Stonehenge (12 page)

…no more the Masculine mingle

With the feminine, but the Sublime is shut out from the Pathos

In howling torment.

Pathos was figuratively female for him and literally so for Wordsworth. The wandering woman is the more poignant for having the faded ‘rose on her sweet cheek’ set against the lurid firelight of the ‘powerful circle’s reddening stones’, her ‘sober sympathy and tranquil mind’ contrast with the hectic orgy of the pagan sacrifice. The same idea occurred to Henry Thomson, whose painting,
Distress by Land
, showing a woman and her children ‘defenceless before the Stonehenge storm’, so closely mirrors Wordsworth that it might be taken for an illustration were it not for the fact that the Salisbury Plain poems were still unpublished in 1811. At least two Romantic novelists exploited the same dramatic contrast by bringing their heroines to Stonehenge at the climax of their stories.

The first was Fanny Burney in her last novel,
The Wanderer
, published in 1814. The book was not a success. Its length and the fact that it had been composed over a period of nearly fifteen years counted against it, but what displeased readers more was the critical view it took of English society, a view close to Wordsworth’s and similarly overshadowed by recent history. Burney thought it impossible to produce ‘in whatever form, any picture of actual human life, without reference to the French Revolution’, which must be integral to ‘every intellectual survey of the present times’. She was married to a Frenchman and had been trapped for a decade in France after 1802. She had no illusions about Napoleon. But nor was she so admiring of British life and its supposed liberties. Her
heroine, the mysterious wanderer Juliet, is a refugee from the Revolution who observes fashionable society in Lewes and Brighton in all its callous frivolity. When
The Wanderer
appeared, the year before Waterloo, this was neither a patriotic nor a popular view.

The story, subtitled
Female Difficulties
, tells of Juliet’s adventures in England against the background of the Terror. Towards the end, penniless and reluctantly dependent on her elderly but predatory admirer, Sir Jasper, Juliet is taken by him to Stonehenge. She walks on alone towards the ‘massy ruins’ and finds them ‘grand and awful, though terrific rather than attractive’. As in a textbook example of the Sublime, the rough stones tower over the vulnerable figure of our heroine. But then something more interesting happens. As she sits among them Juliet begins to feel a comfort from the stones, the ‘uncouth monument of ancient days’ in its roughness exudes a sympathy with her own distress that calms her gradually, until ‘Thought, uninterrupted and uncontrouled [
sic
], was master of her mind’. The stones retain their masculinity, but this has become a soothing and protective force. She contrasts them with Wilton, which she has just visited, and its ‘appendages of luxury’, which offer nothing to the suffering mind. In the two centuries since Philip Sidney had compared ‘Wilton sweete’ with the ‘huge heapes of stones’, sensibility, like the landscape, had turned inside out and could find comfort now where once there had been only chaos.

There is comfort too, of a bitter kind, in the climax of the greatest novel to invoke Stonehenge, Thomas Hardy’s
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
. Although he was writing nearly a century after Fanny Burney, his novels set in the suffering and expressive landscape of Wessex belong with Blake and Wordsworth
to the same Romantic tradition. Towards the end of the book Tess, who has murdered the man who seduced her, has married Angel Clare and is fleeing with him when they come, by night, to Salisbury Plain. Since Juliet was there another hundred years of landscape painting and guidebook descriptions had taken their artistic toll and overworked the image of Stonehenge into a cliché. Hardy brilliantly reawakens it by the literary equivalent of William Cunnington’s technique. He brings his characters to Salisbury Plain at night so that, vast as it is, Stonehenge comes upon them suddenly. They hear the stones before they see them fully as the wind plays among them, humming like ‘some gigantic one-stringed harp’. Once inside the circle, Tess lies down to sleep upon the Altar Stone. ‘It is so solemn and so lonely,’ she tells Angel, finding, like Juliet, some comfort in the place. As she lies there, a sacrificial victim waiting a cruel modern justice, Angel watches over her until the dawn begins to rise. ‘The band of silver paleness along the east horizon made even the distant parts of the Great Plain appear dark and near; and the whole enormous landscape bore that impress of reserve, taciturnity, and hesitation which is usual just before day.’ As the dawn wind falls and the sun rises, men appear from behind the megaliths. They have come to take Tess, but at Angel’s request they let her sleep, standing round her in a human circle more savage and implacable than the stones. When she wakes she goes willingly with them to trial and then to be hanged. It is the climax not just of the novel but of the Romantic literary tradition that found in Stonehenge a symbol powerful enough to stand for all humanity and inhumanity and for the individual in the shadow of history.

To rise to such heights required the genius of a Wordsworth
or a Hardy. Elsewhere Stonehenge and the Druids lost a certain amount of dignity as they passed into popular Romantic culture. The English found the Sublime difficult. They much preferred the Picturesque, with its tumbledown cottages and ivied ruins. The Druids sometimes became Picturesque or, just missing the Sublime, plunged, like Gray’s Bard into the gulf and became ridiculous. The Prince of Wales, later Prince Regent and then George IV, was in all things a leader of fashion. He headed the subscription list for Iolo Morganwg’s
Poems Lyric and Pastoral
, followed by James Boswell, Fanny Burney, William Wilberforce and many other distinguished people who also paid for the privilege of receiving Iolo’s prefatory rant against his enemies, ‘the boasted laws of this land … one reeves [and] … his brother
Bearmonger
of Holborn-Hill … modern Welsh Historians, gentlemen (if they may be so called) of no conscience’ and a list of many other private misfortunes and personal grudges.

By 1802 the Prince of Wales had his own bard, Edward Jones, whose book of ballads,
The Bardic Museum of Primitive British Literature
, included ‘Hail, all hail to the mistletoe’, a traditional Druidic song to be sung ‘with dignity’ and arranged for the piano. But the ultimate expression of Picturesque taste, for those who could afford it, was the landscape garden. While Humphrey Repton was creating vistas of great charm and beauty for his exclusive clientele, the more general passion for follies, artificial ruins and ornamental hermits gave rise to some curious miniature henges following the lead of the Earl of Pembroke’s pioneering version at Wilton. At Alton Towers in Staffordshire the fifteenth Earl of Shrewsbury added to his collection of pagodas and fountains a ‘Stonehenge’ which stood between the Gothic temple and the
cottage belonging to the Earl’s personal harpist. It rose, not very imposingly, above the conservatory. At Swinton in Yorkshire William Danby, combining fashion with philanthropy, created work for local labourers by paying them a shilling a day to build a great oval of standing stones complete with ceremonial avenue. Like the Earl of Shrewsbury’s, Danby’s Stonehenge still stands and in 1993, by way of a dubious compliment to its aura of authenticity, a severed pig’s head was discovered on the central altar stone.

Follies offered a rich vein of satire which nobody exploited better than Thomas Love Peacock. His novel of 1816,
Headlong Hall
, deals with the pretensions of Mr Milestone – a thinly disguised Humphrey Repton – who persuades the gullible Squire Headlong to spend a fortune on ridiculous improvements to his grounds. Peacock hits not only nails but several of the characters on the head when Mr Milestone’s scheme for creating a Sublime sense of danger with a megalith, a ‘ponderous stone, so exactly balanced as to be ready to fall on the head of any person who may happen to be beneath’, goes wrong, with predictable results for the unfortunate house guests. Peacock’s novels were part of the great late-Georgian satire boom, when caricature and cartoons flourished, yet Stonehenge itself features only rarely, for there is nothing intrinsically funny about it. It is its implacable gravity that makes it so often the foil for the comedy of contrasts and bathos. In itself it offers nothing to ridicule. Even Thomas Rowlandson, though he drew it, could not get a laugh out of it. His cartoon parson Dr Syntax, in his hopeless quest for the Picturesque, does not visit Salisbury Plain, but Rowlandson does invoke it as the background for the last plate in his darkest work,
The English Dance of Death
, where Time and Death succumb to Eternity in the form of a portly angel, while in the background an assemblage of somewhat phallic megaliths collapses.

17. The miniature ‘Stonehenge’ at Alton Towers in Staffordshire, home of the Earls of Shrewsbury, was one of many late Georgian garden follies made in imitation of the original. Some were more plausible than others.

Of the various eighteenth- and nineteenth-century attempts to recreate the atmosphere of Stonehenge in three dimensions, the best and most interesting idea, though it never came to fruition, was John Britton’s. The Wiltshire antiquary, topographer, historian, publisher, self-promoter and one-time showman was impressed by the models of the site made by Henry Browne. In 1822, as visitor numbers continued to rise, Browne appointed himself the first full-time guardian of Stonehenge. His models, available singly or in pairs, showed the monument as it had perhaps been originally and as it appeared in the early nineteenth century, and were based on Browne’s own theories about its history. He believed it to be the last building put up before the Flood. Britton could not agree with Browne’s ‘very eccentric hypothesis’ but thought it a pity that nobody would review the ‘humble pamphlets’ which he published. It was typical of Britton that his attempts to secure some recognition for Browne by ‘turning his talents to use’ were couched in terms that seemed to disparage him at every point, while promoting his promoter. Britton, though he was, he assured readers of the
Gentleman’s Magazine
in 1825, ‘urgently occupied, at least 14 hours per day with literary works and public and private engagements’, tried to raise a subscription to pay Browne to produce his models. Once this was achieved through the proposed Druidical Antiquarian Company (a term, Britton explained with his usual ponderousness, that was used ‘merely jocosely’), Britton himself would make them the centrepiece of a light show which would combine information and entertainment in an early form of interactive visitor centre.

18. John Britton hoped that his life-long enthusiasm for Stonehenge would be commemorated after his death with a monument in the form of a trilithon. Unfortunately funds ran short and he was buried, in 1857, in West Norwood Cemetery, under a single megalith.

Light shows were immensely popular in the Romantic period. Art and science met in these displays of (usually) backlit painting over which, by the skilful use of lamps and shutters, the moon appeared to pass behind clouds at Holy-rood or distant horsemen to cross the Alps. Britton had begun his career by writing, performing and singing the commentary for one such show, the Eidophusikon. Now he came up with a plan for another such ‘very interesting exhibition … of Celtic or Druidical Antiquities’, to be combined with a commentary. The illuminated model of Stonehenge would no doubt have been an attraction, but the £5 subscriptions, as so often in his career, were not forthcoming. What does survive is Britton’s Celtic Cabinet, an astonishing piece of furniture which he persuaded a wealthy enthusiast to commission. It incorporates a pair of Browne’s models, plus another of Avebury, and it is now in the Devizes Museum in Wiltshire. The remnant of the light-show idea can be glimpsed in the glass case on top, its sides tinted different colours to suggest the various times of day. Light could be shone through them to create an atmospheric effect of dawn or sunset when the model was viewed from above. Britton, while he despaired of finding an answer to the questions it posed, never lost his enthusiasm for Stonehenge, or his passion for replicating it. In his London garden at St Pancras he created a stone circle ‘intended to indicate, on a small scale, a Celtic or Druidical Temple’ and at his death it was hoped to erect at least a trilithon to his memory. Yet again, however, the funds ran short and he is buried, in West Norwood cemetery in London, under a single megalith.