Document généré le 25 sept. 2021 14:35 Lumen Selected Proceedings from the Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Travaux choisis de la Société canadienne d'étude du dix-huitième siècle “Druid Rocks”: Restoration, Originality, Nature and Authority in John Dryden, Titia Brongersma and William Blake’s Visions of Megalithic Monuments Eric Miller Volume 36, 2017 URI : https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/1037859ar DOI : https://doi.org/10.7202/1037859ar Aller au sommaire du numéro Éditeur(s) Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies / Société canadienne d'étude du dix-huitième siècle ISSN 1209-3696 (imprimé) 1927-8284 (numérique) Découvrir la revue Citer cet article Miller, E. (2017). “Druid Rocks”: Restoration, Originality, Nature and Authority in John Dryden, Titia Brongersma and William Blake’s Visions of Megalithic Monuments. Lumen, 36, 143–159. https://doi.org/10.7202/1037859ar All Rights Reserved © Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies / Société Ce document est protégé par la loi sur le droit d’auteur. L’utilisation des canadienne d'étude du dix-huitième siècle, 2017 services d’Érudit (y compris la reproduction) est assujettie à sa politique d’utilisation que vous pouvez consulter en ligne. https://apropos.erudit.org/fr/usagers/politique-dutilisation/ Cet article est diffusé et préservé par Érudit. Érudit est un consortium interuniversitaire sans but lucratif composé de l’Université de Montréal, l’Université Laval et l’Université du Québec à Montréal. Il a pour mission la promotion et la valorisation de la recherche. https://www.erudit.org/fr/ “Druid Rocks”: Restoration, Originality, Nature and Authority in John Dryden, Titia Brongersma and William Blake’s Visions of Megalithic Monuments Eric Miller University of Victoria According to John Hughes in his Boscobel Tracts, Charles Stuart spent Wednesday the seventh of October, 1651, reckoning and re-reckoning the stones of Stonehenge, to beguile the time till he could return to his hostess Amphillis Hyde and her safe house, Heale.1 The King was fugitive from the rout at the Battle of Worcester. His companion Colonel Phelips claims that Charles’s extemporary pleasure was to refute a “fabulous tale,” namely, that the stones at Stonehenge could not be summed “alike twice together,” but that rather, abiding under enchantment, they must perpetually elude human census.2 Similar demystifying empiricism inflects a 1663 poem on the topic by the royal- ist Dryden, though the stones really do seem to persist under the sway of innumerability. Charles counted what he saw. But (as recently as the summer of 2015) fully ninety more stones of no small size were detected on, or beneath, the Wiltshire Downs. So fable and fact part and meet at once. The past is – and remains – as difficult to prophesy as the future. Yet a megalith, that most assertive and simple of monuments 1. Alison Plowden reports that Mrs. Hyde recognized Charles at once and favoured him with dangerous generosity, with a double helping of larks at dinner. See Women All on Fire: The Women of the English Civil War (Stroud: Sutton, 2004), 173. 2. See J. Hughes, The Boscobel Tracts Relating to the Escape of Charles the Second After the Battle of Worcester and His Subsequent Adventures, 2nd ed. (Edinburgh: William Blackwood & Sons, 1857), 79, 175. lumen xxxvi, 2017 • 143-159 Lumen 36.final.indd 143 2016-10-18 11:48 AM 144 1 Eric Miller and images, is predictably provocative, even when such massive com- memoration itself is ruined and amnemonic. For John Dryden, Stonehenge, with its crown-like arrangement of stones, marked the ceremonial venue of Danish coronations. For Titia Brongersma, the megalithic hunebed at Borger, in the Landscape of Groningen and Drenthe, Netherlands, comprised a temple to an entity of her own sex, the Goddess Nature, erected for (and to be restored by) panegyric to that divinity. For William Blake, Stonehenge amounted to both the relic and portent of the bloody and detestable practice and doctrine of vengeance, rather than Christian forgiveness of sins. What unites these poems is their will to displace not the megaliths, but an old version of the past. Patriotic Dryden prefers natural philosophy, advanced under Bacon, chartered by Charles II, to the controvert- ible authorities of Greece and Rome: fealty to a king thus still allows (even encourages) insubordination toward respectable pseudodoxia. Brongersma invokes an indigenous, yet universal female figure; in her allegiance to her native ground and its intellectual circle (centred at Groningen), she rejects or, better, sublimates to the glories of her homeland the legacy of Greece and Rome, while assuming the deco- rum of her congruity with a goddess. And Blake, despite the massacre at Welsh Anglesey (or Isle of Mona, in 61) and the legions’ razing of the sacred groves there, aligns Romans with Druids, and dismisses both in favour of Judaeo-Christian revelation. Dryden, Brongersma and Blake therefore raise verses, if not books, like a ring of resonant, responsive stones, supernumerary to Stonehenge and to the hunebed, whetting by the keenness of their gaze the inscrutability of their topic, using the centrum phonicum supplied by these wonders to amplify their own voices. “As the Eye – Such the Object” says Blake. And if, as he asserts, “Every Eye Sees differently,” then no object is available to a final ‘reckoning.’3 The special authority of these old structures precedes the literate revolution: they come from before books. Stonehenge and hunebed become Mosaic tablets that are also, conveniently, Lockean tabulae rasae. They remain, to use the latest parlance and the most current 3. See Blake’s marginalia to Joshua Reynolds’s Works in William Blake, Blake’s Poetry and Designs, 2nd ed., ed. by Mary Lynn Johnson and John E. Grant (New York: Norton, 2008), 464. Lumen 36.final.indd 144 2016-10-18 11:48 AM “Druid Rocks”: Restoration, Originality, Nature and Authority 1 145 instance, equally illegible to, and inscribable by, hackers and their semblables, those hypocrite readers, the confabulating police (poets all, whether they will or no). Charles was not the last to combine the role of tourist with hunted refugee. Brongersma projected a resounding female voice in a place where the jealous atavism of paternal classics, perpetuated at Groningen, might not wholly smother it. William Blake directly associated the megaliths of Salisbury with his nation’s wartime “Reign of Alarm,” after the authorities charged him with high treason.4 The freedom of antiquity, a value and resource all three writers address, abides in its analphabetic taciturnity: Stonehenge and hune- bed provide asylum for the interpretation and interpreters that they cannot satisfy. They erect a standing rebuke to surveillance’s ‘single vision.’ But the language of restoration, as confident as it is speculative, has insistently attached to them. In Dryden, nature restores the King who, though already recognized as such in January 1651, by the Covenanters at the stone of Scone, had yet to come into his crown. In Brongersma, a personified Nature is restored; and in Blake, Jerusalem would be restored – the imaginative body, rather than the merely vegetative one, in opposition to the state that can “Rob & Plunder & accumulate into one place, & Translate & Copy & Buy & Sell & Criticise, but not Make.”5 John Dryden and Stonehenge The first line of Dryden’s “To my Honor’d Friend, Dr. Charleton On His Learned And Useful Works; And More Particularly This Of Stonehenge, By Him Restor’d To The True Founders” decries “tyr- anny.” The poet’s titular topics of restoration and foundation plainly carry the connotative weight not just of the ages, but of 1663. The tyrant, perhaps surprisingly, is not Cromwell but a Greek philosopher – Aristotle. What has he to do with Stonehenge? A consideration of Dr. Charleton’s context, lexical as well as theoretical, will help to elucidate this mystery. 4. I borrow the phrase “Reign of Alarm” from Kenneth R. Johnson, Unusual Suspects: Pitt’s Reign of Alarm and the Lost Generation of the 1790s (Oxford: OUP, 2013). 5. See “On Homer’s Poetry” (Blake, 349). Lumen 36.final.indd 145 2016-10-18 11:48 AM 146 1 Eric Miller Inigo Jones, fancying that Vitruvian and Palladian geometry gov- erned Stonehenge’s configuration, alleged that he “restored” this ostensible temple to Coelus or the Sky, in a work that hypothesized a Roman origin to the monument, published posthumously in 1655. Charles II’s physician Walter Charleton, imagining that the Danes built Stonehenge as a king-making site shortly before their defeat by Alfred, restores it, as the erroneous Dryden declares, “to its true founders.”6 John Aubrey, in unpublished work from the interregnum and afterward, credited Stonehenge to the British Druids: in 1740, William Stukeley, who adopted the sacerdotal identity of Chyndonax, “restor’d” the “temple” on Salisbury plain to the same sect – elaborat- ing Aubrey’s belief.7 But what is ‘restoration,’ that arch-Carolinian, as well as archaeological, concept? A paradox, from the start: the OED tells us especially that it is to give back, to make return of anything previously taken away or lost; to make good loss or damage; to repair; to bring back to its original state; to retouch a thing, so as to bring it back to its original condition; to replace humankind in a state of grace; to replace a person in a former office, dignity or estate. But what is the original state? Which origin is to be preferred? The megalith is embod- ied but unrestored authority, nature and culture’s equivocally. Aristotle is pertinent here precisely because he is impertinent: the consensus omnium keeps wrongly re-applying him. The Greeks are irrelevant. Any authority would appear to be founded at one time, and to be sustained through subsequent time.