The Past in the Present: Romans in Britain

Now and then it strikes me that it is not things in themselves, but what we think of things, that most matters to the human race. Now and then I veer from acknowledging this as truth to a flat contradiction: rubbish, I think; things-in-themselves give supreme value to all existence, and it does not matter what human beings make of them because they stand outside time in our imagination. In Michael Ignatieff’s life of Isaiah Berlin, there occurs a good instance of one side of this Janus-faced commonplace. It is 1945, and the philosopher, born in Riga in 1909 when Latvia was part of the Russian Empire, is in Leningrad as a British diplomat, new on the scene, and a native Russian-and German-speaker at that. He inquires, among other things, about the fate of the city’s writers under the Soviets in the late and terrible war. What of the famous Anna Akhmatova, say, who has not been allowed to publish since 1925 and whose poems Berlin has never even read? Overwhelmed by news of her continued existence, he calls on her that afternoon and returns in the evening to talk all night. Their talk ranges across all experience: “He asked her whether the Renaissance was a real world to her, or an imaginary one, and she affirmed it was the latter. All poetry and art, she said, were ‘a form of nostalgia, a longing for a universal culture, as Goethe and Schegel had conceived it, of what had been transmuted into art and thought—nature, love, death, despair and martyrdom, of a reality which had no history, nothing outside itself.’” Ignatieff goes on, “That evening in the Fontanny Dom, in the bare and denuded room, with the potatoes in the dish, the Modigliani drawing [of Akhmatova], the cigar smoke slowly settling, Isaiah’s life came as close as it ever did to the still perfection of art” (Isaiah Berlin: A Life).

In northern England, where southern parts of Scottish counties touch on the English counties of Northumbria and Cumbria, the land is rough and hilly, with occasional outcrops of crag over moorland grazed by sheep and the habitat of curlews, grouse, lapwings, skylarks, with wild geese and swans on loughs, and there is only the occasional farmhouse to mark a human dwelling. These are the Debatable Lands, for centuries fought over by Scots and English up to the union of the two kingdoms in 1603, some mere eighty miles in breadth, extending between North Sea in the east and Irish Sea in the west. Here runs Hadrian’s Wall, a frontier of the Roman empire erected by the Emperor Hadrian following the year a.d. 122 and still in existence for the most part nearly two millennia later; and, though serving no practical purpose today, it is tramped by thousands going east or west for pure pleasure on the well-marked path that runs immediately to the north or south of it. I walked some forty miles of it with five friends a few years ago, and was aware, as I think we all were, that the geography and the brilliant April weather that prevailed then, and the history and the desolation around us meant much more than present conditions indicate, that all hung on the imagination, as the Renaissance existed in the imagination of Anna Akhmatova in 1945. I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed myself more profoundly.

Nor was this an effect of the solitary landscape. When people like me who were born and bred in long-lived parts of the earth find ourselves in a North American landscape, we are often disturbed by the difference. No lumps in the fields that may be tumuli, no fields at all, no tracks or tracks broken off or continued far away, no crumbling green dykes, no silted waterways, no ruins, no former quarries, no mines, no obelisks, no standing stones or henges, nothing in the places between houses or villages, towns, cities, providing the smother of humanity: a prehuman landscape. An American wrote to me recently from the...