Albion (56 page)

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

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.

2. Christopher Kendrick, “Preaching Common Grounds,” in
Writing and the
English Renaissance
, ed. William Zunder and Suzanne Trill, p. 179.

3. D. Talbot Rice,
English Art,
871–1100
, pp. 174–5.

4. ibid., p. 6.

5. Nikolaus Pevsner,
The Englishness of English Art
, p. 137.

6. ibid., p. 138.

7. Eric Mercer,
English Art, 1553–1625
, p. 156.

8. John Stephens,
Music and Poetry in the Early Tudor Court
, p. 100.

9. Margaret Whinney and Oliver Millar,
English Art, 1625–1714
, p. 22.

10. David Watkin,
English Architecture
, p. 67.

11. William Gaunt,
A Concise History of English Painting
, p. 200.

12. Rickert, p. 65.

13. ibid., p. 95.

14. Walter Oakeshott,
The Sequence of English Medieval Art
, p. 44.

15.
St. Erkenwald
, trans. Brian Stone, p. 31.

14. ANGLO-SAXON ATTITUDES

1. J. W. Lever, “Paradise Lost and the Anglo-Saxon Tradition,” Review of English
Studies
, Vol. 23, No. 90, p. 100.

2. ibid., p. 98.

3. D. Talbot Rice,
English Art, 871–1100
, pp. 95–6.

15. THE ALTERATION

1. Derek Brewer, “Medieval European Literature,” in
Pelican Guide to Medieval
Literature
, Volume 2, p. 74.

2. R. W. Southern, Medieval Humanism, p. 161.

3. G. Zarnecki, “1066 and Architectural Sculpture,”
PBA
, Vol. 52, 1966, p. 102.

4. Elizabeth Salter,
English and International Studies in the Literature, Art and
Patronage of Medieval England
, p. 6.

5. D. Pearsall,
Old English and Middle English Poetry
, p. 76.

6. Lesley Johnson, “Dynastic Chronicles,” in The Arthur of the English, ed. W. R. J. Barron, p. 40.

7. W. F. Bolton, A Short History of Literary English, p. 35.

8. Norman Davies,
The Isles
, p. 425.

9. May McKisack,
The Fourteenth Century
, p. 525.

10. John Caldwell (ed.),
The Oxford History of English Music
, Volume 1, p. 108.

11. Sheila Lindbaum, “London Texts and Literary Practice,” in
The Cambridge
History of Medieval English Literature
, ed. D. Wallace, p. 29.

12. ibid., pp. 284–5.

16. HE IS NOT DEAD

1. Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan, “The Celtic Tradition,” in
The Arthur of the English
, ed. W. R. J. Barron, p. 3.

2. Richard Barber,
King Arthur
, p. 6.

3. ibid., p. 12.

4. Denis Hollier (ed.),
A New History of French Literature
, p. 41.

5. ibid., p. 51.

6. Barron (ed.), p. 24.

7. Rosamund Allen (trans. and intr.),
Brut
, p. 28.

8. ibid.

9. Barron (ed.), p. 71.

10. Hollier (ed.), p. 67.

11. Barron (ed.), p. 89.

12. Barber, p. 104.

13. Quoted in Barron (ed.), p. 195.

14. Thomas Malory,
Works
, ed. Eugene Vinaver, p. 7.

15. Barber, p. 122.

16. Barron (ed.), p. 245.

17. ibid.

18. W. P. Ker, quoted in E. K. Chambers, Malory and Fifteenth-Century Drama, Lyrics
and Ballads
, p. 198.

19. Chris Brooks and Inga Bryden, “The Arthurian Legacy” in Barron, p. 250.

20. Beverly Taylor and Elizabeth Brewer,
The Return of King Arthur
, p. 69.

21. ibid., pp. 15–16.

22. ibid., p. 26.

23. ibid., p. 135.

24. Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Letters, ed. C. Y. Lang and E. F. Shannon, Jr., Volume 2, p. 267.

25. Barron (ed.), p. 263.

17. FAITH OF OUR FATHERS

1. G. G. Coulton,
Chaucer and His
England
, p. 282.

2.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
, ed. Brian Stone, p. 147.

3. F. L. Utley, The Crooked Rib, p. 29.

4. R. P. Miller, “Allegory in The Canterbury Tales,” in Companion to Chaucer Studies, ed. Beryl Rowland, p. 348.

5. Jody Enders,
Rhetoric and the Origins of Medieval Drama
, p. 245.

6. Quoted in Martin Thornton,
English Spirituality
, p. 107.

7. J. A. W. Bennett and Douglas Gray (ed.), Middle English Literature, p. 268.

8. Thornton, p. 169.

9. ibid., p. 89.

10. W. K. Sorley, A History of British Philosophy to 1900, pp. 6–7.

11. T. S. R. Boase, English Art 1800–1870, p. 297.

12. R. W. Southern, Medieval Humanism, p. 177.

18. OLD STONE

1. Peter Brieger,
English Art 1216–1307
, p. 10.

2. Margaret Rickert,
Painting in Britain: The Middle Ages
, p. 181.

3. John Caldwell (ed.),
The Oxford History of English Music
, Volume 1, p. 174.

4. C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image, p. 210.

5. Alex Clifton-Taylor,
The Cathedrals of England
, p. 88.

6. Brieger, p. 26.

7. Nikolaus Pevsner,
The Englishness of English Art
, p. 41.

8. Joan Evans,
English Art 1307–1461
, p. 9.

9. Quoted in Claude Rawson’s “Henry Fielding,” in
The Cambridge Companion to the
Eighteenth-Century Novel
, ed. John Richetti, p. 130.

10. Derek Pearsall, “The Visual World of the Middle Ages,” in
Medieval Literature
, ed. Boris Ford, p. 312.

11. Morton W. Bloomfield, “Chaucerian Realism,” in The Cambridge Chaucer
Companion
, ed. Pierre Boitani and Jill Mann, p. 187.

12. Peter Happé,
English Drama before Shakespeare
, p. 29.

13. Kenneth Pople,
Stanley Spencer
, p. 67.

19. PART OF THE TERRITORY

1. Walter Oakeshott,
The Sequence of English Medieval Art
, p. 22.

2. J. C. Coldewey, “The Non-Cycle Plays and the East Anglian Tradition,” in The
Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre
, ed. Richard Beadle, p. 189.