Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination by Peter Ackroyd
Author:Peter Ackroyd
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Europe, History - General History, Irish, English literature, England, Welsh, History and criticism, Arts, Europe - Great Britain - General, Literary Criticism, History: World, Scottish, Great Britain, History, National characteristics, English, European
ISBN: 9780385497732
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 2004-11-09T08:00:00+00:00
Antiquarianism and English History
“Britannia”: frontispiece illustration to William Camden’s Britannia, 1600
CHAPTER 30
Among the Ruins
In his twenty-ninth year John Milton wrote in a letter that “my genius is such that no delay, no rest, no care or thought almost of anything, holds me aside until I reach the end I am making for, and round off, as it were, some great period of my studies.” In Bread Street, London, he studied as if for life.
Milton is in all respects a profoundly English writer, and became an iconic representative of England for poets as diverse as Blake and Wordsworth. His first great ambition was to compose an epic upon the “Matter of Britain”; in 1639, two years after composing the letter upon his genius, he wrote a poem in which he entreats his pastoral pipe, if “patriis mutata camoenis” (if transformed by native songs), to play a British melody. In another poem of the same period, “Mansus,” he speculates upon the commemoration of English kings in his own native verse. He was aware of his inheritance. The mystical vision surrounding Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained is conceived within the vast apparatus of the miracle plays; as one critic has put it, Paradise Lost is “the last of the medieval attempts to write the history of Everyman, to survey the whole course of events from the Creation to man’s final ascent into Heaven, and to relate this course to the universal plan of Divine Providence.” 1
Paradise Lost was itself immensely influential. The resourceful and melodic verse of that poem revived, for all practical purposes, the role of blank verse in English poetry. Wordsworth’s Prelude, for example, could not have been written without Milton’s example. He became “the English author who could be presented as a classic to a burgeoning middle-class readership.”2 Handel set his poetry to music, and scenes from that poetry were depicted by Blake, Fuseli and a host of other artists aspiring to the sublime. In the year of Milton’s death John Dryden composed an opera of Paradise Lost entitled The State of Innocence, thus inaugurating two centuries of Miltonic imitation.
Even as Milton still wrote, his was known as an “antiquated” style. This could be a term of celebration—“ancient liberty recover’d to the Heroic Poem,” as a 1688 edition of Paradise Lost asserted—or a term of mild opprobrium. One early eighteenth-century history claimed that “Mr. Milton chose to write (if the Expression may be allow’d) a hundred Years backward.” In the 1730s it was suggested by William Warburton that Milton’s archaic style was “best suited to his ‘English History’; his air of the antique giving a good grace to it.” Here Warburton touches upon a presiding element of Milton’s genius and, by natural extension, of the English imagination itself; it lies in the nature, and nurture, of antiquarianism.
Goethe mocked the English obsession with the ruined fabric of the past. In his Faust Mephistopheles asks:
Are Britons here? They go abroad, feel calls To trace old battle-fields and crumbling walls . . .
In
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