(I)

Peter Ackroyd has not only written fiction and poetry, he has also written weighty scholastic books which are highly readable. He is the biographer of Dickens, Blake, Thomas More, Ezra Pound, Chaucer and Shakespeare. He is one of the most eminent contemporary critics and he has the rare distinction of being a best-selling author as well. Ackroyd is a polymath, and as he is one of my most favoured authors.

One of his recent works is Albion -- The Origins of the English Imagination, a book which discovers the roots of English cultural history in the Anglo-Saxon period and traces it through the centuries. English quality, he informs us, can be discovered in all forms of English culture, not only in literature but also in painting, music, architecture, gardening, philosophy and science.

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Way back in 1962 I was in New York when I was approached by Caedmon Records to record some stories to be presented in the form of a long playing record. LPs were in vogue then. That was the first time I came across the name of Caedmon. My friend, Donald Farber, a lawyer, who represented some well-known authors, told me that the Caedmon company specialised in recording off-beat literature.

I now learn from Ackryod’s masterly work Albion… that Caedmon, who belonged to the seventh century, was the first Christian poet in the English language. He was a herdsman at the monastery of Whitby known then as Streones Heath. A man of modest nature he had no pretensions of poetical skill and when, in a feast, he was handed over the harp to recite episodes from the native poetry -- a custom in those days -- he would leave the table and return to his hut.

One evening he had retired to the stable where he had been posted that night to care for the animals and had slept. Then in dream he saw a man standing beside him. "Caedmon", said the man in the dream, "sing me a song."

"I have no skill in singing," said Caedmon.

"This is the reason I left the feast and

retired here"

"But you will sing to me," the man insisted

"What shall I sing?" asked Caedmon

"Sing the song of creation."

Then at once, in the dream, Caedmon chanted a hymn: "Now shall we praise the maker of the heavenly kingdom."

On awakening, Caedmon added more verses and then visited the reeve of the monastery to tell the story of the night and the vision. The reeve then took him before the Abbess of Whitby, a great religious leader of the era. She asked Caedmon to repeat his story, and his song to a group of learned clerics who deemed his vision to be the work of God. Caedmon was admitted as a brother to the monastery and, on being educated in the scriptures, composed many verses on such themes as Incarnation, the Resurrection and the Last Judgement.

This miraculous event, Peter Ackroyd tells us, heralded a great change in the nature of the English imagination, since for the first time the old songs of the tribe were redeveloped to state the truths of the Christian faith. Caedmon’s poems were written down. Unfortunately, only the transcription of Caedmon’s hymn survives which in Ackroyd’s estimation originates the great sequences of religious poetry in the English language.

For several centuries the English were characterised "as seers of vision." Ackroyd quotes from a letter written (in the twelfth century) by a French cleric to an Englishman:

"Your land is surrounded by water, and not unnaturally its inhabitants are affected by the nature of the element in which they live. Fantasies slide easily into their minds. They think their dreams to be visions and their vision to be divine."

One of the pillars on which Ackroyd has built his edifice is that the tradition of ‘dreams and vision’ -- a salient feature of the English imagination -- has travelled through the centuries into the works of Bunyon, Blake, Spencer, Keats and many others. could it be otherwise on an island which in the earliest histories was itself established upon a vision?"

According to an old legend, the Goddess Diana appeared before Brutus with the news that "Beyond the realm of Gaul, a land there lies, where giants dwelt of old. Now void, it fits thy people… And kings be born of thee, whose dreaded might shall awe the world and conquer nations bold."

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The green of the English bowling green is a marvel to behold. A well-shorn English lawn is perfection as far as I am concerned. The English garden bears all the fruits of English imagination. Gardening in England is a national pursuit. No matter how small his house is, an Englishman has a patch of land which he treats as his garden and he tends to it with meticulous care. It is not entirely untrue to say that however various their occupations and tastes, however conflicting their opinions, in the garden the English are united.

One distinctively English aspect of the cultivated gardens is their serpentine look. Capability Brown dubbed as "England’s greatest gardener" has been much admired for his smooth and suave curves and serpentines. He lived in Georgian times and the Georgian landscape gardens have been described as enshrining the spirit of England. Capability Brown and the other landscape artists avoided the straight lines -- a hallmark of the French classical garden -- and replaced them with the amorphous serpentines in lawns and paths and lakes.

Ackroyd says that this suggests distaste for regimentation and a love for English liberty, that liberty of which the eighteenth century gardens themselves were a sort of symbol. The art historian, man of letters and whig politician, Horace Walpole considered "the art of the garden to be totally new, original and undisputably English", a development which he associated with English liberties. Ackroyd cites the priceless comment of a Georgian who asked, "Whether a modern gardener could consent to enter heaven if any path there is not serpentine?"

According to Ackroyd no better example could be found for the essential unity of English cultural practice. He writes, "it is therefore natural that the literature of gardens and the gardens of literature should be harmoniously united. Some of the best English prose has been preserved in gardening books where communion with the spirit of place releases a note of native lyricism."

An Englishman’s home is his castle. He prefers to have high hedges which make for privacy. Ackroyd points out that English diffidence or embarrassment may also be deemed to be present "since gardening may encourage the displacement of passion and even of sexuality itself".

(to be continued)