Stonehenge (13 page)

Among the more traditional arts, painting found Stonehenge a difficult subject. Most of the great watercolourists and many amateurs attempted it, but few distinguished themselves. Gilpin was right, it was not Picturesque, and after 1797, when the western trilithon fell, it was even less so. Many of the popular views and engravings were little more than hack work, some of them surely made not from life but from Browne’s or other models, which led to even more unconvincing results. Only Samuel Palmer, the visionary artist and follower of Blake, managed to make an image of Stonehenge that was intimate, picturesque and truthful. He set it in the background of what Blake would have called ‘a little moony night’, a scene illustrating Milton’s
Il Penseroso
and the lines:

Or let my lamp at midnight hour
Be seen in some high lonely tower

19. John Britton’s ‘Celtic Cabinet’ made in about 1824 in the shape of a trilithon. It houses a pair of Henry Browne’s models of Stonehenge showing it as it was in the early nineteenth century and as he believed it to have been originally. The glass in the case on top is coloured to imitate the effects of dawn and dusk on the stones.

Beyond the solitary tower the outline of Stonehenge appears against the night sky seeming by comparison familiar and hence comforting. This was, Palmer explained, his intention, to evoke a scene of ‘poetic loneliness – not the loneliness of the desert, but a secluded spot in a genial pastoral country, enriched also by antique relics, such as those so-called Druidic stones’.

Of those who eschewed the Picturesque and took the high road of classical history painting, the most interesting to tackle Stonehenge was another acquaintance of Blake, the best of the history painters, James Barry. He incorporated a version of it in his
King Lear Weeping over the Body of Cordelia
, painted in 1786–7 and now in Tate Britain in London. History painting, though much admired in theory, was never popular in Britain. Landscapes, portraits, narratives and animal pictures all went down better with the public and Barry died embittered and impoverished in 1806, believing himself to have been the victim of ‘a dark conspiracy’. He was certainly badly treated. The Society for the Encouragement of Art in particular, as Blake noted in the margin of his copy of the
Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds
, ‘Suffer’d Barry to Give them his Labour for Nothing, A Society Composed of the Flower of the English Nobility & Gentry? – Suffering an Artist to Starve’. Barry, the only artist ever to be expelled from the Royal Academy, was an example of a man with a persecution complex who was also actually persecuted. No doubt his strange appearance, ‘rugged, austere and passion-beaten’, not unlike a Druidical Lear, contributed to the difficulties he experienced with neighbours and critics. But he was also a man of controversial, radical views, a friend not only of Blake but of Joseph Priestley and Mary Wollstonecraft, a ‘sturdy republican’. His
Lear
was painted just before the French Revolution, yet, like Wordsworth and Fanny Burney, he was thinking of the overthrow of monarchy and the rise of a new social order. Shakespeare’s play, its story taken at several removes from Geoffrey of Monmouth, is scarcely a republican parable, but its end is the fall of a king, brought down by ill-judgment. In Barry’s version old and new orders are painted in a way that depicts the battle of the styles, classical and Gothic, as well as the battle for the state. Lear is a primitive, wild-eyed creature, desperate and pathetic as he holds his dead daughter in his arms. His other daughters lie dead at his feet. Opposite him Edgar and Albany, who represent the new order, are painted with the ‘sublime, venerable, majestic, genuine simplicity of the Grecian taste’ that Barry admired.

20. James Barry’s
King Lear Weeping over the Body of Cordelia
, 1786–7. Barry presents a confrontation between the old, Gothic, order and the new Classical civilization with Stonehenge an enigmatic presence in the background.

What, in this context, Stonehenge represents is not clear. The stone circle is visible behind the human circle in the
foreground. Scott Paul Gordon, who has written the fullest account of the painting as ‘patriot art’, is inclined to see it as a ‘republican image’, showing the ancient Britons resisting the invaders. That was one popular reading of the Druids and their monuments, but it seems more likely that Barry shared Blake’s view and saw the monument like Lear himself as a symbol of ancient tyranny about to be overthrown. It is impossible to be sure; the scene in front of the trilithons is ‘hard to decipher’, as Gordon points out. This was the kind of difficulty, not knowing what was going on or what to think about it, that made the British dislike history painting.

The most popular medium of the Romantic era was water-colour and the two most successful portrayals of Stonehenge are in that medium by the two greatest British Romantic artists, J. M. W. Turner and John Constable. Turner made two views. One shows it in the distance, the other, a close-up exhibited in London at the Egyptian Halls in 1829, became the subject of an immensely popular print. It involved considerable artistic licence. Described fairly by the archaeologist Christopher Chippindale as ‘hopeless’ in terms of accuracy, the painting deals with the problem of composition by adjusting the stones, changing the shape of some and adding others, until the result is both picturesque and sublime. At Turner’s Stonehenge a shepherd has been struck dead by lightning. His dog howls beside him, and around him many of his flock lie stricken, while overhead the storm rages and lightning forks across a wild sky. It is the storm, the elemental force, that makes the drama. As Ruskin later wrote, it is ‘as if the whole muscular energy were writhing in every fold; and [the clouds’] fantastic and fiery volumes have a peculiar horror, an awful life’. In this extraordinary piece
of painting the most transient of natural effects is prolonged indefinitely, the mental anguish of Wordsworth’s wanderer is abstracted into light and air, while between the turbulent sky in the background and the scene of death and suffering in the foreground stand the all-resisting stones.

No Romantic was likely to produce a picture called ‘A Fine Day at Stonehenge’ and equally extreme weather characterises Constable’s version, the most ambitious watercolour of his career, painted in 1835. Like his rival Turner, Constable was interested in an imagined landscape, thinking, as he told John Britton, that the ‘literal representation’ of Stonehenge ‘as a “stone quarry” has been often enough done’. For him, too, it is the wide sky that offers the opportunity to draw on the emotions of the viewer. Once again it is stormy, but split this time not by lightning but by a double rainbow. Constable visited Stonehenge only once, in July 1820, but he did not begin planning his view of it until the end of 1832, at a time when he was much troubled physically by illness and mentally by anxiety. His work was not going well, his book
English Landscape Scenery
was a financial disaster and he feared the consequences of the great Reform Act, which would, by extending the vote, undermine, he thought, the order of society. By 1834 he felt that ‘every gleam of sunshine is blighted to me … Can it … be wondered at that I paint continual storms?’ If there is a political reading of his Stonehenge it is, uniquely among the Romantics, a conservative one.

The idea should not be taken too far. What Constable was painting above all was the much-discussed but seldom achieved Sublime of what he called ‘the mysterious monument … unconnected with the events of past ages … [which] carries you back beyond all historical record’. Yet
underlying it, surely, is the comparison with another favourite subject, both of Constable and of those who contemplated Stonehenge, Salisbury Cathedral. Since Dr Johnson had made the comparison of these two ‘eminent models of art and rudeness … the first essay, and the last perfection of architecture’, it had become a tourist’s cliché. Wordsworth’s wanderer measures his worsening situation as he advances towards the stones and loses sight of ‘the distant spire’ of the cathedral, which he looks back for long after it has gone. Constable painted Salisbury Cathedral many times, culminating in the view from the water meadows of 1831, also under a stormy sky and rainbow, portraying a fragile hope in dark times as reform menaced, he thought, the established Church. In his Stonehenge the monument abides against the fleeting rainbow and the spots of time that count for human history.

Yet Stonehenge, by 1835, was on the brink of change once more, or rather the understanding of it was. Between 1831 and 1833, while Constable was working on his painting, Charles Lyell published his three-volume work,
Principles of Geology
. The time barrier that had trapped Stonehenge within biblical chronology was about to be broken as the implications of Lyell’s book became more widely accepted and understood. And sensibilities were changing too. It was not until 1842 that the elderly Wordsworth finally published a version of his ‘Salisbury Plain’ called ‘Guilt and Sorrow’. It was not a great success. His friend Dr Arnold, headmaster of Rugby College, told the disappointed poet that young people these days seldom read the classics or poetry, and ‘his lads seemed to care for nothing but Bozzy’s next No’. ‘Can that Man’s public and others of the like kind materially affect the question’,
Wordsworth wondered nervously, adding, ‘I am quite in the dark.’ ‘Bozzy’ or Boz was the pseudonym of Charles Dickens. The Victorian age had arrived.

In which
‘everything is explained by geology and astronomy.’

Benjamin Disraeli,
Tancred

The Victorians did not lose interest in Stonehenge, in fact they visited it in ever increasing numbers, but they found it less mysterious than their predecessors had. Theirs was an age of expansion, imperial and intellectual. If there were questions still to be answered, then it was only a matter of time and science. ‘Very few of the riddles which puzzled and perplexed our forefathers now remain,’ the architectural historian James Fergusson remarked in the
Quarterly Review
in 1860, at the beginning of an article that went on to prove that Stonehenge was a post-Roman Buddhist temple. And as mental horizons expanded, so language grew in proportion. Among the words that were either coined or took on their modern meaning in the nineteenth century were ‘archaeology’, ‘ethnology’, ‘photography’, ‘megalith’, ‘cave-man’, ‘dinosaur’ and ‘railway’. All of them had implications for Stonehenge. Poets, meanwhile, came less often to Salisbury Plain and, when they did, like Coventry Patmore’s hero in
The Angel in the House
, they generally chose fine weather, unpacked a hamper beneath the shady stones and there ‘in converse sweet, / Took luncheon’.

Not that this was a complacent age. Its certainties were matched by equally compelling doubts, for as science and industry transformed human experience, so they raised fundamental questions about human nature. Were we God-created beings or simply overdeveloped apes? The nature of creation itself had to be reimagined and it was geology, ‘the newest and most controversial of the sciences’, that first raised these important, disturbing questions. ‘If only the Geologists would let me alone,’ Ruskin wrote to his friend Henry Acland in 1851, ‘…those dreadful hammers! I hear the clink of them at the end of every cadence of the Bible verses.’ That same year Matthew Arnold looked out on Dover Beach and heard ‘the melancholy, long, withdrawing roar’ of faith and certainty. But it was in the cliffs and fossils, these immeasurably old rocks, that profound mystery now lay. Stonehenge by comparison could be classed by Arthur Evans in the
Archaeological Review
as merely an ‘antiquarian riddle’. When Darwin himself visited it in the summer of 1877 he came in search of the answer to a much smaller, if interesting question, the activity of earthworms. He drew a cross-section of one of the fallen sarsens showing how, due to the worms, it had sunk over time into the ground. The drawing appears in his last book, the improbable best-seller of 1881,
The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms
.

Its diminishing mystery, however, did not prevent the Victorians from bringing the full weight of their new intellectual firepower to bear on Stonehenge. The abiding questions – How old? Who by? What for? – could be met with much more varied if not always more accurate answers. ‘Time, time, time’, that, as the geologist George Scrope said, was the problem. Geology had to wrestle with Archbishop Ussher, whose 4004-year span for prehistory was becoming increasingly inadequate to cover even the known history of ancient civilisations. The most effective attempt to break the time barrier was made by Scrope’s friend Charles Lyell, in his
Principles of Geology
. Like
On the Origin of Species
, more than twenty-five years later, the
Principles
was not wholly original. Much of what Lyell said had been said before. That his was the voice that made itself heard owed something to his prose style, which was persuasive and fluent, and much to his utter respectability. Despite his determination to ‘free science from Moses’, Lyell remained a practising Anglican all his life and he put forward his ideas in moderate, carefully referenced terms. Published by John Murray, the publisher of Walter Scott,
Principles
seemed a solid, even conservative book. It has been described as a Trojan horse and the Victorians wheeled it enthusiastically into their midst. It ran through edition after edition.