Complete Works of G K Chesterton, page 990
There is one custom in Spain, and probably in other southern countries, which might be a model of the popular instinct for poetry in action. It is what corresponds to our idea of Santa Claus, who is, of course, St Nicolas, and in the North the patron of children and the giver of gifts at Christmas. In the South this function is performed by the Three Kings, and the gifts are given at the Epiphany. It is in a sense more logical, which, perhaps, is why it is common among the Latins. The Wise Men are in any case bringing gifts to the Holy Child, and they bring them at the same time to the human children. But there is in connexion with it an excellent example of how people who retain this popular instinct can actually act a poem.
The mysterious Kings arrive at the end of the holiday, which again is really very reasonable. It is much better that the games and dances and dramas, which are fugitive, should come first and the children be left with the presents, or permanent possessions, at the end. But it is also the occasion of a process very mystical and moving to the imagination. The Kings are conceived as coming nearer and nearer every day; and, if there are images of these sacred figures, they are moved from place to place every night. That alone is strangely thrilling, either considered as a child’s game or as a mystic’s meditation on the mysteries of time and space. On the last night of all, when the strange travellers through time are supposed to arrive, the children carefully put out water and green stuff for the camels and the horses of that superhuman cavalcade out of the depths of the East. Even the touch of putting water, so necessary to purely Eastern animals, is enough to suggest that reach of the imagination to the ends of the earth.
Now, that is only one example, out of hundreds that can be collected in any valley or countryside, of something which people in simpler times had the power to create; a complete and concrete drama perfectly plain and unfathomably profound. What I want to know about modern civilization, which in many ways cares so much for beauty, which in some ways cares far too much for beauty, is why it cannot produce these beautiful things. I do not want it to copy Spain and the Three Kings, or to copy Scandinavia and St Nicolas, or to copy any particular local ritual. But why can it never invent anything of its own? I have long paused for a reply.
THE ROMANCE OF HISTORY
THE signs of the resurrection of Spain of which I think there are many to be seen lately, have turned my thoughts to certain subtleties in the tradition of that land. They are things so subtle that they always appear to be simple. One of them is the tradition of chivalry and the double attitude towards it which we connect with the name of Don Quixote. There is no more fantastic paradox in all history than the life and work of Cervantes. He is generally recognized as having written a book to show that romantic adventures are all rubbish and do not really happen in this world. As a matter of fact, the one man in this world to whom romantic adventures were incessantly happening was the author of ‘Don Quixote’. He covered himself with glory and lost his right hand at the most romantic battle in history — when the Crescent and the Cross met in the blue Mediterranean by the Isles of Greece, trailing all their pageants of painted and gilded ships with emblazoned sails. He was just about to receive public recognition from the victor, Don John of Austria, when he was kidnapped by pirates. He organized a series of escapes, each like the ideal adventure of a schoolboy; he organized supplies and comforts for his fellow-prisoners with the laborious altruism of a saint. As men go, he was really a pretty perfect pattern of the knight of chivalry; eventually he escaped and returned home to write a book showing that chivalry was impossible. At least, that is what three rationalistic centuries have taken it as showing. But I think the time has come to dig a little deeper in that stratified irony and show the other side of Cervantes and chivalry.
Hero-worship has fallen out of fashion with Carlyle, who forced it into fashion. But in the case of Carlyle there were circumstances that were a needless handicap of hero worship and even to heroism. Carlyle set himself the impossible task of making heroes out of the successful men of history and politics. It was not much more hopeful than that of making heroes out of the successful men in soap or petrol. In one sense that sort of hero-worship is heroic, in the sense of being impossible. The task is heroic be cause the subject is unheroic. In Carlyle’s characteristic work it soon ran into absurdity. It reached the point of praising Frederick the Great — a form of hero-worship which is clearly a reductio ad absurdum, and even almost a contradiction in terms. The character of Cromwell had more human elements; but what was best in it was human and emphatically not heroic. The best case for Cromwell is that he was a moderately sane man in a very insane age. His best work was done as a moderator and maker of compromises, not as an originator or inspirer of enthusiasms. He saved works of art which the wilder Puritans would have destroyed, but we cannot picture him as a great patron of art in the sense of a friend of artists. He insisted that there must be good pay for good soldiers; but he was not the sort of man to be a romance to his own soldiers, like Napoleon. He was a seventeenth-century English squire whose family had grown rich in the great pillage; and morally he was no worse than most of his kind and perhaps better than many of them. He was certainly much better than Frederick the Great whom Carlyle made even more of a hero, and even a god.
The worship of Frederick the Great can hardly be called hero-worship. It is rather devil-worship softened by a touch of monkey-worship. It is superstition and therefore heresy to say such things seriously, but we may say symbolically that if a demon could enter the body of a monkey the result might be something like Frederick II of Prussia. It is not only true that he had a large mind and a small soul, it might almost equally truly be said that he had a large brain and a small mind. Even his intellectual pride was petty. Moreover, he was in another sense curiously like a monkey. He was an imitator. As the old mystics used to say that the devil was the ape of God, we might more literally say that Frederick II was the ape of Louis XIV. But just as the monkey imitates the man without understanding the man, just as the ape can copy an action that he cannot comprehend, so the Prussian had nothing of the national and civilized quality of the Frenchman. He substituted a new impudence and malignity for the last trailing tradition of medieval chivalry and Roman law. But Carlyle had to make a hero out of him, on his own theory of the heroism of success. Frederick had nothing else except success — not even the power to enjoy it.
But when we have got rid of this sort of hero-worship we may really come back to heroes. There really were heroes who were historical characters though they were not generally successful men. More often the true hero was a tragic hero. But while his tale was often a tragedy in so far as he failed, it was often a wildly impossible romance in the moments when he triumphed. The curious thing is that real history is much more romantic, and not less romantic, than Carlyle made it out. The hero may sometimes have lost his campaign, but he won his battles. And he can often be seen winning his battles single handed like the most legendary knight winning his spurs. Chivalry really did succeed in doing the impracticable things, even when it failed to do the practical things. We may differ or feel doubtful about the ultimate success or even the ultimate value of various policies pursued in the past; but nobody can doubt the thrill and enthusiasm and courage of the pursuit. The only really reliable part of history is the romance of it.
For instance, Godfrey de Bouillon died young, wasted by a fever that might have been cured in more sanitary conditions and wearied with a problem which was perhaps almost insoluble. That is a tragedy of the modern sort; it may well be said that his life was a failure; it might be said that the Crusades were a failure. We might argue about whether he was a maker, a builder, a man who can, or any of the Carlylean descriptions. For those depend on elaborate historical results which arise later; and the end of everything arrives sooner or later. It is disputable whether Richelieu was a successful man, since the French monarchy went down in the French Revolution. It is disputable whether Frederick the Great was a successful man, since Prussianized Germany went down in the Great War. So it is disputable whether Godfrey was a successful man, since the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem went down in the disaster of Hattin. What is quite indisputable is that Godfrey was a hero of romance, a hero of the wildest and most improbable romance, a hero behaving as heroes behave in the extravagant romances of chivalry. What is certain is that he, the Commander-in-Chief of the whole military system of Europe in the East, did really behave in the manner of Dick Dauntless among the Redskins or How a Powder-Monkey Foiled the Pirates. It is a cold and concrete fact that he was himself the first to leap from the battle-tower on to the Saracenic turrets, exactly as the boy who ran away to sea is the first to leap from his baffle-ship on to the slaver’s deck. All that part of the business that was a statesman’s calculation may or may not have been falsified. All that part of it that was like a schoolboy’s daydream came true.
There are any number of other examples of the kind. Nelson is too near to us for us to be certain of the duration of his practical achievement; but the nearer we are to him the less doubt we have of his purely poetical achievement. Near as he is to us, he is nearer still to the morning of the world, and has the colour and the clear outline that belongs to the primitive legends of the dawn. We do not know how long the naval leadership of England will last, but we do know that the legend will last. We do not know how far aviation has altered everything or how far politicians would go in the direction of scrapping the British Navy. But we do know that Nelson could hardly have been a more mythical figure if he had flown upon wings; or that his ship might have been a fairy-ship and hardly shone more strangely on the storied sea. The things that are quite certain about Nelson are all the improbable things; that he died in the very hour of triumph; that he died on a vessel that bore the very name of victory; that he was shot through wearing the flaming stars with which he had just offered to die in honour — all the coincidences that would be called crude and far-fetched in a story. They are the fancies that are considered a little too romantic for historical fiction. They are also the only fixed facts of history.
THE HERALDIC LION
SIR THOMAS BROWNE was, as everybody knows, a medical man. He was a rather curious kind of medical man; and there are a great many points in which he presents a somewhat singular contrast to our doctors of today. For instance, he wrote an eloquent and exhaustive work on urn-burial, churchyards, and death generally; a subject which doctors are now understood to avoid. But in nothing is he so permanently interesting as in his relations with the remarkable zoology of his time. His superb religious rhetoric and the whole literary side of him are obviously immortal. Nothing finer has ever been said about the soul than that phrase of Browne’s that it is a thing in man ‘which owes no homage unto the sun’. But a more delicate defence is needed of his quaint science, and, indeed, of all the medieval science from which he drew his ideas. We know that his theology was true. We know that his zoology was untrue; but do not let us too readily assume that it is therefore unimportant. The whole of that old, fantastic science is misunderstood. It made every creature rather a symbol than a fact. But, then, it thought that all material facts were valuable as symbols of spiritual facts. It did not really very much mind whether the lion was a noble animal who spared virgins. What it did want to make clear was that, if the lion was a noble animal, it would spare virgins.
Let me take this example of what I mean. Every modern person of intelligence can see quite easily that the heraldic lion is very different from the real lion. But what we moderns do not quite realize is this: that the heraldic lion is much more important than the real lion. Words positively fail me to express the unimportance of the real lion. The real lion is a large, hairy sort of cat that happens to be living (or rather happens to be dying) in useless deserts that we have never seen and never want to see; a creature that never did us any good, and, in our circumstances, cannot even do us any harm; a thing as trivial, for all our purposes, as the darkest of the deep-sea fishes or as the minerals in the moon. There is no earthly reason to suppose that he has any of the leonine qualities as we ordinarily understand them. There is no ground for imagining that he is generous or heroic, or even proud. Some people who have fought him say that he is not even brave. He does not touch human life at any point at all. You cannot turn him, as you can the ox, into a labourer: nor can you turn him, as you can the dog, into a sportsman and a gentleman. He can share neither our toils nor our pleasures: you cannot harness a lion to a plough, nor can you, with a pack of lions, go hunting an elephant. He has no human interest about him. He is not even good to eat. From the fringe of his mangy and overrated mane to the tip of his tail (with which, I understand, he hits himself in order to overcome the natural cowardice of his disposition), from his mane to his tail, I say, he is one mass of unimportance. He is simply an overgrown stray cat. And he is a stray cat that never comes into our street. He is living his commonplace existence in regions where no white man can live without going mad with monotony and heat. We have to put him in our museums and such places, just as we have to put tiny little chips of grey stone that look as if you could pick them up in the street, or homely-looking brown beetles at which no self-respecting child could look twice. But the only kind of lion that is of any earthly practical importance is the legendary lion. He really is a useful thing to have about the place. He holds up the shield of England, which would otherwise fall down, despite the well-meant efforts of the Unicorn, whose hoofs are deficient in a prehensile quality. The African lion does not matter to anyone. But the British Lion, though he does not exist, does matter. He means something; it is the only true object of existence to mean something; and the real African lion has never succeeded in meaning anything at all. The legendary lion, the lion that was made by man and not by Nature, he is indeed the king of beasts. He is a great work of art, a great creation of the genius of man, like Rouen Cathedral or the Iliad. We know his character perfectly well, as we know the character of Mr Micawber, or many other persons who have never taken the trouble to exist in a mere material way. His virtues are the virtues of a grand European gentleman; there is nothing African about his ethics. He has the sense of the sanctity and dignity of death which is behind so many of our ancient rites. He will not touch the dead. He has that strange worship of a bright and proud chastity which is the soul of our Europe, in Diana, in the Virgin Martyrs, in Britomart, which left a single white star in the sensual storms of the Elizabethan Drama, and which is reconquering the world in its new form — the worship of children. The lion will not hurt virgins. In an innumerable number of the old legends and poems you will find the description of the refusal of some eminent lion to touch some eminent young lady. Some say that this sense of delicacy is mutual; and that young ladies also refuse to touch lions. This may be true: but even if it is true it probably only applies to the lower or actual lion, the mere lion of Africa, a negligible creature whom we have already dismissed to wander in his deserts, deserts which are as futile as himself and which form the dustbin of the universe. The valuable lion, we have agreed, is a creature made entirely by man, like the chimaera and the hippogriff, the mermaid and the centaur, the giant with a hundred eyes, and the giant with a hundred hands. The lion on one side of the royal shield is as fabulous as the unicorn on the other side. In so far as he is not merely fantastic and impossible, he consists of all the aggregate good qualities of a kind of super-celestial country gentleman. The heraldic lion is fading, I fear, upon our escutcheons. He still swings valiantly, how ever, over certain places of entertainment where so many of the kindlier traditions of our ancient civilization have taken refuge. If you see the Red Lion, which should be on the shield of a knight, painted only on the signboard of an inn, remember all the great truths that you have read in this article; remember that this heraldic lion on the sign is the symbol of all that has lifted our Christian civilization into life and energy and honour — magnanimity, valour, a disdain of easy victories, a scorn for all the scorners of the weak. The heraldic lion has, perhaps, sprawled rather too widely over this article. A great many other examples might be taken. The heraldic leopard is not without his good points. The dog-headed men in Africa were full of interest; nor must we forget Jehan de Mandeville’s memorable description of a hippopotamus, that it was ‘half man and half horse’. That is what may be called an impressionist or symbolist sketch of it; it avoids teasing details, and gives a sense of mass and atmosphere. I have often looked at the hippopotamus in his cage at the Zoological Gardens, and wondered which part of his appearance or physiognomy impressed the incisive Mandeville as being contributed by some human person of his acquaintance. Had he seen a very human class of hippopotamus, or had he mixed with a hippopotamic class of men? But the general remarks which I have made about the medieval lion, the heraldic lion, apply equally well to all these other medieval monstrosities or combinations. They were all fictitious. They were all entirely different from and independent of, the living creature upon which they were supposed to be modelled. And those who wrote about them and talked about them, and gravely disputed about all their characteristics, physical, mental, and moral, were, at the bottom of their hearts and the back of their minds, totally indifferent to whether they were true or not. The Middle Ages were full of logic. And logic in its examples and symbols is in its nature entirely indifferent to fact. It is as easy to be logical about things that do not exist as about things that do exist. If twice three is six, it is certain that three men with two legs each will have six legs between them. And if twice three is six, it is equally certain that three men with two heads each will have six heads between them. That there never were three men with two heads each does not invalidate the logic in the least. It makes the deduction impossible, but it does not make it illogical. Twice three is still six, whether you reckon it in pigs or in flaming dragons, whether you reckon it in cottages or in castles-in-the-air. And the object of all this great medieval and Renaissance science was simply to find everywhere and anywhere examples of its philosophy. If the hippopotamus illustrated the idea of justice, well and good; if it did not, so much the worse for the hippopotamus. These ancients sought to make the brutes the mere symbol of the man. Some moderns seek to make Man a mere symbol of the brutes. These old scientists were only interested in the human side of the beasts. Some new scientists are only interested in the beastly side of the men. Instead of making the ape and tiger mere accessories to the man, they make man a mere accessory, a mere afterthought to the ape and tiger. Instead of employing the hippopotamus to illustrate their philosophy, they employ the hippopotamus to make their philosophy, and the great fat books he writes you and I, please God, will never read.
