Peter Ackroyd and the Englishman's Imagination. . - Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination - book review

Contemporary Review, May, 2003 by George Wedd

Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination. Peter Ackroyd. Chatto and winous. [pounds sterling] 25.00. 516 pages. ISBN 1-85619-721-2.

Hwaet! (= What! = Listen!) is the traditional opening word of an Anglo-Saxon story such as Beowulf -- reminiscent of King George III's 'What, what, what, Miss Burney', when he wanted to be listened to (followed by 'there is a great deal of sad stuff in Shakespeare, only one must not say so'). That is roughly where Peter Ackroyd starts, as he magisterially traces the underlying patterns and motivation of Eng Lit for the last fifteen hundred years; one says Eng Lit because, although he discusses painting, decorative art and music, he does so to support his main theses which all relate to literature.

One's first impression is that Mr Ackroyd wishes to describe the English imagination as a widening stream, drawing tributaries from French, German and Italian cultures, natural philosophy, religious thought and other art-forms. However it gradually becomes clear that his idea is circular, and that a few basic themes circulate from Caedmon to the Booker Prize. One of these ideas is the spirit of place, with an acute appreciation of living on an island which is different from its neighbours - cold, stormy and dark and only to be reached across an often stormy ocean. Another is an interest in the surface of things, traceable to Anglo-Saxon manuscripts and the west front of Wells Cathedral. A third is the willingness to appropriate from other cultures -- quite significant when one thinks of the reluctance of the French to admit other thought-patterns into their formal classical system of education and ideas. The English language itself is an instance of the success of a willingness to accept intruders and inserti ons; cultures which resist foreign words and phrases, and the ideas which underlie them, are doomed to weakness and ultimate failure. A fourth is the acceptance of dreams and of dreaminess as a natural state, and the readiness to regard them, if appropriate, as visions: it is quite respectable in Eng Lit to report a dream, or to describe a dreaming state. Fifth, there is a streak of melancholia in the English imagination, which can easily slide into a condition of fatalism. Sixth, there is a considerable streak of prudishness in the English temperament; our visual arts are notably short on the enjoyment of the human form, and prefer a fann-cart being washed down in a ford to a joyous depiction of lovers enjoying each other's shape and surface. Another concept which intrigues and impresses the author is the simple idea of London, a large cosmopolitan city which is culturally dominant, a teeming hive where words and ideas rub off each other and cross-fertilise. (Would it be possible to imagine the Elizabethan t heatre thriving in York or Bristol, even though the seeds - the mystery plays - were growing there?)

This is a very good book, in which Mr Ackroyd deploys his enormously wide reading to great effect. One might not say he is learned, but he is extremely well-read. Everyone of note is mentioned. One could only think of one person one would have liked to see mentioned who is not: John Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester during the Wars of the Roses, a Renaissance man before his time, who introduced 'law Padovan' and who died for it. Perhaps the book would have benefited if the author had cited rather fewer examples, made more of them and left us to assume the width of his reading. When he discusses King Arthur he could have spared us Layamon and given us T. H. White instead. He integrates all his threads into a whole, with no unnatural forcing and no suppression of elements which do not fit his general thesis. There is an air of intellectual honesty and openness which appeals. The division into fifty-three short chapters also makes for easy reading and following his theses. One does not think his history is always quite sound; for example, was not Richard II, and not Henry IV, our first English-speaking king? Also, did 'the justification for Tudor governance lie in inheritance or continuity'? It surely lay in the power to keep order, to stop civil war and to let economic development get on with it. Their attempt to prove themselves ancient and to suggest descent from King Arthur was a rococo embellishment of a thoroughly efficient up-to-date administration.

Those are details. There are two more substantial matters on which one would take issue. There are in English history five vast events which changed everything, for those alive and those who came after. The first is the Norman Conquest, which Mr Ackroyd takes in his stride. The second is the Black Death, in which half the livings in the Church changed hands -- which tells one something about its impact. Then came the Reformation, which he hints at but one doubts he fully understands. Late-medieval religion was complex, elaborate, often beautiful and satisfying. The whole business of processions, purgatory, pardons, penances, chantries and so on, underpinning the vast structure of the Church, fitted together like the pieces of a jigsaw -- a perfect and complicated fit, but only a millimetre thick. It had to wait for the Bible in English, and mainly for the writings of St Paul, to offer a deep logic which explained the working of the universe and the place of fallen mankind in it. After this, the English mind w as utterly changed, and unless one appreciates this one cannot understand the impatience and distaste with which reformers from Cranmer to Cromwell regarded what they saw as the superficial and misguided medieval mind, with all its statues, frescoes and gratuitous additional doctrines.