Stonehenge (11 page)

Gilpin and others worked out the theory of the Picturesque in great detail and contended hotly among themselves and against Burke and his idea of the Sublime, but the theoretical ins and outs mattered little to most people. ‘Sublime’ and ‘Picturesque’ were often used in the same description and Constable and Turner were not prevented by Gilpin’s strictures from painting Stonehenge. What mattered was that by the late eighteenth century the association of ideas was an almost universally accepted fact. It was expected that landscape and weather would act upon the imagination and that history and poetry should feed on one another. Thus, when the young Wordsworth came to Salisbury Plain, it was not in itself surprising that he ‘had a reverie and saw the past’, nor that the past that rose before him owed much to Stukeley and even more to Aylett Sammes and his wicker man. Wordsworth saw:

A single Briton in his wolf-skin vest,
With shield and stone-axe, stride across the wold;
…

I called upon the darkness, and it took –

A midnight darkness seemed to come and take –
All objects from my sight; and lo, again
The desert visible by dismal flames!

It is the sacrificial altar, fed
With living men – how deep the groans! – the voice

Of those in the gigantic wicker thrills
Throughout the region far and near, pervades

The monumental hillocks, and the pomp
Is for both worlds, the living and the dead.

Of the various versions of the Druids and their culture available by the 1790s, the Romantics chose not Stukeley’s peaceful proto-Christians but the violent priesthood of John Toland and Aylett Sammes. This dark vision on Salisbury Plain, which Wordsworth recalled in
The Prelude
, was of great importance to him. He saw it as proof of the supernatural power of the poetic gift, ‘Imagination’, which made the poet into a kind of prophet, ‘Connected in a mighty scheme of truth’ and able to perceive ‘Something unseen before’. While the details of what he actually saw may seem familiar to the seasoned Stonehenge enthusiast, it was what he understood by it, the connection of ‘both worlds’, present and past, the immanence of the dead among the living, that enabled Wordsworth to take the material of the antiquaries and turn it into art. By the time he wrote these lines his experience on Salisbury Plain had already made the basis of two poems, the second a development of the first. In both of them the nightmare vision of ancient human sacrifice forms the background to a modern drama of cruelty and distress that has nothing to do with Druids, but is concerned instead with the great events of Wordsworth’s lifetime, the French Revolution and its aftermath.

In August 1793, when Britain declared war on France, Wordsworth was on the Isle of Wight. He watched the fleet prepare to sail from Portsmouth with ‘melancholy forebodings’. Not only did he sympathise with revolutionary France, he feared that the war would be ‘productive of distress and misery beyond all possible calculation’ for both sides.
Meanwhile, in his own country, William Pitt’s government, terrified of revolution at home, was bringing in repressive measures to silence its critics, putting radicals on trial and banning anything it considered to be ‘wicked and seditious writings’. The liberty on which the British prided themselves seemed to have been betrayed. Isolated in a nation gripped by anti-French fervour, Wordsworth felt himself to be ‘an uninvited guest / Whom no-one own’d’ in his own country. It was just weeks later, as he continued on his summer tour, that a carriage accident left him stranded near Stonehenge. There, physically and morally alone, troubled by thoughts of war and suffering, he had his vision and conceived the idea for the first poem, ‘A Night on Salisbury Plain’.

It tells the story of a wanderer like the poet and his meeting with a woman who has lost her husband to the war and her children to famine and disease. The second version, ‘Adventures on Salisbury Plain’, was written two years later, by which time Pitt had suspended habeas corpus and poverty, hunger and unrest posed a still greater menace. In it the story of the woman is subsumed within a longer, more complex story of a sailor, discharged from the navy and left destitute, who, on his way home to his wife and children, robs and murders a stranger. In both versions Stonehenge forms the forbidding background. The ‘child of darkness deep / And unknown days … Inmate of lonesome Nature’s endless year’ looms over the action, the manifestation of all that is cruel in human nature. The narrator of ‘A Night on Salisbury Plain’ flees from it in terror, but as he runs he ‘often backward cast his face’, for the horror that it represents is inescapable, it has come alive again in the present day. As the story unfolds, the ‘spectral sights’ of ancient sacrifice and battle that haunt the several wanderers
on the plain find echoes in the sounds of modern warfare: ‘The mine’s dire earthquake, the bomb’s thunder stroke’ and the sickly light of ‘midnight flames’ from burning, looted towns. The suffering of the sailor and the woman, who, like many of their countrymen, were ‘homeless near a thousand homes … And near a thousand tables pined for food’, weighs modern cruelty against the savagery of the past and finds no great improvement. Reason, Wordsworth concludes, has only given us a clearer view of man’s inhumanity:

Though from huge wickers paled with circling fire
No longer horrid shrieks and dying cries
To ears of Daemon-Gods in peals aspire,

To Daemon-Gods a human sacrifice;

Though Treachery her sword no longer dyes

In the cold blood of Truce, still, reason’s ray,

What does it more than while the tempests rise,
With starless glooms and sounds of loud dismay,
Reveal with still-born glimpse the terrors of our way?

Wordsworth was clearly familiar with the myths and histories surrounding Stonehenge and he drew on them as they suited his purpose, magnifying, simplifying, cutting and eliding. The whole story of Hengist’s betrayal becomes a single motif, the sword of Treachery soaked in the cold blood of truce. The somewhat comical suggestion that the priests had actually stood on top of the trilithons to perform their rites becomes in Wordsworth’s hands a Sublime image of ‘Gigantic beings ranged in dread array’ on top of ‘mountains hung in air’ who ‘like a thousand Gods mysterious council hold’.

William Blake made a similar but more complex use of
Druidic theories, for he was much closer to the antiquarian tradition. Blake’s ‘Welch Triads’ of 1809 were probably inspired by Iolo’s
Poems Lyrical and Pastoral
, and, as an engraver in London, Blake knew and worked for several antiquaries. His largest painting, now lost,
The Ancient Britons
, was commissioned by William Owen Pughe, an antiquary and lexicographer who collaborated with Iolo in his more respectable works and translated
Paradise Lost
into Welsh (without critical success). For Blake, history was ‘the field of recurrent attempts to wake up human conscience’. He was mistrustful of official facts and not at all interested in literal authenticity. ‘I Believe both Macpherson & Chatterton’, he wrote, ‘that what they say is Ancient is’. Blake was a mystic. While Wordsworth experienced visions that flashed upon the ‘inward eye’, Blake actually saw things. He saw angels on Peckham Rye and shortly before he began work on his long poem
Jerusalem
he had had a renewal of his visionary experiences and been ‘again enlightened with the light I enjoyed in my youth’. He had also recently been arrested and acquitted of a charge of sedition, a charge which carried the death penalty.
Jerusalem
, like ‘Adventures on Salisbury Plain’, is a poem in which the ancient past speaks about modern Britain and its injustices.

The text, interwoven with Blake’s drawings, covers a hundred pages through which his anger against his persecutors and against the condition of Albion, the personification of England, ricochets. ‘The little villages of Middlesex & Surrey hunger and thirst … the Oppressors of Albion in every city & village / …mock at the Labourers limbs! They mock at his starved Children …’, and ‘Albions mountains run with blood.’ In the complex iconography of Blake’s apocalyptic world Stonehenge ‘the cruel druid temple’, forms part of one of many triads. It is associated with Tyburn, the place of execution at the western end of London, and with London Stone, the supposedly Roman marker to the east, from which proclamations were made and where, in 1450, the rebel Jack Cade declared himself mayor. All three are sites of violence, past, present and to come. Blake’s Stonehenge, like Wordsworth’s, shows the modern world haunted by history and stalked by visions, which in Blake’s case presage also a millenarian future, where ‘The sun was black & the moon rolld a useless globe through Britain’ and ‘Time was finished.’ The Druids are symptomatic of the recurring decay of faith, which first wakes human consciousness and then declines into law and system, the ‘natural religion’ that Blake hated, for it seemed to limit both God and humanity. The forces of evil in
Jerusalem
include all rule makers and rationalists, Bacon, Voltaire and Newton, ‘the great Reactor’. Its Stonehenge is:

… a wondrous rocky World of cruel destiny

Rocks piled on rocks reaching the stars: stretching from pole to pole.

The Building is Natural Religion & its Altars Natural Morality

A building of eternal death: whose proportions are eternal despair

16. In William Blake’s long poem,
Jerusalem
, Stonehenge is a powerful, brooding and almost entirely sinister presence.

Blake’s Stonehenge is like nothing else. Yet it is at the same time recognisable to anyone familiar with the literature. It too includes Sammes’s sensational ‘Wicker Idol’ and also the less well-known image of Britannia from the title page of Drayton’s
Poly-Olbion
. There she appears with her lovers, ‘Briton Saxon Roman Norman’; Blake reverses the image and turns
her into the figure of Jerusalem in an attitude of surrender, weeping against a background of trilithons. There is perhaps an echo even of Inigo Jones’s
Stone-Heng
in the lines:

… the Great Voice of the Atlantic howled over the Druid Altars:

Weeping over his Children in Stone-henge in Malden & Colchester

… What is a Church? & What

Is a Theatre? Are they Two & not One? can they Exist Separate?

But it is in the overarching idea of the poem, the belief that ‘All things begin & end in Albion’s Ancient Druid Rocky Shore’, that Blake draws most deeply on the antiquarian tradition. He invokes the idea of Britain as the new Jerusalem, the site of the first temple. This possibility, which tantalised Inigo Jones and obsessed John Wood, came to Blake partly through Stukeley and partly through another antiquary, Jacob Bryant. ‘Bryant and all antiquaries have proved’, he wrote, ‘All had originally one language, and one religion: this was the religion of Jesus, the everlasting Gospel. Antiquity preaches the Gospel of Jesus.’ ‘Was Britain the Primitive Seat of the Patriarchal Religion?’ he asks in the section of
Jerusalem
addressed ‘To the Jews’. ‘If it is true: my title-page is also True, that Jerusalem was & is the Emanation of the Giant Albion.’ For Blake this was a spiritual ideal, not a description of a literal past that could be calculated, as Wood had calculated it, by using the chronology of ‘the great Reactor’. It is experienced inwardly, ‘Jerusalem in every Man / A Tent & Tabernacle of Mutual Forgiveness’.

Robert Southey, who was Poet Laureate at the time
Jerusalem
was completed, thought it ‘completely mad’. Blake made only one fully coloured version of the poem, noting sadly but accurately that it was ‘not likely I shall get a customer for it’. Today he has many admirers, but few would claim fully to understand the involutions of his imagery. His attitude towards the Druids changed over time and Stonehenge, while it remains an evil presence throughout the poem, reappears, transfigured, on the final page. Here we see a complete stone circle with a snaking curl of trilithons on either side, a fusion of Stonehenge with Stukeley’s serpent temple of Avebury. It is a positive image of restored order, of the original faith, perhaps, before its decline into law and natural religion. Given so much ambiguity, it is not surprising that there have been attempts to recruit Blake for the Druid cause. In the twentieth century the Druid Order of the Universal Bond claimed him as a forebear and his name has also been associated with a copper medal depicting Stonehenge which was struck in 1796 for the Ancient Druids Universal Brethren. This was a friendly society that commissioned the medal to raise funds for the parliamentary reformer Thomas Muir, who, like Blake, had been charged with sedition, but unlike him was found guilty and sentenced to fourteen years’ transportation. Blake would have sympathised with the cause and may indeed have provided a drawing for the medallist Thomas Wyon, but he would not have cared to be thought of as a Druid.

Dark, forbidding, cruel, the Stonehenge of the Romantic poets was a place of terror. It was also, noticeably, a masculine place. The qualities of the Sublime – physical power, the sense of danger, difficulty and obscurity, were male. Blake makes the distinction in
Jerusalem
: