Complete Works of G K Chesterton, page 1051
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.
THE CAMP AND THE CATHEDRAL
IT MUST always be something of a problem how far the private amateur may venture merely to guess that the professional specialist is mistaken. On the other hand it is quite certain that the man who knows most about a thing is often quite wrong about it. He is often quite wrong in fact, and still more wrong in spirit. On the other hand, the fact that the learned man has lost humility is no reason why the unlearned man also should lose that humorous and healthy gift. On the whole, I think the test of the question is in the size and simplicity of the mistake. It depends on whether the scholar is blind to something because it is too small to be seen, or because it is too large to be seen. I cannot draw the learned man’s attention to something recondite, for he knows far more of such obscure details than I do. But I may sometimes draw his attention to something obvious, for that is the sort of thing that the learned man has a way of falling over in the street.
History is the only hobby in which I have dabbled even in this tentative fashion; and it is to history that I should specially apply the test. I mean the test of whether the truth has been missed because it is small and hidden, or actually because it is big and plain. Cobbett, for instance, was an amateur historian in somewhat the same sense, though less amateurish than myself. And when he was right, as I think he generally was, it was because he had an eye for large and obvious things. His eye went across a great landscape like a bird, and was master of the lie of the land. Thus his broadest deduction was simply from the big churches in England, and especially from the very fact of their bigness. It was a fact filling the sky; a thing whose shadow lay at evening on the whole landscape. But it never seems to have occurred to anybody but Cobbett at that time, to ask whether a sparse remnant of ignorant savages were likely to have raised a sort of sacred tower of Babel to the stars, in half the hamlets of England.
The obscurantism of the Reformation, and the rationalists who were its heirs, was in this way quite unique. Nobody before or since ever kept a people quite so much in darkness as those who put out all the candles in the sixteenth century. In this, for instance, the anti-Catholic reaction in the sixteenth century was quite different from the first Catholic movement in the fourth or fifth century. The Early Christians had a great moral horror of the last phase of the great civilization of Rome; but they never attempted to pretend that it was not a great civilization, or that it had not been made by Rome. Their moral horror was in most matters justified; in some matters considerably exaggerated. But in its wildest exaggerations of fanaticism, it never talks as if the heathen had not built bridges or produced poetry. They did not call the classical architecture the Vandal architecture, as if it had been built only by the barbarians who destroyed it. Yet that would have been a parallel to the very word `Gothic’ which we are still compelled by custom to use. The medieval world did not talk about Plato and Cicero as fools occupied with futilities; yet that is exactly how a more modern world talked of the philosophy of Aquinas and sometimes even of the purely philosophic parts of Dante. The Christians recognized an awful spiritual chasm dividing them from their great ancestors; but they recognized that their ancestors were great. At no moment in all those two thousand years was the legend lost that Virgil was something magnificent, whether as a magician in the Dark Ages or a model classic in the Middle Ages. In religion and morals there had indeed been a shuddering recoil; but it was a recoil from over-civilization, not a complacent contempt for savagery. They thought the Coliseum had been the arena of bestial abominations; of beasts, employed by men in a spirit too base to be called beastly; and so it had. But they did not think the Coliseum had been made by beasts; or look at its labyrinth of arches with contemptuous curiosity, as at the rude instinctive architecture of an ant-hill. In all that mixture of regret and pain and fascination, with which paganism has haunted the Christian centuries, there was never a touch of the innocent vulgarity with which even the Victorians sometimes talked of monks as if they were monkeys.
Now the lifting of this load of obscurantism was a thing largely done by the light of nature, by men like William Cobbett or William Morris. And the light of nature showed them very simple and solid things like the large churches in the English countrysides. These things are the unanswerable arguments of the amateur. These are the big guns that he can really bring up in order to outflank the specialist. Constitutional historians like Hume and Hallam and Robertson might have read many things that the adventurous amateur could not read, but it was impossible to pretend that he could not have access to his own huge empty parish church. It required no spectacles to see a church spire; and the stones of Winchester needed no interpreter to translate them from the Latin. These facts were soon found sufficient, to anyone who would use his senses; and it became more and more self-evident that men had been about some very big business in medieval times. The researches of later and more learned scholars confirmed the random commonsense of Cobbett or Morris. But ignorant men had originally made the right guess; and made it merely because they refused to explain away a mountain, or ignore the presence of a whale.
I have remarked that nobody ever tried to do with Roman remains what was once done with Gothic remains. I mean the attempt to treat them not merely as ruins but as rudiments. I mean the attempt to look at the stone arches as we look at stone hatchets, or regard carved pillars as we regard chipped flints. Nobody ever condescended to heathen architecture, as they condescended to Christian architecture. As a matter of fact it is far more impossible for us to build a Gothic abbey than a Roman aqueduct. The engineering work of the pagan empire does in many ways resemble the works of more modern times. It resembles them largely because the method is scientific. It resembles them still more because the labour is servile. You could build a Roman aqueduct and improve on a Roman aqueduct with scientific appliances. But you cannot build a Gothic cathedral with servile labour. People who want to work in that way must put up with the Pyramids and the Eiffel Tower. And this brings me to a final consideration, in this matter of Roman and medieval remains, which has often intrigued and attracted me as an amateur in historical guesswork. It is a yet larger though somewhat looser application of the same principle, that the things that are hid from the wise and understanding are the things that are too large for them to see.
I have often wondered whether the vastness and vitality of the legends that descend from the Dark Ages, such as the legends of King Arthur and the Round Table, were due to this comparative continuity between the last strength of the Empire and the first strength of the Church. I mean that there may have been a moment, even in Britain, when that majesty of the old pagan civilization still stood unchanged, save that it was no longer pagan. The combination of the old pride in being Roman with the new pride in being Christian may have created a militant morality really not unlike its later form of medieval chivalry. In other words, the popular tradition may not be so far wrong when it talks of some dim fighter in the fifth century as a knight. It may not be so far wrong when it talks of the table where those fighters feasted as the original model of knighthood. It is only by a sort of symbol that we clothe the body of that British king in thirteenth century armour; but it may be something more than a symbol which clothes his spirit with the thirteenth century conception of arms. If ever history did repeat itself, the mood of the first Crusaders who fought with the Saracens might really very well have repeated, as in a mirror, the mood of the last baptized Romans and Romanized Britons who fought with the Saxons. It is really a historical fallacy to say that the courtliness and polish of Sir Lancelot would not have existed in that barbarous time. Courtliness and polish are exactly the things that would have existed in one of the last of the Romanized Christians in comparison with his barbarous time. It is a blunder to say that the virginity and the vision of Sir Galahad are a later romantic fiction added to a half-heathen struggle. Virginity and visions are exactly the ideas that would have shone among the last champions of a Catholic culture in a half-heathen struggle. In this matter of Arthurian legend, I am disposed to suspect that the romantic view is really the realistic view, and the right view. If others doubt it, it will not be because of any realistic arguments of history against it. It will be because others do not feel as I do the enormous argument from the scale of popular stories; the sense that a story we have all heard from childhood is something solid and colossal, like a Gothic cathedral or a Roman camp.
THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY
EVERY NOW and again in the long and weary history of literature and journalism something is said that is important, something that blows a trumpet and calls a halt. For the first time, perhaps for many years we have suddenly to stop and think. There remains the essential difference between a sentence that is read once and a sentence that is read twice. Now, one of these arresting and transfiguring hints can be found in Hilaire Belloc’s The Historic Thames. He says it was a mere accident of history that the phrase Westminster Abbey does not sound to us today like the phrase Welbeck Abbey. It would give the modern English a great shock if Westminster Abbey were turned into a suite of rooms for the Duke of Westminster. Yet it gives them no shock that Welbeck Abbey should be turned into a suite of rooms for the Duke of Portland. Yet God was worshipped, I suppose, in Welbeck Abbey as well as in Westminster Abbey. The first fact about Westminster Abbey, considered as a religious institution, is as simple as it is sardonic. It is the great religious institution of the Middle Ages that managed to survive.
The whole of this theme is, of course, subject to exaggeration on both sides. One of the ablest men I have ever known summed up all the tombs at Westminster which tourists go to see in the curt and confident formula: “Westminster Abbey is to be venerated, not because of those that sleep therein, but rather in spite of them.” Many may call this a harsh paradox; but if they walk round the Abbey seriously and slowly, and really observe what petty politicians and third-rate generals have cumbered the ground there with their cold and clumsy monuments, I do not think that they will wholly deny the truth of that idle but bitter jest. A very great part of the funereal art in the Abbey can really be expressed only by one of those colossal epigrams which can be found in the Gospels more than anywhere else. It is, indeed, such statuary as would be made by the dead burying their dead.
It is true that anyone knowing the savour either of England or Christianity will have the religious emotion as well as the patriotic by the low Gothic tomb of Chaucer. But this, if it be examined, is an exception that proves the rule. For Chaucer was buried there when the popular Christianity of the Middle Ages still coloured this church like all others. It would be appropriate in any case that Chaucer should be in Westminster Abbey, even if it were exactly what it was when he used to look out of his London window at its towers. But it would be far more appropriate if men like Pitt or Macaulay were buried in St. Paul’s Cathedral; the new Renaissance St. Paul’s, which seems built as a pantheon for the heathen but heroic aristocrats of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Florid pillars and posturing statues are appropriate to them; most of them died rather defying death than looking for immortality. And it is really a part of their patriotic, but not Christian spirit that their figures should, as it were, stand frozen for ever in some gesture of eloquence or pride. No imaginative person will wholly fail to respond to the emotion expressed about a murdered Renaissance prince by a great English Renaissance poet:
