When an Englishman turns to Latin poetry, he finds that his land is obscure, remote, and exotic. Catullus extravagantly tells his friends that they are willing to follow him to the ends of the earth, to where the eastern waves beat upon the Indian shore and to the ‘‘shaggy and most distant Britons’’ (Poem 11). Horace flatters his master by predicting the conquest of the farthest and most improbable peoples: Augustus will be held to be a god upon earth when he has added the Persians and the Britons to his empire (Odes 3.5.1-4). And one of Vergil’s herdsmen, in an excess of despair, declares that exile will take him to Scythia or the Sahara or to ‘‘the Britons separated from the entire world’’ (Eclogue 1.66). Nineteen hundred years on, when Tennyson wrote his homage To Virgil, he echoed these lines, but with a significant adjustment:
I, from out the Northern Island, sunder’d once from all the human race,
I salute thee, Mantovano...
(lines 35-7)
In the little adverb ‘‘once,’’ much of the history of the British engagement with classical antiquity is encapsulated - the awareness that the British had been peripheral to the classical story, to which they might add the hope that they might be able to latch on to the central tradition of European culture, or the confidence that they had indeed done so. In Tennyson’s time the British might claim that far from being sundered from all the human race, they were at the head of it; even so, his ‘‘Mantovano,’’ ‘‘man of Mantua,’’ recalls that Vergil is not only what T. S. Eliot was to call him, the classic of all Europe, but also an Italian, a foreigner. At the same time, Tennyson remembers that Dante had addressed Vergil with the selfsame word, and thus he engages also with the Vergilian tradition that has been carried down into the literature of the west.
Throughout its history, Britain’s outlook upon classical antiquity has been affected by its distinctive relationship to the Mediterranean world. Contrasts of climate, history, and culture differentiate the south of Europe from the north, and the massive barrier of the Alps has kept the British symbolically and practically separate. In addition, they have always been inevitably conscious that they live in an island, part of Europe but not part of the continent; and after the Reformation they were divorced confessionally from the Catholic south. All these things contributed to an idea of the classical world that often combined admiration with a sense of otherness.
However remote Britain may have seemed to Catullus, Vergil, and Horace, a hundred years later the Romans conquered the southern half of the island. But though this part of Britain was to remain under Roman control for some three and a half centuries, it was always at the edge of empire, and after the Romans left, the dissevering from Mediterranean civilization was almost complete. In some parts of Europe the transition from antiquity to what we call the Middle Ages can seem to be an almost continuous process. The languages of Italy, Spain, Provence, and even northern France evolved from Latin. In the Romanesque architecture of France and southern Europe we can often detect a modification of the Corinthian order in the capitals and sometimes in the bases of the columns. Even in Germany we may catch the distant resonances of Roman grandeur: Charlemagne based his imperial chapel at Aachen on one of the masterpieces of late antiquity, the church of San Vitale in Ravenna; and another building of the same period, at Lorsch, plainly derives its organization from the Roman triumphal arch. But in Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman architecture, Romanesque though it may be, even the faintest echo of antiquity is seldom to be found. Any classical element in the visual culture of England would henceforth have to be a matter of recovery, not continuity.
The case of Westminster Abbey, Henry III’s showpiece church, may illustrate England’s relationship at once to modern Europe and to the classical tradition. One of Henry’s aims was to emulate Louis IX of France, and the Abbey is famously the most French in style of all English medieval churches. But it also looked to Rome - and that meant both the Church and the ancient past. Richard Ware, Abbot of Westminster, traveled to Rome to receive his commission from the pope, and came back with ‘‘marbles of Thasos’’ and porphyry, stripped from the ruins of classical buildings. He also brought with him Italian craftsmen, who used the porphyry in making King Henry’s tomb. On the side of this tomb is what is unmistakably a miniature classical portico, with pediment and pilasters, seeming to anticipate the arrival of the Renaissance in England by more than two hundred years. By its uniqueness, this extraordinary work may suggest the remoteness of medieval England from classical antiquity; but by its presence it also suggests an aspiration.
That aspiration is exemplified in another way by the inscription, in bronze letters, that surrounded the pavement before the high altar, made by the imported Italian artists from the stones that Abbot Ware had acquired. The content of this inscription is a weird and more or less incomprehensible allegory; but it is written in verse, and in classical Latin meter. Or rather it is written in a mixture of Latin meters, mingling hexameters with elegiac couplets. That is something that any classical Roman would have considered bizarre. So in these words, too, we find a great distance from ancient Rome combined with an aspiration toward it. It is like observing the centripetal tendency in a planet at the outermost edge of the solar system.
Architecture is the master art of the Middle Ages, and Gothic is its master style. The earliest Gothic, as it appears in northern France in the middle of the twelfth century, may still be felt to have something ‘‘classical’’ about its aesthetic - in balance, proportion, and even in some of its forms. And the same may be said of the twelfth-century Gothic of the choir of Canterbury Cathedral. The cylindrical columns around the apse and their superbly carved capitals, whose concave profile and crisply executed leaf forms are in a line of descent from the Corinthian order, might be said to continue the classical tradition by other means. But the first architect of Gothic Canterbury was William of Sens, a Frenchman, and the craftsmen who carved the capitals may have been imported from France also. As soon as the first indigenous Gothic style appears in England, the story is different. The stiff-leaf capitals and clustered columns of Wells Cathedral are wholly new and original. Twice more English Gothic would create something radically new - first in the early fourteenth century, with the Decorated style, which would be taken up on the Continent and developed into the Flamboyant style, and then in the middle of the century with the Perpendicular style, which would remain wholly English and endure for the best part of two hundred years.
The consequence of this for the British relationship to the classical tradition was to be profound. The idea was planted that Gothic was the natural - almost it might seem the native - style for England. This was an argument that Pugin, the most passionate champion ofthe Gothic Revival, was to use in the nineteenth century. Gothic, he said, was Christian architecture; despite this, the classical style might be just about acceptable in southern Europe, but in the north it was not only pagan but alien. Back in the sixteenth century, the long and noble history of English Gothic meant that when the Italian Renaissance began to impinge on the English consciousness, it came as something wholly external. It also came out of a brilliant new culture. Engagement with the Renaissance would be at once an engagement with modern Italy and with the classical past.
In the case of literary culture, the story is somewhat different. There is a sense in which England was part of the Latinate culture that was the common possession of all western Christendom. John of Salisbury, Roger Bacon, and William Occam wrote in Latin just as Aquinas did, and as Bede or even St. Patrick had, many centuries before. As for the vernacular, there never was an English without vocabulary of Latin origin. Even before they crossed the Channel, the peoples who were to become the Anglo-Saxons had derived many words from Latin; among them are such plain, everyday nouns as ‘‘mat,’’ ‘‘belt,’’ ‘‘pipe,’’ ‘‘sack,’’ ‘‘sock,’’ ‘‘candle,’’ ‘‘pan,’’ ‘‘butter,’’ ‘‘kitchen,’’ ‘‘pin,’’ ‘‘plant,’’ ‘‘pit,’’ ‘‘beer.’’ More words entered Old English from Latin before the Norman Conquest: for example, ‘‘cat,’’ ‘‘chest,’’ ‘‘anchor,’’ ‘‘pear,’’ ‘‘fan,’’ ‘‘spend,’’ ‘‘cook.’’ After the Conquest English acquired many words from French, which had itself derived them from late spoken Latin. Other words came into English from written Latin, either directly or via France. Hence the phenomenon of the etymological doublet: two English words deriving from the same Latin source. Some of these doublets are merely curious (and sometimes surprising): ‘‘treason’’ and ‘‘tradition,’’ ‘‘forge’’ and ‘‘fabric,’’ ‘‘spice’’ and ‘‘species.’’ Others have affected the texture and flavor of the language. Take the pairs ‘‘frail’’ and ‘‘fragile,’’ ‘‘poor’’ and ‘‘pauper,’’ ‘‘abridge’’ and ‘‘abbreviate.’’ In each case the second word looks and feels Latinate, while the first does not.
Such doublets have enriched the word store of English and increased its expressive range. This phenomenon apart, the history of England formed a language of distinctive character: the base is Germanic, but the bulk of the abstract vocabulary derives from Latin or Greek. Yet there remain plenty of abstracts that descend from the Anglo-Saxons. When Tyndale translated St. Paul, he wrote, ‘‘Now abideth faith, hope, and love, even these three: but the chief of these is love’’ (1 Corinthians 13:13). When the revisers who produced the King James Bible came to this verse they changed ‘‘love’’ to ‘‘charity.’’ St. Paul’s word is agape., which he uses to denote Christian love, as distinct from eras, physical desire, and philia, a general word for all kinds of personal affection. The Vulgate renders agape by ‘‘caritas,’’ the word that gives us ‘‘charity.’’ Tyndale chooses the plain, straight word; the revisers choose a word directed to St. Paul’s particular nuance; the mixed origin of the English language gives them the choice.
The development of English as a literary language was bound in the long term to lead to a decline in the writing of Latin; but as long as Latin was learnt, people had a direct access to the literature of ancient Rome. Just before the end of his Troilus and Criseyde Chaucer writes,
But litel book, no makyng thow n’envie,
But subgit be to alle poesye;
And kis the steppes, where as thow seest pace Virgile, Ovide, Omer, Lucan, and Stace.
(V.1789-92)
This expresses a sense of subordination, and perhaps also of isolation and remoteness: all these poets are very distant in time, and distant in place as well. And yet Chaucer is echoing Statius, a poet more highly regarded in the Middle Ages than he was to be later. As he concludes his epic Thebaid, Statius admonishes his poem not to seek to rival the divine Aeneid, but to follow at a distance and to worship its footsteps. And so in the very act of marking his separation from the great names of classical antiquity, Chaucer is inserting himself into the stream of a classical tradition.
The Latin heritage was a common possession of western Christendom as a whole: Chaucer can use Statius as readily as Dante can. The same was not true of visual culture: paintings, statues, and buildings do not travel as easily as words. The effect of the Italian Renaissance, or at least of its visual elements, was to provincialize northern Europe as a whole. When Francois I of France brought Primaticcio to Fontainebleau and Leonardo to the Loire valley, he acknowledged an inferiority. Even in the seventeenth century the churches of Paris follow, a little staidly, the models of Baroque Rome. England was further from Italy, but even here we find royal patronage importing the new style, and reaching, through that newness, toward the recovery of antiquity. Italians carve the choir stalls at King’s College Cambridge; the Italian Torrigiani makes the tombs in Henry VII’s Chapel at Westminster. Henry VII’s
Figure 18.1 The Tower of the Five Orders. © Brian Harding / Eye Ubiquitous / CORBIS
Chapel is indeed spectacularly international: Flemings to carve the stone figures, a German for the metalwork, Englishmen for the architecture, and an Italian for the royal monuments themselves. Here Gothic and Renaissance collide, combine, and curiously harmonize. The architecture, wholly English and wholly Gothic, was equal to anything in contemporary Europe; nonetheless, for whatever reason, it marked the end of a story. The future, even in England, would lie with classical forms.
A visitor entering Henry VII’s Chapel when it was new might well have supposed that England was on the brink of developing a brilliantly cosmopolitan visual culture. He would have been wrong: in the event the Reformation and its consequences cut England off from the Continental mainstream, and the movement of English art toward classicism was to be slow and fitful, and as a result to be marked by a sense of deference toward classical antiquity and its supposed rebirth in modern Italy. The Tower of the Five Orders, part of the Bodleian Library in Oxford, built in the early years of the seventeenth century, illustrates the English condition. This spectacular frontispiece has a different classical order on each of its five storeys, a display of learning suitable for a university library; but the orders are inaccurate in detail, and the columns are added as purely surface decoration to a tower that is unmistakably still Gothic in its construction. This is the classical language of architecture spoken in a quaint and half-barbarous accent.
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