<h2><SPAN name="III" id="III"></SPAN>III</h2>
<h3>THE AGE OF LEGENDS</h3>
<p>We should be startled if we were quietly reading a prosaic modern novel,
and somewhere in the middle it turned without warning into a fairy tale.
We should be surprised if one of the spinsters in <i>Cranford</i>, after
tidily sweeping the room with a broom, were to fly away on a broomstick.
Our attention would be arrested if one of Jane Austen's young ladies who
had just met a dragoon were to walk a little further and meet a dragon.
Yet something very like this extraordinary transition takes place in
British history at the end of the purely Roman period. We have to do
with rational and almost mechanical accounts of encampment and
engineering, of a busy bureaucracy and occasional frontier wars, quite
modern in their efficiency and inefficiency; and then all of a sudden we
are reading of wandering bells and wizard lances, of wars against men as
tall as trees or as short as toadstools. The soldier of civilization is
no longer fighting with Goths but with goblins; the land becomes a
labyrinth of faërie towns unknown to history; and scholars can suggest
but cannot explain how a Roman ruler or a Welsh chieftain<span class='pagenum'><SPAN name="Page_20" id="Page_20"></SPAN></span> towers up in
the twilight as the awful and unbegotten Arthur. The scientific age
comes first and the mythological age after it. One working example, the
echoes of which lingered till very late in English literature, may serve
to sum up the contrast. The British state which was found by Cæsar was
long believed to have been founded by Brutus. The contrast between the
one very dry discovery and the other very fantastic foundation has
something decidedly comic about it; as if Cæsar's "Et tu, Brute," might
be translated, "What, <i>you</i> here?" But in one respect the fable is quite
as important as the fact. They both testify to the reality of the Roman
foundation of our insular society, and show that even the stories that
seem prehistoric are seldom pre-Roman. When England is Elfland, the
elves are not the Angles. All the phrases that can be used as clues
through that tangle of traditions are more or less Latin phrases. And in
all our speech there was no word more Roman than "romance."</p>
<p>The Roman legions left Britain in the fourth century. This did not mean
that the Roman civilization left it; but it did mean that the
civilization lay far more open both to admixture and attack.
Christianity had almost certainly come to Britain, not indeed otherwise
than by the routes established by Rome, but certainly long before the
official Roman mission of Gregory the Great. It had certainly been
largely swamped by later heathen invasions of the undefended coasts. It<span class='pagenum'><SPAN name="Page_21" id="Page_21"></SPAN></span>
may then rationally be urged that the hold both of the Empire and its
new religion were here weaker than elsewhere, and that the description
of the general civilization in the last chapter is proportionately
irrelevant. This, however, is not the chief truth of the matter.</p>
<p>There is one fundamental fact which must be understood of the whole of
this period. Yet a modern man must very nearly turn his mind upside down
to understand it. Almost every modern man has in his head an association
between freedom and the future. The whole culture of our time has been
full of the notion of "A Good Time Coming." Now the whole culture of the
Dark Ages was full of the notion of "A Good Time Going." They looked
backwards to old enlightenment and forwards to new prejudices. In our
time there has come a quarrel between faith and hope—which perhaps must
be healed by charity. But they were situated otherwise. They hoped—but
it may be said that they hoped for yesterday. All the motives that make
a man a progressive now made a man a conservative then. The more he
could keep of the past the more he had of a fair law and a free state;
the more he gave way to the future the more he must endure of ignorance
and privilege. All we call reason was one with all we call reaction. And
this is the clue which we must carry with us through the lives of all
the great men of the Dark Ages; of Alfred, of Bede, of Dunstan. If the
most extreme modern Republican were put back in<span class='pagenum'><SPAN name="Page_22" id="Page_22"></SPAN></span> that period he would be
an equally extreme Papist or even Imperialist. For the Pope was what was
left of the Empire; and the Empire what was left of the Republic.</p>
<p>We may compare the man of that time, therefore, to one who has left free
cities and even free fields behind him, and is forced to advance towards
a forest. And the forest is the fittest metaphor, not only because it
was really that wild European growth cloven here and there by the Roman
roads, but also because there has always been associated with forests
another idea which increased as the Roman order decayed. The idea of the
forests was the idea of enchantment. There was a notion of things being
double or different from themselves, of beasts behaving like men and not
merely, as modern wits would say, of men behaving like beasts. But it is
precisely here that it is most necessary to remember that an age of
reason had preceded the age of magic. The central pillar which has
sustained the storied house of our imagination ever since has been the
idea of the civilized knight amid the savage enchantments; the
adventures of a man still sane in a world gone mad.</p>
<p>The next thing to note in the matter is this: that in this barbaric time
none of the <i>heroes</i> are barbaric. They are only heroes if they are
anti-barbaric. Men real or mythical, or more probably both, became
omnipresent like gods among the people, and forced themselves into the
faintest memory and the shortest record, exactly in<span class='pagenum'><SPAN name="Page_23" id="Page_23"></SPAN></span> proportion as they
had mastered the heathen madness of the time and preserved the Christian
rationality that had come from Rome. Arthur has his name because he
killed the heathen; the heathen who killed him have no names at all.
Englishmen who know nothing of English history, but less than nothing of
Irish history, have heard somehow or other of Brian Boru, though they
spell it Boroo and seem to be under the impression that it is a joke. It
is a joke the subtlety of which they would never have been able to
enjoy, if King Brian had not broken the heathen in Ireland at the great
Battle of Clontarf. The ordinary English reader would never have heard
of Olaf of Norway if he had not "preached the Gospel with his sword"; or
of the Cid if he had not fought against the Crescent. And though Alfred
the Great seems to have deserved his title even as a personality, he was
not so great as the work he had to do.</p>
<p>But the paradox remains that Arthur is more real than Alfred. For the
age is the age of legends. Towards these legends most men adopt by
instinct a sane attitude; and, of the two, credulity is certainly much
more sane than incredulity. It does not much matter whether most of the
stories are true; and (as in such cases as Bacon and Shakespeare) to
realize that the question does not matter is the first step towards
answering it correctly. But before the reader dismisses anything like an
attempt to tell the earlier history of the country by its legends, he<span class='pagenum'><SPAN name="Page_24" id="Page_24"></SPAN></span>
will do well to keep two principles in mind, both of them tending to
correct the crude and very thoughtless scepticism which has made this
part of the story so sterile. The nineteenth-century historians went on
the curious principle of dismissing all people of whom tales are told,
and concentrating upon people of whom nothing is told. Thus, Arthur is
made utterly impersonal because all legends are lies, but somebody of
the type of Hengist is made quite an important personality, merely
because nobody thought him important enough to lie about. Now this is to
reverse all common sense. A great many witty sayings are attributed to
Talleyrand which were really said by somebody else. But they would not
be so attributed if Talleyrand had been a fool, still less if he had
been a fable. That fictitious stories are told about a person is, nine
times out of ten, extremely good evidence that there was somebody to
tell them about. Indeed some allow that marvellous things were done, and
that there may have been a man named Arthur at the time in which they
were done; but here, so far as I am concerned, the distinction becomes
rather dim. I do not understand the attitude which holds that there was
an Ark and a man named Noah, but cannot believe in the existence of
Noah's Ark.</p>
<p>The other fact to be remembered is that scientific research for the last
few years has worked steadily in the direction of confirming and not
dissipating the legends of the populace.<span class='pagenum'><SPAN name="Page_25" id="Page_25"></SPAN></span> To take only the obvious
instance, modern excavators with modern spades have found a solid stone
labyrinth in Crete, like that associated with the Minataur, which was
conceived as being as cloudy a fable as the Chimera. To most people this
would have seemed quite as frantic as finding the roots of Jack's
Beanstalk or the skeletons in Bluebeard's cupboard, yet it is simply the
fact. Finally, a truth is to be remembered which scarcely ever is
remembered in estimating the past. It is the paradox that the past is
always present: yet it is not what was, but whatever seems to have been;
for all the past is a part of faith. What did they believe of their
fathers? In this matter new discoveries are useless because they are
new. We may find men wrong in what they thought they were, but we cannot
find them wrong in what they thought they thought. It is therefore very
practical to put in a few words, if possible, something of what a man of
these islands in the Dark Ages would have said about his ancestors and
his inheritance. I will attempt here to put some of the simpler things
in their order of importance as he would have seen them; and if we are
to understand our fathers who first made this country anything like
itself, it is most important that we should remember that if this was
not their real past, it was their real memory.</p>
<p>After that blessed crime, as the wit of mystics called it, which was for
these men hardly second to the creation of the world, St. Joseph of
Arimathea, one of the few followers of the new religion<span class='pagenum'><SPAN name="Page_26" id="Page_26"></SPAN></span> who seem to
have been wealthy, set sail as a missionary, and after long voyages came
to that litter of little islands which seemed to the men of the
Mediterranean something like the last clouds of the sunset. He came up
upon the western and wilder side of that wild and western land, and made
his way to a valley which through all the oldest records is called
Avalon. Something of rich rains and warmth in its westland meadows, or
something in some lost pagan traditions about it, made it persistently
regarded as a kind of Earthly Paradise. Arthur, after being slain at
Lyonesse, is carried here, as if to heaven. Here the pilgrim planted his
staff in the soil; and it took root as a tree that blossoms on Christmas
Day.</p>
<p>A mystical materialism marked Christianity from its birth; the very soul
of it was a body. Among the stoical philosophies and oriental negations
that were its first foes it fought fiercely and particularly for a
supernatural freedom to cure concrete maladies by concrete substances.
Hence the scattering of relics was everywhere like the scattering of
seed. All who took their mission from the divine tragedy bore tangible
fragments which became the germs of churches and cities. St. Joseph
carried the cup which held the wine of the Last Supper and the blood of
the Crucifixion to that shrine in Avalon which we now call Glastonbury;
and it became the heart of a whole universe of legends and romances, not
only for Britain but for Europe. Throughout this<span class='pagenum'><SPAN name="Page_27" id="Page_27"></SPAN></span> tremendous and
branching tradition it is called the Holy Grail. The vision of it was
especially the reward of that ring of powerful paladins whom King Arthur
feasted at a Round Table, a symbol of heroic comradeship such as was
afterwards imitated or invented by mediæval knighthood. Both the cup and
the table are of vast importance emblematically in the psychology of the
chivalric experiment. The idea of a round table is not merely
universality but equality. It has in it, modified of course, by other
tendencies to differentiation, the same idea that exists in the very
word "peers," as given to the knights of Charlemagne. In this the Round
Table is as Roman as the round arch, which might also serve as a type;
for instead of being one barbaric rock merely rolled on the others, the
king was rather the keystone of an arch. But to this tradition of a
level of dignity was added something unearthly that was from Rome, but
not of it; the privilege that inverted all privileges; the glimpse of
heaven which seemed almost as capricious as fairyland; the flying
chalice which was veiled from the highest of all the heroes, and which
appeared to one knight who was hardly more than a child.</p>
<p>Rightly or wrongly, this romance established Britain for after centuries
as a country with a chivalrous past. Britain had been a mirror of
universal knighthood. This fact, or fancy, is of colossal import in all
ensuing affairs, especially the affairs of barbarians. These and
numberless other local legends are indeed for us buried<span class='pagenum'><SPAN name="Page_28" id="Page_28"></SPAN></span> by the forests
of popular fancies that have grown out of them. It is all the harder for
the serious modern mind because our fathers felt at home with these
tales, and therefore took liberties with them. Probably the rhyme which
runs,</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<div>"When good King Arthur ruled this land</div>
<div>He was a noble king,</div>
<div>He stole three pecks of barley meal,"</div>
</div></div>
<p>is much nearer the true mediæval note than the aristocratic stateliness
of Tennyson. But about all these grotesques of the popular fancy there
is one last thing to be remembered. It must especially be remembered by
those who would dwell exclusively on documents, and take no note of
tradition at all. Wild as would be the results of credulity concerning
all the old wives' tales, it would not be so wild as the errors that can
arise from trusting to written evidence when there is not enough of it.
Now the whole written evidence for the first parts of our history would
go into a small book. A very few details are mentioned, and none are
explained. A fact thus standing alone, without the key of contemporary
thought, may be very much more misleading than any fable. To know what
word an archaic scribe wrote without being sure of what thing he meant,
may produce a result that is literally mad. Thus, for instance, it would
be unwise to accept literally the tale that St. Helena was not only a
native of Colchester, but was a daughter of Old King Cole. But it would
not be very unwise; not so unwise as some things that are deduced<span class='pagenum'><SPAN name="Page_29" id="Page_29"></SPAN></span> from
documents. The natives of Colchester certainly did honour to St. Helena,
and might have had a king named Cole. According to the more serious
story, the saint's father was an innkeeper; and the only recorded action
of Cole is well within the resources of that calling. It would not be
nearly so unwise as to deduce from the written word, as some critic of
the future may do, that the natives of Colchester were oysters.</p>
<hr />
<p><span class='pagenum'><SPAN name="Page_30" id="Page_30"></SPAN></span></p>
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