The Pleasures of England Part 5

The proper Service-book of the thirteenth century consists first of the pure Psalter; then of certain essential pa.s.sages of the Old Testament--invariably the Song of Miriam at the Red Sea and the last song of Moses;--ordinarily also the 12th of Isaiah and the prayer of Habakkuk; while St. Louis' Psalter has also the prayer of Hannah, and that of Hezekiah (Isaiah x.x.xviii. 10-20); the Song of the Three Children; then the Benedictus, the Magnificat, and the Nunc Dimittis.

Then follows the Athanasian Creed; and then, as in all Psalters after their chosen Scripture pa.s.sages, the collects to the Virgin, the Te Deum, and Service to Christ, beginning with the Psalm 'The Lord reigneth'; and then the collects to the greater individual saints, closing with the Litany, or constant prayer for mercy to Christ, and all saints; of whom the order is,--Archangels, Patriarchs, Apostles, Disciples, Innocents, Martyrs, Confessors, Monks, and Virgins. Of women the Magdalen _always_ leads; St. Mary of Egypt usually follows, but _may_ be the last. Then the order varies in every place, and prayer-book, no recognizable supremacy being traceable; except in relation to the place, or person, for whom the book was written. In St. Louis', St. Genevieve (the last saint to whom he prayed on his death-bed) follows the two Maries; then come--memorable for you best, as easiest, in this six-foil group,--Saints Catharine, Margaret, and Scolastica, Agatha, Cecilia, and Agnes; and then ten more, whom you may learn or not as you like: I note them now only for future reference,--more lively and easy for your learning,--by their French names,

Felicite,

Colombe,

Christine,

Auree, Honorine,

Radegonde,

Praxede,

Euphemie,

Bathilde, Eugenie.

Such was the system of Theology into which the Imaginative Religion of Europe was crystallized, by the growth of its own best faculties, and the influence of all accessible and credible authorities, during the period between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries inclusive. Its spiritual power is completely represented by the angelic and apostolic dynasties, and the women-saints in Paradise; for of the men-saints, beneath the apostles and prophets, none but St. Christopher, St.

Nicholas, St. Anthony, St. James, and St. George, attained anything like the influence of Catharine or Cecilia; for the very curious reason, that the men-saints were much more true, real, and numerous.

St. Martin was reverenced all over Europe, but definitely, as a man, and the Bishop of Tours. So St. Ambrose at Milan, and St. Gregory at Rome, and hundreds of good men more, all over the world; while the really good women remained, though not rare, inconspicuous. The virtues of French Clotilde, and Swiss Berthe, were painfully borne down in the balance of visible judgment, by the guilt of the Gonerils, Regans, and Lady Macbeths, whose spectral procession closes only with the figure of Eleanor in Woodstock maze; and in dearth of nearer objects, the daily brighter powers of fancy dwelt with more concentrated devotion on the stainless ideals of the earlier maid-martyrs. And observe, even the loftier fame of the men-saints above named, as compared with the rest, depends on precisely the same character of indefinite personality; and on the representation, by each of them, of a moral idea which may be embodied and painted in a miraculous legend; credible, as history, even then, only to the vulgar; but powerful over them, nevertheless, exactly in proportion to the degree in which it can be pictured and fancied as a living creature. Consider even yet in these days of mechanism, how the dullest John Bull cannot with perfect complacency adore _himself_, except under the figure of Britannia or the British Lion; and how the existence of the popular jest-book, which might have seemed secure in its necessity to our weekly recreation, is yet virtually centred on the imaginary animation of a puppet, and the imaginary elevation to reason of a dog. But in the Middle Ages, this action of the Fancy, now distorted and despised, was the happy and sacred tutress of every faculty of the body and soul; and the works and thoughts of art, the joys and toils of men, rose and flowed on in the bright air of it, with the aspiration of a flame, and the beneficence of a fountain.

And now, in the rest of my lecture, I had intended to give you a broad summary of the rise and fall of English art, born under this code of theology, and this enthusiasm of duty;--of its rise, from the rude vaults of Westminster, to the finished majesty of Wells;--and of its fall, from that brief hour of the thirteenth century, through the wars of the Bolingbroke, and the pride of the Tudor, and the l.u.s.t of the Stewart, to expire under the mocking snarl and ruthless blow of the Puritan. But you know that I have always, in my most serious work, allowed myself to be influenced by those Chances, as they are now called,--but to my own feeling and belief, guidances, and even, if rightly understood, commands,--which, as far as I have read history, the best and sincerest men think providential. Had this lecture been on common principles of art, I should have finished it as I intended, without fear of its being the worse for my consistency. But it deals, on the contrary, with a subject, respecting which every sentence I write, or speak, is of importance in its issue; and I allowed, as you heard, the momentary observation of a friend, to give an entirely new cast to the close of my last lecture. Much more, I feel it inc.u.mbent upon me in this one, to take advantage of the most opportune help, though in an unexpected direction, given me by my constant tutor, Professor Westwood. I went to dine with him, a day or two ago, mainly--being neither of us, I am thankful to say, blue-ribanded--to drink his health on his recovery from his recent accident. Whereupon he gave me a feast of good talk, old wine, and purple ma.n.u.scripts. And having had as much of all as I could well carry, just as it came to the good-night, out he brings, for a finish, this leaf of ma.n.u.script in my hand, which he has lent me to show you,--a leaf of the Bible of Charles the Bald!

A leaf of it, at least, as far as you or I could tell, for Professor Westwood's copy is just as good, in all the parts finished, as the original: and, for all practical purpose, I show you here in my hand a leaf of the Bible which your own King Alfred saw with his own bright eyes, and from which he learned his child-faith in the days of dawning thought!

There are few English children who do not know the story of Alfred, the king, letting the cakes burn, and being chidden by his peasant hostess. How few English children--nay, how few perhaps of their educated, not to say learned, elders--reflect upon, if even they know, the far different scenes through which he had pa.s.sed when a child!

Concerning his father, his mother, and his own childhood, suppose you were to teach your children first these following main facts, before you come to the toasting of the m.u.f.fin?

His father, educated by Helmstan, Bishop of Winchester, had been offered the throne of the great Saxon kingdom of Mercia in his early youth; had refused it, and entered, as a novice under St. Swithin the monastery at Winchester. From St. Swithin, he received the monastic habit, and was appointed by Bishop Helmstan one of his sub-deacons!

"The quiet seclusion which Ethelwulph's slow[26] capacity and meek temper coveted" was not permitted to him by fate. The death of his elder brother left him the only living representative of the line of the West Saxon princes. His accession to the throne became the desire of the people. He obtained a dispensation from the Pope to leave the cloister; a.s.sumed the crown of Egbert; and retained Egbert's prime minister, Alstan, Bishop of Sherborne, who was the Minister in peace and war, the Treasurer, and the Counsellor, of the kings of England, over a s.p.a.ce, from first to last, of fifty years.

[Footnote 26: Turner, quoting William of Malmesbury, "Cra.s.sioris et hebetis ingenii,"--meaning that he had neither ardour for war, nor ambition for kinghood.]

Alfred's mother, Osburga, must have been married for love. She was the daughter of Oslac, the king's cup-bearer. Extolled for her piety and understanding, she bore the king four sons; dying before the last, Alfred, was five years old, but leaving him St. Swithin for his tutor.

How little do any of us think, in idle talk of rain or no rain on St.

Swithin's day, that we speak of the man whom Alfred's father obeyed as a monk, and whom his mother chose for his guardian!

Alfred, both to father and mother, was the best beloved of their children. On his mother's death, his father sent him, being then five years old, with a great retinue through France and across the Alps to Rome; and there the Pope anointed him King, (heir-apparent to the English throne), at the request of his father.

Think of it, you travellers through the Alps by tunnels, that you may go to b.a.l.l.s at Rome or h.e.l.ls at Monaco. Here is another manner of journey, another goal for it, appointed for your little king. At twelve, he was already the best hunter among the Saxon youths. Be sure he could sit his horse at five. Fancy the child, with his keen genius, and holy heart, riding with his Saxon chiefs beside him, by the Alpine flowers under Velan or Sempione, and down among the olives to Pavia, to Perugia, to Rome; there, like the little fabled Virgin, ascending the Temple steps, and consecrated to be King of England by the great Leo, Leo of the Leonine city, the saviour of Rome from the Saracen.

Two years afterwards, he rode again to Rome beside his father; the West Saxon king bringing presents to the Pope, a crown of pure gold weighing four pounds, a sword adorned with pure gold, two golden images,[27] four Saxon silver dishes; and giving a gift of gold to all the Roman clergy and n.o.bles,[28] and of silver to the people.

[Footnote 27: Turner, Book IV.,--not a vestige of hint from the stupid Englishman, what the Pope wanted with crown, sword, or image! My own guess would be, that it meant an offering of the entire household strength, in war and peace, of the Saxon nation,--their crown, their sword, their household G.o.ds, Irminsul and Irminsula, their feasting, and their robes.]

[Footnote 28: Again, what does this mean? Gifts of honour to the Pope's immediate attendants--silver to all Rome? Does the modern reader think this is buying little Alfred's consecration too dear, or that Leo is selling the Holy Ghost?]

No idle sacrifices or symbols, these gifts of courtesy! The Saxon King rebuilt on the highest hill that is bathed by Tiber, the Saxon street and school, the Borgo,[29] of whose miraculously arrested burning Raphael's fresco preserves the story to this day. And further he obtained from Leo the liberty of all Saxon men from bonds in penance;--a first phase this of Magna Charta, obtained more honourably, from a more honourable person, than that doc.u.ment, by which Englishmen of this day, suppose they live, move, and have being.

[Footnote 29: "Quae in eorum lingua Burgus dicitur,--the place where it was situated was called the Saxon street, Saxonum vic.u.m"

(Anastasius, quoted by Turner). There seems to me some evidence in the scattered pa.s.sages I have not time to collate, that at this time the Saxon Burg, or tower, of a village, included the idea of its school.]

How far into Alfred's soul, at seven years old, sank any true image of what Rome was, and had been; of what her Lion Lord was, who had saved her from the Saracen, and her Lion Lord had been, who had saved her from the Hun; and what this Spiritual Dominion was, and was to be, which could make and unmake kings, and save nations, and put armies to flight; I leave those to say, who have learned to reverence childhood.

This, at least, is sure, that the days of Alfred were bound each to each, not only by their natural piety, but by the actual presence and appeal to his heart, of all that was then in the world most n.o.ble, beautiful, and strong against Death.

In this living Book of G.o.d he had learned to read, thus early; and with perhaps n.o.bler ambition than of getting the prize of a gilded psalm-book at his mother's knee, as you are commonly told of him. What sort of psalm-book it was, however, you may see from this leaf in my hand. For, as his father and he returned from Rome that year, they stayed again at the Court of Charlemagne's grandson, whose daughter, the Princess Judith, Ethelwolf was wooing for Queen of England, (not queen-consort, merely, but crowned queen, of authority equal to his own.) From whom Alfred was like enough to have had a reading lesson or two out of her father's Bible; and like enough, the little prince, to have stayed her hand at this bright leaf of it, the Lion-leaf, bearing the symbol of the Lion of the tribe of Judah.

You cannot, of course, see anything but the glittering from where you sit; nor even if you afterwards look at it near, will you find a figure the least admirable or impressive to you. It is not like Landseer's Lions in Trafalgar Square; nor like Tenniel's in 'Punch'; still less like the real ones in Regent's Park. Neither do I show it you as admirable in any respect of art, other than that of skilfullest illumination. I show it you, as the most interesting Gothic type of the imagination of Lion; which, after the Roman Eagle, possessed the minds of all European warriors; until, as they themselves grew selfish and cruel, the symbols which at first meant heaven-sent victory, or the strength and presence of some Divine spirit, became to them only the signs of their own pride or rage: the victor raven of Corvus sinks into the shamed falcon of Marmion, and the lion-heartedness which gave the glory and the peace of the G.o.ds to Leonidas, casts the glory and the might of kinghood to the dust before Chalus.[30]

[Footnote 30: 'Fors Clavigera,' March, 1871, p. 19. Yet read the preceding pages, and learn the truth of the lion heart, while you mourn its pride. Note especially his absolute law against usury.]

That death, 6th April, 1199, ended the advance of England begun by Alfred, under the pure law of Religious Imagination. She began, already, in the thirteenth century, to be decoratively, instead of vitally, religious. The history of the Religious Imagination expressed between Alfred's time and that of Cur de Lion, in this symbol of the Lion only, has material in it rather for all my seven lectures than for the closing section of one; but I must briefly specify to you the main sections of it. I will keep clear of my favourite number seven, and ask you to recollect the meaning of only Five, Mythic Lions.

First of all, in Greek art, remember to keep yourselves clear about the difference between the Lion and the Gorgon.

The Gorgon is the power of evil in heaven, conquered by Athena, and thenceforward becoming her aegis, when she is herself the inflictor of evil. Her helmet is then the helmet of Orcus.

But the Lion is the power of death on earth, conquered by Heracles, and becoming thenceforward both his helmet and aegis. All ordinary architectural lion sculpture is derived from the Heraclean.

Then the Christian Lions are, first, the Lion of the Tribe of Judah--Christ Himself as Captain and Judge: "He shall rule the nations with a rod of iron," (the opposite power of His adversary, is rarely intended in sculpture unless in a.s.sociation with the serpent--"inculcabis supra leonem et aspidem"); secondly, the Lion of St. Mark, the power of the Gospel going out to conquest; thirdly, the Lion of St. Jerome, the wrath of the brute creation changed into love by the kindness of man; and, fourthly, the Lion of the Zodiac, which is the Lion of Egypt and of the Lombardic pillar-supports in Italy; these four, if you remember, with the Nemean Greek one, five altogether, will give you, broadly, interpretation of nearly all Lion symbolism in great art. How they degenerate into the British door knocker, I leave you to determine for yourselves, with such a.s.sistances as I may be able to suggest to you in my next lecture; but, as the grotesqueness of human history plans it, there is actually a connection between that last degradation of the Leonine symbol, and its first and n.o.blest significance.

You see there are letters round this golden Lion of Alfred's spelling-book, which his princess friend was likely enough to spell for him. They are two Latin hexameters:--

Hic Leo, surgendo, portas confregit Averni Qui nunquam dormit, nusquam dormitat, in aevum.

(This Lion, rising, burst the gates of Death: This, who sleeps not, nor shall sleep, for ever.)

Now here is the Christian change of the Heraclean conquest of Death into Christ's Resurrection. Samson's bearing away the gates of Gaza is another like symbol, and to the mind of Alfred, taught, whether by the Pope Leo for his schoolmaster, or by the great-granddaughter of Charlemagne for his schoolmistress, it represented, as it did to all the intelligence of Christendom, Christ in His own first and last, Alpha and Omega, description of Himself,--

"I am He that liveth and was dead, and behold I am alive for evermore, and _have the keys_ of h.e.l.l and of Death." And in His servant St.

John's description of Him--

"Who is the Faithful Witness and the First-begotten of the dead, and the Prince of the kings of the earth."

All this a.s.suredly, so far as the young child, consecrated like David, the youngest of his brethren, conceived his own new life in Earth and Heaven,--he understood already in the Lion symbol. But of all this I had no thought[31] when I chose the prayer of Alfred as the type of the Religion of his era, in its dwelling, not on the deliverance from the punishment of sin, but from the poisonous sleep and death of it.

Will you ever learn that prayer again,--youths who are to be priests, and knights, and kings of England, in these the latter days? when the gospel of Eternal Death is preached here in Oxford to you for the Pride of Truth? and "the mountain of the Lord's House" has become a Golgotha, and the "new song before the throne" sunk into the rolling thunder of the death rattle of the Nations, crying, "O Christ, where is Thy Victory!"

[Footnote 31: The reference to the Bible of Charles le Chauve was added to my second lecture (page 54), in correcting the press, mistakenly put into the text instead of the notes.]