This Enchanted Isle
The Neo-Romantic Vision
from William Blake to the New Visionaries
Peter Woodcock
Introduction
WE ARE MAKING A NEW WORLD
There is no need for us to travel to exotic locations in search of lost tribes. We have one of our very own, right here in the British Isles. This lost tribe was a group of British artists, writers and film-makers who lived and worked between the two World Wars and until the mid-nineteen fifties. They then became part of a lost generation.
These artists were known as the Neo-Romantics and their work had a great influence on post-war Britain. Raymond Mortimer, reviewing the exhibition New Movements in Art – Contemporary Work in England, first used the term 'Neo-Romantic' in 1942 to depict a group of artists who shared a similar vision. However, there was no movement or manifesto. These artists were brought together by the conditions of the time. They were greatly influenced by the works of William Blake and Samuel Palmer. Certainly European art had been an influence, first with the painters Cezanne, Picasso and Matisse, as well as the Surrealist movement, but the British Neo-Romantics were more concerned with depicting the qualities of their own landscape and culture. This particularly connected with the English tradition of art which has its roots not only in ancient carvings, but also in illuminated manuscripts.
Although the Neo-Romantics embraced nature as their source, it was not a benign, sentimentalised vision of nature. There was often a sinister, barbed edge to it. Ruined buildings to be found in the bombed cities after World War II, where nature had reclaimed its territory, was a favourite subject. Their landscape often portrayed allegorical images conjuring up another dimension, an unseen reality beyond everyday appearances.
Paul Nash is the key artist in the Neo-Romantic tradition. When he went to the front as a war artist in 1914, he was so appalled at the destruction of men and landscape, that when he returned to England, his paintings changed completely. His work became bolder, stronger and was more influenced by Vorticism and Surrealism. Although he integrated aspects of Surrealism in his work, he finally rejected any 'isms' and developed his own unique visual language. He explored aspects of the English countryside which evoked a strange, otherworldly atmosphere. The phrase he used to describe his paintings was 'genius loci' – translated as 'spirit of place'.
During World War II, when European and British cities were devastated, artists, writers, poets and film-makers reacted creatively in response to the nihilism and destruction. After the war, the availability once again of Europe, of the brilliant colours of the south of France, Italy and Spain, were like a breath of fresh air to our monochrome, camouflaged, rationed Britain. These sun-drenched landscapes permeated post-war society. Ancient myths re-emerged: Icarus, Orpheus, the Minotaur. The shores of the Aegean could be felt in the galleries of London. And yet this was not simply a return to nature, a sweet and light fantasy. Like mankind, nature can be cruel and sadistic. Our cities with their bomb sites still unbuilt in the early Sixties presented us with ruins and shadows, an almost gothic splendour which certain artists such as John Piper, Graham Sutherland, and John Minton, revelled in.
Neo-Romanticism was often theatrical, combining a sense of drama with the macabre. It is flamboyant, embraces decorative qualities and nostalgia. It looks back to a Golden Age, not forwards with the idea of progression to be found in Modernism. Yet nostalgia can be many things, as the writer Kazuo Ishiguro says: "Nothing wrong with nostalgia. It is a much-maligned emotion ... nostalgia is the emotional equivalent to idealism. You can use memory to go back to a place better than the one you found yourself in."
(Interview with Kazuo Ishiguro by Suzie Mackenzie, Guardian Weekend 25th March 2000.)
Historically, Neo-Romanticism died in the mid Fifties. However, the imaginative doorway opened by Paul Nash still reverberates today with painters, writers and film-makers, out of the mainstream, quietly pursuing the quest for 'something beyond appearances' which does not fit into the vogue for cynicism or self-declaration.
The prevailing culture during this period was, of course, the cinema. Many now see the Forties and Fifties as the Golden Age of British film in which directors as diverse as Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, David Lean, Carol Reed, Michael Crichton, and Humphrey Jennings, captured both the realistic and imaginary world of Britain. But it was also the cinema which imported and popu larised a whole new mythology – 'the American Dream'. Seen as the land of plenty, of endless sunshine and readily available sex, America, or at least the Hollywood version, was highly seductive. Along with the Hollywood movies came the invasion of American culture. The Abstract Expressionist painters Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Robert Motherwell stole the scene. They changed the face of art, redefining space and mass, emerging as champions of a new creative impetus which challenged Europe as the bastion of culture. Only later did we learn how much of a cultural invasion it had been, propped up by finances from the CIA to counteract the dangers of the creeping European Leftism.
After the war ended, it could be said that Britain went through a crisis of confidence. Through the following decades we lost connection with our own source, with our own cultural roots. Hence our neglect of the Neo-Romantics. Despite this, however, an undercurrent of art, films and writing on the images and writings of William Blake, the poetry of Coleridge, Wordsworth and Shelley, the antiquarian discoveries of William Stukeley, the magical realm of Doctor John Dee, persists to this day.
Another element which embraced the 'genius loci' subversively crept into our culture during the Sixties. John Michell had reintroduced a new generation to the mystical concepts of a 'hidden' British landscape with his book The View over Atlantis. Michell, a radical antiquarian, brought to life the idea of a carefully laid out 'celestial' landscape linked by ley lines. Ley lines had first been discovered in the 1920s by Alfred Watkins, a Herefordshire entrepreneur and pioneer photographer. These invisible 'lines of energy' connect ancient monuments, prehistoric stone circles, churches, even nuclear power stations – creating another dimension of reality. It is this psychogeographical concept that writers as diverse as John Michell and Ian Sinclair have explored over the last three decades.
The British have always revered the land. For artists it has always been a major theme. In our art, literature, poetry and music, the landscape continuously evokes an atmospheric and often mystical presence. This presence is aptly summed up by Christopher Hobbs who worked with Derek Jarman: "The Britain Derek believed in perhaps never historically existed, but is always present."
While investigating the Neo-Romantics, one could easily ask: where does it begin and where does it end? Although the artists, writers and film-makers included in this book constitute the nucleus of Neo-Romanticism, there are other strands, other influences which I have also included. John Cowper Powys, that magus and under rated writer considered by many to be one of Britain's greatest novelists, is a forerunner to some of the ideas found in Neo Romanticism. Powys' dense and imaginative writing explores not only the world of nature and mythology, but also the world of the inner self. His sense of nature is at times dark and brooding, creating an eerie sense of presence as if we are about to accidentally enter some elemental realm. Arthur Machen, another lost genius, not only evoked mystical realms amid the hills of Wales and the streets of London, but set the scene for the kind of gothic horror also found in elements of Neo-Romanticism. That haunted novel by Henry James, The Turn of the Screw, appears both as an opera by Benjamin Britten with designs by John Piper, then later as the film, Jack Clayton's The Innocents.
And what of today? Amid all the Brit-Art hype there are those who are still pursuing a visionary quest, exploring the spirit of not only the landscape of the British Isles, but the urban and inner city spaces as well. This Enchanted Isle is a plea for a return to the art of the imagination – art which concerns itself not only with the 'genius loci', but connects the viewer to a higher state of consciousness. We need not go far for our terms of reference. We have our own indigenous magic, our own vocabulary hammered out through the centuries from ancient rituals, stone circles, hill figures, the language of Shakespeare, to the newly evolving awareness of ecological and mythological issues. This does not mean embracing a xenophobic attitude. We live in a world rich with diverse cultures. But it would be a tragedy to lose contact with our own roots. Finally, This Enchanted Isle is only a taste of the vast and complex world of creativity which depicts the magical and spiritual realm of Britain. This book is certainly not an exhaustive survey. The artists, writers and film-makers chosen here are but examples used to convey the flavour of Neo-Romanticism and the spirit of place. There are many others. Some may disagree with the categories. I can only hope that it will encourage further investigation into this rich and highly rewarding area.
AWAKE ALBION! AWAKE!
William Blake 1757-1827
 Madman, visionary, revolutionary, genius, even today William Blake is considered to be all of these. His writings still reverberate in the twenty first century, his engravings and watercolours still excite, disturb. Born in Soho, the son of a London hosier, Blake had little formal education, but was steeped in the Greek and Latin classics, Milton and the Bible. When his younger brother died from consumption aged twenty, an exhausted Blake, who had nursed his brother throughout, said that he witnessed his brother's soul ascending towards heaven. Blake had seen angels and heavenly forms since childhood. His father reprimanded him for saying that he had seen the prophet Ezekiel sheltering beneath a tree. Blake saw angels in a tree on Peckham Rye and throughout his life he conversed with spirits. Growing up in eighteenth century London, he was in the midst of a whole world of visionary and dissenting religious teachings. As a Londoner, the capital was where he witnessed most of his visions. Wandering through each chartered street, he experienced a visionary city – the Four-Fold city which could be witnessed by anyone who shed the dust from the mundane world.
The capital was a city seething with riots and disorder. Britain was under threat from France, sedition was in the air, revolution underfoot. Blake was sympathetic to radical politics; it is said that he knew Tom Paine and helped him flee the country. As well as politics, Blake embraced the teachings of the Swedish theologist Emmanuel Swedenborg with enthusiasm, but later in life rejected them, finding more sustenance in the writings of Paracelsus and Jacob Boehme. Boehme in particular had a profound effect on Blake with his concept that Man contained not only the Sun, Moon, Stars and universe within him, but God as well, which resonated with Blake's own beliefs.
It was while apprenticed as a young man to the engraver James Basire that Blake was asked to make drawings of the royal tombs in the chapel of Edward the Confessor in Westminster Abbey. This great Gothic masterpiece, 'a book in stone' which Victor Hugo called the Abbey, thrilled the young Blake. The very essence of the architecture with its pageant of British history encased in stained glass, carved effigies and ancient tapestries, struck a deep chord in him.
While drawing in the Abbey he had more visions, of monks and priests. It was as if he were witnessing the archetypal realm of the nation, something to which he would return for the rest of his life. Even the Archangel Gabriel appeared to him in majestic glory, and moved the universe.
His first engraving is Joseph of Arimathea among the Rocks of Albion. A rather solid patriarchal figure broods on a rugged coast against which the sea is raging. It is interesting that Blake chose this figure (although biblical figures were popular as artistic subjects in Blake's time) for Joseph was none other than the uncle of Jesus who brought the Holy Grail containing the blood of Christ to Britain and created the first Christian church in the land at Glastonbury. Blake's immortal poem Jerusalem relates to this event.
In 1779 Blake enrolled at the Royal Academy of Art as a student. The principal was Sir Joshua Reynolds which was unfortunate as Blake detested Reynolds' views on art as well as his painting. Forever battling against the practice of 'copying nature', Blake developed his own extraordinary visionary skills. Mainly influenced by his own inner world, he created a mythical realm which to many of his contemporaries appeared on the edge of madness. As a skilled and creative printmaker Blake developed his own method of reproducing his images and writings, combining a mixture of relief etching on copper plates and hand-coloured prints, executed by himself and his wife Catherine. The results were unique, echoing not only references to the old masters but to the pamphlets, leaflets and radical publications produced in London during his life.
Blake and his wife left London in 1800 and moved to Felpham for three years. During this period Blake was highly prolific. Among other major writings combined with images, he produced The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, The Book of Urizen, Songs of Experience, The Book of Los and The Four Zoas. It seems that Blake had a fiery temper. On one occasion an argument with a soldier outside his cottage resulted in Blake being charged with high treason. Blake was anti-monarchist and had supported the French Revolution until news of the Jacobin slaughter of opponents became known in Britain. Fortunately the case against Blake collapsed due to insufficient evidence. But it shook him and aggravated the nervous disposition which afflicted him all his life.
During the later part of his life Blake, through his acquaintance with John Varley, himself a fine watercolourist, drew many portraits of spirits, including Socrates, Herod, Voltaire, Richard Coeur de Lion and the Man who built the Pyramids.
It was unfortunate that Blake was born when he was; if he had been born a hundred years earlier, his visions would have been acceptable, almost commonplace. In the eighteenth century the Newtonian universe was rapidly encroaching. The rise of materialism, which Blake warned against, was closing the doors to men and women of vision.
With the Neo-Romantics of the twentieth century, Blake's images and writings struck a deep chord. Nash, Sutherland, Piper and Vaughan in particular admired Blake, who along with Samuel Palmer, conjured up an archetypal realm. Because of the restrictions of the Second World War, artists in Britain were thrown back onto their cultural roots. It is easy to see why they revered the work of Blake and Palmer. If Blake portrayed an ancient land called Albion, in which angelic and demonic forces were drawn from the imagination rather than from reality, Palmer caught an idyllic, Arcadian mood, particularly in his Shoreham pictures. Both artists represented an archetypal view of Britain which was free of the pseudo-chivalry of the Pre-Raphaelites. However, there is an odd discrepancy here, as all the Neo-Romantics revered nature and based their work on actual observation which Blake refuted, preferring to work from his imagination or his 'visions'.
 During the latter part of his life, Blake, regretting having spent so much time reconciling his creativity with commercialism, burst into a frenzy of activity producing some of his most complex and beautiful poetry and images. His colours became more vibrant as if describing the inner world he saw. Some of the most dazzling images are to be found in the wood engravings for The Pastorals of Virgil. Although small in scale, they are like jewels glowing with an inner light, their inky blackness as deep as the night sky, their attention to detail ravishing.
Towards the end of his life Blake became revered by a group of young artists called the Ancients. They were so called because they considered modern society debased when compared with older civilisations. Among the group was Samuel Palmer who worshipped Blake. Palmer was also a visionary but the Ancients did not have the political fire born from experience, which Blake had. Their art was more concerned with an idyllic pastoralism which did not reflect Blake's views.
Always impoverished, Blake, with the help of his wife Catherine, worked until the end on his paintings and engravings. When he finally died in 1827, he died singing, his face enraptured by the visions he was seeing.
Blake above all was prophetic and had insights which are of relevance today. Not only did he foresee the rise of materialism, he created his own spiritual universe based on a mystical, and some would say heretical version of Christianity, incorporating elements from Hinduism, alchemy and ancient British mythology. He also held strong views on sexuality: he saw war as a direct result of sexual repression and believed in a healthy, robust sexual life. In the preface of his epic poem Milton there is almost a call to arms, which poignantly reverberates in today's age of cultural consumerism.
"Painters! on you I call! Sculptors! Architects! Suffer not the fashionable fools to depress your powers by the prices they pretend to give for contemptible works or the expensive advertising boasts that they make of the works."
The political fervour and fascination with underground religious beliefs and occultism of the eighteenth century is echoed two hundred years later in the Sixties, when many of the beliefs of the earlier period resurfaced. As well as political ferment there was an explosion of interest in such beliefs as the Western Mystery Tradition, paganism, Druidism, divination, sacred geometry – the whole concept of the landscape of Britain laid out in a magical tradition.
READING THE LANDSCAPE
To make a concrete definition regarding the effect of Neo Romanticism on literature is impossible. However, certain traits are detectable. Various writers on Neo-Romanticism have suggested literature which falls into the category. Malcolm York in The Spirit of Place - Nine Neo-Romantic Artists and their Times (1988) suggests that strange fantasy by Herbert Read, The Green Child. Both critics William Feaver and Peter Cannon-Brooke (who curated the exhibition at Cardiff Museum of Neo-Romantic Art in 1983) give the novel Rogue Male by Geoffrey Household as a classic example.
What distinguishes Neo-Romanticism from traditional romanticism is the feeling of danger, the juxtaposition of the urban with the countryside, the element of darkness, dissolution, an almost pagan reverie breaking through the ruins of post-industrialism.
One of the greatest writers whose descriptions of landscape evoke the spirit of place, is John Cowper Powys. His novels, huge in size as well as in content, explore those mysterious nether regions which appear at the edge of consciousness. He can evoke a sense of the mythic within everyday life, as in A Glastonbury Romance.
The genius loci merged with gothic undercurrents (vampirism, possession by evil spirits) is evoked in the writings of Arthur Machen. His descriptions of an unknown country, which lies invisible yet within reach of those who dare to enter it, can be chilling. In his short story The Great God Pan he describes the pagan god not as a back to nature, merry romp in the woods, but as something devastatingly terrifying.
An obvious choice of a Neo-Romantic writer is Denton Welch who tragically died in 1948. His writings reflect the qualities found in his art a strong sense of place, an obsessive edginess and acerbic sense of humour.
In the short stories by Elizabeth Bowen – The Demon Lover and Mysterious Kor – the descriptions of the bombed houses and moonlit streets of wartime London evoke an eerie presence.
The past and present merge in Peter Ackroyd's novels such as Hawksmoor, Chatterton, The House of Doctor Dee and First Light. Ackroyd, with his ear for the language of past times, conjures up the atmosphere and spirit of place. He can cut through the multi-layered strata of an historical and fictional London and with a Blakean eye conjure up angelic and demonic forces.
Iain Sinclair investigates the realm of Psychogeography, those focal points where psychic flak, historical relevance and urban myths collide. Here we find Neo-Romanticism merging gothic sensibility with the accoutrements of urban squalor – the English flotsam and jetsam of suburbia, sometimes to be found discarded not only in places of historical importance, but in some back street obscure junk shop or village fete.
The flavour of Neo-Romanticism surfaces in Christopher Petit's Robinson. In his short story Newman Passage, Petit evokes the spirit of place which was to be found post-war with such Bohemian characters as Julian Maclaren-Ross, sometime writer and journalist, poet Dylan Thomas, artists John Minton and Francis Bacon, Soho-ite Nina Hamnett and other luminaries.
"At its best", the novelist Michael Moorcock has observed, "London fiction has, in the past twenty years, become characteristically a visionary medium."
JOHN COWPER POWYS
The way of the magician
 The world beyond appearances pervades the novels of John Cowper Powys (1881-1963). The world is full of everyday magic, the spirit of place lives and influences our lives. Out of the misty waters of the River Brue in Glastonbury a sword gleams, conjuring up Excalibur and the Arthurian legends. A strange sound is emitted from beneath the ancient hill site of Maiden Castle. In the mountains of Wales Merlin and Taliesin still dwell.
John Cowper Powys is considered to be one of our greatest neglected writers, on a par with Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. He was revered by Henry Miller, John Steinbeck, J B Priestley, Iris Murdoch, and many others. The painter David Blackburn recently said how he had read Wolf Solent while a student at art college in the early Sixties and how it had been a revelation. The world suddenly had new dimensions; beyond the visible other realms were discernible.
Powys was much more than a romantic writer. His works were vast and complex. A multi-faceted view of the world which incorporated pre-Celtic religion, Taoism, Hinduism and his own brand of animism. He believed that everything has consciousness: stones, trees, rivers, mountains, clouds, the weather, human beings. Ancient megaliths were repositories of ancient knowledge and wisdom, race memories emitting their secrets to the initiated. And Powys considered himself to be an initiate. He ceremoniously tapped his head against the stones to gain access to information, the collective unconscious. All his life he had longed to be a magician. It is said that he did possess magical powers such as teleportation. On two occasions he seemed to have projected an image of himself witnessed by the American playwright Theodore Dreiser and Cowper Powys' grandson.
Powys embraced nature in all its rawness and mystery. Not a benevolent nature, but one that contained the dark both in reality and in oneself. In his vast and densely written novels his characters interact with their environment. Moods and emotions change in conjunction with the elements. Water and fire, storms, floods, outbursts of madness and mystical visions. In 1931 he wrote one of his most famous novels A Glastonbury Romance in which the main characters engage in a drama as complex as the Arthurian legends, to which there are many references. They battle not only with their own desires and delusions but with fundamental issues of the day (the novel is set in the 1930s) – the battle for the soul of a town between the forces of commerce and industrialisation and the forces of tradition and non-conformity. Powys wrote that his novel attempted to describe "the effects of a particular legend, a special myth, a unique tradition, from the remotest past in human history, upon a particular spot on the surface of this planet together with its crowd of inhabitants of every age and every type of character." The same battle continues worldwide today.
If any writer evoked the genius loci, it is Powys. His novels are daunting in their length – A Glastonbury Romance is over one thousand pages. Not only did Powys write novels, but poems, books on philosophy, essays, short stories and he was a prolific diary writer. He was a literary giant. His life was equally gigantic. He went to America in 1905 to lecture. For many he was seen as charismatic, spellbinding, a sage, a great orator, but to others he could appear ruthless, even demonic at times.
Returning to Britain, he eventually settled in Wales with his partner Phyllis Plater. Magic and ritual played a major part in his life. He saw himself as being in the lineage of Welsh bards and seers, a descendant of a lost tribe, Iberian in origin, which is reminiscent of Arthur Machen's fallen race. He called his belief system 'a complex vision'. He did not believe that 'everything is one' – that everything ends up in some kind of primordial soup, but that everything retains its own individual essence and also interrelates with others. He believed in a multiverse rather than a universe and this aspect is central to his writings, particularly his novels where his characters inhabit the real world and are also on the verge of a mysterious 'other world'. He also admired painting, particularly the paintings of the eighteenth century French artist Claude whose landscape paintings have been influential, alongside Samuel Palmer and William Blake, with the Neo-Romantic painters.
Magical aspects run throughout Powys' work. When living in Wales, he was thrilled to have returned to this ancient kingdom. The landscape from his cottage in Corwen filled him with inspiration. The land exuded a magical atmosphere, a kingdom of nature spirits and the ancient king Eliseg who ruled the surrounding land. An ancient pillar which he believed marked the spot where the earth mother was worshipped, stood in the local graveyard. Some miles away from Corwen is Liangollen and in Obstinate Cymric he writes:
"The ruins of Dinas Bran tower up, jagged and desolate above this romantic town of Liangollen; and to the initiates in Welsh mythology it is Bran the Blessed, one of the most singular of the ancient gods who became either saints or devils in the Christian era, rather than of the flocks of black-winged birds – though Bran means a crow – that still hover round it, that this wild fortress must speak. Bards and Gods and Demons and Druids have all left indelible impressions on the landscape of my new home..."
Powys' dense and complex novels have been compared to Proust. They explore not only the outer world and mythological dimensions, but the inner world, the psychological and emotional states of the individual. In today's culture of sound bites and commercialism Powys' novels are well worth tracking down and reading.
He was a forerunner of much of the interest which has surfaced in the last three decades in paganism and Celtic beliefs. He was virulently anti-vivisection and held an animistic, Blakean view of the world as a living entity.
John Cowper died in 1963. His ashes were scattered on Chesil Beach in Dorset.
THE SPIRIT OF PLACE
The Dragon Hill rises above the mists in the Vale of The 'White Horse. Behind it, the almost abstract forms of the prehistoric horse flow in graceful lines. The valley is silent. Beyond lies the ancient Ridgeway that cuts its way towards Offa's Dyke. As the mist drifts away, the early morning sun rises casting shadows between the bare trees which surround the neolithic burial chamber at Wayland's Smithy. Wayland, mythological smithy to the gods, hammering his silver horseshoes onto celestial horses. Paul Nash sensed a hidden geometry here, an intangible presence which triggered the imagination.
Avebury Stones. Photo Peter Woodcock.
At Avebury the processional path of standing stones along the Kennet Avenue stands majestically against the risen sun. Diamond and lozenge shapes, male and female energies, mark the route towards the circle of stones, the inner sanctum for fertility rites and celebration of the year's seasons. Across the cornfields the largest man-made mound in Europe, Silbury Hill, retains its secrets. A giant sundial whose creeping shadows announce the coming of spring, summer, autumn, winter?
It is not only in the countryside that places of power can be found. The poet Aiden Dun spent over twenty years investigating the location of Troyvantus, ancient capital of Albion, amid the detritus, gas works and overgrown wasteland behind King's Cross and St Pancras Stations in London.
The spirit of place has always been a rich source for artists, poets, writers and visionaries. The reverence of the land is in our bones going back to neolithic times, resonating in the many battles we have fought to protect the land. Being an island creates a certain vision, different, for example, from the wide open spaces of America or Australia. The painter Sean Kelly said that abstract art was more understandable on a continent where the boundaries are larger. When one lacks outer space one creates inner space. Invention becomes more complex, cup and circle markings on stones, intricate Celtic spirals and knots, illuminated manuscripts, gothic architecture with its inherent story telling.
We had the monastic tradition which provided the basis for all art in Britain. Henry VIII began the Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1534. The Reformation was then carried on with fervour by his son Edward VI. Works of art equal to those of the great artists of Europe were destroyed. Not only Christian art died but the remnants of pagan iconography as well, for many churches and cathedrals assimilated images of the old religion, such as the Green Man, the Corn Goddess and many nature spirits. Andrew Graham Dixon, in his television programmes A History of British Art (1997) suggested around ninety-five per cent of art was destroyed.
 For two hundred years painting in Britain meant predominantly portraiture, which was dominated by two great European artists, Holbein and Van Dyke. It was not until the eighteenth century that landscape painting was perceived as a serious subject. The great European Tradition of Romantic landscape painting which evolved from Claude and Poussin, developed in Britain with the works of Thomas Gainsborough, George Lambert, and Richard Wilson. The Romantic Tradition was further developed by the landscape paintings of John Constable. While attempting to describe the 'reality of nature' his sketches and preparatory work on closer inspection seem to precipitate Cézanne. The shimmering, irridescent paintings of William Mallord Turner paved the way for Impressionism, which created the conditions for breaking boundaries in the artistic world during the twentieth century.
The Romantic Tradition was abandoned as Modernism emerged via Cubism, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, finally resulting in Conceptualism and Minimalism. A new form of Puritanism evolved which marginalised other responses, particularly work that sought to describe the world or went beyond the wholly personal response. Just as the Neo-Romantics had been erased in the Fifties, artists of the last fifty decades who did not fit in with Modernism were negated. lyon Hitchens, Norman Adams, Frances Hodgkin and Winifred Nicholson were some of the artists who did not wholly subscribe to the concepts of Modernism.
 Meanwhile, out of the mainstream of British culture, other issues were surfacing which took the attention of artists, writers and filmmakers. There was a resurgence of interest in mythological and ecological issues. The world of the imagination started to break through the confines of modernist ideology. It is not by chance that such figures as the Green Man and the Goddess have emerged into our consciousness. The pendulum of rampant materialism has now swung too far, correspondingly to be rebuked by new forces of dissent. Many people are participating in attempts to stop what they see as destructive elements, whether it be the building of roads, runways for airports, or the rise of consumerism at the expense of the planet's health. In times of need it seems that ancient forces re-emerge.
The spirit of place is no Luddite dream. New technology has created a universal space for contact and ideas. However, as barriers merge, there is the fear of loss of identity, national and personal. Therefore it still is a necessity to nurture our own roots.
 I discussed these issues recently with author and radical antiquarian John Michell. It was Michell who was instrumental in reintroducing the concept of ley lines in the late Sixties. In his first book The Flying Saucer Vision (1967) he related ancient sites with UFOs. "It was at the time a belief that these sites had a relationship with flying saucers. I saw the phenomenon as symbolic of changes taking place, changes in consciousness." In 1969 View Over Atlantis was published to great acclaim which expounded more on the ley line system, putting forward the view of a celestial landscape laid out across the British Isles. The Herefordshire entrepreneur Alfred Watkins, who discovered ley lines in the 1920s, influenced Michell but it is William Stukeley, the seventeenth century antiquarian who wrote about such places as Avebury, whom Michell reveres. It was Stukeley who had a great influence on William Blake. Most biographies of Blake make little of this. "Stukeley was seen with suspicion by other historians as an oddball and eccentric." Michell believes that the concept of ley lines since the Sixties has greatly influenced the arts, something which has never been acknowledged. "Richard Long paid homage to ley lines with his earth sculptures and journeys across the landscape but never really developed the idea. Most people do find the idea of invisible lines of energy a bit wacky." It is the ideas which stemmed from the concept of ley lines and interest in ancient sites which has given birth, Michell believes, to a uniquely Radical Romantic movement in Britain. This movement includes the road protesters, such people as the Dongas Tribe, the Travellers and the Free Festivals at such places as Stonehenge.
 Michell sees the culmination of all this as resulting in the movement to stop genetically modified crops in Britain. "The movement actually began in Britain and at the moment appears to have been a success.
One of the dangers inherent in reclaiming one's roots is nationalism, which Michell warns against. "Sacred sites and ley lines are all over the world. In Germany before the Second World War there was huge interest in such things which were then politicised and became fascist. This did not need to happen. Hitler was not interested in antiquity, he was a modernist, more concerned with roads, trains and logical solutions. The spirit of place is universal." It is of interest, therefore, that the Radical Romantic Movement in Britain has always embraced a cross section of different cultures, whether it was Blake's influence by Swedenborg or Boehme or the neo-pagan element which looks to Pan-European connections with Norse, Celtic and Anglo-Saxon roots and even further afield to Indo-European roots.
 In today's consumer world do we still connect with the spirit of place? Are new sites being created or do we need access to the thread of arcane knowledge? Is there an archetypal wisdom that sifts through the layers of materialism regardless of repudiation? Ancient sites are obvious choices for the genius loci, but what of the last five hundred years? Have we lost the ability, let alone the knowledge to construct new places which allow us to connect with something higher? Glib journalists tell us that the new shopping malls are the cathedrals of our age, but this I see as just pure cynicism. The tribal gatherings in the fields and woods are more likely to connect with something other. It is essential for the health of a civilisation to have access to places of natural beauty, to wild places. In a country as small as Britain, this is difficult. The government's response to conserve places of natural beauty is well meaning but often ends up in theme park trivia. This is where the power of culture comes into play, providing spaces for the imagination. In the past we had our sacred groves, our stone circles, our cathedrals and monastic environments which created the conditions for art in all its forms.
 With the advent of the new technology there is the fear that the hand-made object, whether it be painting, sculpture or a book, will vanish into cyberspace. But we will always need the tactile. Technology, in fact, could initiate a new renaissance of hand-made art. As a reaction to electronic imagery or mass made objects, neither of which are particularly individual or tactile, the handcrafted object could become something unique.
The Romantic vision also has an important part to play in combating the current craze, rampant in the media whether it be films, television, computer games or newspapers, of forecasting a nihilistic future. Despite all the propaganda, we do not have to live in a RoboCop, Terminator world! There are alternatives.
RE-ENCHANTING THE LAND
Neo-Romanticism and beyond
 Does the spirit of place still exist in our culture or have we lost our spiritual heritage to the conglomeration of market forces and corporate art?
"For nearly all of human history, the world was enchanted. As material and rationalist values have gained in pre-eminence, however, spiritual values have declined in direct proportion. Once uprooted from the world of symbols, art lost its links with myth and sacramental vision. The kind of sacramental vision to which I am referring is not that of routine church-going or religious dogma as such, but a mode of perception which converges on the power of the divine. It is what Theodore Roszak has called 'The Old Gnosis' a visionary style of knowledge as distinct from the theological or a factual one, that is able to see the divine in the human, the infinite in the finite, the spiritual in the material. This sacramental vision, which underlies our perception of the Absolute, can never be completely uprooted, according to Mircea Eliade, it can only be debased. However much we ignore, camouflage, or degrade art's sacred elements they still survive in the unconscious. Indeed, the recalling and setting up of sacred signs is the even more urgent task of an artist in times estranged from symbol and sacrament."
(Has Modernism Failed? Suzy Gablik 1988)
Indeed elements survive which view the world as a sacred space. Released from its historical location like a ghost in the machine, the genius loci has spawned a hybrid of forms. No longer contained within two dimensions, the celluloid fusions of a mystical Renaissance England to be found in the films of Derek Jarman have resurfaced with the emergence of a baroque splendour in fashion, Hammer Horror furniture welded in radioactive bronze and torture chamber metal, a gothic sensibility against the conformity of our Puritanical age.
 During the Seventies and Eighties we had the rise of Minimalism and Conceptualism in art. In American universities we saw the rise of Deconstructivism which, although in a diluted form, influenced British academia. Moving into the Eighties, it seemed that art was no longer deemed 'political' or 'spiritual'. It certainly was no longer necessary to describe the world. Instead it became its own term of reference, with the questionable result of achieving the status of a 'monetary commodity'. However, there were always voices which did not heed this call, who still reverberated with Blakean ideas, echoing the philosophy and visual sensibilities of artists such as Paul Nash. Quietly, out of the mainstream hype, artists are still exploring the landscape, revealing its secret language. The Romantic vision, whether it be geographical or of an inner nature, emerges into the twenty first century. The dark side of the previous century is observed but not dwelt on. A new alchemy is being formed which encompasses traditional methods of art, the new technology, and the revolutionary new scientific discoveries.
 Since the demise of the Neo-Romantics in the mid-Fifties, much has changed not only in the world of art but socially and politically. At the time of Paul Nash, Freudian psychoanalysis had an impact on the language, dreams and concepts of artists, writers, poets. Since then, particularly in the Sixties, Jung usurped the mantle of decoder of dreams and the unconscious. New psychological thought swept Europe and in particular America. The Deconstructivist Derrida, the philosophers Foucault and Baudrillard have had substantial impact particularly in the world of media studies and art exhibition organisation. Increasingly our sense of ourselves became fragmented. Art became a mirror of that fragmentation. As Suzy Gablik points out, the spiritual domain of the world shrunk. Increasingly alienation, violence and despair became the lingua franca, expounded by the movies, television and indeed the explosion of violence on the world stage. It now seems to have turned full circle. The time has arrived when we need to reconnect with higher ideals than the aims of self destruction and nihilism.
 Amid the confusion which reigns at least in the public's mind concerning the 'New Art', there are artists who break through the hype of sensationalism and go beyond the boundaries of the self reverential cul-de-sac. The spirit of place is still being painted, filmed, assembled, though it is no longer enslaved in galleries and is no longer the prerogative of the art world either. William Blake said that the streets are the theatre of our imagination. The natural consequence of an art which transcends the artist's self, burning away neurotic preoccupations, expands into the world in many forms. One does not have to imitate art of the past, although one benefits from the knowledge of our historical heritage. Visionary art may or may not be a painted canvas; equally, the new technology is creating new forms of expression. Within the context of cyberspace, the interests and ideas expressed in this book can evolve in new forms.
The spirit of place is still deeply embedded in our national consciousness. Every new motorway is questioned, every ancient wood fought for. The old Neo-Romantic world has long gone, but the dream persists.
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