The Spirit of Britain: A Narrative History of the Arts. By Roy Strong. Hutchinson. 708pp. £40 in UK
Attempts to define the essence of a country's culture usually seem doomed to failure, or at least incompleteness, since cultures are constantly changing, developing or retrogressing, absorbing new elements and influences or occasionally rediscovering and reviving neglected areas of their own past.
That much is probably stating the obvious. Is there such a thing as "Englishness", then? I believe that there was and still is, but an attempt to define it bogs us down straightaway in contradictions and qualifications. Sir Roy Strong, however, has taken up the challenge with erudition and courage, and a conspicuously broad view.
Unlike Ireland, Britain was colonised by Rome, though Roman civilisation did not leave the deep imprints which it did on the Continental nations and territories it conquered. The Anglo-Saxons who succeeded it are probably an under-rated race culturally, but Danish pressures broke much of their power, and until well into the Middle Ages Britain was ruled by Scandinavian kings such as Canute (Knut). However, in the end they largely went native as the Vikings did in Ireland. Harold, the last Saxon king, died at Hastings in 1066 and the Norman Conquest began, in which 10,000 invaders took over a country with almost two million people, killed or suppressed the native aristocracy, and divided the land among themselves as ruthless overlords. It was out of this racial mix that England finally emerged as a unified nation.
The great shaper of culture and morals, and the cement of society, was, of course, the Church. England, with some French help, evolved her own splendid brand of Gothic architecture, and the remnants of the visual art of the times - the Reformation destroyed most of it - show a culture as rich as anything on the Continent.
The kings endowed places of learning, built handsome palaces and residences, and encouraged music - a very important part of English life for centuries. Chaucer virtually initiated English literature, and under the early Tudors there was a flowering of humanist learning whose highest point was Thomas More. Tudor architecture, indigenous and rather strange, produced the great manor houses, some of which still stand, including Longleat and Hardwicke Hall.
Though More's master, Henry VIII, turned against Rome, under him and his daughter Elizabeth Italy became a major influence on literature, the masque and certain other fields, along with Neo-Platonism. Shakespeare set many of his plays in Italy, even if Italy represented to the average, insular Englishman a land of vice and Popery and even murder. English music, however, largely continued on its own way and reached a peak under Byrd and Bull and Tallis, though architecture began to change under Continental models, and Inigo Jones brought in Palladianism which lasted until late in the 18th century. Painting failed to develop from the Elizabethan miniature, so Charles I was forced to import Rubens and Van Dyck to create a genuine court art.
However, militant puritanism and native chauvinism swung violently against the Baroque world, seeing it as Papist and foreign and degenerate; Charles, like his servants Strafford and Archbishop Laud, died on the block, and an iconoclastic frenzy swept England.
Henry VIII had already destroyed the monasteries and much of the legacy of medieval Catholicism, but puritanism went much farther in its hatred of images, smashing priceless stained glass, statues and pictures without number, stripping the great cathedrals of their ornaments and altars, and reducing them to shells. Ancient public holidays were annulled, the splendid royal collection of paintings was sold off, the theatres were shut and even Christmas celebrations were forbidden, as Cromwell and his kind tried to turn the English into a nation of psalm-singers. This traumatic break with the past, however, was partly compensated for by the flowering of science which had begun in the 1640s and produced Newton, Boyle, Harvey and the foundation of the Royal Society.
Anglicanism was driven underground and flowered in the mysticism of Henry Vaughan and other isolated religious poets, while Calvinism produced its supreme literary monument in Milton's Paradise Lost. With the return of the Stuarts from exile, Milton was driven into impoverished retirement, but Cavalier literature flourished - particularly in the reopened theatres - and so did architecture under Wren, Vanbrugh, etc, while music (out of favour under the puritans, though Milton himself was highly musical) did so, too, under Purcell. Once again, England looked towards the Continent, particularly France, and the Rule of the Saints became a bad folk memory.
The Augustan Age of Pope and Dryden needs no description, though English music - for centuries, arguably its greatest art - virtually died away and Handel was imported and naturalised, to fill the gap. Hogarth founded a new, vigorous native painting with some hints from Flemish and other models, while Capability Brown and certain other great landscape gardeners created what is probably England's greatest visual achievement - the "shaped" landscape, something which Earth Art and Environmental Art in our day have groped after ineffectually. Reynolds and Gainsborough began the great line of English portraitists.
The Romantic Age which followed reacted against many aspects of the 18th century, yet it allowed Regency neo-classic elegance to flourish alongside the Gothic Revival. Similarly, along with the Lake poets and the cult of wild nature went the rapid growth of the Industrial Revolution and engineering achievements such as Thomas Telford's suspension bridge over the Conway River in Wales.
The reign of Victoria saw the cultural dominance of the middle class, William Morris's blend of socialism and medievalism, the best-selling poetry of Tennyson - and the runaway growth of capitalism and industrialism, in which millions lived on the breadline so that the few could live in luxury.
Organised religion was increasingly on the defensive before secularism and scientific rationalism, with Protestant fundamentalism in particular badly hit. This was because it had based itself largely on the literal truth of the Bible, which was increasingly eroded by contemporary historicism. Similarly Henry James in his novels chronicles the relegation of the British aristocracy to a largely ceremonial and ornamental role, just as the music of Elgar simultaneously sounds both the peak and the decay of Empire.
As Strong points out, 20th-century Modernism "was the greatest revolution in the arts since Romanticism. In its simplest terms it ushered in atonal music, free verse in poetry, and painting which no longer worked from the notion that a picture was a window. It was a sea change within European civilisation on the scale of the Renaissance or the mechanistic universe."
Most of its pioneers, however, were not English - there is no English Picasso, Schoenberg or Joyce. Britain's Modernist revolution in poetry, for instance, was headed by two American interlopers, Eliot and Pound - Wyndham Lewis attempted to do the same in painting, but ultimately he lacked the talent. Another ambitious American, Jacob Epstein, managed to delude the British public into accepting that he was a spearhead of modern sculpture.
The mid-century witnessed, rather surprisingly, a golden - or, at least, a silver - age in English music. However, perhaps the most significant development after the second World War was the creation of the Arts Council, based on the assumption of the State's duty not only to patronise the arts, but to guide and develop public taste. As a result, a new cultural elite emerged, personified by the late Sir Kenneth Clark, and the spirit of the epoch crystallised in the Festival of Britain in 1951. Socialist governments took the arts seriously, whether or not their voters did. Yet many of the period's leading figures have faded badly - Henry Moore, John Piper, Reg Butler, Graham Sutherland, most of the fashionable architects. In spite of high ideals, England - or rather Britain - was falling behind the Continent, though probably it believed the opposite was true.
Strong has left some odd gaps in his survey, even if he does not claim to cover everything: nothing on the St Ives School of painting, for instance, or on Ivon Hitchens, and only a single, passing reference to Louis MacNeice. Similarly, he under-rates the achievements of "native" poets such as Housman and de la Mare, who today seem vastly more authentic than most of the 1930s versifiers.
On the other hand, he is not too snobbish or inhibited to ignore a populist phenomenon such as the Beatles, and he is constructive and hopeful about the multi-racial, multi-cultural society which seems to be shaping itself in today's melting-pot. This, he believes, will not rule out the continuing existence of a genuine English culture - which, like that of the other great European nations, has managed to absorb a remarkable amount of invasions, influences and even foreign dominance in the past, yet somehow to remain itself.
Brian Fallon is an author and critic