Albion Read Online Free Page A

In
The Woodlanders
, Hardy himself dwells upon the “runic obscurity” of the language of trees, yet “from the quality of the wind’s murmur through a bough” the local inhabitants could name its species. In
Far from the Madding Crowd
, humankind “learn how the trees on the right and the trees on the left wailed or chaunted to each other in the regular antiphonies of a cathedral choir.” It is not difficult to understand, therefore, how the trees of the ancient landscape became images of British liberty and of primitive Christianity itself.
    When Tess of the D’Urbervilles remarked that the trees had “inquisitive eyes” she was exclaiming upon that same preternatural insight which the “Tree of Truth” possesses in nineteenth-century pantomimes; whenever a character told a lie, a large acorn fell upon his or her head. When Jane Eyre accepts Rochester’s fanatical passion, “little Adele came running in to tell me that the great horse-chestnut at the bottom of the garden had been struck by lightning.”
    The folklore of England has many interesting ramifications. When in 1922 D. H. Lawrence wrote that “I would like to be a tree for a while,” he was expressing his need for deep and yet deeper absorption into the earth; it represents that descent into the layers of past time which is very like the journey into his own inner self where all unacknowledged fantasies and unknown powers lie hidden. That is why, in ancient poems, the woods are places of refuge and sanctuary. When Will Brangwen, in
The Rainbow
, carved two angels out of wood they “were like trees.” In Blake’s “A Vision of the Last Judgement,” Jehovah is “The I am of the Oaks of Albion.” So the tree grows through the literature of the English.

CHAPTER 2
    The Radiates

    In “A Letter to a Friend
upon Occasion of the Death of His Intimate Friend,” composed in the 1670s, Sir Thomas Browne noticed the change in the human countenance just before death; the man about to die began to resemble his uncle “the Lines of whose Face lay deep and invisible in his healthful Visage before.” Thus before our mortal end “by sick and languishing Alterations, we put on new Visages: and in our Retreat to Earth, may fall upon such Looks which from community of seminal Originals, were before latent in us.” Our ancestors shine through at that moment of quietus and we are but a palimpsest of past times.
    And is this the condition of the world itself? As the lachrymose eighteenth-century poet Edward Young asked, in his
Conjectures on Original
Composition
, “Born originals, how comes it to pass that we die Copies?” It is a question of absorbing interest for those who contemplate the persistence through time of certain patterns of behaviour or expression. It has often been remarked how the inhabitants of the Scottish Highlands retained such a primitive way of life that they remained in the ninth century for many hundreds of years. But more unequivocal evidence was discovered in Gough’s Cave, Cheddar Gorge. Here was found the skeleton of a man who had expired at some moment in that great expanse of time known as the Middle Stone Age; his mitochondrial DNA was subsequently tested, and a close match found with a history teacher residing in the late twentieth-century Cheddar village. Thus a genetic link can be directly established over a period of approximately eleven thousand years. But can it also pose a question of place, rather than of tribe or family? Can dwelling become a form of indwelling or imaginative life? To attempt to elucidate the characteristics of the English imagination over a period of two thousand years may not then be a futile or unworthy task.
    For
over one thousand years
the Celtic tribes were established all over England; these separate British tribes, or kingdoms, or
civitates
, survived
in situ
from the pre-Roman Iron Age to the sub-Roman period and the Saxon invasions. Their verses of prophecy and legend remain in the Irish,