It has been remarked of Delius and his contemporaries that, through their works, “a wave of nature-mysticism swept like a rushing mighty wind.”21 This great wave has been related to pagan nature worship and to elements of Celtic mythology, also; the possibilities of English music spring from the distant past, and can be expressive of it. But if the material is innate and instinctive, it must constantly be refashioned or refined. Thus in his Third Symphony, known as The Pastoral Symphony, Vaughan Williams wished to touch upon that “nerve of English mysticism” by which he hoped “the psyche of the nation might be made whole.” 22 His last symphony, completed shortly after he had set ten poems by William Blake for voice and oboe, is filled “with an inner light” and a sound both “unearthly and enigmatic.”23 It is the inner light of the English tradition and the English imagination.
His understanding of that tradition was informed by his twin passion for folk-song and for Tudor music. He loved madrigals just as much as he loved “Bushes and Briars” because he found in both of them an authentic, if unanalysable, English note. His deepest instinct was to draw both of them together in a music rich with harmony. He believed that the formal or ecclesiastical music of the Tudors drew its energy and strength “from the unwritten and unrecorded art of its own countryside,” and his purpose was to restore that grand symbiosis. “There was a time,” he once wrote, “when England was always reckoned a most musical nation” and he wished to replenish his native culture with fresh melodies.
It has often been remarked how, in the music of Delius, the plangent harmonies convey an intense and intricate sense of loss or transience; it is an intrinsic part of the English imagination, first evinced in Beowulf and the Arthurian cycle. Warlock’s “Corpus Christi Carol,” based upon an old English carol, contains “a plaintive liquescent chromatic harmony of unutterable desolation.”24 It is associated with lost childhood and the fugitive memory of the child’s landscape is related to the concept of innocence, precarious and fragile. The melancholy of Vaughan William’s music “set it apart from that of the continental masters,” 25 and it may be that the island itself manifests the sadness of long-endured human occupation with all the cares and woes that it brings. Thus the music of Delius has a characteristically English tone which sets him apart from, for example, Mahler or Strauss— with its often searing nostalgia . . . “its ever-frustrated yearning . . . its understated dreamy melancholy.” 26 It is aligned with the “sense of weary desolation” attendant upon certain English songs of the thirteenth century,27 and “the undertone of intense sadness” glimpsed in Vaughan Williams’s setting of the songs of A. E. Housman.28 Pleasure and melancholy, lyrical beauty and desolation, are thus uniquely aligned in true English synthesis.
Another line of national music was continued by Vaughan Williams when he agreed to be the musical editor of The English Hymnal as an alternative to Hymns Ancient and Modern. He knew well enough that sacred music was one of the great glories of English composition, and that Tallis and Byrd and Dunstable were acknowledged to be the finest masters of their time. So, engaged upon his twin pursuit of reclaiming Tudor polyphony and folk-music as the true native arts, he fashioned a hymnal directly out of these elements. His concern was once more with the tradition. Church music provided the only consistent and continuous musical inheritance, however bowdlerised and inhibited it had become, and Vaughan Williams wished to revive it by incorporating “tunes” by Lawes and Tallis as well as carols and traditional folk-melodies. When he took a psalm tune from that hymnal and composed his Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, he created “the ultimate expression of the English soul in music.”29
The sacred music of the past can be restored to life in more than one sense. Vaughan Williams received his first inspiration for the masque of Job, for example, from Blake’s series of illustrations to that sacred book. Throughout his life he evinced a profound regard for Blake and the tradition of visionary writing in English, encompassing Bunyan as well as Herbert, Shelley as well as the King James Bible. His own visionary powers, intimated in the great symphonies, were enlarged by his reading of the English visionaries; he had pondered over Bunyan’s pilgrim for fifteen years before completing The Shepherds of the Delectable Mountains, and thus associated himself with a tradition of ancient religious dissent and radicalism even while remaining for all intents and purposes an atheist. He could not escape his national inheritance, however, and his religious music is some of the finest ever created.
There are other elements of Vaughan Williams’s native artistry which may be adduced here by way of explanation and interpretation. There is the question, for example, of his detachment and reticence. “I don’t know whether I like it,” he remarked of his Fourth Symphony, “but it’s what I meant.” Of another orchestral piece he said, “Do what you like with it. Play it backwards if you want to.” All this was said in the context of his overwhelming artistry and professionalism. Pevsner has already noted this detachment as an intrinsic element of the English imagination. It is not a question of false modesty but, rather, a genuine aversion towards claiming too much. When a contemporary composer acknowledged that he had written a piece of music “on his knees,” Vaughan Williams replied that “I wrote Sancta Civitas sitting on my bum.” It seems, like much in Vaughan Williams, to be a “typically” English remark, eschewing any expression of deep emotion and siting the real strength of purpose in his posterior. It has all those elements of practicality and common sense which are considered to be characteristic, as well as a faint sense of earthy or ribald humour which comes (almost literally) with the territory.
Another example of his temperament has been explored by his friend and interpreter Michael Kennedy, who has remarked that “at rehearsal and in performance his concern was always with technical matters . . . and never with the emotional content of the music.”30 This emphasis upon the practical and pragmatic is wholly comprehensible in the English context, as is Vaughan Williams’s taciturnity or diffidence concerning “the emotional content.” He was not given “to probing into himself and his thoughts or his own music.”31 We may say the same of other English artists who have prided themselves on their technical skills and are decidedly reluctant to discuss the “meaning” of their productions. Thus Mr. Kennedy believes that the Sixth Symphony must have represented “a deeply-felt, personal and impassioned utterance” precisely because Vaughan Williams’s own programme-note “studiously avoids any hint of emotional commitment.”32 It is, once more, a question of English embarrassment.
There is in Vaughan Williams’s work what has been described as “a preoccupation with sonorities,”33 which may in turn be related to what one musical historian has called “the English love of fullness of sound”34 first noticed in the twelfth century. That fullness of sound, touched by melodic beauty, is a distinctive passion in Vaughan Williams just as it is in Purcell or in Tallis. We read of certain extant manuscripts where “the English added their characteristically acute sense of vocal sonority” which could become “a special concern for euphony (for which they were later to become especially noted).” 35 It became apparent, too, in the employment of several lines of harmony meeting and parting in a musical structure like that of interlace.
That particular reverence for harmony might be variously interpreted at an aesthetic or social level; the English predilection for compromise and moderation, after all, is an aspect of the “golden mean.” The rich harmonic texture of Vaughan Williams’s music may thus be associated with the “harmonic forces” of Purcell’s compositions and the “slow-moving harmonies” and “fullness of instrumentation” in Elgar,36 or it may be related to a more primitive need for harmonious order arising from various competing elements. In either sphere, it is the true music of England. In 1994 the most acclaimed of contemporary English composers, Thomas Adès, completed a string quartet entitled Arcadiana; its most poignant and lyrical movement, the sixth, was entitled “O Albion.”
EPILOGUE
The Territorial Imperative<
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And so the English imagination takes the form of an endless en-chanted circle, or shining ring, moving backwards as well as forwards. I return again to Ford Madox Ford—returning being one of the central images of this book—who wrote that “my private and particular image of English history in these matters is one of waving lines. I see tendencies rise to the surface of the people. I see them fall again and rise again.” These “lines” of force or influence connect the present with the past. We draw half our strength and inspiration from the writers of the past. From their example we learn that the history of the English imagination is the history of adaptation and assimilation. Englishness is the principle of diversity itself. In English literature, music and painting, heterogeneity becomes the form and type of art. This condition reflects both a mixed language comprised of many different elements and a mixed culture comprised of many different races. That is why there is also, in the products of the English imagination, a characteristic mixing or blurring of forms; in these pages I have traced the conflation of biography, or history, and the novel.
The English have in that sense always been a practical and pragmatic race; the history of English philosophy, for example, has been the history of empiricism and of scientific experiment. There are no works of speculative theology, but there are many manuals of religious instruction. This native aptitude has in turn led to disaffection from, or dissatisfaction with, all abstract speculation. The true emphasis rests upon the qualities of individual experience, which are manifest in the English art of portraiture and in the English novel of character. The English imagination is also syncretic and additive—one episode leading to another episode—rather than formal or theoretical.
So there are many striking continuities in English culture, ranging from the presence of alliteration in English native poetry for the last two thousand years to the shape and size of the ordinary English house. But the most powerful impulse can be found in what I have called the territorial imperative, by means of which a local area can influence or guide all those who inhabit it. The example of London has often been adduced. But the territorial imperative can also be transposed to include the nation itself. English writers and artists, English composers and folk-singers, have been haunted by this sense of place, in which the echoic simplicities of past use and past tradition sanctify a certain spot of ground. These forces are no doubt to be found in other regions and countries of the earth; but in England the reverence for the past and the affinity with the natural landscape join together in a mutual embrace. So we owe much to the ground on which we dwell. It is the landscape and the dreamscape. It encourages a sense of longing and belonging. It is Albion.
Notes
INTRODUCTION: ALBION
1.S.B. Greenfield and D. G. Calder, A New Critical History of Old English Literature, p. 58.
2. ibid., p. 61.
3. Michael Wood, In Search of England, p. 100.
4. ibid.
5. ibid., p. 16.
1. THE TREE
1. Joan Evans, English Art 1307–1461, p. 54.
2. Francis Spufford, The Child that Books Built, p. 24.
2. THE RADIATES
1. K. R. Dark, Civitas to Kingdom, p. 184.
2. ibid., p. 191.
3. LISTEN!
1. E. M. W. Tillyard, The English Epic and Its Background, p. 171.
2. Kenneth Sisam, Studies in the History of Old English Literature, p. 28.
4. WHY IS A RAVEN LIKE A WRITING DESK?
1. The Exeter Book Riddles, ed. and trans. Kevin Crossley-Holland, p. 68.
2. ibid., p. 24.
3. ibid., p. 28.
4. John Stephens, Music and Poetry in the Early Tudor Court, p. 17.
5. John Leyerle, “The Interlace Structure of Beowulf,” University of Toronto Quarterly, October 1967, p. 81.
6. The Owl and the Nightingale, trans. Brian Stone, p. 162.
7. John Caldwell, The Oxford History of English Music, Volume 2, p. 226.
8. ibid., Volume 1, p. 162.
9. A. R. Braunmuller, “The Arts of the Dramatist,” in The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Drama, ed. A. R. Braunmuller and Michael Hattaway, p. 73.
10. Graham Hough, A Preface to the Fairie Queen, p. 93.
11. Margaret Rickert, Painting in Britain: The Middle Ages, p. 47.
12. Joan Evans, English Art, 1307–1461, p. 5.
5. A RARE AND SINGULAR BEDE
1. A. H. Thompson (ed.), Bede, His Life, Times and Writings, p. 62.
2. Kevin Crossley-Holland (ed. and trans.), The Anglo-Saxon World, p. 241.
3. J. F. Webb (ed. and trans.), The Age of Bede, p. 203.
4. S. B. Greenfield and D. G. Calder, A New Critical History of Old English Literature, p. 8.
5. Bede, A History of he English Church and People, trans. Leo Sherley-Price, rev. R. E. Latham, p. 205.
6. Edwin Jones, The English Nation: The Great Myth, p. 2.
7. Webb, p. 23.
8. ibid., p. 178.
9. D. Talbot Rice, English Art, 871–1100, p. 36.
10. Greenfield and Calder, p. 31.
11. D. Parsons (ed.), Tenth-Century Studies, p. 44.
12. ibid., p. 8.
13. Talbot Rice, p. 47.
6. THE SONG OF THE PAST
1. Wilhelm Levison, “Bede as Historian,” in Bede, ed. A. H. Thompson, p. 142.
2. R. W. Southern, Medieval Humanism, p. 7.
3. All quotations are from Nennius, History of the Britons, ed. A. W. Wade-Evans.
4. Kevin Crossley-Holland (ed. and trans.), The Anglo-Saxon World, p. 35.
7. THE LIVES OF OTHERS
1. J. Boffey, “Middle English Lives.” In The Cambridge History of Medieval Literature, ed. D. Wallace, p. 617.
2. The Voyage of St. Brendan, ed. J. J. O’Meara, p. xiv.
3. J. F. Webb (ed. and trans.), The Age of Bede, p. 216.
4. ibid., p. 221.
5. John Wasson, “The Morality Plays: Ancestor of Elizabethan Drama,” in The Drama of the Middle Ages, ed. C. Davidson et al., p. 322.
6. ibid., p. 325.
8. A LAND OF DREAMS
1. Humphrey Carpenter, J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography, p. 64.
2. R. W. Southern, Medieval Humanism, p. 146.
3. Bede, A History of the English Church and People, trans. Leo Sherley-Price, rev. R. E. Latham, p. 127.
4. ibid., p. 175.
5. ibid., p. 285.
6. ibid., p. 289.
7. J. F. Webb (ed. and trans.), The Age of Bede, p. 52.
8. M. Rickert, Painting in Britain: The Middle Ages, p. 172.
9. A NOTE ON ENGLISH MELANCHOLY
1. S. A. J. Bradley (ed.), Anglo-Saxon Poetry, p. 359.
2. John Caldwell (ed.), The Oxford History of English Music, Volume 1, p. 31.
3. ibid., pp. 73–4.
4. E. K. Chambers, Malory and Fifteenth-Century Drama, Lyrics and Ballads, p. 198.
5. Caldwell (ed.), Volume 1, p. 427.
6. Wilfred Mellers, “Music: Paradise and Paradox,” in Seventeenth-Century Britain, ed. Boris Ford, p. 196.
7. Ellis Waterhouse, Painting in Britain 1530–1790, p. 139.
8. John Murdoch, “Painting: From Astraea to Augustus,” in Seventeenth-Century Britain, ed. Boris Ford, p. 254.
9. Andrew Varney, Eighteenth-Century Writers in Their World, pp. 176–7.
10. Waterhouse, p. 235.
10. THE ROLLING HILLS
1. W. G. Hoskins, The Making of the English Landscape, p. 285.
2. J. F. Webb (ed. and trans.), The Age of Bede, p. 56.
3. ibid., p. 69.
4. Christopher Woodward, In Ruins, p. 119.
5. ibid., p. 120.
6. William Gaunt, A Concise History of English Painting, p. 111.
11. IT RAINED ALL NIGHT
1. Kevin Crossley-Holland (ed. and trans.), The Anglo-Saxon World, p. 242.
2. S. A. J. Bradley (ed. and trans.), Anglo-Saxon Poetry, p. 142.
3. ibid., p.
21.
4. ibid., p. 34.
5. Kenneth Sisam, Studies in the History of Old English Literature, p. 23.
6. Bede, A History of the English Church and People, trans. Leo Sherley-Price, rev. R. E. Latham, pp. 129–30.
7. Peter Conrad, The Everyman History of English Literature, p. 451.
8. Kenneth Clark, On the Painting of English Landscape, p. 14.
9. Margaret Drabble, A Writer’s Britain, p. 189.
10. Peter Woodcock, The Enchanted Isle, p. 25.
11. ibid., p. 16.
12. ibid., p. 31.
12. THE PROSE OF THE WORLD
1. A. P. Smyth, King Alfred the Great, p. 549.
2. ibid., p. 560.
3. Patrick Wormald, “Anglo-Saxon Society and Its Literature,” in The Cambridge Companion to Old English Literature, ed. Malcolm Godden and Michael Lapidge, p. 19.
4. Smyth, p. 525.
5. ibid., p. 531.
6. ibid., p. 530.
7. S. B. Greenfield and D. G. Calder, A New Critical History of Old English Literature, p. 61.
8. W. P. Ker, Medieval English Literature, p. 55.
9. K. H. Jackson, Language and History in Early Britain, p. 107.
10. ibid., p. 108.
13. THE FIRST INITIALS
1. Margaret Rickert, Painting in Britain: The Middle Ages, p. 19.
Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination Page 52