in order to write his treatise, with the purpose of relieving or reliving his own melancholy; yet it increased to the point that, according to an old account, “nothing could make him laugh but going to the bridge-foot and hearing the ribaldry of the bargemen, which rarely failed to throw him into a violent fit of laughter.” It is rumoured that he committed suicide, and on his epitaph in Christ Church it is recorded that “Melancholia” gave him both life and death.

  Hobbes was a flicted with melancholy; in Leviathan he created a vision of the world born out of fearfulness and nourished by desperation. Sir Godfrey Kneller’s portraits of Hobbes’s noble contemporaries are distinguished by “sensitive penetration of character and melancholy.” 7 The portrait of Charles I at his trial depicts him dressed in “the uniform of Melancholy” with black coat and broad-brimmed black hat. Yet melancholy was as much at home among the Puritans as the defeated Royalists, leading one historian of the seventeenth century to suggest that it was “a cultural mode available to the whole ‘educated’ class.”8 We know also of Milton’s “Il Penseroso.” When John Donne sat for a painting towards the end of his life, he chose to drape himself in a shroud and stand upon an urn. When he mounted the pulpit of St. Paul’s Cathedral he carried with him an hour-glass to remind the congregation that “from the first minute that thou beganst to live, thou beganst to die too.” He desired to die in the pulpit. It was indeed in the pulpit that he preached his funeral sermon known as “Death’s Duell”; a few days later, at the end of March 1631, he expired. He was killed by the power of his own oration.

  He mused upon “a handful of dust” and truly became, in the Anglo-Saxon term, an avower of “dustsceawung.” He was a disciple of death and a voluptuary of decay. His was a fantastic melancholy, dwelling upon the surcease of breath with morbid and fascinated relish; he created an elaborate patterning of graveyard themes, an embroidery, an opus anglicanum. Like Burton, he proceeds by association and paradox, the whole panoply of words determined by consonance and contrast; it is a syllabic rhetoric in which tone and colour play as much part as argument. We are approaching once more the genius loci. And the familiar cry goes up. “They tell me it is my Melancholly; Did I infuse, did I drinke in Melancholly into my selfe? It is my thoughtfulnesse ; was I not made to thinke?” As with so many other English artists and writers, his taste for the macabre and for the grotesque encouraged theatricality of various kinds. One of his predecessors as Dean of St. Paul’s, John Colet, insisted upon wearing mournful black rather than the required scarlet; the image of Donne wrapped in his winding sheet, facing east to greet the rising Christ, is perhaps sufficiently theatrical. There is sensationalism, too, within the melancholia of his sermons. “Between that excrementall jelly,” he wrote, “that thy body is made of at first, and that jelly which thy body dissolves to at last; there is not so noysome, so putrid a thing in nature.”

  It is all of a piece with Jacobean tragedy, and the sensational Gothic drama of the eighteenth-century London patent theatres. With such a distinguished ancestry it is perhaps not surprising that the most successful exhibition of contemporary English art was entitled, simply, “Sensation.”

  When John Donne stood upon his urn, the knots of the winding sheet clutched in his hand, he might have been anticipating Thomas Browne’s Hy driotaphia,or Urne-Buriall in which, as Browne intimates elsewhere, “I perceive I doe Anticipate the vices of age, the world to mee is but a dreame or mockshow, and wee all therein but Pantalones and Antickes to my severer contemplations.” Thus “ ’tis all one to lie in St. Innocent’s Church-yard, as in the Sands of Aegypt: Ready to be anything, in the extasie of being ever, and as content with six foot as the Moles of Adrianus.” And so “The Iniquity of Oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy.” Browne was born in 1605, but he continued his life apparently undisturbed by the vagaries of civil war, Commonwealth and Restoration. He was educated at Winchester and at Oxford, where he learned six languages, but he pursued his real studies in anatomy and medicine. He practised as a doctor in Halifax but most notably in Norwich, during which period he completed his most celebrated and erudite work. He was an expert in witchcraft and delighted in scientific experiments of any kind. “All places, all airs, make unto me one Country,” he once wrote, “I am in England everywhere and under any Meridian.”

  Here, then, are the makings of a wholly English measure—this gravity, this grandiloquence, this sombre rhetoric always in peril of decay and dissolution into its component parts. The melancholy imagination has of course also been associated with the movement of German romanticism but, under English skies, it takes on a wholly native hue. In particular the delight in demonstration, the vast expenditure of energy into words, characterises this prose; there is no ontology, or metaphysic, but rather the plangent chords of a dying fall. From the discovery of Anglo-Saxon urns at Old Walsingham in Norfolk Browne divagates widely into burial rites and obsequies in a style at once gay and learned, comic and erudite. He digresses, and follows an argument fitfully through imperfect logic; he adduces many examples and enlists many anecdotes so that the effect, like that of Burton and of Donne, is of a garishly lit stage with too many scenes and too many characters. Yet there is nobility even within the stage-fire. “Life i
s a pure flame, and we live by an invisible Sun within us. . . . Time which antiquates Antiquities . . . that duration, which maketh Pyramids pillars of snow, and all that’s past in a moment.” It is a great triumph of English literature, more substantial and enduring than “the heaviest stone that melancholy can throw at a man.”

  Samuel Johnson admired Browne’s prose, despite its tendency to prolixity; the haunted, shambling, melancholic figure of Johnson swallowed great draughts of such recondite learning in the attempt to sublimate his own disturbed genius. It might be otiose to place him within “the strains of sentiment, gloomy sublimity and melancholia that became a feature of British cultural life from the mid-century”9 but in his company we can also see Laurence Sterne and Oliver Goldsmith. Johnson believed that he was growing melancholy mad and William Adams found him “in a desperate state, sighing, groaning, talking to himself and restlessly walking” up and down his chamber. In his diary for 18 September 1768 he wrote: “This day it came into my mind to write the history of my melancholy. On this purpose to deliberate. I know not whether it may not too much disturb me.” Like Cowper he believed himself to be in danger of being damned perpetually. He administered large doses of opium to himself in order to alleviate his mental and physical miseries. He wished to be confined and to be whipped, a predilection known upon the European continent as “the English disease.”

  Stone portrait of John Donne in his shroud, St. Paul’s Cathedral, London

  We may mark here the “melancholy poetry” of Richard Wilson’s eighteenth-century landscapes,10 which are not unconnected with that current of nostalgia which plays so large a part in English painting; it is as if the English were born looking backwards. Melancholy lies within Tennyson and Swinburne, A. E. Housman and Christina Rossetti:

  God strengthen me to bear myself; That heaviest weight of all to bear, Inalienable weight of care

  We hear it, too, within the music of Emily Brontë:

  O for the time when I shall sleep Without identity, And never care how rain may steep Or snow may cover me!

  In twentieth-century poetry it can be glimpsed within the mournful embarrassment of Philip Larkin and the bleakness of Ted Hughes. And yet from what does it spring? Many historians and scholars have favoured the English landscape as the fons et origo of melancholy.

  CHAPTER 10

  The Rolling Hills

  Much of that landscape still rises and declines in ancient patterns, which hold their own stories of lives laboriously led. The lines of ditches and hedgerows represent an ancient order; even densely built urban areas can reflect an older reality. Nineteenth-century Nottingham, for example, was “largely determined by the medieval footpaths and furlongs of the open fields.”1 It is an open secret that the topography of the City of London is established upon Roman and Saxon divisions.

  These affinities are not simply material for nostalgia, however. It is sometimes supposed that landscape shapes human perception and that the power of the earth, the ground upon which we stand and move, is greater than that of the heavens in determining human destiny. Milton himself suggested that climate and topography nourish wit and consciousness as well as fruit, and more recent studies have confirmed the associations between locality and behaviour. It is of course a piece of ancient wisdom, but the present author has noticed its workings in various districts of twenty-first-century London.

  It is the wisdom D. H. Lawrence gathered, and used, from the novels of Thomas Hardy in which “there exists a great background, vital and wild, which matters more than the people who move upon it.” Lawrence also said that Hardy’s understanding of the world derived from his recognition of the territorial imperative and that “putting aside his metaphysic, which must always obtrude when he thinks of people, and turning to the earth, to landscape, then he is true to himself.” It can be a source of power, too, as well as vision. As John Constable said of another country, “the Dutch were stay-at-home people. Hence their originality.” But in England itself the source of that originality, or genius, may lie far back. The spires of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century parish churches, an example of a line of beauty in the English landscape, follow a geological stratum from Lincoln to north Somerset and seem ineluctably to rise out of oolite stone. Wordsworth pursues a similar course of enquiry when in his Guide Through the District of the Lakes he asks his reader to imagine a primitive landscape. “He may see or hear in fancy the winds sweeping over the lakes, or piping with a loud voice among the mountain peaks and, lastly, may think of the primaeval woods shedding and renewing their leaves with no human eye to notice, or human heart to regret or welcome the change.” In the north-west region Wordsworth experienced “low breathings coming after him”; in that same territory, five hundred years before, Sir Gawain felt “etins aneleden him,” or giants blowing after him. The faint shudder of disquiet may be part of the landscape.

  The coming of the Anglo-Saxons scarcely altered the vista of “primaeval woods,” with the ash and oak upon the claylands and beech upon the chalk. Part of the country possessed a settled agrarian regime, inherited from Romano-British or prehistoric farmers. And many of the great forests had already been cut back or burned down. But much of England was still a wilderness covered with thick woods or with cold moorlands broken by outcrops of stone, marshlands, fens and heaths; log huts with thatched roofs betrayed their presence with thin plumes of smoke rising into the vast English sky, while in certain places the ruins left by earlier settlers were visible among the weeds and scrubland. Here, except for the wind sighing among the trees and the rain falling upon the damp soil, was silence—silence together with the calls of the natural world. Earnwood in Shropshire signifies “eagle’s wood,” Yarnscombe in Devon means “eagles’ valley” and Arncliff in West Yorkshire “eagles’ cliff.” In these fastnesses we are not so far removed from the conclusion of Wuthering Heights with Heathcliff ’s head-stone “still bare” upon the moor. “I lingered round them, under that benign sky; watched the moths fluttering among the heath and hare-bells; listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass; and wondered how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers, for the sleepers in that quiet earth.” Here the protagonists have returned to the earth from which they came; after their fitful sojourn in the human world they have folded back into the landscape of which they were always a part.

  This odd, silent and empty England in its earliest manifestations was one that haunted the Anglo-Saxon imagination. The opening encomia in the histories of Britain describe a landscape of springs and snow-white gravelled streams, of plains and hills and various flowers; but the imaginative work of the Saxons is possessed by cold and isolation and darkness. The female persona within one short poem laments her state of houselessness; she dwells within an ancient barrow among dark hills and dales. Guthlac finds a resting place upon a primeval mound or “hill” within the wilderness. Everywhere there are references to steep and rugged places, to black waters and ice-cold streams, to crags and mountain caves. When Bede describes Ely as “an island surrounded by watery marshes” and Grant-chester as “a small ruined city,” he is describing a waste land scarcely populated and meagrely cultivated, a darkly tangled landscape of wolves and boars. So it appears in Beowulf, too; the home of the monster race was the “mor” and the “faestnes,” the moor and the fastness where there is frost and darkness. It is the landscape of King Lear where “the wrathfull skies / Gal-low the very wanderers of the darke” and the setting of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight:

  Thay clomben bi clyffez ther clengez the colde . . . Mist muged on the mor, malt on the mountez

  Wild England is the context of the opening dream within Piers the Plowman: “That I was in a wildernesse, wist I never where.” It is couched in Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd where “the general aspect of the swamp was malignant. From its moist and poisonous coat seemed to be exhaled the essences of evil things in the earth, and in the waters under the earth.” It is the landscape that haunts the English imagination. Thus Egdon He
ath, in Hardy’s Return of the Native, “had a lonely face, suggesting tragical possibilities,” while in “The Palace of Art” Alfred Tennyson depicts an equally bleak vista with

  a foreground black with stones and slags, Beyond, a line of heights, and higher All barred with long white cloud the scornful crags

  It is the internal landscape of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.

  Within the English landscape there are hallowed places, sacred by event or by association. There is a path that leads through English literature; it is the path of human agency and human settlement, a pact with the earth leading the traveller forward. It is the forest path, the wald-swathu, in Beowulf; it is the trackway along which Jude Fawley walks, weeping, in Jude the Obscure. John Clare rejoiced in “those crooked shreds / Of footpaths,” of which Edward Thomas remarked that “the more they are downtrodden, the more they flourish”; they are themselves a sign or token of national feeling, like that long serpentine line which in The Analysis of Beauty William Hogarth named as the line of beauty. It is the line as curved or curling, in the sinuous grace of a reclining body or in a line drawn upwards around a cone. Hogarth simply called it “VARIETY.” Stanley Spencer’s The Bridlepath at Cookham has the same irregular beauty as Paul Nash’s The Field Path, both paintings showing narrow ways turning among fields and trees. The journey of Bunyan’s Pilgrim, of Spenser’s Red Crosse Knight, of Dickens’s Little Nell, all take on the allegory of the winding path.