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Our rigorous pursuit of empiricism, though it has strangely co-existed with our fascination with ghosts, has led us to distrust abstract theory, showiness and even intellectualism. Out of our belief in the primacy of experience over speculation grew the English sense of irony. We also favour understatement (but enjoy exaggeration too). Our artistic geniuses displayed a tendency toward personal modesty, together with a belief, typified by Handel, that the English are a chosen people. That does not prevent us from enjoying scatology, transvestism and Gothic horror.
When a composer remarked that he had written a piece of music ‘on his knees’, Vaughan Williams responded, ‘I wrote the Sancta Civitas sitting on my bum’, a comment that exemplified many of those English tendencies. Sir Thomas More referred to Luther as a ‘shit devil’ who celebrates mass ‘super fornicam’, which serves to remind us that although he died like a saintly martyr, he spoke like a Londoner.
As Ackroyd attempted this ambitious project he faced the issue of how to organise his mass of material. The book consists largely of tying together lines of poetry and prose from across our history and pointing out the links. The process is necessarily repetitive and potentially tedious. He overcomes the problem as best he can by a combination of themed chapters (on ghosts, weather, trees, ruins and other elements that have shaped the English imagination) set within a broad chronology.
Some chapters are too much like a list to make felicitous reading. It’s like watching those machines that faster-than-the-eye-can-see assemble tiny components on a printed circuit board. The author’s hand moves with dizzying speed to pluck a snatch of verse of Gerard Manley Hopkins and lay it close by an allusion to Tennyson. In a blur the arm is off again, returning with a quotation from Jane Austen, to be embedded next to Tacitus and tied into Whistler and Monet.
This is cerebral stuff and my first reaction suggested a streak of atavistic English anti-intellectualism. ‘Smart arse,’ I thought. But didn’t that exactly prove Ackroyd’s point about the strength of our linguistic tradition? My reflex response to anything that seemed overblown was to revert to monosyllables, possibly of Anglo-Saxon origin and certainly alliterative; and didn’t my expletive betray a national fixation with bottoms that Vaughan Williams and I must have caught subliminally from Chaucer?
Joking apart, this work could have been produced only by the liveliest of intellects, drawing on an astonishing depth of experience. Ackroyd in his own writing illustrates the quality of the English imagination as he picks up a thread of imagery and demonstrates how it binds together Chaucer, Malory, Dryden, Henry Fielding and C. S. Lewis. Nor does he rely on only the most obvious of English writers. The book is remarkably comprehensive. That said, the essays on England’s finest – for example on Shakespeare and Samuel Johnson – are delightful for their admiration and affection. Furthermore, Ackroyd’s book encompasses not only the firmament of English literature, but also its connections to painting, architecture, philosophy and even gardening.
If I have an objection, it is that he does not prove that the influences on the English imagination that he describes were truly exclusive or defining. Take, for example, the supposed effect of weather on the English imagination. Has it not affected others as much? Holland is as damp and flat as East Anglia, it rains a lot in Germany too, the winters are colder in Russia than here, and Russian authors have been a melancholy lot. Perhaps for reasons of space Ackroyd has not produced many international comparisons in the field of literature. Indeed there are few references even to the Scots, Welsh or Irish. Does this perhaps betray a Handelian view of England’s place amongst nations?
It is in the domain of philosophy that Ackroyd is most clear that the English school is set apart from its continental counterparts. The 13th-century Franciscan Roger Bacon is credited with being the first of our philosophical empiricists, with his careful attention to experimentation and observation. Three centuries later, as Francis Bacon championed the same rigorous approach, there was an inescapable political implication. If truth was to be discovered by experimentation, it could not be the preserve of hierarchies. Once more, English thought emphasised individualism and so the importance of character in shaping social change.
John Locke was another in the pragmatic tradition, a seeker after practical solutions not grand designs, a proponent not of dogma but of tentative discoveries, a manner of thinking that implied tolerance of other views. Such attitudes, suggests Ackroyd, can be seen to permeate English law and the development of our constitution.
I would go further and suggest that Ackroyd’s highly plausible account of the development of our culture, philosophy and laws is politically significant even today. Those who argue that the peoples of Europe should be governed in common must address the startling differences between the English and continental traditions. The English imagination has its origins in the very rhythms of our language. The ‘common substance of thought’ to which we are heirs cannot be set aside with the stroke of a pen.
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