A Short History of England | Page 8

G.K. Chesterton
come from Rome. Arthur has his name
because he killed the heathen; the heathen who killed him have no
names at all. Englishmen who know nothing of English history, but less
than nothing of Irish history, have heard somehow or other of Brian
Boru, though they spell it Boroo and seem to be under the impression
that it is a joke. It is a joke the subtlety of which they would never have
been able to enjoy, if King Brian had not broken the heathen in Ireland
at the great Battle of Clontarf. The ordinary English reader would never
have heard of Olaf of Norway if he had not "preached the Gospel with
his sword"; or of the Cid if he had not fought against the Crescent. And
though Alfred the Great seems to have deserved his title even as a
personality, he was not so great as the work he had to do.
But the paradox remains that Arthur is more real than Alfred. For the
age is the age of legends. Towards these legends most men adopt by
instinct a sane attitude; and, of the two, credulity is certainly much
more sane than incredulity. It does not much matter whether most of
the stories are true; and (as in such cases as Bacon and Shakespeare) to
realize that the question does not matter is the first step towards
answering it correctly. But before the reader dismisses anything like an
attempt to tell the earlier history of the country by its legends, he will
do well to keep two principles in mind, both of them tending to correct
the crude and very thoughtless scepticism which has made this part of
the story so sterile. The nineteenth-century historians went on the
curious principle of dismissing all people of whom tales are told, and

concentrating upon people of whom nothing is told. Thus, Arthur is
made utterly impersonal because all legends are lies, but somebody of
the type of Hengist is made quite an important personality, merely
because nobody thought him important enough to lie about. Now this is
to reverse all common sense. A great many witty sayings are attributed
to Talleyrand which were really said by somebody else. But they would
not be so attributed if Talleyrand had been a fool, still less if he had
been a fable. That fictitious stories are told about a person is, nine times
out of ten, extremely good evidence that there was somebody to tell
them about. Indeed some allow that marvellous things were done, and
that there may have been a man named Arthur at the time in which they
were done; but here, so far as I am concerned, the distinction becomes
rather dim. I do not understand the attitude which holds that there was
an Ark and a man named Noah, but cannot believe in the existence of
Noah's Ark.
The other fact to be remembered is that scientific research for the last
few years has worked steadily in the direction of confirming and not
dissipating the legends of the populace. To take only the obvious
instance, modern excavators with modern spades have found a solid
stone labyrinth in Crete, like that associated with the Minataur, which
was conceived as being as cloudy a fable as the Chimera. To most
people this would have seemed quite as frantic as finding the roots of
Jack's Beanstalk or the skeletons in Bluebeard's cupboard, yet it is
simply the fact. Finally, a truth is to be remembered which scarcely
ever is remembered in estimating the past. It is the paradox that the past
is always present: yet it is not what was, but whatever seems to have
been; for all the past is a part of faith. What did they believe of their
fathers? In this matter new discoveries are useless because they are new.
We may find men wrong in what they thought they were, but we cannot
find them wrong in what they thought they thought. It is therefore very
practical to put in a few words, if possible, something of what a man of
these islands in the Dark Ages would have said about his ancestors and
his inheritance. I will attempt here to put some of the simpler things in
their order of importance as he would have seen them; and if we are to
understand our fathers who first made this country anything like itself,
it is most important that we should remember that if this was not their

real past, it was their real memory.
After that blessed crime, as the wit of mystics called it, which was for
these men hardly second to the creation of the world, St. Joseph of
Arimathea, one of the few followers of the new religion who seem to
have been wealthy,
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