A Short History of England | Page 7

the awful and unbegotten Arthur.
The scientific age comes first and the mythological age after it. One
working example, the echoes of which lingered till very late in English
literature, may serve to sum up the contrast. The British state which
was found by Cæsar was long believed to have been founded by Brutus.
The contrast between the one very dry discovery and the other very
fantastic foundation has something decidedly comic about it; as if
Cæsar's "Et tu, Brute," might be translated, "What, you here?" But in
one respect the fable is quite as important as the fact. They both testify
to the reality of the Roman foundation of our insular society, and show
that even the stories that seem prehistoric are seldom pre-Roman. When
England is Elfland, the elves are not the Angles. All the phrases that
can be used as clues through that tangle of traditions are more or less
Latin phrases. And in all our speech there was no word more Roman
than "romance."
The Roman legions left Britain in the fourth century. This did not mean
that the Roman civilization left it; but it did mean that the civilization
lay far more open both to admixture and attack. Christianity had almost
certainly come to Britain, not indeed otherwise than by the routes
established by Rome, but certainly long before the official Roman

mission of Gregory the Great. It had certainly been largely swamped by
later heathen invasions of the undefended coasts. It may then rationally
be urged that the hold both of the Empire and its new religion were
here weaker than elsewhere, and that the description of the general
civilization in the last chapter is proportionately irrelevant. This,
however, is not the chief truth of the matter.
There is one fundamental fact which must be understood of the whole
of this period. Yet a modern man must very nearly turn his mind upside
down to understand it. Almost every modern man has in his head an
association between freedom and the future. The whole culture of our
time has been full of the notion of "A Good Time Coming." Now the
whole culture of the Dark Ages was full of the notion of "A Good Time
Going." They looked backwards to old enlightenment and forwards to
new prejudices. In our time there has come a quarrel between faith and
hope--which perhaps must be healed by charity. But they were situated
otherwise. They hoped--but it may be said that they hoped for
yesterday. All the motives that make a man a progressive now made a
man a conservative then. The more he could keep of the past the more
he had of a fair law and a free state; the more he gave way to the future
the more he must endure of ignorance and privilege. All we call reason
was one with all we call reaction. And this is the clue which we must
carry with us through the lives of all the great men of the Dark Ages; of
Alfred, of Bede, of Dunstan. If the most extreme modern Republican
were put back in that period he would be an equally extreme Papist or
even Imperialist. For the Pope was what was left of the Empire; and the
Empire what was left of the Republic.
We may compare the man of that time, therefore, to one who has left
free cities and even free fields behind him, and is forced to advance
towards a forest. And the forest is the fittest metaphor, not only because
it was really that wild European growth cloven here and there by the
Roman roads, but also because there has always been associated with
forests another idea which increased as the Roman order decayed. The
idea of the forests was the idea of enchantment. There was a notion of
things being double or different from themselves, of beasts behaving
like men and not merely, as modern wits would say, of men behaving

like beasts. But it is precisely here that it is most necessary to
remember that an age of reason had preceded the age of magic. The
central pillar which has sustained the storied house of our imagination
ever since has been the idea of the civilized knight amid the savage
enchantments; the adventures of a man still sane in a world gone mad.
The next thing to note in the matter is this: that in this barbaric time
none of the heroes are barbaric. They are only heroes if they are
anti-barbaric. Men real or mythical, or more probably both, became
omnipresent like gods among the people, and forced themselves into
the faintest memory and the shortest record, exactly in proportion as
they had mastered the heathen madness of the time and preserved the
Christian rationality that had