HISTORY
There are three examples of
Western work on the great eastern slope of the Mount of Olives; and they form a
sort of triangle illustrating the truth about the different influences of the
West on the East. At the foot of the hill is the garden kept by the Franciscans
on the alleged site of Gethsemane, and containing the hoary olive that is
supposed to be the terrible tree of the agony of Christ. Given the great age
and slow growth of the olives, the tradition is not so unreasonable as some may
suppose. But whether or not it is historically right, it is not artistically
wrong. The instinct, if it was only an instinct, that made men fix upon this
strange growth of grey and twisted wood, was a true imaginative instinct. One
of the strange qualities of this strange Southern tree is its almost startling
hardness; accidentally to strike the branch of an olive is like striking rock.
With its stony surface, stunted stature, and strange holes and hollows, it is
often more like a grotto than a tree. Hence it does not seem so unnatural that
it should be treated as a holy grotto; or that this strange vegetation should
claim to stand for ever like a sculptured monument. Even the shimmering or
shivering silver foliage of the living olive might well have a legend like that
of the aspen; as if it had grown grey with fear from the apocalyptic paradox of
a divine vision of death. A child from one of the villages said to me, in
broken English, that it was the place where God said his prayers. I for one
could not ask for a finer or more defiant statement of all that separates the
Christian from the Moslem or the Jew; <credo quia impossibile>.
Around this terrible spot the
Franciscans have done something which will strike many good and thoughtful
people as quite fantastically inadequate; and which strikes me as fantastically
but precisely right. They have laid out the garden simply as a garden, in a way
that is completely natural because it is completely artificial. They have made
flower-beds in the shape of stars and moons, and coloured them with flowers
like those in the backyard of a cottage. The combination of these bright
patterns in the sunshine with the awful shadow in the centre is certainly an
incongruity in the sense of a contrast. But it is a poetical contrast, like
that of birds building in a temple or flowers growing on a tomb. The best way
of suggesting what I for one feel bout it would be something like this; suppose
we imagine a company of children, such as those whom Christ blessed in
Jerusalem, afterwards put permanently in charge of a field full of his sorrow;
it is probable that, if they could do anything with it, they would do something
like this. They might cut it up into quaint shapes and dot it with red daisies
or yellow marigolds. I really do not know that there is anything better that
grown up people could do, since anything that the greatest of them could do
must be, must look quite as small. "Shall I, the gnat that dances in Thy
ray, dare to be reverent?" The Franciscans have not dared to be reverent;
they have only dared to be cheerful. It may be too awful an adventure of the
imagination to imagine Christ in that garden. But there is not the smallest
difficulty about imagining St. Francis there; and that is something to say of
an institution which is eight hundred years old.
Immediately above this little
garden, overshadowing and almost overhanging it, is a gorgeous gilded building
with golden domes and minarets glittering in the sun, and filling a splendid
situation with almost shameless splendour; the Russian church built over the
upper part of the garden, belonging to the Orthodox-Greeks. Here again many
Western travellers will be troubled; and will think that golden building much
too like a fairy palace in a pantomime. But here again I shall differ from
them, though perhaps less strongly. It may be that the pleasure is childish
rather than childlike; but I can imagine a child clapping his hands at the mere
sight of those great domes like bubbles of gold against the blue sky. It is a
little like Aladdin's Palace, but it has a place in art as Aladdin has a place
in literature; especially since it is oriental literature. Those wise
missionaries in China who were not afraid to depict the Twelve Apostles in the
costume of Chinamen might have built such a church in a land of glittering
mosques. And as it is said that the Russian has in him something of the child
and something of the oriental, such a style may be quite sincere, and have even
a certain simplicity in its splendour. It is genuine of its kind; it was built
for those who like it; and those who do not like it can look at something else.
This sort of thing may be called tawdry, but it is not what I call
meretricious. What I call really meretricious can be found yet higher on the
hill; towering to the sky and dominating all the valleys.
The nature of the difference, I
think, is worth noting. The German Hospice, which served as a sort of palace
for the German Emperor, is a very big building with a very high tower, planned
I believe with great efficiency, solidity and comfort, and fitted with a
thousand things that mark its modernity compared with the things around, with
the quaint garden of the Franciscans or the fantastic temple of the Russians. It
is what I can only describe as a handsome building; rather as the more vulgar
of the Victorian wits used to talk about a fine woman. By calling it a handsome
building I mean that from the top of its dizzy tower to the bottom of its
deepest foundations there is not one line or one tint of beauty. This negative
fact, however, would be nothing; it might be honestly ugly and utilitarian like
a factory or a prison; but it is not. It is as pretentious as the gilded dome
below it; and it is pretentious in a wicked way where the other is pretentious
in a good and innocent way. What annoys me about it is that it was not built by
children, or even by savages, but by professors; and the professors could
profess the art and could not practice it. The architects knew everything about
a Romanesque building except how to build it. We feel that they accumulated on
that spot all the learning and organization and information and wealth of the
world, to do this one particular thing; and then did it wrong. They did it
wrong, not through superstition, not through fanatical exaggeration, not
through provincial ignorance, but through pure, profound, internal,
intellectual incompetence; that intellectual incompetence which so often goes
with intellectual pride. I will mention only one matter out of a hundred. All
the columns in the Kaiser's Chapel are in one way very suitable to their place;
every one of them has a swelled head. The column itself is slender but the
capital is not only big but bulging; and it has the air of bulging <downwards>,
as if pressing heavily on something too slender to support it. This is false,
not to any of the particular schools of architecture about which professors can
read in libraries, but to the inmost instinctive idea of architecture itself. A
Norman capital can be heavy because the Norman column is thick, and the whole
thing expresses an elephantine massiveness and repose. And a Gothic column can
be slender, because its strength is energy; and is expressed in its line, which
shoots upwards like the life of a tree, like the jet of a fountain or even like
the rush of a rocket. But a slender thing beneath, obviously oppressed by a
bloated thing above, suggests weakness by one of those miraculous mistakes that
are as precisely wrong as masterpieces are precisely right. And to all this is
added the intolerable intuition; that the Russians and the Franciscans, even if
we credit them with fantastic ignorance, are at least looking up at the sky;
and we know how the learned Germans would look down upon them, from their
monstrous tower upon the hill.
And this is as true of the moral
as of the artistic elements in the modern Jerusalem. To show that I am not
unjustly partisan, I will say frankly that I see little to complain of in that
common subject of complaint, the mosaic portrait of the Emperor on the ceiling
of the chapel. It is but one among many figures; and it is not an unknown
practice to include a figure of the founder in such church decorations. The
real example of that startling moral stupidity which marked the barbaric
imperialism can be found in another figure of which, curiously enough,
considerably less notice seems to have been taken. It is the more remarkable
because it is but an artistic shadow of the actual fact; and merely records in
outline and relief the temporary masquerade in which the man walked about in
broad daylight. I mean the really astounding trick of dressing himself up as a
Crusader.
That was, under the circumstances,
far more ludicrous and lunatic a proceeding than if he had filled the whole
ceiling with cherub heads with his own features, or festooned all the walls
with one ornamental pattern of his moustaches.
The German Emperor came to
Jerusalem under the escort of the Turks, as the ally of the Turks, and solely
because of the victory and surpremacy of the Turks. In other words, he came to
Jerusalem solely because the Crusaders had lost Jerusalem; he came there solely
because the Crusaders had been routed, ruined, butchered before and after the
disaster of Hattin; because the Cross had gone down in blood before the
Crescent, under which alone he could ride in with safety. Under those
circumstances to dress up as a Crusader, as if for a fancy dress ball, was a
mixture of madness and vulgarity which literally stops the breath. There is no
need whatever to blame him for being in alliance with the Turks; hundreds of
people have been in alliance with the Turks; the English especially have been
far too much in alliance with them. But if any one wants to appreciate the true
difference, distinct from all the cant of newspaper nationality, between the
English and the Germans (who were classed together by the same newspapers a
little time before the war) let him take this single incident as a test. Lord
Palmerston, for instance, was a firm friend of the Turks. Imagine Lord
Palmerston appearing in chain mail and the shield of a Red Cross Knight.
It is obvious enough that
Palmerston would have said that he cared no more for the Crusade than for the
Siege of Troy; that his diplomacy was directed by practical patriotic
considerations of the moment; and that he regarded the religious wars of the
twelfth century as a rubbish heap of remote superstitions. In this he would be
quite wrong, but quite intelligible and quite sincere; an English aristocrat of
the nineteenth century inheriting from the English aristocrats of the
eighteenth century; whose views were simply those of Voltaire. And these things
are something of an allegory. For the Voltairian version of the Crusades is
still by far the most reasonable of all merely hostile views of the Crusades.
If they were not a creative movement of religion, then they were simply a
destructive movement of superstition; and whether we agree with Voltaire in
calling it superstition or with Villehardouin in calling it religion, at least
both these very clear-headed Frenchmen would agree that the motive did exist
and did explain the facts. But just as there is a clumsy German building with
statues that at once patronise and parody the Crusaders, so there is a clumsy German
theory that at once patronises and minimises the Crusades. According to this
theory the essential truth about a Crusade was that it was not a Crusade. It
was something that the professors, in the old days before the war, used to call
a Teutonic Folk-Wandering. Godfrey and St. Louis were not, as Villehardouin
would say, fighting for the truth; they were not even, as Voltaire would say,
fighting for what they thought was the truth; this was only what they thought
they thought, and they were really thinking of something entirely different.
They were not moved either by piety or priestcraft, but by a new and unexpected
nomadism. They were not inspired either by faith or fanaticism, but by an
unusually aimless taste for foreign travel. This theory that the war of the two
great religions could be explained by "Wanderlust" was current about
twenty years ago among the historical professors of Germany, and with many of
their other views was often accepted by the historical professors of England.
It was swallowed by an earthquake, along with other rubbish, in the year 1914.
Since then, so far as I know, the
only person who has been patient enough to dig it up again is Mr. Ezra Pound.
He is well known as an American poet; and he is, I believe, a man of great
talent and information. His attempt to recover the old Teutonic theory of the
Folk-Wandering of Peter the Hermit
was expressed, however, in prose; in an article in the <New Age>. I have
no reason to doubt that he was to be counted among the most loyal of our allies;
but he is evidently one of those who, quite without being Pro-German, still
manage to be German. The Teutonic theory was very Teutonic; like the German
Hospice on the hill it was put together with great care and knowledge and it is
rotten from top to bottom. I do not understand, for that matter, why that
alliance which we enjoy with Mr. Pound should not be treated in the same way as
the other historical event; or why the war should not be an example of the
Wanderlust. Surely the American Army in France must have drifted eastward
merely through the same vague nomadic need as the Christian Army in Palestine.
Surely Pershing as well as Peter the Hermit was merely a rather restless
gentleman who found his health improved by frequent change of scene. The Americans
said, and perhaps thought, that they were fighting for democracy; and the
Crusaders said, and perhaps thought, that they were fighting for Christianity.
But as we know what the Crusaders meant better than they did themselves, I
cannot quite understand why we do not enjoy the same valuable omniscience about
the Americans. Indeed I do not see why we should not enjoy it (for it would be
very enjoyable) about any individual American. Surely it was this vague
vagabond spirit that moved Mr. Pound, not only to come to England, but in a
fashion to come to Fleet Street. A. dim tribal tendency, vast and invisible as
the wind, carried him and his article like an autumn leaf to alight on the
<New Age> doorstep. Or a blind aboriginal impulse, wholly without rational
motive, led him one day to put on his hat, and go out with his article in an
envelope and put it in a pillar-box. It is vain to correct by cold logic the
power of such primitive appetites; nature herself was behind the seemingly
random thoughtlessness of the deed. And now that it is irrevocably done, he can
look back on it and trace the large lines of an awful law of averages; wherein
it is ruled by a ruthless necessity that a certain number of such Americans
should write a certain number of such articles, as the leaves fall or the
flowers return.
In plain words, this sort of
theory is a blasphemy against the intellectual dignity of man. It is a blunder
as well as a blasphemy; for it goes miles out of its way to find a bestial
explanation when there is obviously a human explanation. It is as if a man told
me that a dim survival of the instincts of a quadruped was the reason of my
sitting on a chair with four legs. I answer that I do it because I foresee that
there may be grave disadvantages in sitting on a chair with one leg. Or it is
as if I were told that I liked to swim in the sea, solely because some early
forms of amphibian life came out of the sea on to the shore. I answer that I
know why I swim in the sea; and it is because the divine gift of reason tells
me that it would be unsatisfactory to swim on the land. In short this sort of
vague evolutionary theorising simply amounts to finding an unconvincing
explanation of something that needs no explanation. And the case is really
quite as simple with great political and religious movements by which man has
from time to time changed the world in this or that respect in which he
happened to think it would be the better for a change. The Crusade was a
religious movement, but it was also a perfectly rational movement; one might
almost say a rationalist movement. I could quite understand Mr. Pound saying
that such a campaign for a creed was immoral; and indeed it often has been, and
now perhaps generally is, quite horribly immoral. But when he implies that it is
irrational he has selected exactly the thing which it is not. It is not
enlightenment, on the contrary it is ignorance and insularity, which causes
most of us to miss this fact. But it certainly is the fact that religious war
is in itself much more rational than patriotic way. I for one have often
defended and even encouraged patriotic war, and should always be ready to
defend and encourage patriotic passion. But it cannot be denied that there is
more of mere passion, of mere preference and prejudice, in short of mere
personal accident, in fighting another nation than in fighting another faith.
The Crusader is in every sense more rational than the modern conscript or
professional soldier. He is more rational in his object, which is the
intelligent and intelligible object of conversion; where the modern militarist
has an object much more confused by momentary vanity and one-sided
satisfaction. The Crusader wished to make Jerusalem a Christian town; but the
Englishman does not wish to make Berlin an English town. He has only a healthy
hatred of it as a Prussian town. The Moslem wished to make the Christian a
Moslem; but even the Prussian did not wish to make the Frenchman a Prussian. He
only wished to make the Frenchman admire a Prussian; and not only were the means
he adopted somewhat ill-considered for this purpose, but the purpose itself is
looser and more irrational. The object of all war is peace; but the object of
religious war is mental as well as material peace; it is agreement. In short
religious war aims ultimately at equality, where national war aims relatively
at superiority. Conversion is the one sort of conquest in which the conquered
must rejoice.
In that sense alone it is foolish
for us in the West to sneer at those who kill men when a foot is set in a holy
place, when we ourselves kill hundreds of thousands when a foot is put across a
frontier. It is absurd for us to despise those who shed blood for a relic when
we have shed rivers of blood for a rag. But above all the Crusade, or, for that
matter, the Jehad, is by far the most philosophical sort of fighting, not only
in its conception of ending the difference, but in its mere act of recognising
the difference, as the deepest kind of difference. It is to reverse all reason
to suggest that a man's politics matter and his religion does not matter. It is
to say he is affected by the town he lives in, but not by the world he lives
in. It is to say that he is altered when he is a fellow-citizen walking under
new lamp-posts, but not altered when he is another creature walking under
strange stars. It is exactly as if we were to say that two people ought to live
in the same house, but it need not be in the same town. It is exactly as if we
said that so long as the address included York it did not matter whether it was
New York; or that so long as a man is in Essex we do not care whether he is in
England.
Christendom would have been
entirely justified in the abstract in being alarmed or suspicious at the mere
rise of a great power that was not Christian. Nobody nowadays would think it
odd to express regret at the rise of a power because it was Militarist or
Socialist or even Protectionist. But it is far more natural to be conscious of
a difference, not about the order of battle but the battle of life; not about
our definable enjoyment of possessions, but about our much more doubtful
possession of enjoyment; not about the fiscal divisions between us and
foreigners but about the spiritual divisions even between us and friends. These
are the things that differ profoundly with differing views of the ultimate
nature of the universe. For the things of our country are often distant; but
the things of our cosmos are always near; we can shut our doors upon the
wheeled traffic of our native town; but in our own inmost chamber we hear the
sound that never ceases; that wheel which Dante and a popular proverb have
dared to christen as the love that makes the world go round. For this is the
great paradox of life; that there are not only wheels within wheels, but the
larger wheels within the smaller. When a whole community rests on one
conception of life and death and the origin of things, it is quite entitled to
watch the rise of another community founded on another conception as the rise
of something certain to be different and likely to be hostile. Indeed, as I
have pointed out touching certain political theories, we already admit this
truth in its small and questionable examples. We only deny the large and
obvious examples.
Christendom might quite reasonably
have been alarmed if it had not been attacked. But as a matter of history it
had been attacked. The Crusader would have been quite justified in suspecting
the Moslem even if the Moslem had merely been a new stranger; but as a matter
of history he was already an old enemy. The critic of the Crusade talks as if
it had sought out some inoffensive tribe or temple in the interior of Thibet,
which was never discovered until it was invaded. They seem entirely to forget
that long before the Crusaders had dreamed of riding to Jerusalem, the Moslems
had almost ridden into Paris. They seem to forget that if the Crusaders nearly
conquered Palestine, it was but a return upon the Moslems who had nearly
conquered Europe. There was no need for them to argue by an appeal to reason,
as I have argued above, that a religious division must make a difference; it
had already made a difference. The difference stared them in the face in the
startling transformation of Roman Barbary and of Roman Spain. In short it was
something which must happen in theory and which did happen in practice; all
expectation suggested that it would be so and all experience said it was so.
Having thought it out theoretically and experienced it practically, they
proceeded to deal with it equally practically. The first division involved
every principle of the science of thought; and the last developments followed
out every principle of the science of war. The Crusade was the counter-attack.
It was the defensive army taking the offensive in its turn, and driving back
the enemy to his base. And it is this process, reasonable from its first axiom
to its last act, that Mr. Pound actually selects as a sort of automatic
wandering of an animal. But a man so intelligent would not have made a mistake
so extraordinary but for another error which it is here very essential to
consider. To suggest that men engaged, rightly or wrongly, in so logical a
military and political operation were only migrating like birds or swarming
like bees is as ridiculous as to say that the Prohibition campaign in America
was only an animal reversion towards lapping as the dog lappeth, or Rowland
Hill's introduction of postage stamps an animal taste for licking as the cat
licks. Why should we provide other people with a remote reason for their own
actions, when they themselves are ready to tell us the reason, and it is a
perfectly reasonable reason?
I have compared this pompous
imposture of scientific history to the pompous and clumsy building of the
scientific Germans on the Mount of Olives, because it substitutes in the same
way a modern stupidity for the medieval simplicity. But just as the German
Hospice after all stands on a fine site, and might have been a fine building,
so there is after all another truth, somewhat analogous, which the German
historians of the Folk-Wanderings might possibly have meant, as distinct from
all that they have actually said. There is indeed one respect in which the case
of the Crusade does differ very much from modern political cases like
prohibition or the penny post. I do not refer to such incidental peculiarities
as the fact that Prohibition could only have succeeded through the enormous
power of modern plutocracy, or that even the convenience of the postage goes
along with an extreme coercion by the police. It is a somewhat deeper
difference that I mean; and it may possibly be what these critics mean. But the
difference is not in the evolutionary, but rather the revolutionary spirit.
The First Crusade was not a racial
migration; it was something much more intellectual and dignified; a riot. In
order to understand this religious war we must class it, not so much with the
wars of, history as with the revolutions of history. As I shall try to show
briefly on a later page, it not only had all the peculiar good and the peculiar
evil of things like the French Revolution or the Russian Revolution, but it was
a more purely popular revolution than either of them. The truly modern mind
will of course regard the contention that it was popular as tantamount to a
confession that it was animal. In these days when papers and speeches are full
of words like democracy and self-determination, anything really resembling the
movement of a mass of angry men Is regarded as no better than a stampede of
bulls or a scurry of rats. The new sociologists call it the herd instinct, just
as the old reactionaries called it the many-headed beast. But both agree in
implying that it is hardly worth while to count how many head there are of such
cattle. In face of such fashionable comparisons it will seem comparatively mild
to talk of migration as it occurs among birds or insects. Nevertheless we may
venture to state with some confidence that both the sociologists and the
reactionaries are wrong. It does not follow that human beings become less than
human because their ideas appeal to more and more of humanity. Nor can we
deduce that men are mindless solely from the fact that they are all of one
mind. In plain fact the virtues of a mob cannot be found in a herd of bulls or
a pack of wolves, any more than the crimes of a mob can be committed by a flock
of sheep or a shoal of herrings. Birds have never been known to besiege and
capture an empty cage of an aviary, on a point of principle, merely because it
had kept a few other birds in captivity, as the mob besieged and captured the
almost empty Bastille, merely because it was the fortress of a historic
tyranny. And rats have never been known to die by thousands merely in order to
visit a particular trap in which a particular rat had perished, as the poor
peasants of the First Crusade died in thousands for a far-off sight of the
Sepulchre or a fragment of the true cross. In this sense indeed the Crusade was
not rationalistic, if the rat is the only rationalist. But it will seem more
truly rational to point out that the inspiration of such a crowd is not in such
instincts as we share with the animals, but precisely in such ideas as the
animals never (with all their virtues) understand.
What is peculiar about the First
Crusade is that it was in quite a new and abnormal sense a popular movement. I
might almost say it was the only popular movement there ever was in the world.
For it was not a thing which the populace followed; it was actually a thing
which the populace led. It was not only essentially a revolution, but it was
the only revolution I know of in which the masses began by acting alone, and
practically without any support from any of the classes. When they had acted,
the classes came in; and it is perfectly true, and indeed only natural, that
the masses alone failed where the two together succeeded. But it was the
uneducated who educated the educated. The case of the Crusade is emphatically
not a case in which certain ideas were first suggested by a few philosophers,
and then preached by demagogues to the democracy. This was to a great extent
true of the French Revolution; it was probably yet more true of the Russian
Revolution; and we need not here pause upon the fine shade of difference that
Rousseau was right and Karl Marx was wrong. In the First Crusade it was the
ordinary man who was right or wrong. He came out in a fury at the insult to his
own little images or private prayers, as if he had come out to fight with his
own domestic poker or private carving-knife. He was not armed with new weapons
of wit and logic served round from the arsenal of an academy. There was any
amount of wit and logic in the academies of the Middle Ages; but the typical
leader of the Crusade was not Abélard or Aquinas but Peter the Hermit, who can
hardly be called even a popular leader, but rather a popular flag. And it was
his army, or rather his enormous rabble, that first marched across the world to
die for the deliverance of Jerusalem.
Historians say that in that huge
host of thousands there were only nine knights. To any one who knows even a little
of medieval war the fact seems astounding. It is indeed a long exploded fallacy
to regard medievalism as identical with feudalism. There were countless
democratic institutions, such as the guilds; sometimes as many as twenty guilds
in one small town. But it is really true that the military organization of the
Middle Ages was almost entirely feudal; indeed we might rather say that
feudalism was the name of their military organization. That so vast a military
mass should have attempted to move at all, with only nine of the natural
military leaders, seems to me a prodigy of popular initiative. It is as if a
parliament were elected at the next general election, in which only two men
could afford to read a daily newspaper.
This mob marched against the military
discipline of the Moslems and was massacred; or, might I so mystically express
it, martyred. Many of the great kings and knights who followed in their tracks
did not so clearly deserve any haloes for the simplicity and purity of their
motives. The canonization of such a crowd might be impossible, and would
certainly be resisted in modern opinion; chiefly because they indulged their
democratic violence on the way by killing various usurers; a course which
naturally fills modern society with an anger verging on alarm. A perversity
leads me to weep rather more over the many slaughtered peasants than over the
few slaughtered usurers; but in any case the peasants certainly were not
slaughtered in vain. The common conscience of all classes, in a time when all
had a common creed, was aroused, and a new army followed of a very different
type of skill and training; led by most of the ablest captains and by some of
the most chivalrous gentlemen of the age. For curiously enough, the host
contained more than one cultured gentleman who was as simple a Christian as any
peasant, and as recklessly ready to be butchered or tortured for the mere name
of Christ.
It is a tag of the materialists
that the truth about history rubs away the romance of history. It is dear to
the modern mind because it is depressing; but it does not happen to be true.
Nothing emerges more clearly from a study that is truly realistic, than the
curious fact that romantic people were really romantic. It is rather the
historical novels that will lead a modern man vaguely to expect to find the
leader of the new knights, Godfrey de Bouillon, to have been merely a brutal
baron. The historical facts are all in favour of his having been much more like
a knight of the Round Table. In fact he was a far better man
than most of the knights of the
Round Table, in whose characters the fabulist, knowing that he was writing a
fable, was tactful enough to introduce a larger admixture of vice. Truth is not
only stranger than fiction, but often saintlier than fiction. For truth is
real, while fiction is bound to be realistic. Curiously enough Godfrey seems to
have been heroic even in those admirable accidents which are generally and
perhaps rightly regarded as the trappings of fiction. Thus he was of heroic
stature, a handsome red-bearded man of great personal strength and daring; and
he was himself the first man over the wall of Jerusalem, like any boy hero in a
boy's adventure story. But he was also, the realist will be surprised to hear,
a perfectly honest man, and a perfectly genuine practicer of the theoretical
magnanimity of knighthood. Everything about him suggests it; from his first
conversion from the imperial to the papal (and popular) cause, to his great
refusal of the kinghood of the city he had taken; "I will not wear a crown
of gold where my Master wore a crown of thorns." He was a just ruler, and
the laws he made were full of the plainest public spirit. But even if we
dismiss all that was written of him by Christian chroniclers because they might
be his friends (which would be a pathetic and exaggerated compliment to the
harmonious unity of Crusaders and of Christians) he would still remain
sufficiently assailed crowned with the words of his enemies. For a Saracen
chronicler wrote of him, with a fine simplicity, that if all truth and honour
had otherwise withered off the earth, there would still remain enough of them
so long as Duke Godfrey was alive.
Allied with Godfrey were Tancred
the Italian, Raymond of Toulouse with the southern French and Robert of Normandy,
the adventurous son of the Conqueror, with the Normans and the English. But it
would be an error, I think, and one tending to make the whole subsequent story
a thing not so much misunderstood as unintelligible, to suppose that the whole
crusading movement had been suddenly and unnaturally stiffened with the highest
chivalric discipline. Unless I am much mistaken, a great mass of that army was
still very much of a mob. It is probable <a priori>, since the great
popular movement was still profoundly popular. It is supported by a thousand
things in the story of the campaign; the extraordinary emotionalism that made
throngs of men weep and wail together, the importance of the demagogue, Peter
the Hermit, in spite of his unmilitary character, and the wide differences
between the designs of the leaders and the actions of the rank and file. It was
a crowd of rude and simple men that cast themselves on the sacred dust at the
first sight of the little mountain town which they had tramped for two thousand
miles to see. Tancred saw it first from the slope by the village of Bethlehem,
which had opened its gates willingly to his hundred Italian knights; for
Bethlehem then as now was an island of Christendom in the sea of Islam.
Meanwhile Godfrey came up the road from Jaffa, and crossing the mountain ridge,
saw also with his living eyes his vision of the world's desire. But the poorest
men about him probably felt the same as he; all ranks knelt together in the
dust, and the whole story is one wave of numberless and nameless men. It was a
mob that had risen like a man for the faith. It was a mob that had truly been
tortured like a man for the faith. It was already transfigured by pain as well
as passion. Those that know war in those deserts through the summer months, even
with modern supplies and appliances and modern maps and calculations, know that
it could only be described as a hell full of heroes. What it must have been to
those little local serfs and peasants from the Northern villages, who had never
dreamed in nightmares of such landscapes or such a sun, who knew not how men
lived at all in such a furnace and could neither guess the alleviations nor get
them, is beyond the imagination of man. They arrived dying with thirst,
dropping with weariness, lamenting the loss of the dead that rotted along their
road; they arrived shrivelled to rags or already raving with fever and they did
what they had come to do.
Above all, it is clear that they
had the vices as well as the virtues of a mob. The shocking massacre in which
they indulged in the sudden relaxation of success is quite obviously a massacre
by a mob. It is all the more profoundly revolutionary because it must have been
for the most part a French mob. It was of the same order as the Massacre of
September, and it is but a part of the same truth that the First Crusade was as
revolutionary as the French Revolution. It was of the same order as the
Massacre of St. Bartholomew, which was also a piece of purely popular
fanaticism, directed against what was also regarded as an anti-national
aristocracy. It is practically self-evident that the Christian commanders were
opposed to it, and tried to stop it. Tancred promised their lives to the
Moslems in the mosque, but the mob clearly disregarded him. Raymond of Toulouse
himself saved those in the Tower of David, and managed to send them safely with
their property to Ascalon. But revolution with all its evil as well as its good
was loose and raging in the streets of the Holy City. And in nothing do we see
that spirit of revolution more clearly than in the sight of all those peasants
and serfs and vassals, in that one wild moment in revolt, not only against the
conquered lords of Islam, but even against the conquering lords of Christendom.
The whole strain of the siege
indeed had been one of high and even horrible excitement. Those who tell us
to-day about the psychology of the crowd will agree that men who have so
suffered and so succeeded are not normal; that their brains are in a dreadful
balance which may turn either way. They entered the city at last in a mood in
which they might all have become monks; and instead they all became murderers.
A brilliant general, who played a decisive part in our own recent Palestinian
campaign, told me with a sort of grim humour that he hardly wondered at the
story; for he himself had entered Jerusalem in a sort of fury of
disappointment; "We went through such a hell to get there, and now it's
spoilt for all of us." Such is the heavy irony that hangs over our human
nature, making it enter the Holy City as if it were the Heavenly City, and more
than any earthly city can be. But the struggle which led to the scaling of
Jerusalem in the First Crusade was something much wilder and more incalculable
than anything that can be conceived in modern war. We can hardly wonder that
the crusading crowd saw the town in front of them as a sort of tower full of
demons, and the hills around them as an enchanted and accursed land. For in one
very real sense it really was so; for all the elements and expedients were alike
unknown qualities. All their enemies' methods were secrets sprung upon them.
All their own methods were new things made out of nothing. They wondered alike
what would be done on the other side and what could be done on their own side;
every movement against them was a stab out of the darkness and every movement
they made was a leap in the dark. First, on the one side, we have Tancred
trying to take the whole fortified city by climbing up a single slender ladder,
as if a man tried to lasso the peak of a mountain. Then we have the flinging
from the turrets of a strange and frightful fiery rain, as if water itself had
caught fire. It was afterwards known as the Greek Fire and was probably
petroleum; but to those who had never seen (or felt) it before it may well have
seemed the flaming oil of witchcraft. Then Godfrey and the wiser of the
warriors set about to build wooden siege-towers and found they had next to no
wood to build them. There was scarcely anything in that rocky waste but the
dwarf trees of olive; a poetic fantasy woven about that war in after ages
described them as hindered even in their wood-cutting by the demons of that
weird place. And indeed the fancy had an essential truth, for the very nature
of the land fought against them; and each of those dwarf trees, hard and hollow
and twisted, may well have seemed like a grinning goblin. It is said that they
found timbers by accident in a cavern; they tore down the beams from ruined
houses; at last they got into touch with some craftsmen from Genoa who went to
work more successfully; skinning the cattle, who had died in heaps, and
covering the timbers. They built three high towers on rollers, and men and
beasts dragged them heavily against the high towers of the city. The catapaults
of the city answered them, the cataracts of devouring fire came down; the
wooden towers swayed and tottered, and two of them suddenly stuck motionless
and useless. And as the darkness fell a great flare must have told them that
the third and last was in flames.
All that night Godfrey was toiling
to retrieve the disaster. He took down the whole tower from where it stood and
raised it again on the high ground to the north of the city which is now marked
by the pine tree that grows outside Herod's gate. And all the time he toiled,
it was said, sinister sorcerers sat upon the battlements, working unknown
marvels for the undoing of the labour of man. If the great knight had a touch
of such symbolism on his own side, he might have seen in his own strife with
the solid timber something of the craft that had surrounded the birth of his
creed, and the sacred trade of the carpenter. And indeed the very pattern of
all carpentry is cruciform, and there is something more than an accident in the
allegory. The transverse position of the timber does indeed involve many of
those mathematical that are analogous to moral truths and almost every
structural shape has the shadow of the mystic rood, as the three dimensions
have a shadow of the Trinity. Here is the true mystery of equality; since the longer
beam might lengthen itself to infinity, and never be nearer to the symbolic
shape without the help of the shorter. Here is that war and wedding between two
contrary forces, resisting and supporting each other; the meeting-place of
contraries which we, by a sort of pietistic pun, still call the crux of the
question. Here is our angular and defiant answer to the self-devouring circle
of Asia. It may be improbable, though it is far from impossible (for the age
was philosophical enough) that a man like Godfrey thus extended the mystical to
the metaphysical; but the writer of a real romance about him would be well
within his rights in making him see the symbolism of his own tower, a tower
rising above him through the clouds of night as if taking hold on the heaven or
showing its network of beams black against the daybreak; scaling the skies and
open to all the winds, a ladder and a labyrinth, repeating till it was lost in
the twilight the pattern of the sign of the cross.
When dawn was come all those
starving peasants may well have stood before the high impregnable walls in the
broad daylight of despair. Even their nightmares during the night, of unearthly
necromancers looking down at them from the battlements and with signs and
spells paralysing all their potential toils, may well have been a sort of
pessimistic consolation, anticipating and accounting for failure. The Holy City
had become for them a fortress full of fiends, when Godfrey de Bouillon again
set himself sword in hand upon the wooden tower and gave the order once more to
drag it tottering towards the towers on either side of the pastern gate. So
they crawled again across the fosse full of the slain, dragging their huge
house of timber behind them, and all the blast and din of war broke again about
their heads. A hail of bolts hammered such shields as covered them for a
canopy, stones and rocks fell on them and crushed them like flies in the mire,
and from the engines of the Greek Fire all the torrents of their torment came
down on them like red rivers of hell. For indeed the souls of those peasants
must have been sickened with something of the topsy-turvydom felt by too many
peasants of our own time under the frightful flying batteries of scientific
war; a blasphemy of inverted battle in which hell itself has occupied heaven.
Something of the vapours vomited by such cruel chemistry may have mingled with
the dust of battle, and darkened such light as showed where shattering rocks
were rending a roof of shields, to men bowed and blinded as they are by such
labour of dragging and such a hailstorm of death. They may have heard through
all the racket of nameless noises the high minaret cries of Moslem triumph
rising shriller like a wind in shrill pipes, and known little else of what was
happening above or beyond them. It was most likely that they laboured and
strove in that lower darkness, not knowing that high over their heads, and up
above the cloud of battle, the tower of timber and the tower of stone had
touched and met in mid-heaven; and great Godfrey, alone and alive had leapt
upon the wall of Jerusalem.
FROM THE
AMERICAN CHESTERTON SOCIETY
The eclipse of Christian theology
during the rationalist advance of the eighteenth century is one of the most
interesting of historical episodes. In order to see it clearly, we must first
realize that it was an episode and that it is now historical. It may be stating
it too strongly to say that it is now dead; it is perhaps enough to say that it
is now distant and yet distinct; that it is divided from our own time as much
as any period of the past. Neither reason nor faith will ever die; for men
would die if deprived of either. The wildest mystic uses his reason at some
stage; if it be only by reasoning against reason. The most incisive sceptic has
dogmas of his own; though when he is a very incisive sceptic, he has often
forgotten what they are. Faith and reason are in this sense co-eternal; but as
the words are popularly used, as loose labels for particular periods, the one
is now almost as remote as the other. What was called the Age of Reason has
vanished as completely as what are called the Ages of Faith.
It is essential to see this fact
first, because if we do not see its limitations we do not see its outline. It
has nothing to do with which period we prefer, or even which we think right. A
rationalist is quite entitled to look back to the eighteenth century as a
golden age of good sense, as the medievalist looks back to the thirteenth
century as a golden age of good faith. But he must look back, and look back
across an abyss. We may like or dislike the atmosphere of the modern world,
with its intense interest in anything that is called psychological, and in much
that is called psychical. We may think that speculation has gone more deep or
that it has grown more morbid. We may like or dislike the religions of
faith-healing or spirit-rapping; or a hundred other manifestations of the same
mood, in fields quite remote from the supernatural or even the spiritual. We
may like or dislike, for instance, that vast modern belief in "the power
of suggestion" expressed in advertising or publicity and educational
methods of all sorts. We may like or dislike the appeal to the non-rational
element; the perpetual talk about the Sub-conscious Mind or the Race Memory or
the Herd Instinct. We may deplore or we may admire all these developments. But
we must fix it in our minds as a historical fact that to any one of the great
'Infidels' or
Freethinkers of the eighteenth
century, this whole modern world of ours would seem a mere madhouse. He might
almost be driven, in pursuit of the reasonable, to take refuge in a monastery.
We are dealing therefore with an
episode and even an interlude; though the man who likes it has as much right to
say that it was an hour of happy daylight between the storms as a Christian has
to say it of primitive Christianity or medieval Christendom. From about the
time that Dryden died a Catholic to about the time that Newman began to write a
little less like a Protestant, there was a period during which the spirit of
philosophy filling men's minds was not positively Protestant any more than it
was positively Catholic. It was rationalist even in Protestants and Catholics;
in a Catholic like Pope or a Protestant like Paley. But it can be seen at the
clearest when the last clinging traditions or presences were dropped; when the
most stolid specimen of the Protestant middle classes is found busily
scribbling sneers in the footnotes and even the index of a great history of the
Fall of Rome; when a brilliant
pupil going forth out of the Jesuit seminary turns back over his shoulder the
terrible face of Voltaire.
In order to exhibit the essential
quality, let us first compare the period with that which preceded it. Touching
its historical causes, no man with a sense of human complexity will offer
anything but contributory causes. But I think there are contributory causes
that have been strangely overlooked. On the face of it, it refers back to the
Renaissance, which refers back to the old pagan world. On the face of it, it
also refers back to the Reformation, though chiefly in its negative aspect or
branch in the old Christian world. But both these things are connected with a
third, that has not, I think, been adequately realized. And that is a feeling
which can only be called futility. It arose out of the disproportion between
the dangers and agonies of the religious wars and the really unreasonable
compromise in which they ended; <cuius regio ejus religio>: which may be
translated, "Let every State establish its State Church", but which
did mean in the Renaissance epoch, "Let the Prince do what he likes."
The seventeenth century ended with
a note of interrogation. Pope, the poet of reason, whom some thought too
reasonable to be poetical, was once compared to a question mark, because he was
a crooked little thing that asked questions. The seventeenth century was not
little, but it was in some ways crooked, in the sense of crabbed. But anyhow it
began with the ferocious controversies of the Puritans and it ended with a
question. It was an open question, but it was also an open wound. It was not
only that the end of the seventeenth century was of all epochs the most
inconclusive. It was also, it must be remembered, inconclusive upon a point
which people had always hoped to see concluded. To use the literal sense of the
word 'conclude', they expected the wound to close. We naturally tend to miss
this point today. We have had nearly four hundred years of divided Christianity
and have grown used to it; and it is the Reunion of Christendom that we think
of as the extraordinary event. But they still thought the Disunion of
Christendom an extraordinary event. Neither side had ever really expected it to
remain in a state of Disunion. All their traditions for a thousand years were
of some sort of union coming out of controversy, ever since a united religion
had spread all over a united Roman Empire. From a Protestant standpoint, the
natural thing was for Protestantism to conquer Europe as Christianity had
conquered Europe. In that case the success of the counter-Reformation would be
only the last leap of a dying flame like the last stand of Julian the Apostate.
From a Catholic standpoint the natural thing was for Catholicism to reconquer
Europe, as it had more than once reconquered Europe; in that case the
Protestant would be like the Albigensians: a passing element ultimately
reabsorbed. But neither of these natural things happened. Prussia and the other
Protestant principalities fought against Austria as the heir of the Holy Roman
Empire in the Thirty Years War. They fought each other to a standstill. It was
utterly and obviously hopeless to make Austria Protestant or Prussia Roman
Catholic. And from the moment when that fact was realized the nature of the
whole world was changed. The rock had been cloven and would not close up again,
and in the crack or chasm a new sort of strange and prickly weed began to grow.
The open wound festered.
We have all heard it said that the
Renaissance was produced or precipitated by the Fall of Constantinople. It is
true in a sense perhaps more subtle than is meant. It was not merely that it
let loose the scholars from the Byzantine Court. It was also that it let loose
the sceptical thoughts of the scholars, and of a good many other people when
they saw this last turn of the tide in the interminable strife between Christ
and Mahomet. The war between Islam and Christendom had been inconclusive. The
war between the
Reformation and the counter-Reformation
was inconclusive. And I for one fancy that the former fact had a good deal to
do with the full sceptical expansion of the eighteenth century. When men saw
the Crescent and the Cross tossed up alternately as a juggler tosses balls, it
was difficult for many not to think that one might be about as good or bad as
the other when they saw the Protestant and the Catholic go up and down on the
seesaw of the Thirty Years War. Many were disposed to suspect that it was six
to one and half-a-dozen to the other. This addition involved an immense
subtraction; and two religions came to much less than one. Many began to think
that, as they could not both be true, they might both be false. When that
thought had crossed the mind the reign of the rationalist had begun.
The thought, as an individual
thought, had of course begun long before. It is, in fact, as old as the world;
and it is quite obviously as old as the Renaissance. In that sense the father
of the modern world is Montaigne; that detached and distinguished intelligence
which, as Stevenson said, saw that men would soon find as much to quarrel with
in the Bible as they had in the Church. Erasmus and Rabelais and even Cervantes
had their part; but in these giants there was still a great gusto of subconscious
conviction, still Christian; they mocked at the lives of men, but not at the
life of man. But Montaigne was something more revolutionary than a
revolutionist; he was a relativist. He would have told Cervantes that his
knight was not far wrong in thinking puppets were men, since men are really
puppets. He would have said that windmills were as much giants as anything
else; and that giants would be dwarfs if set beside taller giants. This doubt,
some would say this poison in its original purity, did begin to work under the
surface of society from the time of Montaigne onwards and worked more and more
towards the surface as the war of religions grew more and more inconclusive.
There went with it a spirit that may truly be called humane. But we must always
remember that even its refreshing humanity had a negative as well as a positive
side. When people are no longer in the mood to be heroic, after all, it is only
human to be humane. Some men were really tolerant, but others were merely
tired. When people are tired of the subject, they generally agree to differ.
But against this clear mood, as
against a quiet evening sky, there stood up the stark and dreadful outlines of
the old dogmatic and militant institutions. Institutions are machines; they go
on working under any sky and against any mood. And the clue to the next phase
is the revolt against their revolting incongruity. The engines of war, the
engines of torture, that had belonged to the violent crises of the old creeds,
remained rigid and repellent; all the more mysterious for being old and
sometimes even all the more hideous for being idle. Men in that mellow mood of
doubt had no way of understanding the fanaticism and the martyrdom of their
fathers. They knew nothing of medieval history or of what a united Christendon
had once meant to men. They were like children horrified at the sight of a
battlefield.
Take the determining example of
the Spanish Inquisition. The Spanish Inquisition was Spy Fever. It produced the
sort of horrors such fevers produce; to some extent even in modern wars. The
Spaniards had reconquered Spain from Islam with a glowing endurance and
defiance as great as any virtue ever shown by man; but they had the darker side
of such warfare; they were always struggling to deracinate a Jewish plot which
they believed to be always selling them to the enemy. Of this dark tale of
perverted patriotism the humanitarians knew nothing. All they knew was that the
Inquisition was still going on. And suddenly the great Voltaire rose up and
shattered it with a hammer of savage laughter. It may seem strange to compare
Voltaire to a child. But it is true that though he was right in hating and
destroying it, he never knew what it was that he had destroyed.
There was born in that hour a
certain spirit, which the Christian spirit should be large enough to cover and
understand. In relation to many things it was healthy, though in relation to
some things it was shallow. We may be allowed to associate it with the jolly
uncle who does not believe in ghosts. It had an honourable expression in the
squires and parsons who put down the persecution of witches. The uncle is not
always just to Spiritualists; but he is rather a comfort on a dark night. The
squire did not know all there is to know about diabolism, but he did stop many
diabolical fears of diabolism. And if we are to understand history, that is
humanity, we must sympathize with this breezy interlude in which it seemed
natural for humanity to be humane.
The mention of the squire is not
irrelevant; there was in that humanity something of unconscious aristocracy.
One of the respects in which the rational epoch was immeasurably superior to
our own was in the radiant patience with which it would follow a train of
thought. But it is only fair to say that in this logic there was something of
leisure, and indeed we must not forget how much of the first rational reform of
the age came from above. It was a time of despots who were also deists or even,
like Frederick the Great, practically atheists. But Frederick was sometimes humanitarian
if he was never human. Joseph of Austria, offending his people by renouncing
religious persecution, was very like a squire offending the village by
repressing witch-burning. But in considering the virtues of the age, we must
not forget that it had a very fine ideal of honourable poverty; the Stoic idea
of Jefferson and Robespierre. It also believed in hard work, and worked very
hard in the details of reform. A man like Bentham toiled with ceaseless
tenacity in attacking abuse after abuse. But people hardly realized that his
utilitarianism was creating the new troubles of Capitalism, any more than that
Frederick of Prussia was making the problem of modern militarism.
Perhaps the perfect moment of
every mortal thing is short, even of mortal things dealing with immortal, as
was the best moment of the Early Church or the Middle Ages. Anyhow the best
moment of rationalism was very short. Things always overlap, and Bentham and
Jefferson inherited from something that had already passed its prime. Not for
long did man remain in that state of really sane and sunny negation. For
instance, having covered the period with the great name of Voltaire, I may well
be expected to add the name of Rousseau. But even in passing from one name to
the other, we feel a fine shade of change which is not mere progression. The
rationalist movement is tinged with the romantic movement, which is to lead men
back as well as forward. They are asked to believe in the General Will, that is
the soul of the people; a mystery. By the time the French Revolution is passed,
it is elemental that things are loose that have not been rationalized. Danton
has said, "It is treason to the people to take away the dream".
Napoleon has been crowned, like Charlemagne, by a Pope. And when the dregs of
Diderot's bitterness were reached; when they dragged the Goddess of Reason in
triumph through Notre Dame, the smouldering Gothic images could look down on
that orgy more serenely then than when Voltaire began to write; awaiting their
hour. The age was ended when these men thought it was beginning. Their own
mystical maenad frenzy was enough to prove it: the goddess of Reason was dead.
One word may be added, to link up
the age with many other ages. It will be noted that it is not true, as many
suppose, that the rational attack on Christianity came from the modern
discoveries in material science. It had already come, in a sense it had already
come and gone, before these discoveries really began. They were pursued
persistently partly through a tradition that already existed. But men were not
rationalistic because they were scientists. Rather they became scientists
because they were rationalists. Here as everywhere the soul of man went first,
even when it denied itself.
FROM THE
AMERICAN CHESTERTON SOCIETY
It is quite natural that the
prosperous people in our time should know no history. If they did know it, they
would know the highly unedifying history of how they became prosperous. It is
quite natural, I say, that they should not know history: but why do they think
they do? Here is a sentence taken at random from a book written by one of the
most cultivated of our younger critics, very well written and most reliable on
its own subject, which is a modern one. The writer says: "There was little
social or political advance in the Middle Ages" until the Reformation and
the Renaissance. Now I might just as well say that there was little advance in
science and invention in the nineteenth century until the coming of William
Morris: and then excuse myself by saying that I am not personally interested in
spinning-jennies and jelly-fish - which is indeed the case. For that is all
that the writer really means: he means he is not personally interested in
heralds or mitred abbots. That is all right; but why, when writing about
something that did not exist in the Middle Ages, should he dogmatise about a
story that he has evidently never heard? Yet it might be made a very
interesting story.
A little while before the Norman
Conquest, countries such as our own were a dust of yet feeble feudalism,
continually scattered in eddies by barbarians, barbarians who had never ridden
a horse. There was hardly a brick or stone house in England. There were
scarcely any roads except beaten paths: there was practically no law except
local customs. Those were the Dark Ages out of which the Middle Ages came. Take
the Middle Ages two hundred years after the Norman Conquest and nearly as long
before the beginnings of the
Reformation. The great cities have
arisen; the burghers are privileged and important; Labour has been organised
into free and responsible Trade Unions; the Parliaments are powerful and
disputing with the princes; slavery has almost disappeared; the great
Universities are open and teaching with the scheme of education that Huxley so
much admired; Republics as proud and civic as the Republics of the pagans stand
like marble statues along the Mediterranean; and all over the North men have
built such churches as men may never build again. And this, the essential part
of which was done in one century rather than two, is what the critic calls
"little social or political advance." There is scarcely an important
modern institution under which he lives, from the college that trained him to
the Parliament that rules him, that did not make its main advance in that time.
If anyone thinks I write this out
of pedantry, I hope to show him in a moment that I have a humbler and more
practical object. I want to consider the nature of ignorance, and I would begin
by saying that in every scholarly and academic sense I am very ignorant myself.
As we say of a man like Lord Brougham that his general knowledge was great, I
should say that my general ignorance was very great. But that is Just the
point. It is a general knowledge and a general ignorance. I know little of
history; but I know a little of most history. I don’t know much about Martin
Luther and his Reformation, let us say; but I do know that it made a great deal
of difference. Well, not knowing that the rapid progress of the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries made a great deal of difference is quite as extraordinary
as never having heard of Martin Luther. I am not very well-informed about
Buddhists; but I know they are interested in philosophy. Believe me, not
knowing that Buddhists are interested in philosophy is not a bit more
astounding than not knowing that the mediaevals were interested in political progress
or experiment. I do not know much about Frederick the Great. I was frightened
in my boyhood by the row of Carlyle’s volumes on the subject: there seemed to
be such an awful lot to know. But, in spite of my fears, I should have been
able to guess with some sort of probability the sort of substance such volumes
would contain. I should have guessed (and I believe not incorrectly) that the
volumes would have contained the word "Prussia" in one or more
places; that war would be touched on from time to time; that some mention might
be made of treaties and boundaries; that the word "Silesia" might be
found by diligent search, as well as the names of Maria Teresa and Voltaire;
that somewhere in all those volumes their great author would mention whether
Frederick the Great had a father, whether he was ever married, whether he had
any great friends, whether he had a hobby or a literary taste of any kind,
whether he died on the battle-field or on his bed, and so on and so on. If I
had summoned the audacity to open one of these volumes, I should probably have
found something on these general lines at least.
Now change the image; and conceive
the ordinary young, well-educated Journalist or man of letters from a public
school or a college when he stands in front of a still longer row of still
larger books from the libraries of the Middle Ages - let us say, all the
volumes of St. Thomas Aquinas. I say that in nine cases out of ten that
well-educated young man does not know what he would find in those leathery
volumes. He thinks he would find discussions about the powers of angels in the
matter of balancing themselves on needles; and so he would. But I say he does
<not> know that he would find a schoolman discussing nearly all the
things that Herbert Spencer discussed: politics, sociology, forms of
government, monarchy, liberty, anarchy, property, communism, and all the varied
notions that are in our time fighting for the time of "Socialism."
Or, again, I do not know much about Mohammed or Mohammedanism. I do not take
the Koran to bed with me every night. But, if I did on some one particular
night, there is one sense at least in which I know what I should not find
there. I apprehend that I should not find the work abounding in strong
encouragements to the worship of idols; that the praises of polytheism would
not be loudly sung; that the character of Mohammed would not be subjected to
anything resembling hatred and derision; and that the great modern doctrine of
the unimportance of religion would not be needlessly emphasised. But again
change the image; and fancy the modern man (the unhappy modern man) who took a
volume of mediaeval theology to bed. He <would> expect to find a
pessimism that is not there, a fatalism that is not there, a love of the
barbaric that is not there, a contempt for reason that is not there. Let him
try the experiment. It will do one of two good things: send him to sleep - or
wake him up.
FROM THE
AMERICAN CHESTERTON SOCIETY
In my innocent and ardent youth I
had a fixed fancy. I held that children in a school ought to be taught history,
and ought to be taught nothing else. The story of human society is the only
fundamental framework outside of religion in which everything can fall into its
place. A boy cannot see the importance of Latin simply by learning Latin. But
he might see it by learning the history of the Latins. Nobody can possibly see
any sense in learning geography or in learning arithmetic - both studies are
obviously nonsense. But on the eager eve of Austerlitz, where Napoleon was
fighting a superior force in a foreign country, one might see the need for
Napoleon knowing a little geography and a little arithmetic. I have thought
that if people would only learn history, they would learn to learn everything
else. Algebra might seem ugly, yet the very name of it is connected with
something so romantic as the Crusades, for the word is from the Saracens. Greek
might be ugly until one knew the Greeks, but surely not afterwards. History is
simply humanity. And history will humanise all studies, even anthropology.
Since that age of innocence I
have, however, realised that there is a difficulty in this teaching of history.
And the difficulty is that there is no history to teach. This is not a scrap of
cynicism - it is a genuine and necessary product of the many points of view and
the strong mental separations of our society, for in our age every man has a
cosmos of his own, and is therefore horribly alone. There is no history; there
are only historians. To tell the tale plainly is now much more difficult than
to tell it treacherously. It is unnatural to leave the facts alone; it is
instinctive to pervert them. The very words involved in the chronicles -
"Pagan", "Puritan", "Catholic",
"Republican", "Imperialist" - are words which make us leap
out of our armchairs.
No good modern historians are
impartial. All modern historians are divided into two classes - those who tell
half the truth, like Macaulay and Froude, and those who tell none of the truth,
like Hallam and the Impartials. The angry historians see one side of the
question. The calm historians see nothing at all, not even the question itself.
But there is another possible
attitude towards the records of the past, and I have never been able to
understand why it has not been more often adopted. To put it in its curtest
form, my proposal is this: That we should not read historians, but history. Let
us read the actual text of the times. Let us, for a year, or a month, or a
fortnight, refuse to read anything about Oliver Cromwell except what was
written while he was alive. There is plenty of material; from my own memory
(which is all I have to rely on in the place where I write) I could mention
offhand many long and famous efforts of English literature that cover the
period. Clarendon's History, Evelyn's Diary, the Life of Colonel Hutchinson.
Above all let us read all Cromwell's own letters and speeches, as Carlyle
published them. But before we read them let us carefully paste pieces of
stamp-paper over every sentence written by Carlyle. Let us blot out in every
memoir every critical note and every modern paragraph. For a time let us cease
altogether to read the living men on their dead topics. Let us read only the
dead men on their living topics.
I have just come by accident on a
striking case of what I mean. Most modern notions of the earlier and better
Middle Ages are drawn either from historians or from novels. The novels are
very much the more reliable of the two. The novelist has at least to try to
describe human beings; which the historian often does not attempt. But
generally speaking, it is to novels first and then to partisan histories that
we owe our impressions of this epoch.
The average modern Englishman's
idea of the Middle Ages is a stratification of several modern views of them
which might be summarised thus:
1.The Old Romantic View, with its
wandering knights and captive princesses. According to this, the Dark Ages were
not so much dark as lit exclusively by moonlight. This view was fictitious, but
not false; for since love and venture exist in all ages, they did exist in the
Middle Ages.
2. The Cheap Manchester View,
which Dickens floundered into in his happy ignorance, which enabled the smug
merchant to say with a snigger that no doubt it was very romantic for a Jew to
have his teeth pulled out; and even to suggest that the feudal heroes took care
to lock themselves up in steel and iron before they ventured into battle.
To this, one obvious answer was to
ask the merchant whether the knight was ever as ingloriously safe as his
armourer, and whether even his armourer was not a braver man than the merchant
who in modern Birmingham lives by making the tools of death.
3. The Rossetti View that the age
was one of tender transparencies and sacred perfumes; a strong dose of
Chaucer's Miller can be recommended as a desperate remedy for this.
4. The Condescending View; as when
Macaulay said of the Pilgrims with the utmost solemnity that in an age when men
were too ignorant to travel from curiosity, "or the desire of gain",
it was just as well that they should travel from superstition. I have always
delighted in this idea that the ecstatic traveller and the heroic traveller
were mere foreshadowings and prophecies of the commercial traveller. The Palmer
kissed the Land of Christ, and the Crusader fell with forty wounds at Ascalon,
that they might make smooth in the desert a highway for the bagman.
Now Dickens and Rossetti and
Macaulay were very great men, and though none of them knew very much about the
Middle Ages, their views on that time are bound to be interesting. But there is
another humble class of men who might be allowed to tell us something about the
Middle Ages. I mean the men who lived in the Middle Ages. There are in
existence medieval memoirs - which are nearly as amusing as Pepys, and much
more truthful. In England they are almost entirely unknown. But I am very glad
to find that the Chronicles of Joinville and the Chronicle of Villehardouin
have been translated into excellent English. Let anyone open Joinville's
rambling story, and he will find the Middle Ages of Macaulay and Rossetti and
Dickens and Miss Jane Porter fall from him like a cumbrous cloak. He will find
himself among men as human and sensible as himself, a little more brave and
much more convinced of their first principles. Joinville reveals himself as
innocently as Pepys, and reveals himself as a very much finer fellow. The
reader will find it impossible not to respect the man; his lumbering
punctiliousness about truth, when he explains what part of a scene he saw
himself and what he heard reported; his prompt and instinctive veracity, as
when St. Louis asked him, "Is it better to be a leper or commit a mortal
sin?" and he answered, "I would rather commit fifty mortal
sins"; his perpetual and generous praise of others in battle; his rooted
affections and simple pride in the affection of others for him; his slight
touchiness about his dignity as a gentleman, which St. Louis rebuked in him,
but which is, even to a shade, the exact touchiness of Colonel Newcome. Above
all we must thank him for his picture of the Great King in whom the lion lay
down with the lamb. The shafts of St. Louis' judgment fly across the ages and
hit the joints in every harness.
I had intended to tell some tales
out of these books but I must at least defer them. They would all be to the
same tune,, the tune to which Chaucer's pilgrims walked when the Miller with
his bagpipes played them out of town. If the eighteenth century was the Age of
Reason, the thirteenth was the Age of Commonsense. When St. Louis said that
extravagant dress was indeed sinful, but that men should dress well "that
their wives might the more easily love them", we can feel the age that is
talking about facts, and not about fads. There was plenty of romance, indeed;
we not only see St. Louis giving humorous judgments under a garden tree, we see
also St. Louis leaping from his ship into the sea with the shield at his neck
and the lance in his hand. But it is not a romance of darkness nor a romance of
moonlight, but a romance of the sun at noonday.
FROM THE
AMERICAN CHESTERTON SOCIETY
Opening my newspaper the other
day, I saw a short but emphatic leaderette entitled 'A Relic of Medievalism'.
It expressed a profound indignation upon the fact that somewhere or other, in
some fairly remote corner of this country, there is a turnpike-gate, with a
toll. It insisted that this antiquated tyranny is insupportable, because it is
supremely important that our road traffic should go very fast; presumably a
little faster than it does. So it described the momentary delay in this place
as a relic of medievalism. I fear the future will look at that sentence,
somewhat sadly and a little contemptuously, as a very typical relic of
modernism. I mean it will be a melancholy relic of the only period in all human
history when people were proud of being modern. For though to-day is always
to-day and the moment is always modern, we are the only men in all history who
fell back upon bragging about the mere fact that to-day is not yesterday. I
fear that some in the future will explain it by saying that we had precious
little else to brag about. For, whatever the medieval faults, they went with
one merit. Medieval people never worried about being medieval; and modern
people do worry horribly about being modern.
To begin with, note the queer,
automatic assumption that it must always mean throwing mud at a thing to call
it a relic of medievalism. The modern world contains a good many relics of
medievalism, and most of us would be surprised if the argument were logically
enforced even against the things that are commonly called medieval. We should
express some regret if somebody blew up Westminster Abby, because it is a relic
of medievalism. Doubts would trouble us if the Government burned all existing
copies of Dante's Divine Comedy
and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales,
because they are quite certainly relics of medievalism. We could not throw
ourselves into unreserved and enthusiastic rejoicing even if the Tower of
Giotto were destroyed as a relic of medievalism. And only just lately, in
Oxford and Paris (themselves, alas! relics of medievalism), there has been a
perverse and pedantic revival of the Thomist Philosophy and the logical method
of the medieval Schoolmen. Similarly, curious and restless minds, among the
very youngest artists and art critics, have unaccountably gone back even
farther into the barbaric period than the limit of the Tower of Giotto, and are
even now telling us to look back to the austerity of Cimabue and Byzantine
diagrams of the Dark Ages. These relics must be more medieval even than
medievalism.
But, in fact, this queer phrase
would not cover only what is commonly called medievalism. If a relic of
medievalism only means something that has come down to us from medieval times,
such writers would probably be surprised at the size and solidity of the
relics. If I told these honest pressmen that the Press is a relic of
medievalism, they would probably prove their love of a cliché by accusing me of
a paradox. But it is at least certain that the Printing Press is a relic of
medievalism. It was discovered and established by entirely medieval men,
steeped in medieval ideas, stuffed with the religion and social spirit of the
Middle Ages. There are no more typically medieval words than those noble words
of the eulogy that was pronounced by the great English printer on the great
English poet; the words of Caxton upon Chaucer. If I were to say that
Parliament is a relic of medievalism, I should be on even stronger ground; for,
while the Press did at least come at the end of the Middle Ages, the
Parliaments came much more nearly at the beginning of the Middle Ages. They
began, I think, in Spain and the provinces of the Pyrenees; but our own
traditional date, connecting them with the revolt of Simon de Montfort, if not
strictly accurate, does roughly represent the time. I need not say that half
the great educational foundations, not only Oxford and Cambridge, but Glasgow
and Paris, are relics of medievalism. It would seem rather hard on the poor
journalistic reformer if he is not allowed to pull down a little turnpike-gate
till he has proved his right to pull down all these relics of medievalism.
Next we have, of course, the very
considerable historic doubt about whether the turnpike-gate is a relic of
medievalism. I do not know what was the date of this particular turnpike; but
turnpikes and tolls of that description were perhaps most widely present, most
practically enforced, or, at least, most generally noted, in the eighteenth
century. When Pitt and Dundas, both of them roaring drunk, jumped over a
turnpike-gate and were fired at with a blunderbuss, I hope nobody will suggest
that those two great politicians were relics of medievalism. Nobody surely
could be more modern than Pitt and Dundas, for one of them was a great
financial statesman, depending entirely on the bankers, and the other was a
swindler. It is possible, of course, that some such local toll was really
medieval, but I rather doubt whether the journalist even inquired whether it
was medieval. He probably regards everything that happened before the time of
Jazz and the Yellow Press as medieval. For him medieval only means old, and old
means bad; so that we come to the last question, which ought to have been the
first question, of whether a turnpike really is necessarily bad. If we were
really relics of medievalism--that is, if we had really been taught to
think--we should have put that question first, and discussed whether a thing is
bad or good before discussing whether it is modern or medieval. There is no
space to discuss it here at length, but a very simple test in the matter may be
made. The aim and effect of tolls is simply this: that those who use the roads
shall pay for the roads. As it is, the poor people of a district, including
those who never stir from their villages, and hardly from their firesides, pay
to maintain roads which are ploughed up and torn to pieces by the cars and
lorries of rich men and big businesses, coming from London and the distant
cities. It is not self-evident that this is a more just arrangement than that
by which wayfarers pay to keep up the way, even if that arrangement were a
relic of medievalism. Lastly, we might well ask, is it indeed so certain that
our roads suffer from the slowness of petrol traffic; and that, if we can only
make every sort of motor go faster and faster, we shall all be saved at last?
That motors are more important than men is doubtless an admitted principle of a
truly modern philosophy; nevertheless, it might be well to keep some sort of
reasonable ratio between them, and decide exactly how many human beings should
be killed by each car in the course of each year. And I fear that a mere policy
of the acceleration of traffic may take us beyond the normal modern recognition
of murder into something resembling a recognition of massacre. And about this,
I for one still have a scruple; which is probably a relic of medievalism.
FROM THE AMERICAN
CHESTERTON SOCIETY
Academic year 2008/2009
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
© Rafael Gil-Nogués
ragilno@alumni.uv.es
Universitat de València Press
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