An Anglocentric eccentric
Peter Levi
WILLIAM STUKELY by Stuart Piggott
Thames & Hudson, £14
As Chesterton observed, the purpose of school is to watch the amazing be- haviour of schoolmasters. Great scholars are often enough more attractive objects of study than the syllabuses they teach. Philo- sophers are more amusing than philoso- phy, and the lives of minor poets of the past make more interesting reading than their verses. The same is surely true of Stukely. He is not as fascinating as Ave- bury or Stonehenge, but one begins by pillaging him for facts and ends up observ- ing his investigations and himself with much wonder. Stuart Piggott's gently ironic and by now classic essay on Stukely is the best book on any English archaeolog- ist and one of the most entertaining that an archaeologist has ever written, at least since Stukely, who lived in the golden age of English prose, from 1687 to 1765.
Stuart Piggott himself deserves a para- graph. His career in archaeology began with apprenticeship; I doubt whether in his day any formal qualification short of a postgraduate one existed. After the war, when he was already an archaeologist of some distinction, he wrote an Oxford thesis of extraordinary originality about Stukely. It appeared as a book in 1950, and has now been thoroughly revised in the light of new evidence for a splendidly illustrated and notably well-produced third cycle of its existence. This is the monumental first milestone in the study of a fascinating confluence and separation point in the history of ideas. of techniques and taste. There should be more to come, because plenty of Stukely's manuscripts remain unpublished, and much of his printed work unread. Stuart Piggott deals mostly with his antiquarian and aesthetic side.
Roughly speaking, the story is simple. Stukely was a provincial boy who could dance and play the flute. He entertained himself with his own puppet-show. He botanised and took refuge from a lawyer's office in the thrilling antiquities of the city of Lincoln. In 1703 he went to Cambridge to become a doctor, and then to London where he attracted the patronage of the great Richard Mead, and went up a step socially. He was already drawing land- scapes and hunting for plants and fossils. By 1708 he was making careful drawings of ancient monuments and from 1710 to 1725 he took long riding tours all over England, which I have read somewhere were in- tended to cure his gout. He kept illustrated journals. But his great contribution was his very careful, precise studies of Avebury and Stonehenge. In both cases, his first inspiration seems to have been John Au- brey, whose unpublished Monumenta Britannica he saw in manuscript copy.
He then became dotty about Druids, with whom he associated his own strong views about natural and traditional reli- gion. He developed a fantasy in which he himself and various aesthetic Earls and a Princess were all true Druids. He went so far as to be ordained in the Church of England and preach about Druids. His works on the subject are crazy and volumi- nous; I long to possess them. Stuart Pig- gott's main thesis is that Stukely was born out of his time, and showed the last, waning influence of a great age of anti- quarianism which was over. He had, as he grew older, no one to talk to who was serious enough to keep him straight. The Professor has tried at times to suppress his sympathy for poor old Stukely, but it shows through on every page. No thesis was ever less like a thesis; this is the study of one aesthete by another, and the super- ior heights of modern archaeology are revealed but not much emphasised.
I take it that scientific archaeology could not come into existence until the Victorian mania for accumulation and classification had produced a sufficient mass of materials to furnish a proper chronology, or at least its beginnings. Stukely and his friends were `errant Vertuosoes'. The serious' develop- ments in the next generation went different ways: water-colour painting, which in Eng- land derives largely from Sanby and the Military School of Drawing in the Tower of London, and natural history, for which Pennant did so much. In the late 1740s, when Stukely had done his best work and was running wild, Sandby was recording the military antiquities of Scotland for the Crown. I am not sure that Stuart Piggott is quite fair to anyone who comes later than his hero. Dr Johnson hated stone circles and he hated landscaping and fine garden- ing. He even hated Alderney cattle and
ornamental waterfowl and any vegetable less than enormous because he thought size was more useful. But he did believe in scientific observation and exact measure- ments. William Cunnington's work in Wilt- shire (born 1754), recorded by Sir Richard Colt Hoare, was not contemptible, nor were John Skinner's observations of Had- rian's Wall (1801); they have both attracted attention in the last ten years. All the same, they are pygmies in comparison with the old Vertuoso. Stuart Piggott takes a severe view of Stukely's numerous fol- lies, and of the later follies of antiquaries, derided by Horace Walpole; there is no doubt he is substantially right. And his well-known book about Druids does take at least that strange story further.
Stukely was a founder of clubs and societies. He was abundant in conjectures and immensely talented, though when he scores a bull's-eye modern scholars tend to think he does so by mistake. The silliest episode was a war of pamphlets about whether Oriuna was the wife or the special goddess of Carausius; she was really a misreading of (F)ortuna on a coin he had never seen. That was because the coin was in France; he preferred British antiquities to foreign travel. Is that not a hint of what happened to the antiquarian endeavours of the next generation? They were expended on the discovery of such buildings as the Parthenon. Stukely's Druidism, as Stuart Piggott points out in his wonderful closing chapter, flowered in the poetry of William Blake. So did the discovery of Greek antiquities. Blake even did some plate- making for Stuart and Revett's Antiquities of Athens. That seems a far cry from Avebury, and Stukely is as English as Avebury is. He was an Anglocentric eccen- tric. But the journals of early English travellers in Greece were very like Stuke- ly's English journals. He could as easily have turned that way, but he was deeply in love with the English country. He designed a military tent without guyropes based on the tabernacle of Moses, and an amazing bridge which is the first blast of the Gothic revival. He tried to prove to the Royal Society that sponges are not organisms. When he first appeared in his pulpit in spectacles at the age of 76, he preached on seeing through a glass darkly.
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