Albion (13 page)

Aelfric’s
contemporary Wulfstan
evokes those qualities in a much more idiosyncratic manner. He was the first English writer to suggest the possibilities of a deliberately rhetorical prose, and his “Sermon of the Wolf to the English” is the most famous example in Old English of the ornate and vivid sermons which have since become characteristic of England’s religious literature. He ends laconically: “God ure helpe. Amen.” Curiously, the word “God” is of Celtic rather than Germanic provenance, related to the Erse word “Guth” or voice. So God help us—but in this fiery address, delivered in 1014 when Ethelred was hesitant before the Danish intruders and settlers, the warnings and imprecations are expressed with an eloquence heightened by ancient echoes. Wulfstan invokes “
stric
ond steorfa
,” plague and pestilence, “
wiccan
ond waelcyrian
,” witches and wizards, “
bryne
ond blodgite
,” burning and bloodshed, “
here
ond hunger
,” war and famine. He recalls how the “Britta” were conquered by the “Engla” because they had fallen from God; now the “Engla” in turn are likely to be destroyed by foreign invaders. It may seem unnecessary to sift the details of forgotten polemic, but it is important to understand that, a thousand years ago, English prose was as elaborate and as rigorous as in any of its contemporary manifestations.

There is, however, one distinction. There were effectively two languages in England since Wulfstan, archbishop of York and bishop of London, wrote and spoke Latin as fluently as English. Latin was still the preferred medium for scholars and ecclesiastics, who communicated with their peers on the continent in that tongue. Here again it is unwise to underestimate the powers and possibilities of early utterance. It has been confirmed that at the time of the Roman occupation “British Vulgar Latin,” the language of the Romano-Britons, was considerably purer than that of France or Spain. It was more “conservative,” more “archaic,” and thus closer to classical sources.
⁹
Its usage tends “to agree with the pronunciations recommended by the grammarians as distinct from those of ordinary colloquial Vulgar Latin.”
¹⁰
This throws a distinctive light upon the qualities of life in Roman Britain but, significantly, seven centuries later—by the time of William’s invasion in 1066—the Latin culture of the English was still considerably more advanced and more sophisticated than that of their Norman conquerors. There were other spheres, too, in which the Anglo-Saxons excelled.

CHAPTER 13

The First Initials

The art of manuscript illumination
is the glory of the Anglo-Saxon period. From the strange abstract wildness of the Book of Durrow, completed in Northumbria in the middle of the seventh century, to the richness and vitality of the Grimbald Gospels ornamented at Winchester in the early eleventh century, there emerge features that will become intrinsic to English art itself. And how could it not be so? A tradition of four hunded years does not pass in a night, if it can be said to pass at all.

There is much here in these early manuscript pages to excite contemplation in the twenty-first century. A bull in a field becomes an abstract shape invested in spiritual mystery, as if formed by Henry Moore; a hieratic full-length figure is decorated in radiant detail like some Pre-Raphaelite model; the ornamentation of a sacred chalice is strong and precise, as richly coloured as a tapestry by William Morris or a miniature by Nicholas Hilliard. Wandering through the intricate and elaborate mysteries of the Lindisfarne Gospels, we catch glimpses of William Hogarth’s “line of beauty,” that long serpentine line which the artist considered to be characteristic of English art; discerning the sinuous outlines of the figures within the Lindisfarne gospels, we may be inclined to agree with Roger Fry’s remark at the beginning of the twentieth century that the art of recent English painters is “primarily linear . . . and not plastic,” the only difference being that we are obliged to date this linearity back to the eighth and ninth centuries.

Other attributes may be seen as English in inspiration and in execution. The fascination for detail, and the obsession with the riddle or the puzzle, have already been discussed. But latent within them is the art of the miniature. Its apotheosis lies perhaps with the work of Nicholas Hilliard, who flourished at the Elizabethan court, but its most striking realisation may be in the art of the “historiated initial”—by which is meant the small scenes painted within the initials of manuscript texts. These initials may be an English invention and, according to one historian of medieval art, “this might partly account for their persistent popularity during the whole later history of English illumination.”
¹
The predominance of pattern and border over figure has also been characterised as English in style. The body is represented as flat, as part of the detail, rather than an object formed in volumetric space.

In his
The Englishness of English Art
published in 1956, the German art historian Nikolaus Pevsner noted this denial of the body in English art, quite unlike the typical art of the Mediterranean. Pevsner associated it with the English tendency towards embarrassment and understatement. And yet it might be interpreted as an aspect of a fundamentally non-human art; it is significant that the decorations of the Lindisfarne texts are borrowed from, or related to, the abstract patterns inscribed upon weaponry and jewellery of the same epoch. In the same way the Christian poetry of
Beowulf
is striated with ancient and pagan myths. If there is some wildness here in the obsession with spirals, whorls and lines rather than human figures, one historian of Anglo-Saxon art has a possible explanation: “It is a spiritual mystery; something eerily intangible, as though in secret shrines honour was still paid to older art, and dim traditions of prehistoric and later British aesthetic sensibility lived on to guide the artist’s hand.”
²
It has been described as “tense abstraction,” and is precisely the quality that may be recognised in the art of William Blake. When Anglo-Saxon illuminators from the tenth and eleventh centuries are placed against the engravings and tempera paintings of Blake, the resemblance becomes extraordinarily clear; there is the same figural grace, the same flowing linear pattern. The drawings of the Winchester school, in particular, have a delicacy within the outline, of which Blake’s instinctive movement with the brush or engraver is reminiscent. This is not, however, a matter of chance. Blake had seen the ancient wall-paintings in Westminster Abbey, as well as the funereal monuments of a later date, and had imbibed the Saxon art of outline and linear decoration.

The art of the Winchester monks and of William Blake is a wholly English achievement. One historian of medieval painting has remarked upon “the growth of a new and strongly marked national idiom,” with “the exquisite delicacy of line and proportion in the decorative detail” as of “a particularly English character.”
³
The “light, agitated style of drawing,” characterised by the Winchester school and amplified by William Blake, was “intrinsically English” and a “national idiom”
⁴
as English as the decorated stone crosses of the north and the elaborate embroidery of the south. Linearity and abstract pattern have already been deemed to be native characteristics. It is what Pevsner described in another context as “the anti-corporeal intricacies of line”
⁵
to be traced in English architecture. It is why the English “developed an enthusiasm for brasses—that is not sculpture at all but engraving.”
⁶
It can be seen in what Reynolds called the “marks and scratches” of Gainsborough and “the formalised linear portrait” only to be found in England.
⁷
It is the single line of melody in English music, where, for example, Tudor songs are “linear in conception.”
⁸
It is to be observed in the length of the naves, and of the long galleries, in English buildings; after all, “the long house was traditional in England.”
⁹
It is evinced in the Queen’s House at Greenwich by Inigo Jones, in the straight progression of the Georgian terrace, and in “the calm rectilinear uniformity” of York Minster.
¹⁰

The flowing linear pattern is central to the English imagination. The line drawings of Beardsley and Gillray exemplify this tendency, and it has been said that “line and tone rather than colour were on the whole characteristics of English painting at the end of the nineteenth century.”
¹¹
These examples might be multiplied indefinitely, but they all lead back to the mysterious limpidity and simple outlines of Anglo-Saxon illuminators. It is what Blake called the “bounding” outline as if it exemplified all the vigour and animation of his own “illuminated books,” in which word and image are as indissolubly connected as any on the page of a tenth-century psalter.

The Anglo-Saxons had in a sense anticipated that energy in their own preoccupation with leaping figures. Among the foliated initials of illuminated manuscripts are to be seen human figures “climbing and jumping among the branches”;
¹²
one illuminator from Winchester Cathedral has become known as “the Master of the Leaping Figures,” since his figures “sway and ‘leap,’ with swinging drapery and wide-flung arms”;
¹³
animals “jump” with them in scenes of overflowing energy which seem so characteristic of the Anglo-Saxon world. A curious image which testifies to this delight in motion comes in an early eleventh-century psalter illuminating the Ascension of Our Lord; as is so often the case in presentations of this dramatic scene “the subject is indicated by the feet of the ascending figure only, at the top of the picture.”
¹⁴
Four hundred years before, in the Echternach gospels of Northumbria, the “Lion of St. Mark” is shown in a bounding leap of joy. The same image occurs frequently in the literature of the medieval period, when, for example, the heart “
maketh moni liht lupe
” in
Ancrene Wisse
. Christ is often described as “leaping” in the womb, while at an earlier date Bede describes the cripple healed by the apostles “walking, and leaping, and praising God.” We may leap forward to the middle of the fourteenth century when, in a poem of London, “lads left their labour and leaped to the place.”
¹⁵
Then we can return once more to Blake’s vision where

The little ones leaped & shouted & laugh’d

Ornamental page with the monogram “Chr(ist) autem.” Beginning of the Christmas story,
Matthew
1, 18. From the Lindisfarne Gospels

CHAPTER 14

Anglo-Saxon Attitudes

In 1882 Gerard Manley Hopkins
wrote, “I am learning Anglo-Saxon and it is a vastly superior thing to what we have now” and, at a later date, W. H. Auden described his introduction to Anglo-Saxon literature at Oxford: “I was spellbound. This poetry, I knew, was going to be my dish.” He also confirmed that “Anglo-Saxon and Middle English poetry have been one of my strongest, most lasting influences.” He added that “often some piece of technique thus learnt really unchains one ’s own Daimon quite suddenly.” In the Anglo-Saxon phrase, it unlocks the word-hoard. William Morris translated
Beowulf
in the last years of his life, and there have been many attempts by other poets culminating in the translation of the epic by the Irish poet Seamus Heaney in 2000. It is as if it represented some kind of primal memory.

The Anglo-Saxon inheritance can work in different ways, and one poem can act as the unacknowledged instigator or inspiration for a different form of perception. The theme of lonely pilgrimage in the short poem “The Seafarer”—one of the “elegies” in the Exeter Book—is the first evocation in the language of a metaphor which haunts the English imagination. The image of the voyager alone upon the ice-cold and raging sea is like some scene from the beginning of the world; “
stormas
” and “
flodwegas
” have surged through English poetry ever since, while sighs of transitoriness and exile have been exhaled for a thousand years. The expatriate American poet Ezra Pound was living in London when he translated “The Seafarer”:

On flood-ways to be far departing

His is a spirited and sonorous re-enactment of the original, and exemplified his attempt to connect himself with an English tradition in order both to reinvent himself and to renew his own language. It is one of the great strengths of the English imagination that it does not represent an exclusive or proprietorial gift; like the language itself, it is open to anyone.

Milton’s poetry bears some relation to “The Seafarer,” too. In the Anglo-Saxon poem there is a description of those who live in cities “wingal,” or flushed with wine; in
Paradise Lost
the sons of Belial dwell in “luxurious cities” where they are “flown with insolence and wine.” It has often been suggested that the poet of Bread Street and Aldersgate was here memorialising the street brawlers, the Hectors and Scourers, of his native city; but as he sits by his window, the candle glimmering in the dusk, an image of Anglo-Saxon brawlers also emerges. The English imagination has many mansions, and many rooms. There is another Miltonic connection with these English originals. Passages in
Paradise Lost
, completed by Milton in 1663, concerning the fall of the angels into darkness and the subsequent soliloquy by Satan, bear a startling resemblance to an Anglo-Saxon poem entitled “Genesis B” by scholars and tentatively dated to the mid-ninth century. In that early poem Satan’s first words, for example,

Is thes aenga stede ungelic swithe . . .

are close in cadence and meaning to

Is this the Region, this the Soil, the Clime . . .

An early nineteenth-century scholar, in reviewing both poems, wrote of “a resemblance to Milton so remarkable that much of this portion of ‘Genesis B’ might be almost literally translated”; the biographer of Milton David Masson describes “striking coincidences between notions and phrases.”
¹
This might be construed as no more than scholarly supposition or source-hunting; if such a resemblance exists, then it may arise simply from the consonance or, one may say, consanguinity within the English imagination itself. There are many examples of poets, or dramatists, who seem to have lifted material from their predecessors but who have in reality only been led forward by the pressures and contours of the language itself. Once a sequence of words enters the vast sphere of language, it is always a potential line of expression for any later writer; the first one or two words will activate the entire sequence.

But the case of Milton and “Genesis B” is more interesting. The manuscript was discovered by a seventeenth-century scholar, Junius, who was in fact a close acquaintance of Milton’s. Previously Milton had pored over Anglo-Saxon sources, and had written an enthusiastic note upon the divine inspiration of Caedmon; he evinced a “long preoccupation with the old English past.”
²
What is more natural and inevitable than that his friend, Junius, should read out to him and translate the Creation poem which he had recently discovered? Satan’s great speech of pride and bitterness might then find its way into the blind poet’s consciousness. It offers at least a plausible explanation for continuities between Anglo-Saxon poetry and the poetry of the mid-seventeenth century.

In
the seventh
chapter of
Through the Looking-Glass
the messenger Haigha appears “wriggling like an eel . . . with his great hands spread out like fans on each side.” “He’s an Anglo-Saxon Messenger,” the White King explains to Alice, “and those are Anglo-Saxon attitudes.” The posture is indeed Anglo-Saxon, and can be seen in the late ninth-century cross of Codford St. Peter and in the figure of King Edgar in the foundation charter for the new minster at Winchester; the position has in fact been described as “in essence completely English.”
³
Carroll parodies it successfully, just as he parodies Old English poetry in his lyric “Jabberwocky”:

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe.

Anglo-Saxon attitudes emerge almost everywhere. The fable in Old English translation
Apollonius of Tyre
appears in the poetry of John Gower as well as in Shakespeare’s Pericles. The Old English antiphons of the Advent season were known as the “great O’s” because they began with “O” or “Eala,” and are echoed in the 1608 text of King Lear “O, o, o, o.” The satire upon greedy and wastrel priests, in
Guthlac
and in other Anglo-Saxon originals, is taken up by Langland and Wycliff; the sweet breath of St. Guthlac just before his demise issues from the mouth of Thomas More before his execution. The panther in the Exeter Book, who shines brightly and is the image of Christ, re-emerges as the “tyger” of Blake’s lyric; in T. S. Eliot’s Gerontion there appears in turn “Christ the tiger.” The spiritual narrative of
The Dream of the
Rood
, a devotional poem of the late seventh century with its focus upon the material image of the cross, prefigures the seventeenth-century meditations of George Herbert and Henry Vaughan. The
wyrd
or doom of Anglo-Saxon poetry is matched by Chaucer’s “executrice of wyrdes” in
Troilus and
Criseyde before being resurrected as “Life’s Doom” in Thomas Hardy’s epic poem
The Dynasts
. The conflict between tribal loyalties of revenge and the Christian pieties of forgiveness and redemption, so central to the Anglo-Saxon imagination, was reinterpreted again and again in Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedy; the great preoccupations of ninth- and tenth-century England were flourishing in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. “Periods” of a literary or historical nature do not succeed each other in neat chronology; they overlap and intermingle, fade and then flare up, so that we might call the history of the last two thousand years “the Anglo-Saxon Period.” Instead of asking what is “modern” about the Anglo-Saxons, enquire instead what is Anglo-Saxon about “the modern.”