•
('Not Angles but angels'). A late seventh-century b
deelared that Gregory would lead 'gentem Anglorum' i
God al the time of the Last Judgement. One of the
success of the Reformation, and the formation of
England, lies in this national zeal.
King Alfred is associated with 'the councillors of all t
in a late ninth-centUty treaty, and defined himself as 'r
Saxonum'_ In the preface to the translation of G
Pastora/is he alludes to 'Ange/cynn', or Englishkind, an
'D' and 'E' texts of the Ang/o-Saxon Chronicles evin
...., English nalionalism with reference 10 'this nalion',
of England' and 'all the flower of the English nation'.2
The nationalism of the Anglo-Saxon period has bee
-~
I"
the fact that no other European nalion has kept its b
over so many centuries. English literature, too, is amo
Europe. Ir has been remarked that the hewic poetry
900 strikes a singularly patriotic note, and we may re
significant.
Archbishop Wulfslan's 'Seemon of the Wolfto the E
continually invokes theodscipe or lhe nation in an act
adrnonitory comrnunion. As one historian has put it,
the creation of the Anglo-Saxons, and it was lhey who
lt was of crucial importance, in this context, lhat m
wills were composed in Old English; the language
image of unity and identity. In that most importan
poems, Beowu/f, the voices possess 'eloquence and u
xx
XXll
adjaceot wall. Wordswonh stood beneath an ash tree in
aod was vouchsafed visions
Of human Forms with supcrhuman Powers.
The same poet saw among yew trees 'Time the Shado
other verses upon 'The Haunted Tree'.
The magical talismans of Puck, in Rudyard Kipling's P
Hm, are the leaves of the oak, the thom and the ash
the children access to earlier times. As the Roman
aposrrophised the Druids of the English isle in the first
you only is giveo knowledge or ignorance (whichever it
aod powers of heaven; your dwelling is in the Ione hear
In Pier. the P/owman, composed in the fourteenth cenr
ediet of a later god ensures that 'Beches and brode okes w
the grouode'.
These sourees lilI with vigour aod eoergy the legeods o
hidiog himself among the trccs of Shcrwood Fores
desceoded fcom the Eoglish imp, Robin Goodfellow, b
akio to the formidable ligure of the Green Man. The f
begun in 1354 with the incarceration of a 'Robin H
poaching of venison in the forest of Rockiogham, b
seeular origin can aCCOUnl for the power which this green
the trees has been granted.
By 1377 the 'rymes of Robyn Hooď were as familia
tales, aod as late as the sixteenth century the local f
Thames and Severo ValIeys, and of Devon, were stili a
plays of Robin Hood. It is not neeessarily an old, or forg
4
towards which we ineluetably trave!. Of Gainsborougb's la
trees and forests in profusion, Constable also wrote: 'on
them we find tears in our eyes and know not what bro
Gainsborough himself remarked that there 'was not a
clump of tfees, nor even a single tree of any beauty ... th
treasure in my memory from earliest years'. And what of
own paintings? 'The trees', he wrote, '... seem to ask me t
something like them.' An enthusiast once ereated an enclos
were to be planted all the tfees of Shakespeare's plays.
Tbe destfuction of trees creates dismay and bewilderme
English poets. When Clare's favourite elm tfees were co
explained that 'I have been several momings to bid th
There is an English legend of a dying stag, sobbing whe
time it enters its own familiar glade; this, too, is part of th
When Gerard Manley Hopkins watched an ash tree cut
came at that moment a great pang and I wished to die a
the inscapeS of this world destroyed any more'. 'Inscape
Saxon derivation, from 'sceap' meaning creation wi
obeisance to 'instaepe' or threshold. The ash represenrs
creation, for Hopkins in the nineteenth century no less
ancient priests of Britain. There is, here, a continuity.
century tapestry the antlers of stags resemble the trees u
as if all nature were animated by one aspiring spirit; fif
English mystics saw trees as men walking, a vision recal
in his legend of moving trees or Ents in The Lord or th
derives from the Old English word meaning 'giants'. Tol
to them as the 'shepherds of the trees', thus reintroducin
6
of seminal Originals, were before latent in us'. Dur anc
y thr
0ugh
at that moment of quietus and we are bUfapali
/ times. ~
-":AIld is this the condition of the world itself? As the
eighteenth-century poet Edward Young asked, in his Co
Origina/ Composition, 'Bom originals, how comes it to
die Copies?' It is a question of absorbing interes\ for tho
template the persistence through time of certain panems
or expression.- It has often heen remarked- how the inha
Scotrish Highlands retained such a primitive way of
remained in the ninth century for many hundreds of ye
unequivocal evidence was discovered in Gough's C
Gorge. Here was found the skeleron of a man who had e
moment in that great expanse of time known as the Mid
his mirochondrial DNA was subsequendy tested, and
found with a history teacher residing in the late twe
Cheddar village. Thus a genetic link can be direcdy est
,period of approximately eleven thousand years. lIut c
a question of place, rather than of tribe or famHy?
become a form of indwelling or imaginative life?
elucidate the characteristics of the English imagination
of twO thousand years, may not then be a futile or unw
For over one thousand years the Celtic tribes were esta
England; these separate British tribes, or kingdom
survived in situ from the pre-Roman Iron Age ro the su
and the Saxon invasions. Their verses of prophecy an
8
10
Anglo-Saxon English, which survived for many cen
Augustine had brought Christianity to England in 597, ma
traced to much earlier beliefs. The idols and demons, th
amulets, of the Anglo-Saxons may derive some of their
Neolithic avatars. Just as the spirals are found within
church, so concealed within the fabric of the church of St
discovered rolls which contained magical invocations and
pagan rites.
The lineaments of a style and sensibility wrnch ha
centuries been characterised as entirely English can be tra
work. The motif of the spiral, for example, is deployed w
and abstract patteming. The tendency towards elabo
aligned to surface flamess, will become increasingly app
narrative of the English imagination. The vision of the
intense and graphic one, executed with a grave sense o
majestic, almost numinous, style. Theirs was not an art
representation of narure but one rooted in the essential
appearance. Animals are depieted in long, flowing, ribb
ments; they become zoomorphs, or images of life as
calligraphy of significant formo This visionary capacity of
the utrnost importance in understanding the English gen
There have been many theories about the persistent C
in native art and literature, the most eloquent of them em
Study ofCeltic Líterature by Matthew Arnold in 1867. H
observation that even if we no longer hear of the Celts af
and Saxon invasions, that by no means proves they had c
conquerors make their own history, while the vanquishe
occupaJion with form and rirual, as well as the f
panem. There were the five wounds of Christ and rhe
Vírgln,i:he five wits of the human self and rhe five
virrues of fraunchise, felawship, cleanness, cortaysye
conceen for panem is embodied in the form of rhe pent
known as 'David's Fooť and created by the wooden
folk-dancers wirh the cry of 'A Nut! A Nur!' or a Kno
... the English call it,

In all the land, I hear, the Endless Knot'

There are seven sins, seven sacraments, and seven wor
of rhem pan of the passage of humankind through e
the imponance of allegory may here be glimpsed, wir
'reading' of rexts and illuminarions as a fundamental
: the understanding of Piers the P/owman, Pear/ o
!Prologue' of The Canterbury Ta/es. ~e might suggesr
' hiscory plays of Shakespeare, and rhe symbolic fict
;~c)<el)s, owe something to rhis now buried or disrega
The da}' trself was the medIum of nrual. The canom
J	 Ch;;;~h - ~ith-tJí.e 'Grear Hours' of L-auds and Vespe
rhe 'Linie Hours' of Prime, Tierce, Sext, None a
marerially alrered the shape of time in medieval disco
were connecred with the narrarive of Christ's Pas
representing the crucifixion and entombmenr, but t
fureher lirany of time wirh the hours of the Virgin as
inrermediary for mankind. The sequence of hours the
124
English sensibility from a Catholic sensibility. The world
,and marve1s is stili alive in Shakespeare's late plays.
What e1se might be ex:peeted from a Catholic sensibiJity
in splendour is of course related to the intox:icatio
marvellous, but resplencIem pamp and display were also
ce1ebrating the hierarchy and order of the universe. If t
England gazed heavenward, and looked up at the night sk
light and harmonl', the)' believed that they were looking
outward; the partem oI the heavens then became a para
orders of significaIlce upon the earth, whether orders of in
orders of human rank, orders af dream, ar orders af perce
of some importance to the writer and artist, sioce the
personality was not far advanced; just as the personal si
priest made no difference to his power upon the altar, s
individual perception was less important than the corpus
anc!._aajl1ired knowledge. Authenticity was more sign
individuality or originality, so we mal' ex:pect an art or a l
rests upon things already known and understood. It is
reason wI1Y-P')l'e l[<instated Homer and William Morr
Beowulf, why Tennyson modelled his verse upon Arthur
why Alfred translated Boethius and Augustine. If in on
describe the English imagination as antiquarian in instincl,
the de1ight in the past, then it is important to see how a pr
!-..Catholic culture and sensibility mal' stili dwell within it.
It is a nice point indeed to setde rival instincts and rival d
was an Eng!ish Catholicism, with its rituals and its own loc
the Roman declarations at the Synod of Whitby and t
126
body of English Iyric, both sacred and secular, as well as
English texts; among the great Franciscans can be num
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries respectively, Roger
William of Ockham. AlI of them, too, wrote in Latin for
community of scholars. Nevertheless, it has often been ma
their sensibility was'of a distinet and distinctive English
Ockham believed that 'all knowledge is derived from expe
argument which anticipates in an uncanny way the English
for empiricism, or logical positivism, or whatever term
principled but pragmatic attitude towards all metaphysical
Roger Bacon, too, has often been seen as the forerunner
famous namesake, Francis Bacon, in his emphasis on the im
scientific method in intellectual enquiry. So we have the
distinctively English sensibility working within, and gain
from, a European and Latin tradition of learning. When
that, in the twelfth century, English architecture a
represented 'a great, at moruents supreme, exponent of
style'II the question of in/luence and identity becomes a d
If there is such a thing as a native cast of thougbt it can
understood only in the context of a broadly European sens
was a great movement of 'humanism' in the twelfth
example, but the most significant contribution which Eng
the new learning was historical and practical in nature.
become a familiar theme? The great strengrh of English lea
course monastic learning, but from the English religious
tens of thousands of charters, annals and chronicles. Ma
128
as any cathedral. Ir has been estimated that there were
six hundred of these communities in England, with
Yorkshire and fifty-one in Lincolnshire. These monast
colonised the land about them, with pastures and sheeptruly
be said that they helped to create the landscape of E
thousands of parish churches, many acquired spires so th
faith aspired from the land to the sky. In the thir
Salisbury and Westminster were raised in the Gothic s
great west front of Wells Cathedral was fashioned w
tableaux and gilded statuary gleaming like the gate of h
When Julian of Norwich believed that she was dying h
held a cross before her face saying, 'I have browte thee th
maker and saviour. Louke thereupon and comfort thee
a characteristic medieval scene, but the abbeys and
England fulfilled the same purpose as the crucifix be
woman. The faithful saw them and were comforted.
Over four centuries the styles altered according to d
of perception, with the broad movement of change from
to Gothic classified into the somewhat arbitrary divi
English, Decorated and Perpendicular; but the statemen
glory remained the same. Perpendieular has been descri
native architecture, without parallel in continental Euro
the central characteristics of English churches persist thr
native predilection for patterning, and the delight in fia
have already been suggested as aspects of English t
bination of ingenious or elaborate surface decoration
13 0
venture almost roo close to them. Then you may no
satyrs, goats and dragons, carved upon bosses; there ar
with the wild gaiety which seems to characterise one
medieval spirit. There are also scenes of matchless deta
toothache holds open his mouth in pain, in Wells Ca
farmer belahours a thief with a pitchfork. In Beverley a
scolding wife in a wheelbarrow, and a fox is hange
Manchester a hare grills a huntsman over a fire, and at B
preaches to a congregation of hens. These scenes are
native spirit of mockery; if humour and pathos can
mingled in English drama and fiction, so the sacred and
deemed to be natural companions. It is a question of no
one emotion, or manner, too seriously or for too long.
This is nowhere more evident than in the grotesque mi
obtrude in the margins of sacred books; they a
'babooneries' and according to Nikolaus Pevsner in The
English Art they represent a wholly native convention trace
the baboonery to its source,' he wrote, 'one finds th
in Englanď.7
Ir is a remarkable, but not unexpected,
Wycliff denounced 'peyntings and babwyneries', and in
Fame Chaucer celebrated 'subtiJ compassinges ... Ba
pynacles'. There are monkeys disporting themselves in
illuminated psalters, and on the top of a page illustrating
Christ are two medieval wresders; villagers are fightin
among a Jesse Tree, while on the Beatus page of the Go
ten rabbits solemnly and decorously conduet a foneral
132.
and emotion'.10 There may be spectacle and crowded a
lS no interiority of fee/ing; the outline, rather t
dimensional figure, is presented only. But these ar
criticisms aimed by contemporaries at Fie/ding and Dick
and Steme. It seems to be a native fault, if fault it be,
often reserved for the surface.
'Babooneries' or miniature domestic scenes arrayed i
the iIluminations often act as a kind of frame around th
Chaucerian cricic has in rurIl conduded thar 'the
Canterbury Ta/es 'gives us that strong sense of reallif
aHords',ll In a lifteenth-century Book of Homs the ce
Virgin and Child and worshipper, are depicted in gra
formal attitudes; the frame around ;t, however, is repl
Iife and activity as a pilgrimage makes its way.
The transpositions from iIluminat;on to text ar
inevitable. ln 1250 the artists working upon the mural
'low room' at Westminster requested a copy of the Ges
order to iIlustrate scenes from it. In tum the devisers o
medieval drama directly copied scenes and images from
stained-glass windows and roof-bosses. In a C"tholic
visual icons or. exempla ftre jtniversally recognised,
e,v~rynlode_oLart. Thc illustracion of a royal pagea
shows the principal guests with costumes and attitudes
stages of the 'cycle drama' of Chester or York. In a cult
the appropriate costume ar uniform will be displaye
'Christ among the Doctors' is depicted in matluscript an
'34
exists a pattem of activity, which at a later date manifest
'Norwich School' of painting.
Irs two principal counties, Norfolk and Suffolk, are na
North Folk and South Folk of the Anglo-Saxons but the
boundaries of those tribes are uncertain; we may also in
Cambridgeshire and Essex in what was the most fertile a
London, the most densely populated region of the countr
was to a certain extent isolated from the rest of England
commerce with Europe flourished, however, srnce it was
trade routes of northem Eutope and the Netherlands; t
prospered, in particular, as the emergence of the great 'w
of Long Melford and Lavenham may testify. Another
aspect lent a particular tone to the area. There were few g
but instead a large number of villages and towns filled w
and a farming popuIation. In tum this seems to have crea
to create, what has been described as an 'economically p
religiously radical area'.3 The area was radical in more th
however; anti-monarchical in tendency, it gravitated to
ment or the barons rather than to the king. Ir possessed
merchant economy, 'involved in a capitalist and c
system'" and out of it sprang a distinctively local art and
The illuminations of what has come to be known as the
School' are of an unmatched liveliness of oudine. Wheth
matter is taken from bestiaries or literary romances, Bib
the saints, they are all domesticated within a native
combines naturalism with grotesquerie. There are East A
136
they were depicted in painting ar in stained glass, a pa
of art ar theatre can be seen to inform a particular kin
indeed, in any just analysis, art and devotion cannot be s
also, is part of the Catholic inheritance of England.
Just as the art of East Anglia is derived from many di
English and European, so in turn the lineaments of Julia
piety have been traced to European spiritual ment
Bernard and St Catherine of Siena, St Thomas Aquinas
St Thierry. Yet it has been said that 'Julian perfecdy
English spiritual tradition' because 'she combines all th
patristic lineage into something new''? It is the charac
procedure of assimilation and change, expressing itse
been described as Julian's native cheerfulness and com
'optimism' and her 'prudence' are 'inherent in all Engl
Her methods are practical and her metaphors pragmat
must labour as does the gardener, 'delvyn and dyky
sweten, and turne the earth upsodowne'. Thus she r
juridical categories of scholastic moral theology, and
penitential rigours of the Franciscans',' arriving at a wh
East Anglian compromise.
Another native of that region has added significand
religious history. Margery Kempe came from Bis
Norfolk, and was a contemporary of Julian of Norwich
visited for spiritual consolation. Her father had five tim
of this prosperous 'wool' town, and her husband
I3 8
have also been the defining characteristics of English a
landscape itself adopted the form of the English imagin
140
they were also practical and usefu!. They were modes o
exhortation; where once the circulation of learning wa
the pilgrimage to European libraries or by the wo
exegetes, the demands of knowledge were now amp
municated in the various journals and periodicals of
house society. Matters of theology and of physics, of
economics, were now the subject of the 'easy' and 'fam
English essayists. The contribution of the essay to mo
literature was therefore immense. As Addison remar
number of the Spectator, 'I shall be ambitious to have
I have brought Philosophy out of c10sets and librar
colleges, to dwell in c1ubs and assemblies, at tea-tabl
houses'. The other merit of the essay lay in its brevity;
the early eighteenth century put it, it was more appropr
and lmpetuous Humour of the English, who have na
for long-winded performances, for they have no soon
but they desire to see the End of it'. That is perhaps w
Montaigne, translated by Florio in the early seve
acquired such an enormous popularity at an earlier d
first popularised in English by Francis Bacon, set
eighteenth-century civilisation. It has been concluded t
'the only literary form used by every major author of
influence can be traced in the more fluent and in
dialogues and sermons, treatises and poems. And, of c
was all.
31 8
unexpectedly from allegory to history, from herois
meot to pantomime and melodrama. Pierce Egan's L
narrative adventure diverted and diffused by ver
speculation, topographical enquiry, romance and
Egan even manages ro include an operatic score. T
world is comprehensive and capacious without nece
plex ar profound. It accommodates arbitrariness,
endless change.
Yet Charles Dickens, of all novelists, knew that
necessarily random or inscrutable; rather, that the m
lay in its interconnectedness. His own novels repre
image and symbol such an interpenetration of lives
London itself is packed to blackness with accumulat
shared experience. 'Draw but a Iittle circle', he
Humphrey's Clock, 'above the clustering housetops,
within its space everything, with its opposite extteme
close by.' Here 'life and death went hand in hand; w
stood síde by side; repletion and starvation laid
together' and here also were 'wealth and beggary, vic
and innocence ... all treading on each other and cr
He described 'the restlessness of a great city, and th
tumbles and tosses before it can get to sleep', as if i
encompass its IDuititude before it rests; if it ever can
the 'streams of people apparently without end ... jos
the crowd and hurrying forward'. Spectacle and
intrinsic aspects of the London vision and thus, by
English imagination itself. Yet it is not a false or ign
32.0
compositions,' he wrote, 'those subjects which will both
improve the mind, bid fair to be of the greatest util
therefore be entitled to rank in the highest class.' That e
'utility' might of itself be enough to characterise his Engl
his demotic and egalitarian temper is also pertinent. He d
upon the details of 'Iow life', and crowded his engravings
and helpless. In part it represents a Hogarthian defiance
and a kind of embarrassment at the striking of heroic
attirudes; in practice, too, it relies upon the representatio
familiar details rather than the grandly or generally expre
gesture. The def1ation of magnificence has always bee
English imagination.
Hogarth also depicts pantomimes and masquerades on
London, as if in implicit homage to the theatrical reality
are surrounded. In an engraving completed in the ea
1724, Masquerades and Operas, the London crowd is see
a pantomime entitled The Necromancer; in the same
market, is displayed the notice for a midnight masque
also drew Punch, whom in The Analysis of Beauty he c
being the reverse of all elegance, both as to movement an
same may be concluded of the Londoners in his engrav
often rendered as caricatures or as types.
Hogarth is of London, too, in his disregard for the
pieties of Christianity. Turner died murmuring that the
and this pagan spirit is very much part of the city's i
energetic life. In the fifth plate of Marriage·a-Ia-M
322
eoneeive of an Hoganhian 'progress' of the orphan
misery to wealth and happiness.
One critie wrote, in 1844, that anyone who wishe
genius of Mr Oiekens' should 'read the essays by Ch
Hazlin, on the genius of Hogarth'. There is indeed a
affinity. Oickens was often deseribed as 'Hoganhian
the anist were believed to possess the same strident
The resemblanee is not fortuitous. Oiekens was a
Hogarth's work, and his imagination was panl
absorption of Hogarth's engravings. Hoganh's depi
helped to ereate Rowlandson's The Dram Shop and
Shop, for example, but it was also the inspiration fo
Oiekens entitled 'Gin-Shops'; the young novelist
terms precisely the same spot whieh Hoganh had dep
years before. Just as Hogarth dwelled in loving deta
mass of erowds in March to Finchley and Southwar
exclaimed that 'we revel in a crowd of any kind - a s
delighť. Hoganh and Oiekens were both preoccupi
asylums, as if they represented a true image of Lond
of A Rake's Progress is best and most fully interpre
of Mr Pickwiek's incareeration in the Fleet Prison. B
entraneed by fairs and street earnivals so that Hog
Fair is amplified by Ojekens's essay on 'Greenwich F
the city becomes both prison and theatre, fairgroun
Oliver Twist has as its subtitle 'A Parish Boy's P
homage to Hoganh, while the more pathetic se
Nickleby were deseribed by Forster as 'like a piece
32 4
326
chambermaid into a lady, even if her gentility is som
But then this is also the condition of the city, wh
chastised in pamphlets and tracts for dressing up as th
imitating their manners. The novel was often criti
terms, for the size and nature of its audience. There is
vogue for fiction helped to create a 'reading public'
observed that fiction had become the especial de
tradespeople and servants. The appeal to women is pe
by the plethora of tides devoted to heroines - Pamel
- where the Anglo-Saxon and medieval tradition of f
is continued in another guise.
Despite the complaints of moralists, however, fic
being simply an entertainment or diversion for ser
people; ít acted, on the contrary, as an instruction m
book'. The fictions of the eighteenth century were on
to 'describe manners, paint characters, and try to cor
was advertised that Pamela was 'published in orde
principles of virtue and religion in the minds of the yo
a narrative which has its foundation in truth'. Nove
concemed with practice as weH as principle. They
etiquette and guides to polite society. Ir is no sim
therefore, that 'they depict more otten than not ar
status (ar wea1th and power) through isolated and ind
action rather than by inheritance or through corpor
So the elements of pantomime and masquerade also h
glimmerings of individualism; just as the city is the
328
and fluid society, where all may walk in disguise, th
found in generic identity and stability. Ir could b
fiction is a simulacrum of his journalism, but in tru
distinction. This may be profoundly unsettling f
ctitics, who wish to find in 'the English novel' som
some reliable touchstone of excellence, but it is tr
vatious narure of the English imagination.
Oefoe loved sensation ancl adventure, excessive d
in violent action. Tne energy and motion of Lon
with their rapid and impersonal beat, their digressi
all the fever and fearfulness of Roxana's life, for ex
in the restless and repetitious cadences of h
narrative. The speed and acceleration of the Lond
in Moll Flanders's quick way of explaining hersel
I try'd it at White-Chappel just by the corner
where the Coaches stand that go out ro Stratfor
Side of the Country; and another time at the F
Bishops-gate, where the Chester coaches then lar
streets emerges, too, in Moll's strong pltrases. 'So
sropped.... That's by the way.' There is a wonde
between Moll and a condemned woman. 'Well sa
e..y? ay, says she, I can't help myself, what signi
hang'd there's an End of me, and away she turn'd
furthet confitmation of the foteign belief that
\
death as a cheat or a thing of no moment, but
Defoe's rematkable fluency. In recent years hi
330
detail. Defoe is always seeking for extremes, so that th
is eHectively a literary device. Here we may make the
Hogarth or with Gíllray, whose vivid and animated vis
region of sublime distortion. The artists employed a 'st
expressive line',5 just as Defoe coined a powerful
heavily influenced by short Anglo-Saxon derivations;
out of a popular tradition of print or journalism, and
varied and urban market. But if it was a London visi
upon a native spirit and tradition.
The theatricality and excess of Henry Fielding's n
doubt; he was a highly successful dramatist befo
novelist. During his early career in London he wro
farces for tbe popular stage, composing some thirteen
three years, with titles such as The Author's Farce, R
and Tom Thumb. In the tradition of Defoe, he also fo
as a journalist before he turned to fiction; he became a
The Champion: ar, The British Mercury and wrote m
articles. He created a character upon the model o
Spectator', Hercules Vinegar, who with the members
family commented upon the aHairs of the day. In
writing journalism for the rest of his life. He edited tw
sheets, The True Patriot and The Jacobite's Journa
success of Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones, he took
of a twice-weekly periodical called The Covent-Gard
sense he shares a curious affinity with Charles Dic
332­
Whereupon the periodical Old England described To
Book so truly profligate, of such evi! Tendency, and off
chaste Reader, so discouraging to Vinue and detriment
Dickens avoided any taint of obscenity and improprie
be no Hoganh or Fielding in the nineteenth century
fiction was also derided for inconsistency and implausib
of his later novels were considered to be unrealistic 'tw
response of earnest intelligence to an urban sensibi!ity w
the pantomimic and the scenic, which revels in energy
and which betrays little interest in psychological or mo
lt is no accident that both Fielding and Dickens, for exa
their use of coincidence in plot-making as a natura
experience of the city convinced them that coincidence i
in human life and that it reflects a greater underlyi
relations. Theirs is a London vision.
li we reflect upon the different vinues of Tobias Smoll
Richardson, however, we may understand the actual ca
that vision. Smollett was born and educated in Scotland
London in order to pursue his career as a surgeon. V
assumed the role of a London writer, however, by bec
succession a journalist, dramatist and pamphleteer as we
He helped to edit the Critical Review, he compiled
Authentic and Entertaining Voyages and wrote a history
even tried his hand at farce and tragedy. A recognis
prodigal.achievement once more emerges.
Charles Dickens had Smollett's novels by hean
334
eccenrricity then becomes rhe nalural, if unacknowle
native virlue. 50 Smollett introduces certain srock ch
lhe formidable Mrs Trunnion who 'by the force of pr
Coniac, had erecled a mosl terrible tyranny in lhe
unfortunale spouse, Commodore Trunnion, is of quile
crealion. He is perhaps the first eccenlric in English pr
his companions, Pipe and Hatchway, he lives in a n
have been a hard-working man, and served all office
cook's shifter 10 lhe command of a vesse!. Here, you
the hand of a seaman, you dog.' He is the immed
innumerable Dickensian characters, from Captain C
Bagsrock, and the preposterous if amiable ex-seam
lhe liSl of English immorlals. He caUs his house a
drawbridge over a dilCh, and sleeps in a hammo
woundily' bul 'means no more harm than a suckli
localed in an English county 'bounded on one side by
can be seen as a burlesque upon lhe privale and e
characler. That is why he has achieved such exemp
conslant memories of lhe sea, and of naulical banle
Anglo-Saxon revenant; his fear of women and his
menlality can also be seen as marked characterislic
lemper. He is a reluclant and hen-pecked husband w
wilh his male companions, generally in the lavem, bu
good dealh. On his dealh-bed he declares, of his gr
may nol be ingraved in lhe Greek or Lalin lingos, and
French, which I abominale, bul in plain English, tha
comes to pipe aU hands at the great day, he may k
336
passionate reproach. Ir is written in the form of appare
spontaneous letters, so that everything happens in th
space of a day or a passing hour; the intensity of the a
tionately increased. It is not difficult to enter the move
therefore; the reader keeps pace, as it were, with the
the principal characters.
In that sense, if in no other, Samuel Richardson cha
of the English novel. He had a direct influence upon t
Austen who, in her Sanditon, reveals a character very I
'fancy had been early caught by all the impassioned &
able parts of Richardson; & such Authors as have si
tread in Richardson's steps, so far as Man's determ
Woman in defiance of every opposition of feeling an
concerned'. It has also been said that the novels of R
their steady attention to a sequence of fleeting impres
influenced Virginia Woolf and James Joyce; in addi
European writers as diverse as Rousseau and Goeth
posed a poem in his honour, 'O Richardson, Richard
in my eyes, you shall be my reading at aU times!' So d
and somewhat prim London tradesman enter the his
romanticism.
Ir could be said that Richardson provided a p
contribution to that history since, according to P
Englishness Jdentified, the 'English novel, the single m
of English culture on the Continent, was par excellenc
and manners'. By the laner half of the eighteenth ce
33 8
Rambler and The Idler, in his commentaries upon S
evinces a kind of sublime common sense - literally co
the feelings common to mankind - so that his poetry
marvellously freighted with general reserves of taste a
His gravitas lies also within the weight of his la
contamed aU of its classical afliliations. When introd
scholars and divines he spoke in Latin; like More and
him, he trusted the eflicacy of European humanism and
caUed 'the Anglo-Latin tradition'. His two greatest poe
Poem' and 'The Vanity of Human Wishes', are imitatio
satire; he translated Horace, and wrote poetry in Latin.
of dignilied melancholy he adverted to his position as
than 'author':
There mark what !lls the Scholar's Life assai
Toil, Envy, Want, the Patron, and the Jail
He was possessed by the idea of translation as a ma
English letters, therefore, and in the second volume
Poets he wrote that 'the affluence and comprehension
is very illustriously displayed in aur poetical translation
Writers; a work which the French seem to relinquish
concluding note suggests a certain nationalism of resp
leamed a context, and once again the English genius
out of a confluence of European or classical influe
Johnson remarked of Pope, when he declared that t
translation of the lliad was 'certainly the noblest v
340
language and its 'individualism of style, which corrob
for individuality'.' These are profound matters indeed
transmission 'of some common substance of thought
lorgotren past'.4 The Enghsh language will not yield
ments of academic discipline, and English literature
absorption in character and its developmenť.
J
These c
found in Elizabethan drama no less than in the come
in the historieal characters who populated Clarendon
Rebel/ion or Bumet's History ofMy Own Times, and
of Locke which sustained the natural rights of the ind
in short, to be found everywhere.
Jr is the merest truism to note, in this context, that
painting became for aU intents and purposes a
Hogarth once surmised thac ~portra~t painting cver h
suceeed betrer in this country than any other' and a
has confitmed this observation with the remark that
agenda for oeher forms of painting'.6 le is a practica
art; it is a commercial art. These may be eonsidered E
obsession with charaeter may be traced in medieva
misericords, in Rowlandson's cartoons and in
paintings. No other European nation has a Nationa
It has been said of Holbein's portraiture that 'his
in itself gives an English appearance to his work',7 w
there is something in the soil or air or atmosphere
impregnates even a foreign genius. Roy Strong h
}42.
nowhere so well performed as in Englanď.
His own likeness by Godfrey Kne11er emphasises the
English portrait: he was painted as one of tbe fortytbe
'Kit-Cat Club', a club of Whig notables which m
These portraits are not representations of the
communing individual but of something close to a c
When Jonathan Richardson e1aborated upon the th
painting in the early eighteenth century he chose
importance of 'beauty, good sense, breeding and ot
of the person', as jf he were constructing a raeial or
which the representation of the siner must aspire; the
than personal qualities.
One collector of contemporaneous English art wa
why he had not purchased one of Benjamin We
positions, to wbich came the reply, 'You surely w
hang up a moderu English picture in my house
portrait?' He might have included in this category t
formal portraits of actors in role, or actors in costu
significant part of tbe English canon. They ref/ecr th
for theatrical illusion, and in the work of such arti
Wright the tincmres of stage lighting reveal action
proscenium. Hogarth's renditions of The Beg
Highmore's representations of the more dramatic m
are also part of this tradition.
Yet Hogarth was equally capable of composing
which are suffused with a certain homeliness or in
the portrait heads of his servants are suffieiently we
344
with a litlle dark wig which scarcely covered his hea
hanging loosely about him'. His c10thing was ofte
collar and sleeves unbutloned, his stockings atound
Boswell noted that 'he is very slovenly in his dress, a
most uncouth voice'. Fanny Burney has left the
account, however, with her observations that 'He is
stoops terribly; he is almost bent double. His
constandy opening and shutling as if he was chewing
method of frequently twirling his !ingets, and twist
body i5 in continual agitation, see-sawing up and
never a moment quiet; and, in short, his whole per
motion.' His curious gait rneant that he was a consta
ment to children or to the 'mob'. He would 'zigzag'
streets, often colliding with people without realising
so, and he had an obsessive habit of knocking every
if he missed one, he would retrace his steps and give
suddenly come to a haJt in the middle of these thoro
his arms above his head in a spasmodic movement;
threshold he would whirl about, twisting his bod
sudden stride or leap. He enjoyed rolling down hills
This is not a diversion but, rather, an examp
description in the English manner. Here is Sa
example, upon the life of Jonathan Swift:
He rhought exercise oí great necessiry, and used tO ru
down a hal every twO hours. .. . He was always carefu
was therefore nO liberal entertainer, but was less frug
346
informed' he is also limning a self-porrrait. When h
scientist, Boerhaave, he was also engaged in an act of
'There was, in his air and motion, something rough and
majestic and great at the same time, that no man ever lo
without veneration.' There were less happy resembla
and in his account of William Collins's mental dec
suggestion of his own incipient madness. Collins 'la
years under that depression of mind which enchain
without destroying them, and leaves reason the kno
without the power of pursuing it'; this is the composit
desired to be tied and whipped, and whose own depr
was heavier than many other men could bear.
All the pity and sympathy of his nature, therefore,
bereft Savage. Indeed his entire description of the you
uncommon writer thrown away destitute into the alley
of London, is an image of Johnson as he might have be
day become. He wrote his friend's life when he
impoverished hack in the employment of the Gentlem
often forced to wander the streets at night for want of
And so when Johnson writes of Savage that 'when he l
he was frequently to spend the remaining part of the n
or at least was abandoned to gloomy reflections',
himself as e10quently as he writes about Savage. The
affiliations are formed. When in the same life-story
Savage was 'disowned by his mother, doomed
obscurity, and launched upon the ocean of life only
swallowed by its quick-sands or dashed upon its rock
348
was wholly appropriate that it should also have nurt
extensive development of prose biography. They grew up
acr of symbiosis. There were volumes emitled The Hist
of the most noted highway-men, footpads, house-brea
and cheats as well as The lives of the most eminent pe
in the year 17--; the Biographica Britannica was
seventeen volumes ol John Nichols's Literary Ane
Seventeenth Century were completed. Ir is also highly
indeed it is fitting and significant - that Samuel Johns
been made more generally known tO posterity thro
biography rather than through any ol his own books o
Yet we must pause before we cross the threshold ol t
and examine Boswell's practice ol mingling represem
selective fiction. In his advertisemem to the second editi
Johnson Boswell compares his narrative with that of Ho
'Amidst a thousand entertaining and instrucrive episod
never long out ol sight; lor they are all in some degree
him; and HE, in the whole course of the History, lS e
Author lor the best advamage ol his readers.' Boswellle
writer of the verse epic, however, than the novelist. H
with his subjecr's important actions but also with 'w
wrote, and said, and thought'; he wishes to display 'the
mind and fortunes', like any fictional hero, principally b
'innumerable detached particulars'. Boswell adrnired
Vermeer in this respect, noting 'with what a small
paimer give life to an eye!' He quotes Johnson himsell t
the biographer must examine 'domestick privacies
350
rnien for the benefit of his biographer; both men wer
process of artistic collusion.
Boswell also believed it to be necessary to bowdleri
Johnson's correspondence, so that no trace of grossn
remained. But Boswell's desire to maintain a stable iden
was designed to reassure himself as well as his readers.
suggested, 'the impulse to create or construct a Johnso
private needs is overwhelmingly visible'.8 There is ofte
ance between the biographer and the subject of the
the biographer were ineluctably drawn towards certain
aet of inspection or observation, there is also an
examination. It might account for Mrs Gaskell's biog
in Charlotte Bronte, for example, or for that of Carlyle
Great.
There is another way of conveying biographical iden
fRetitious manner. Boswell admitted that, while compo
out of notes or stray anecdotes, 'he had rewritten som
of Johnson's into what he considered the authentic Jo
It is once more a question of artistry, and has nothing t
or historical concems. That is why the 'Johnsonian' sty
embellished by Boswell, was powerfully influential.
relates how, after publication of the Life, an acquain
success 'in the circles of fashion and elegance'. He info
'you have made them all talk Johnson', to which
appends: 'I have Johnsonised the land.' The conversa
Boswell were anthologised as 'Johnsoniana', and in su
352
English literary inheritance. It combines a peculiar r
and a preoccupation with the formation of charae
have found inspiration on Salisbury Plain or among
so others have found consolation in areas which have
enchanted through their association with writers.
forward there emerged a fashion for topographíes o
upon the life of famous writers - The Homes of Tenn
of Charles Dickens, Bozland, Dickens' Places and P
and Early Haunts of Robert Louis Stevenson are am
volumes which appeared upon the subject. It b
pursuit, and Tennyson was forced to move house in
attentions and depredations of these literary tourist
volumes upon the neighbourhood of the Lake Dis
Hardy's semi-fictional 'Wessex', and there are
Writer's Britain and The Oxford Literary Guide to
The genius loei has many heanhs in England.
50 Elizabeth Gaskell, inspired by the imaginat
novels, re-created Charlotte Brontě. As a novelist sh
with details, and in similar fashion requested inf
peculiar customs & character of the population tow
one of Mrs Gaskell's biographers has put it, 'Char
already fell easily into the patterns of Gaskell's fiction
daughters, profligate son and stem father, and its em
ing and environment, female endurance and coura
lends strong imaginative shape to her biography, als
anecdotes reinforcing the pace and emphasis of the
354
and 'Old Bloody Warrior'; the ubiquitous allotments o
where vegetables are grown, are preserved in 'miniature par
proporrions, everything in impeccable rows'.' Several fo
work here. The love of the small scale, of the miniature, is a
the need for seclusion and for privacy; but this may beco
proteetiveness, with the English love of warfare somehow d
or displaced. But is there not also a trace of irony, a sugge
mockery, in this mimicry of battle conditions among the
flowers?
ln the late eighteenth century Gilbert White remarked
decent labourer also has his garden', and the btick cottages
nineteenth century were built with plots 45 feet wide and 2
In the same period there emerged the 'vílla garden' as
'cottage garden', the harbingers of the ubiquitous suburba
News {Tom Nowhere William Morris ce\ebrates a future st
a 'delicate superabundance of small well-tended gard
Thomas More, in Utopia, reporrs that the inhabitants of
community 'attached the greatest imporrance to their g
'keen competition berween streets as to which has the best k
lt is also worrh observing that More's dialogue is set withi
garden. It is a charmed space of the Englísh imagination.
In indirect homage to Utopia the 'garden city' mo
essentially English in inspiration and, under the tutelage
Howard, deve10ped an erhos in which 'the small gard
exceedingly worrhy and desirable as almost to be sacred
apotheosis'.lO One commentator of 1913 remarked th
various our occupations and tastes, however conflicting o
412
gardens which she rendered fashionable.
The garden displays aU the fruits of the English
including the passion for intricacy and the love of the min
will not be wonderful to leam that the gardens of Englan
described as 'jewelled miniatures'.18 One history of ga
concluded that the cottage garden of many centuries 'h
common with hand needlework, for there is always th
touch and lack of regularity';19 here is an interesting conflu
Anglo-5axon embroidery, renowned for its intricate vari
recognised for its pattem of interlace, a native tendency wh
to explain the 'knot gardens' of the sixteenth century
varied and with so many 'enknotted' flowers 'that the pl
like a piece of tapestry of many various colours to encreas
delight'. Various plants 'were interlaced so that they
weave in and out of each other', and these gardens we
sweetmeats co produce the ' marzipan knot'.20 It is also
here that the 'knot garden' displayed 'abstract and geome
and may in that respeet also claim Angl0-5axon ancestry
affeetion for 'medley' and heterogeneity is also evident in
gardens which proffer intricacy and variety in an enclose
space. John Aubrey described an English garden as 'full
unevenness'. The Theory and Practice af Gardening,
1712, declared that 'the greatest beauty of gardens consi
In Humphry Clinker a garden is described as 'exhibiting
assemblage of the most pieturesque and striking obje
lodges, groves, grottoes, lawns, temples and cascades'; t
of Pope's, aU is 'harmoniously confus'd'. In 5tourhead,
41 4
'constamly demanding sweated exertions and a tender rou
tbe same time 'constandy offering sensual arousa!,.34 The
children is therdore often conceived in the setting of an En
most notably in the animals and birds of Beatrix Potter. W
for children A. A. Milne, James Barrie, Kenneth Graham
Carroll also linger in English gardens as if they had es
refuge or a sanetuary.
Travel has also been seen, in this study, as a form of
English gardener may also be a traveller, and has ranged f
Central America, from China to Australia, from Born
Africa, in pursuit of new or rare species. The Michaelma
from Virginia, the convolvulus from Barbary, the tulip
The fact that they have now been thoroughly acclimatise
as native plants, is further testimony to the assimilative
English genius. It may be that the language of flowers take
the English language itself. At Fulham Palace, for exam
'more than a thousand tender exotics'J5 which like the
inro the language flourish in a mild and accommodating
Brown's insight into botanical practice uncannily echo
commentaries upon the English imagination itself. 'AIl pl
which came home,' she writes, 'became instandy E
mogrified as if they had no native roots at all: conve
anglais waS exported and mysteriously became the rage.'3
more significant example could be found for the ess
English cultural practice. In the gardens of the late se
early eighteenth centuries 'we modified the new Frenc
4r6
4 18
were 50 many garden pubHcations ln the seventeenth cent
migbt conclude that England itself was one large garde
Cowley's 'The Garden' celebrates the 'blessed shades' and
retreat' of a sec1uded place, and much of Marvell's poetry
set among the prospect of Howers and gardens:
Annihilating all thať' made
To a green Thought in a green Shade
Thus the English imagination is forever green.
explored Ossian's territory. Thomas Pennant discove
Ossianic landmarks in the Scottish landscape, and the g
Joseph Banks on the island of Staffa pointed out 'the cave
'Fiuhn Mac Coul, whom the translator of Ossian's work
Finga/'. Oyster shells were dated with reference to t
fragments. So the forged poetry of Macpherson engendere
rocks and crustacea. Pennant wrote also of the local s
'vocal traditions state are the foundation of the works o
skilful faker had created a living communal tradition. Ir is
the credulity of scholars and general readers alike, but it i
to the creative power of Macpherson's imagination. His f
forged - in another sense - a new reality.
In his 'Essay, Supplementaty to the Preface' of Ly
Wordsworth records that 'Having had the good fortune tO
reared in a mountainous country, Irom my very childho
the falsehood that pervades the volumes imposed upon the
the name of Ossian. From what I saw with my own eyes
the imagery was spurious' and from the lips of a 'Phantom
by the snug embrace of an impudent Highlander upo
tradition'. At some point after his childhood, however,
seems to have changed his opinion. The first lines of his
'Glen-Almain; Or, The Narrow Glen' reflect that:
In this still place, remote from men,
Sleeps Ossian, in the NARROW GLEN;
The poem ends thus:
422
turn to the development of the literary personality and
tion of the romantic selfhood, this act of legislation h
well as economic consequences. It is often supposed t
'irritability' of the romantic genius sprang from its im
Iiterary market-piace, and its prostitution in commerc
this disquiet can be traced back to the recognition
'property' itself. Ir has been suggesred by Paul Ba
historian of forgery, that the new monetarism of the eig
'threatened basic ideas of value, and the security of hu
and interactions'.· Did not this new legislative sense of
owning certain words and sets of words as private pr
threaten the old and more established ideas of selfhood
commonality of expression and perception? Ii the rom
first deemed to be a legal and financial unit, its origin
deep unease and ambiguity in those who professed it.
this in subsequent pages. Ifone anonymous discourse o
rcfer to 'that chimerical ill-founded Medium, Paper
perhaps the individuality written upon paper might
'fluctuating, abstract and possibly evanescent value'.s A
has put it, 'Once property was seen to have a symbolic v
in coin ar credit, the foundatíons of personality thems
imaginary or at best consensual: the individual could e
own sight, only at the tluctuating value imposed up
fellows.'6 Ir is interesting to observe in rhis light t
personality in Wordsworth's poetry, which emerges on
by doubt and anxiety as to its true nature. If there did
need for a perfect, unassailable touchstone of human
42 4
by Percy's Reliques of Ancient EngHsh Poetry, pub
Chanerton had reached the age of thirteen; it is ironie, t
eloser examination certain of Percy's own ballads were sh
than the genuine artiele. But the essential truth is that C
inspired and animated by the past; he devoured texts
cormorant and, when not reading or writing, devised ge
created heraldic emblems. He invented a fifreenth-ce
Thomas Rowley, who had resíded in St Mary Reddiffe an
much poetry duly nanscríbed by the young Chanerto
challenged about the provenance of 'Rowley's' poem
confessed that he had found them in an old chest within
room of the church; he even managed to produce some st
documents to prove hís assertíons. Hís case was so plaus
ínto the nineteenth century, there were many who believe
could have fashioned such ma'terpieces of an early dat
them he did; the language of the past spoke through him, a
his was a genius of assimilation and adaptation.
At the age of seventeen Chattenon travelled to Londo
lind his fortune; he was nuticeably successful, composin
satirical poetry on contemporary themes. Five months la
he was found dead in a Holborn anic with traces of arse
in his teeth. It was necessary and inevitable that his death
to be suicide, a las! gesture to society Irom a doomed paet
commentators have suggested that it was a botched e!f
bout of syphilis.
His apparent suicide added immeasurably to his statu
while his celebrity was maÍntained by the rcvelation that
426
vocabulary. In a letter of the same period he remarks that he
up Hyperion because 'there were toO many Miltonic invers
but in the same paragraph he avers that Charterton 'is the pu
in the English Language . . . 'tis genuine English Idiom
words'. His abandonment of Hyperion suggests thar he unde
dangers of imitation or plagiarism, but then how are we to e
praise of Charterton's forged verses as 'genuine English Idi
lie mysteries which may or may not be resolved. Ir may be wo
in this context thar the poem in which Wordsworth cele
memory of Charterton, 'Resolution and Independence', is wr
same metre as Charterton's fake medieval poem'An Excele
of Charitie'.Wordsworth also owned a portrait of the dead p
was itself a forgery.
The posthumous comparison of Charterton with Shakes
suggest what all the evidence implies - the 687 pages of
poetry and prose, in the 'Oxford' edition of his works, is
evidence of his precocity but it also bears tesrimony to the
was a thoroughly English poeto If it were otherwise, his fa
would not be so congenial to the English imaginarion. T
example, the salient marter of Charterton's reverence for th
influence of Percy's Reliques upon the young poet's burgeo
imagination has already been suggested, but the antiquated
metre of Percy's specimens may have been less important
belief that there existed 'a peculiarly English characteristi
history and national identity that derived from the Ancien
the English minstrels were the inheritors of a national poe
same spirit Charterton declared in a lerter to Horace W
42.8
simi1arities between the respective canonisations of C
King Arthur'Y Roth exist on the interstices of the inv
authentic, and both embody the essentia! ebullition or
the past. The assumption may be that, like Arthur who is
will return, Chatterton lives on in the work of success
novelists.
Of course the 'Rowley' poems are themselves set in
rather than the Arthurian period, and provide a curious
the 'Gothic' revival of the nineteenth century. There w
style of the eighteenth cenrury, but that was the work o
and virtuosi. The medieval work of Chatterton was
vigorous and invigorating, anticipating the strong and po
of the Vicrorians. He believed in the presence of the past i
it was the means of defining his own genius. This, again
English preoccupation. The analogy with the mas
nineteenth-century Gothic, A. W. N. Pugin, is inescapab
said that Pugin's 'knowledge of real medieval work wa
that he could instinctively produce new designs ... in a
detail, full of richness and variety'.I'
Pugin is the true child of Chatterton in mOre than o
young poet had written that 'the Motive that actuates me
to convince the world that the Monks (of whom s
despicable an Opinion) were not such Blockheads, as gen
and that good Poetry might be wrote, in the days of Supe
as in these more inlightened Ages'. The letler, of 15 Febru
written in the same month as he composed a medieval
churches of Bristol. It is as if the old religion were still ve
430
shadows created by a sudden light, the dangers of pla
pastiche became evident in the first generation of the rom
ment. In one prefatory epistle Milton wrote: 'I have striven
pages even to overflowing, with quotations drawn from aU
Bible and to leave as little space as possible for my ow
Wordsworth or Coleridge could never admit so much
Coleridge's case, a similar confession might have been appr
introduction to an important volume of essays upon Engli
ism, Romanticism and LangtUJge, poses an interesting qu
pure coincidence, for example, that several of the essays
the metaphor of theft?'17 Romanticism and plagiarism occ
area of the English imagination.
43 2
by invisible powers, which by an act ol rapt attention may
fonned ioto a permanent image or symbol. The poet is one
the conscience and unacknowledged law-maker of human so
as a consequence af his solitariness is doomed to be misinterp
mistreated; he does not endure the world but re-creates it in
imagination, and must place his own sensibility at the he
enterprise because there is no other sure foundation of knowl
romantic poet is a lamp rather than a mirror, to use a
antithesis, the source of illuminalion within his or her own
this entails the re-creation of the self as wel! as ol the wodd
divine afflatus ol the bard may also be a mode ol priv
lormation. A human being may be transfigured by god-like
the imagination. 'A Man's Hfe af any worth is a continual
Keats wrote. 'Shakespeare led a lile of Allegory; his work
comments on it.'
We may lower the temperature a líttle by recal!ing C
comment upon the acting ol Edmund Kean; watching him
stage, he remarked, was 'Iike reading Shakespeare by
lighming'. It is ol some interest in this context that the roman
or at least the image of the romantic hero, was largely em
aetors and in paintings ol actors. They, rather than the po
selves, seemed to fulfil the prerequisites ol the part. K
Coriolanus and as Hamlet, painted by Thomas Lawrence re
in 1798 and 1801, set the mood and tone with 'these hero
dark doaked against murky skies' exhibiting 'Hamlet's int
and 'Coriolanus's humiliated pride'.2
The conneetion ol the
poets with the theatre is not confined to portraiture alone. A
434
latest poetical productions of the period. Romantic actin
romantic poetry, were considered to be equivalent. Ir throws
light, toO, upon Keats's conception of 'the poetical charaeter' w
not itself - it has no self - it is everything and nothing ... the c
poet'; to which definition he adds: 'A poet is the most unpo
anything in existence, because he has no identity; he is continu
filling, some other body.' This might stand aS a definition of th
too, as if the poet and performer shared the same identity - or
shared the same absence of identity.
The equivalence may help to account for the modem
assumption that in the romantic poetry of the early nineteenth
particularly in that of Wordsworth, there exists 'artifice be
postulate of nature'.' Just as an entire dramatic system lies be
apparently unpremeditated art of Kean or Mrs Siddons,
'tradition, convention and genee behind the appearance of
spontaneity'.4
The claíms of the romantic poets, however, were grand inde
Defence ofPoetry Shelley celebrated poets as themselves 'the
the best, the wisest, and the most illustrious of men ... men of
spotless virtue, of the most consummate prudence'. Ir is n
however, if these remarks were made in the spirit of deepe
Wordsworth considered the poet to be a man 'endowed wit
lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tendemess ... a more
hensive soul', so that 'the Poet binds together by pas
knowledge the vast empíre of human society'. The natural
the poet are here asserted in the spirit of what Keats c
Wordsworthian, or egotistical sublime', but the full ramilic
43 6
Like an unfather'd vapour; here that Power,
ln aH the might of its endowments, came
Athwan me; I was lOSl as in a cloucl,
Halted, without a slruggle to break through
The 'lmagination' here isolates and imprisons him; he is
vaporous obscurities. Ir is a power which seals off the w
the traveller susceptible only to 'the might of irs endow
imaginative power is 'unfather'ď; it is not a natural forc
seen to work against the experience of the natural world
irrelevant to its concerns. What Wordswoeth lS experie
rising currents of his highest self, which lead in tum to
verrigo. There are times when he tries to flee from the r
most profound mental consciousness but then he is con
images of death, loss and silence. The romantic image the
romantic selfhood - was more fragile than ltS expo
willing to comprehend.
lt is perhaps appropriate that the great avatar of the ro
was Cain himself. He is invoked by Shelley in Adonais, by
Giaour and Cain: A Mystery, and by Coleridge in The W
Cain. The biblical murderer was one in whom the 'egotis
had dared to rear itself against God. When Cain became '
a vagabond in the earth' he set out upon a path of wander
steps followed such great exilic romantic heroes as M
Melmoth the Wanderer. Bur it was also decreed that 'th
from the earth'. The romantic personality can indeed seem
43 8
'the real musical embodiment of the English compos
Tippen's polyphony was direetly modelled upon the ma
positions of John Wilbye. Delius's secretary and aman
Fenby, noted a connection between William Byrďs 'The
Wilde' and Delius's own Brigg Fair.
A critic, reviewing Ralph Vaughan Williams's Fantasia
by Thomas Tal/is, observed that 'it seems to lift one into som
region' where 'one is never quite sure whether one is
something very old or very new';2 the embrace of present a
in which English antiquarianism becomes a form of alchem
a strange timelessness. It is a quality which Eliot sensed in t
of England itself and to which he gaye memorable expres
Quartets, 'Now and in England'. It is as if the little bird
through the Anglo-Saxon banqueting hall, in Bed
Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, gained the outer air and be
ascending in Vaughan Williams's orchestral setting. It is t
Shelley's poem whose 'notes flow in such a crystal stream
bird, in the words of George Meredith which Vaughan W
rises and begins to round,

He drops me silver chain of sound,

Ol many links without a break
The unbroken chain is that of English music itself.
The passion of Vaughan Williams for folk-music it
become a comrnonplace of English musical history. It be
wood in Essex, in the winter of 1903; Brentwood was th
440
definite way to the expressive qualiry of melody'.13 T
definition of his Englishness, of course, and his pretematur
to melody is part of his overwhelming responsiveness t
Thus his Pastora! Symphony is marked by melody or 'a fr
of one tune from another ... like streams flowing into each
hidden stream itself is that of native song.
The 'melancholy Iyricism' implicit in some of Vaugha
finest work has already been described. A commentato
Times compared Vaughan Williams's Pastora! Symphony
of sad happiness', and of the Oboe Concerto a musicolog
that Vaughan Williams 'seems to be yeaming for som
precious thing'.t5 What has been lost that excites so m
Could it be the idea of England itself? That would be the
but not, perhaps, an altogether convincing one. Th
colleered and arranged by Vaughan Williams are also
profoundly melancholy cadences which have been related
the ancient landscape. It is a national mood, comparable t
note of sadness' which Matrhew Arnold heard on Dove
that note of quietly and insistently 'throbbing melanch
emerges in almost all of Vaughan Williams's orchestral c
it echoes the delicate melancholy of Dowland and the plan
of Purcell. It lies within Elgar, too, in his 'beautifully poet
tinged with wistfulness'.17
Vaughan Williams gaye a set of leerures in 1932, entit
Music', in which he construered a series of variations up
442
social and cultural evolution'." These may not be fashionab
but they are suggestive ones. How far does the Norfolk Rh
back; to what atavistic longing does A Sea Symphony speak,
strangeness and serenity of Sinfonia Antarctica invoke an An
fortitude in face of natura! bleakness? The sense of place, so
this study, is also evident. Peter Warlock's 'An Old Song' r
'very much the Cornish moor where I have been Iiving'.20
historian has in turn recovered this sense of place in th
landscape of Ernest Moeran's 'The Song of the High Hills' an
Bridge's 'There is a WiIlow Grows Aslant a Brook'. The geni
sings. In the preliminary sketches for the Ninth Symphony
Williams drew upon memories of Stonehenge and Salisb
when he first saw the ancient stones he was suffused with 'a
recognition' and 'the inmition that I had been there already'
is instinct with that sense ol belonging, so that the act of lis
becomes a form of home-coming.
It has been remarked of Delius and his contemporaries th
their works, 'a wave of nature-mysticism swept like a tush
wind'.21 This great wave has been related to pagan nature w
to elements of Celtic mythology, also; the possibilities of En
spring from the distant past, and can be expressive of it.
materia) is innate and instinctive, it must constanrly be refa
refined. Thus in his Third Symphony, known aS Th
Symphony, Vaughan Williams wished to touch upon tha
English mysticism' by which he hoped 'the psyche of the na
be made whole'.ll His last symphony, completed shortly a
set ten poems by William Blake for voice and oboe, is fille
444
well as Herbert, SheUey as well as rhe King James Bible
visionary powers, inrimared in the great symphonies, were
his reading of rhe English visionaries; he had pondered ove
piJgrim for fifteen years before complering The Shephe
Delectable Mountains, and rhus associared himself wirh a
ancienr religious dissenr and radicalism even while remain
inrenrs and purposes an atheisr. He could nor escape h
inherirance, however, and his religious music is some of the
creared. .
There are other elements of Vaughan WilIiams's nat
which may be adduced here by way of explanation and inre
There is the question, for example, of his detachment and
don't know whether I like ir,' he remarked of his Fourth
'bur it's what I meant.' Of anorher orchestral piece he said
you like wirh ir. Play ir backwards if you want ro.' All this
the contexr of his overwhelming artistry and pTOfessionalis
has already nored this detachmenr as an intrinsic element of
imaginarion. Ir is nor a question of false modesry but, rarhe
aversion rowards claiming roo much. When a conremporar
acknowledged that he had written a piece of music 'on
Vaughan Williams replied thar 'I wrore Saneta Civitos sit
bum.' Ir seems, like much in Vaughan Williams, ro be a
English remark, eschewing any expression of dccp emotion
rhe real strengrh of purpose in his posterior. Ir has aH tho
of practicaliry and common sense which are conside
characterisric, as well as a fainr sense of earthy or ribald hum
comes (almosr lirerally) wirh rhe rerrirory.
446
From their example we leam that the history of the English
is the history of adaptation and assimilation. English
principie of diversity itself. In English literature, music an
heterogeneity becomes the form and type of art. This cond
both a mixed language comprised of many different elem
mixed culture comprised of many different races. That is
also, in the products of the English imagination, a character
or blurring of forms; in these pages I have traced the c
biography, or history, and the novel.
The English have in that sense always been a practical an
race; the history of English philosophy, for example, h
history of empiricism and of scientific experiment. There a
of speculative theology, but there are many manuals
instruction. This native aptitude has in tum led to disaffect
dissatisfaction with, aH abstract speculation. The true em
upon the qualities of individual experience, which are ma
English art of portraiture and in the English novel of cha
English imagination is also syncretic and additive - one epi
to another episode - rather than formal or theoreticaI.
So there are many striking continuities in English cult
from the presence of aHiteration in English native poetry
two thousand years to the shape and size of the ordinary En
But the most powerful impulse can be found in what I hav
territorial imperative, by means of which a laeal area can
guide aH those who inhabit it. The example of London ha
adduced. But the territorial imperative can also be tra
448