Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination

by Peter Ackroyd

  The equivalence may help to account for the modern critical assumption that in the romantic poetry of the early nineteenth century, particularly in that of Wordsworth, there exists “artifice behind the postulate of nature.”3 Just as an entire dramatic system lies behind the apparently unpremeditated art of Kean or Mrs. Siddons, so dwell “tradition, convention and genre behind the appearance of romantic spontaneity.” 4

  The claims of the romantic poets, however, were grand indeed. In his Defence of Poetry Shelley celebrated poets as themselves “the happiest, the best, the wisest, and the most illustrious of men . . . men of the most spotless virtue, of the most consummate prudence.” It is not clear, however, if these remarks were made in the spirit of deepest irony. Wordsworth considered the poet to be a man “endowed with a more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness . . . a more comprehensive soul,” so that “the Poet binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society.” The natural virtues of the poet are here asserted in the spirit of what Keats called “the Wordsworthian, or egotistical sublime,” but the full ramifications of that phrase have not been properly understood. What, precisely, is egotism in the sphere of the imagination?

  The term itself implies some weakness or insufficiency beneath apparent strength. It implies a trust in a deep and powerful subjectivity, but one which is also obsessive and defensive. Johnson defines an egotist as “a talker of himself,” and in his Lectures on Shakespeare Coleridge called egotism “intense selfishness.” As one critic has remarked of the romantic poet in general, “he is thrown back on himself, his status and nature.” In the case of Wordsworth, “his chief preoccupation is with the question of the poet’s function, his role, his power, his obligations.” 5 In turn the pose, or poses, which Byron adopted were “a logical continuation of the Wordsworthian preoccupation with role.”6 We revert inevitably to the vocabulary and manner of the stage.

  In the largest sense romantic literature is the literature of personality, in which the writer imposes upon an unchanging landscape or a passing scene the contours of his or her own preoccupations; the world becomes an echo-chamber of the solitary voice. But this also may lead to a form of imposture, as if the romantic poet were indeed an actor trying to project to the “gods” as well as the “pit.” We have noticed how fragile the romantic image may become, touched with intimations of forgery and plagiarism as well as theatricality, but there is a subtler frailty. The cult of the “egotistical sublime”—or, in a philosophical context, individualism—effectively destroyed, in the words of one eighteenth-century cultural historian, “the organic metaphysics of earlier centuries and the archaic belief in the unity and wholeness of experience.”7 It promulgated instead the instincts or doctrines “of a solitary, increasingly alienated individual.” 8 Just as the Reformation severed the national Church from the consensus of a thousand years, so its natural child of romanticism abrogated the alliance between the artist and the larger settled community. That is why it has been argued that the “central truth of romanticism is not joy and fulness of being but what Hegel . . . called ‘the unhappy consciousness ... the consciousness of self as a divided nature, a doubled and merely contradictory being’ ” 9 relying upon the artificiality of language and its constructs to exemplify its dubious status. It is not irrelevant that Robert Browning parodied romantic sentiment through the voice of “Mr. Sludge,” a fake spiritualist medium. One critic has discovered, in the narratives of British romanticism, a “problematical self-consciousness” and a “division in the self ”:10 the main thematic and imaginative drift is not towards the affirmation of a certain and simple selfhood, but the nostalgia incumbent upon its loss of connection with the larger world. The solitary wanderers of Coleridge or Wordsworth or Byron are forms of self-projection and self-alienation.

  To read through Wordsworth’s collected works is to encounter strange stories of grief and loss, of death and forgetfulness, of isolation and failure, of dissolution and despair. In one edition of his poetry the “Fragment of a Gothic Tale” is followed by The Borderers—A Tragedy, succeeded a few pages later by “The Three Graves,” “Address to Silence” and “Incipient Madness.”11 In The Prelude Wordsworth invokes the burden and the mystery of the “Imagination”; the vision occurs at a moment when he and his companion are told they had crossed the Alps without realising that they had done so. In this moment of bewilderment and loss, the “Imagination” wreathed itself around the poet

  Like an unfather’d vapour; here that Power, In all the might of its endowments, came Athwart me; I was lost as in a cloud, Halted, without a struggle to break through

  The “Imagination” here isolates and imprisons him; he is trapped in its vaporous obscurities. It is a power which seals off the world, leaving the traveller susceptible only to “the might of its endowments.” The imaginative power is “unfather’d”; it is not a natural force, and can be seen to work against the experience of the natural world as somehow irrelevant to its concerns. What Wordsworth is experiencing are the rising currents of his highest self, which lead in turn to anxiety and vertigo. There are times when he tries to flee from the reaches of his most profound mental consciousness but then he is confronted with images of death, loss and silence. The romantic image—the image of the romantic selfhood—was more fragile than its exponents seemed willing to comprehend.

  It is perhaps appropriate that the great avatar of the romantic poets was Cain himself. He is invoked by Shelley in Adonais, by Byron in The Giaour and Cain: A Mystery, and by Coleridge in The Wanderings of Cain. The biblical murderer was one in whom the “egotistical sublime” had dared to rear itself against God. When Cain became “a fugitive and a vagabond in the earth” he set out upon a path of wandering and in his steps followed such great exilic romantic heroes as Manfred and Melmoth the Wanderer. But it was also decreed that “thou art cursed from the earth.” The romantic personality can indeed seem curiously at a loss, sensitive of “cultural discontinuity, of being nowhere in the movement of history, of being useless, ignored, misunderstood.” 12 As Schopenhauer wrote, “we are lost in a bottomless void; we find ourselves like the hollow glass globe, from out of which a voice speaks whose cause is not to be found in it.” Or, as one historian of the romantic movement has put it, there emerges “an infinite series of displacements of meaning” attendant upon “incompleteness, fragmentation and ruin.”13 Yet flowing beneath them, supporting them and moving them forward, is the steady current of English music itself.

  CHAPTER 53

  English Music

  There can be little doubt that the English music of the twentieth century was inspired and animated by the music of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; the old music awakened the new, and the new reawakened the old. Arthur Bliss composed his Meditations on a Theme of John Blow, which may be compared with Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis; Gustav Holst’s daughter has written of her father’s “wild excitement over the rediscovery of the English madrigal composers” which he considered to be “the real musical embodiment of the English composers,”1 while Tippett’s polyphony was directly modeled upon the madrigal compositions of John Wilbye. Delius’s secretary and amanuensis, Eric Fenby, noted a connection between William Byrd’s “The Woodes So Wilde” and Delius’s own Brigg Fair.

  A critic, reviewing Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, observed that “it seems to lift one into some unknown region” where “one is never quite sure whether one is listening to something very old or very new”;2 the embrace of present and past time, in which English antiquarianism becomes a form of alchemy, engenders a strange timelessness. It is a quality which Eliot sensed in the landscape of England itself and to which he gave memorable expression in Four Quartets, “Now and in England.” It is as if the little bird which flew through the Anglo-Saxon banqueting hall, in Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, gained the outer air and became the lark ascending in Vaughan Williams’s orchestral settin
g. It is the skylark of Shelley’s poem whose “notes flow in such a crystal stream.” The same bird, in the words of George Meredith which Vaughan Williams used,

  rises and begins to round, He drops the silver chain of sound, Of many links without a break

  The unbroken chain is that of English music itself.

  The passion of Vaughan Williams for folk-music itself has now become a commonplace of English musical history. It began in Brentwood in Essex, in the winter of 1903; Brentwood was then a growing market town, where after giving a lecture he was invited to tea by the daughter of the local vicar. One of the villagers invited to this ancient ceremony, a seventy-year-old labourer named Charles Pottipher, began to sing the songs of the region. The first of them, “Bushes and Briars,” affected the young Vaughan Williams suddenly and profoundly with the force of revelation. On first hearing this song, in fact, Vaughan Williams confessed that he was invaded by a “sense of familiarity . . . something peculiarly belonging to me as an Englishman.” The editor of his folk-songs has suggested that he “experienced a deep sense of recognition, as though he had known it all his life.” 3 This is perhaps a strange conception. It is as if the land and the landscape had prepared him for this music; it is as if he had already heard it. The song is of ancestral voices. As a fellow enthusiast wrote, “every country village in England was a nest of singing birds.” But theirs were not necessarily antique airs. “In one aspect,” Vaughan Williams wrote, “the folk song is as old as time itself; in another aspect it is no older than the singer who sang it.” This is another aspect of the English imagination itself, which is endlessly renewed and is indeed “new” again in each passing generation. The folk-song abides in Vaughan Williams’s own music, where it has found fresh life and inspiration even if it has now fallen silent in fields and meadows. Of the English folk-song itself, Vaughan Williams has also written: “We felt that this was what we expected our national melody to be.”

  We may note the emphasis here upon melody. All authentic folk-music, as Vaughan Williams put it, “is purely melodic.” It is also a striking intuition on the nature of English music itself. Of thirteenth-century chant, for example, “the earliest phase of fully legible notation coincides in England with a flowering of melodic beauty so intense as to create the impression of a new and indigenous art.”4 We read of the “well balanced melodic lines” and “rhythmic straightforwardness”5 of fifteenth-century English music, which can profitably be compared with the native emphasis upon the flowing outlines and delicate linear compositions of the manuscript illuminations. Dunstable’s music of that period is notable for its “consonance and for melodic grace,”6 fully comparable with the description of Vaughan Williams’s own music. Of the Eton Choirbook of English church music there has been noted “the fluid yet vigorous melodic line that is so typical of this music,”7 and Taverner’s sixteenth-century compositions are celebrated for “the flexibility of . . . melodic lines.” The songs of John Dowland, “realised” at a much later date by Benjamin Britten, are characterised by “such delicacy and refinement that their melodic material is invariably enhanced and transmuted into something precious.”8 The pure line of melody is best expressed in the solo song, and so it is perhaps not surprising that “simple songs or ballads”—in theatre productions no less than in street airs—take an “indigenous” form.9 In the context of eighteenth-century music, “a wholly English turn of melody” has been remarked.10 Victorian part-songs, resembling the polyphony of an earlier time, were also a native growth.

  Vaughan Williams’s own compositions in general are resplendent with “prodigality of melody,”11 as if the singing birds had returned, and it has been said of A London Symphony that “melodies in this work proliferate in a manner that makes disciplining them symphonically a constant problem to the composer.”12 It is clear that the composer himself “responded in an extremely sensitive and extraordinarily definite way to the expressive quality of melody.”13 This is one definition of his Englishness, of course, and his preternatural attention to melody is part of his overwhelming responsiveness to folk-song. Thus his Pastoral Symphony is marked by melody or “a free evolution of one tune from another . . . like streams flowing into each other”; 14 the hidden stream itself is that of native song.

  The “melancholy lyricism” implicit in some of Vaughan Williams’s finest work has already been described. A commentator in Musical Times compared Vaughan Williams’s Pastoral Symphony to “a dream of sad happiness,” and of the Oboe Concerto a musicologist remarked that Vaughan Williams “seems to be yearning for some lost and precious thing.”15 What has been lost that excites so much lament? Could it be the idea of England itself? That would be the easy answer but not, perhaps, an altogether convincing one. The folk-songs collected and arranged by Vaughan Williams are also possessed by profoundly melancholy cadences which have been related to the line of the ancient landscape. It is a national mood, comparable to “the eternal note of sadness” which Matthew Arnold heard on Dover Beach. It is that note of quietly and insistently “throbbing melancholy”16 which emerges in almost all of Vaughan Williams’s orchestral compositions; it echoes the delicate melancholy of Dowland and the plangent sadness of Purcell. It lies within Elgar, too, in his “beautifully poetic expression tinged with wistfulness.”17

  Vaughan Williams gave a set of lectures in 1932, entitled “National Music,” in which he constructed a series of variations upon the theme of English music. In the first of them he asked whether “it is not reasonable to suppose that those who share our life, our history, our customs, even our food, should have some secret to give us which the foreign composer, though he be perhaps more imaginative, more powerful, more technically equipped, is not able to give us? This is the secret of the national composer, the secret to which he only has the key . . . and which he alone is able to tell to his fellow countrymen.” Vaughan Williams was no narrow nationalist; he studied under Ravel in Paris, and his own thoroughly indigenous music is indebted to Debussy and Sibelius. Like that of Purcell and Elgar, his very “English” music is in part inspired by continental models. Elgar was championed by Kreisler and Strauss before he found a thoroughly welcoming audience at home. In turn Vaughan Williams adduces the lives and careers of Bach and Beethoven, Palestrina and Verdi to suggest that only a “local” or even “parochial” artist can become a “universal musician.” He believed that “if the roots of your art are firmly planted in your own soil and that soil has anything to give you, you may still gain the whole world and not lose your own souls.” It is a specific and significant perception, wholly shaped by his feeling for landscape and traditional English song.

  In a lecture entitled “The Importance of Folk-Song,” for example, he stated that “folk-songs contained the nucleus of all future development in music” and that “national music was a sure index to national temperament.” It is what Elgar meant when he said, “I write the folk-songs of this country.” He was testifying to the power and presence of these often ancient songs within the nation’s musical life. It was a subject which preoccupied Vaughan Williams, too. “It is extraordinarily interesting,” he wrote, “to see the national temperament running through every form of a nation’s art—the national life and the national art growing together.” In his lectures upon national music he refined this sense of the native imagination with his description of a “community of people who are spiritually bound together by language, environment, history and common ideals and, above all, a continuity with the past.” This insistence upon “continuity with the past” is once more thoroughly English in its inspiration, since for Vaughan Williams it is a living past; it is exemplified by the freshness and spontaneity of the ancient folk-song and by the tradition of Byrd and Purcell, Tallis and Wilbye, revived in his own music. Yet it must be emphasised, too, that this belief and trust in a national “community” did not preclude for him a faith in the larger possibilities of human civilisation; he professed a commitment, for example, to “a united Europe and a world federat
ion,” but this global polity had to be established upon an attachment to a local ground since “everything of value in our spiritual and cultural life springs from our own soil.” The medieval composers of England were part of a larger Catholic and European civilisation, but theirs was still a readily identifiable national art. It is the great perplexity, and mystery, of native consciousness.

  Vaughan Williams’s most recent biographer has suggested that the composer “instinctively knew there were idioms of atavistic English music, whether of Tudor polyphony or of folk song, that bore a cultural fingerprint peculiar to his homeland.”18 A musicologist has also remarked, of this “national spirit in music,” that “the composer expresses some deeply-felt national characteristic with roots far back in social and cultural evolution.”19 These may not be fashionable notions, but they are suggestive ones. How far does the Norfolk Rhapsody go back; to what atavistic longing does A Sea Symphonyspeak, and do the strangeness and serenity of Sinfonia Antarctica invoke an Anglo-Saxon fortitude in the face of natural bleakness? The sense of place, so central to this study, is also evident. Peter Warlock’s “An Old Song” represented “very much the Cornish moor where I have been living.” 20 A musical historian has in turn recovered this sense of place in the Norfolk landscape of Ernest Moeran’s “The Song of the High Hills” and in Frank Bridge’s “There Is a Willow Grows Aslant a Brook.” The genius loci still sings. In the preliminary sketches for the Ninth Symphony Vaughan Williams drew upon memories of Stonehenge and Salisbury Plain; when he first saw the ancient stones he was suffused with “a feeling of recognition” and “the intuition that I had been there already.” His music is instinct with that sense of belonging, so that the act of listening to it becomes a form of home-coming.