Complete Works of G K Chesterton, page 991
THE COURT OF CAMELOT
SOMEBODY recently asked me what I meant by a reference to the myth of Arthur; or, rather, a reference to the myth of the myth of Arthur. For in my opinion it is only a modern myth that he is only an ancient one. The chief difference between ancient and modern times seems to be that formerly legends grew very slowly and now they grow very fast. The old legends generally grew more slowly and always had a more historical basis; and it seems to me overwhelmingly probable that the story of King Arthur had a very solid historical basis. This must in a sense be mere guesswork, for I am not competent to judge of the details; but I think I am as competent as anyone else to judge of the theories, in the sense of seeing whether they hang together and are inherently probable and consistent. Now the theory that treats Arthur entirely as a fairy-tale seems to me more fantastic than any fairy-tale. It sometimes takes the form of saying that there was some prehistoric Celtic god or other who afterwards came to be described in more detail as a king in Camelot. I have never been very clear, by the way, about how this vague transition from divinity to humanity is supposed to present itself to human nature. A particular story of an incarnate god or a fallen angel one can imagine easily enough. But I am a little confused about how the mere act of the Pimlico populace continually calling upon heaven in their human difficulties, would of itself become a story that a Mr Heaven had lived in a particular street in Pimlico. It seems rather more likely that a simple people would exaggerate a hero into a god, rather than deliberately diminish a god into a hero. But this is something of a side issue and I do not insist on it. Anyhow, they say there must have been a Celtic god and doubtless there was; doubtless there were many Celtic gods — too many Celtic gods for a fastidious monotheistic taste. I might respectfully inquire what had become of all the others; and why they have not all turned into Christian kings with orders of chivalry? And then the critics complete the confusion by saying, as a sort of after-thought, that Arthur may also have been the name of a king, but implying that this can have nothing to do with the idea of King Arthur.
Now all this seems to me mythical in the worst sense; that it is concentrated on myths and wholly careless of history. If we are studying a historical problem, it would be well to begin with the historical part of it; and if we want to know more, it is best to grasp what we know already. Now we do know as a historical fact that the beginning of the Dark Ages was a time when the north west corner of the Roman Empire was ruined by barbarian invasions. We do know that those who successfully defended civilization everywhere became great legendary yet historic heroes and that in this respect the story of Arthur is just like the story of Alfred. There was certainly a legendary Alfred as well as a historical Alfred; and every common-sense comparison would lead one to think there was a historical Arthur as well as a legendary Arthur. But the question is one of proportion; and the saving of Christendom by the heroes of the Dark Ages does seem to me a sufficient cause for so huge a legend: the last trickle of tradition from some lost Welsh polytheism does not seem to me a sufficient cause. There are a dozen parallel cases of Christian heroes; there are not a dozen parallel cases of Welsh gods.
Then we come to the old suggestion that Arthur was not Arthur but another person of the same name. Here again people seem to forget that a legend requires a story as well as a name. A legend is about something; it is not started by a word but by some true or false event. The earliest historical references to Arthur are references to what he did. What he did was to defend Britain, as a Christian and civilized State, against the heathen invasion. The very first references to him deal with stories like that of the Battle of Mount Badon, in which Arthur drove the heathen before him and carried a holy image, some say on his shield and some on his shoulders. If I remember right, William of Malmesbury, soon after the Norman Conquest, refers to Arthur not as a wild Welsh demigod or even a doubtful Welsh saint, but as a solid historical character whose name needs to be cleared from the later accretions of Welsh fancy. Now there is no doubt at all that battles similar to the Battle of Mount Badon did in all sorts of countries stem or turn the tide of barbarism. There is no doubt whatever that when they did, they left an enormous impression on the imaginations of men, like a story of the Deluge or the Day of Judgement. If the result was a myth, it was like some myth about a man who had saved the sun and stars.
But there is another historical truth that is here forgotten. Many doubts about the Court of Camelot are founded on the notion that anything so far back in time must itself have been barbaric. The truth is, that, if it was far enough back, it would almost certainly have been civilized. It would have been in the last phase of the old Roman civilization. The fallacy is like that of a man who should say at daybreak that if it was darker four hours before, it must have been darker still fourteen hours before. He would forget that fourteen hours might bring him back into the previous day. And the fascination of this study of the Dark Ages is precisely that the darkness does hide a buried day; the last lost daylight of the great culture of antiquity.
Much of the dullness of modern history came from the idea of progress. For history must be progress reversed. If things have always automatically grown brighter and better, then to trace things backwards is to go further and further not only into darkness but into dullness. It is to go from gold to lead and from lead to mud; from beautiful novelties to dreary negations. But, as a fact, these beautiful novelties have never appeared except when this negative theory of the past was itself negatived. They have come when people were quarrying in an older civilization, because it was more civilized than their own civilization. That is obviously what happened at the Renaissance, but it happened in many cases where it is less obvious. I believe that the peculiar magic and mastery still belonging to the Arthurian story is largely due to the long period during which men looked back to Roman Britain as some thing more rich and subtle and artistic than the barbarous centuries that succeeded it. They were not wrong in believing that Arthur and Lancelot were more courtly and cultured than Hengist and Horsa. If Arthur and Lancelot existed at all, they almost certainly were. The same has been true, of course, ever since people began to study the medieval civilization with any intelligence. Some sentimentalists in the eighteenth century may have begun by thinking ruined abbeys (especially by moonlight) merely interesting as rugged and barbaric, ‘with shapeless sculpture decked’. But since we have begun to search out the scheme and science of medieval architecture, we have realized that it is the very reverse of barbaric, that it is especially organized and orderly. We have recognized that Gothic architecture was certainly not made by Goths; and that the shapeless sculpture was anything but shapeless, and had a very deliberate shape. But we do not remember that, as we have groped for an understanding of the medieval system, so the men of the Dark Ages may well have groped for an understanding of the old Roman system. And it is natural that the last monuments of it should have appeared enormous in the twilight; and one of these monuments was the memory of Arthur.
WOLFE AND THE MIDSHIPMAN
THERE are people in the world who really hate the heroic. Granted that there is an extravagance always tending to overrate human achievements, there is an extravagance of triviality also, tending to underrate achievement, to take pleasure in a change from the poetic to the prosaic. That is why realistic novels are sometimes as interesting as romantic novels. It is simply because realistic novels are quite as arbitrary and fantastic as romantic novels. In the romance the hero is always jumping and perpetually falls on his feet. In the realistic story the hero is always plodding and perpetually falls on his nose. But in ordinary life it is unusual either to alight on a distant crag or to fall flat over a too proximate door-scraper. The romancer collects every instance of a beautiful triumph; the realist selects every case of an ugly cropper; but the bias of the realist is as extreme and as unscrupulous as that of the wildest romantic fabulist. If you throw enough mud, some of it will stick, especially to that unfortunate creature Man, who was originally made of mud. A realistic novel is written by stringing together all the tag-ends of human life — all the trains we miss, all the omnibuses we run after without catching, all the appointments that miscarry, and all the invitations that are declined; all the wasted half-hours at Clapham Junction, and all the infant prodigies that grow up into stupid men; all the rainy days and all the broken engagements; all the Might-Have-Beens and all the Hardly Weres. Realism is the art of connecting everything that is in its nature disconnected. But to do this properly a man must be a great artist and rather a good liar.
There are, then, partisans of the prosaic. They are not in the least facing life as it is: life as it is, is almost too splendid — nay, too beautiful to be faced. No man shall see life and live. They are making a special and personal selection, just as the aesthete or the optimist is making a special and personal selection. They nose about for the meannesses of mankind. They hunt for mortal humiliation. We know that they have this prosaic pugnacity in matters of fiction. But it is an interesting fact that they have it also about history. In history itself there is a school which may be called anti-romantic; and it is perpetually occupied in trying to explain away the many romances that have really happened.
When I was a boy I was told that General Wolfe before the assault on Quebec had recited the great lines of Gray about glory and the grave, and declared he would rather have written them than take Quebec. The story is a fine one, full of the eighteenth-century feeling of stoicism and heathen happiness before death, of the kinship of arts and arms, and of the soldier’s splendid contempt for mere soldiering. When I was a man I was told to put away this childish legend and I put it away. It had been disproved. Wolfe had never said anything of the sort. And now, with a great jump, I read that the thing is substantially true after all.
I will take this story of General Wolfe and Gray’s Elegy as a working instance of the way that the historical sceptics do the trick. They will discredit a story for which there is excellent evidence on the ground of certain omissions or discrepancies in that evidence. But they never make the least reference to whether these are of the kind that occur in true stories or of the kind that occur in false. Some slips are obviously the slips of a liar; other confusions arise in honest narration, and in honest narration alone. Some blunders prove falsehood; other blunders prove truth. Let us take this Quebec story and go into it a little. The sceptics, it seems, begin by making the story manifestly ridiculous in order to deny it. ‘Is it likely’, they say, ‘that General Wolfe would have quoted Gray while he was leading his troops in deadly silence to surprise the French?’ Why, of course not; and nobody I ever heard of — certainly not I myself in my infancy — ever imagined that Wolfe talked about literature within earshot of the enemy; or selected the occasion of a steep and silent ascent to recite the whole of Gray’s Elegy. Picture the soldiers crawling and clambering through the darkness hardly daring to pant too loud; and imagine the General putting his mouth to the ear of a midshipman and shouting in a hoarse whisper:
The curfew tolls the knell of parting day.
The lowing herd winds slowly o’er the lea,
The ploughman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.
Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight —
— and all the rest of the verses. Of course Wolfe said it, if he ever said it at all, on some occasion previous to the actual assault — at some distance of time and place at which it was possible for people to speak out loud. Do the critics think that during the whole Canadian campaign the English soldiers conversed by talking on their fingers?
Well, the popular story is that some time before the assault, perhaps on the previous day, Wolfe recited a good part of the Elegy (chiefly the part about ‘the paths of glory’ and ‘the grave’) to a midshipman named Robinson. But, apparently, the only person who can be referred to was a Scotchman named Robison; which, of course, is a perfect example of the mistakes that only the truthful can make. Any ignorant Englishman, seeing the Scotch name Robison, might think it was merely a misprint for Robinson. As it does not matter a rap to the story whether his name was Robinson or Rehoboam, of course men would tell the tale in its familiar form. If there is in Westmorland a person whose name is spelt Smiph, he must not complain if he is turned into Smith in stories in which he is a secondary figure. If there is in North Cornwall a fine old family of Jomes, it will probably become Jones for the purposes of popular narrative. Those are things which are modified, not in order to complicate a fraud, but in order to simplify the truth. And it is the whole case against the pedantic opponents of the romantic element in history that they do not seem able to distinguish between this instinctive omission of the irrelevant, which is simply the art of telling stories, and the introduction of ingenious and over-elaborate detail which is the whole art of telling lies. If popular traditions change, it is rather by dropping things out than by putting things in. The story grows simpler through the ages, not more complex.
Then the massive sceptical mind moves on to the next great difficulty in the story. Not only is it the awful truth that the midshipman Robinson was really Robison, but he was not really a midshipman. ‘Robison was rated as a midshipman in accordance with the usual convention that gives every gentleman employed on a ship of war an official rank, as he was afterwards rated as a colonel when Professor of Mathematics in the C. Cadet Corps at St Petersburg.’ Now, these are very interesting facts, but the insistence on them seems again to betray a singular ignorance of the way in which an honest man tells a true story. A man says, ‘Wolfe said to a midshipman.’ He does not say, ‘Wolfe said to a person rated as a midshipman in accordance with the usual convention that gives to every gentleman employed on a ship of war an official rank, as he was afterwards rated as a colonel when Professor of Mathematics in the C. Cadet Corps at St Petersburg.’ I can quite imagine Mrs Nickleby telling the story in that way, but nobody else.
It does not affect the story in the slightest degree whether Mr Robison was a midshipman, or a music-master, or a boot-black, or an Ethiopian king, or a person rated as a midshipman in accordance with the usual convention which gives, &c. But it does affect that story that we should get to the story with some reasonable speed and hear what was said by Wolfe, the only person in whom we are interested at all. Therefore, of course, the popular narrator said ‘midshipman’, simply because one can say ‘midshipman’ quicker than one can say ‘Jack Robinson’ or ‘Jack Robison’.
ABOUT CHRISTIANITY
A CURIOUS chance led me lately to stumble over an incident which happened some time ago. It was concerned with one of the most interesting men of our time; and also one of the problems which are peculiar to our civilization and our time. I give the story as I heard it; it reflects on nobody, whether it is true or untrue.
It seems that Mr Eric Gill, the distinguished sculptor, was engaged to erect a sculptural memorial for the League of Nations, expressing that need for Peace which is now the most direct and vital, not to say deadly, necessity, for all Christians and for all sane men. Apparently he planned a design which involved a Christian symbol; and this was resisted, on the ground that non-Christians might not accept it. I suspect that it was not so much a question of the non-Christians outside Europe as of the Anti-Christians inside Europe. It is very unlike all the little I know of the intellectual leaders of those who follow Confucius or Buddha to object especially to a mystical emblem connected with Christ; and nobody supposes that any body except leaders and intellectuals has very much to say in such modern political problems. And as for Islam, it is enough to say that Christ is already given at least as high a place by all Moslems as He is by many Modernists.
What produces a practical embarrassment in this case is the sincere and savage hatred felt by many Europeans for the religion of their own European past. And this interests me, simply as a historical comparison, because it is really a historical curiosity. It is a difficulty quite peculiar to Christendom. There does not seem to have been anything like it in Paganism. In the last phase of Paganism there was every sort of doubt; there was every sort of denial; but there was not this particular sort of difficulty. The old gods were once perhaps really worshipped as gods; they were then enjoyed as legends; they were even treated lightly as jokes; but they were never hated as symbols. There may have been a time, though I rather doubt it, when people did actually believe that Apollo drove a golden chariot through the sky; but, anyhow, long after Apollo had become an abstraction, an allegory of music or poetry, a tradition that nobody but the most remote rustics took quite seriously, there was most certainly no sculptor from one end of the Roman Empire to the other who would have felt any difficulty, or found any difficulty, in carving Apollo as driving a chariot. The heathens grew cold towards their religion, or even contemptuous of their religion, but they never had any irritation against it that could make them refuse to use its images, or its imagery, in the realm of imagination.
