Part 7
The White Horse stands for something that year by year we are forgetting, those quaint old English feasts that have done so much to make England merry, and have made history into a beautiful legend that bears the name of Alfred. Yet the White Horse is falling into neglect. The author of 'Tom Brown's Schooldays' lamented the fact that people flew past the White Horse in stuffy first class carriages; were he alive now he would lament still more that English men and English women can pass the White Horse without a glance up from the novel they are reading bound in a flaring yellow cover. But there is one great Englishman who will never do this, and that is Chesterton; rather he writes of the White Horse, the lonely horse that is worthy of this splendid poem.
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In connection with the Vale of White Horse there are three traditions--one, that Alfred fought a great battle there; another, that he played a harp in the camp of the Danes; a third, that Alfred proved himself a very bad cook who wasted a poor woman's cake, a poor woman who would willingly have sacrificed cakes every day to have the honour of the king under her roof.
It is of these three traditions that Chesterton writes his poem. Whether they may be historically accurate does not much matter; there is no doubt that the Vale had something to do with the King of Wessex, and popular tradition has made the name of Alfred a national legend.
When Chesterton writes of the vision of the king he is no doubt writing of his own vision of the events that led up to the gathering of the chiefs. The Danes had descended on England like a cloud of locusts; it was the time that needed a National Champion, as time and again in the past the Israelites had needed one. It is one of the strange things of history that a champion has always appeared when he was most needed. The name of the Danes inspired terror; Wessex was shattered--
'For earthquake following earthquake Uprent the Wessex tree ...'
The kings of Wessex were weary and disheartened: fire and pillage had laid the countryside bare with that horrible bareness that only lies in the wake of conqueror:
'There was not English armour left, Nor any English thing, When Alfred came to Athelney To be an English king.'
This was the vision that Alfred had, and he gathered the disheartened chiefs to his side till, in victory, he could bear the name of king.
* * * * *
In the wake of national champions there have ever appeared popular tales demonstrating the human qualities of these giants; if Napoleon could conquer empires, tradition has never forgotten that he once pardoned a sentry he found asleep at his post. If Wellington won the battle of Waterloo by military genius, so popular hearsay has urged that he commanded the Guards to charge 'La Grande Armee' in cockney terms. Around the almost sacred name of Alfred many and various are the old wives' tales, among which the story of his harp is not the least picturesque; it is one on which Chesterton expends a good deal of poetic energy.
From the gist of the poem it is evident that Alfred, in the course of his wanderings, came near to the White Horse, but as though for very sorrow--
'The great White Horse was grey.'
Down the hill the Danes came in headlong flight and carried Alfred off to their camp; his fame as a harpist had pierced the ears of the invaders:
'And hearing of his harp and skill, They dragged him to their play.'
The Danes might well laugh at the song of the king, but it was a laugh that was soon to be turned to weeping when the king had finished his song:
'And the king with harp on shoulder Stood up and ceased his song; And the owls moaned from the mighty trees, And the Danes laughed loud and long.'
There is in this poem a pleasant rhythm and a clearness of meaning that is absent from much good poetry. Chesterton has caught the wild romantic background of the time when the King of England could play a harp in the camp of his enemies; when he could, by a note, bring back the disheartened warriors to renew the fight; when he could be left to look after the cakes and be scolded when, like the English villages, they were burnt. One of the most popular of the legends is the one connected with Alfred and the woman of the forest. It has made Chesterton write some of his most charming verse.
And Alfred came to the door of a woman's cottage and there rested, with the promise that in return he would watch the cakes that they did not burn.
But--
'The good food fell upon the ash, And blackened instantly.'
The woman was naturally annoyed that this unknown tramp should let her cooking spoil:
'Screaming, the woman caught a cake Yet burning from the bar, And struck him suddenly on the face, Leaving a scarlet scar.'
The scar was on the king's brow, a scar that tens of thousands should follow to victory:
'A terrible harvest, ten by ten, As the wrath of the last red autumn--then When Christ reaps down the kings.'
In a preface to this poem, with regard to that part which deals with the battle of Enthandune, Chesterton says: 'I fancy that in fact Alfred's Wessex was of very mixed bloods; I have given a fictitious Roman, Celt, and Saxon a part in the glory of Enthandune.'
* * * * *
The battle of Enthandune is divided into three parts. The poetry is specially noticeable for the great harmony of the words with the subject of the lines; it is one of the great characteristics of Chesterton's poetry that he uses language that intimately expresses what he wants to describe. He can, in a few lines, describe the discipline of an army:
'And when they came to the open land They wheeled, deployed, and stood.'
It is perfect poetry concerning the machine-like movements of highly-trained troops.
The death of an earl that occurs in a moment of battle: we can almost see the blow, the quick change on the face from life to death; we can almost hear the death gurgle:
'Earl Harold, as in pain, Strove for a smile, put hand to head, Stumbled and suddenly fell dead, And the small white daisies all waxed red With blood out of his brain.'
Of the tremendous power of a charge, Chesterton can give us the meaning in two lines that might otherwise take a page of prose:
'Spears at the charge!' yelled Mark amain, 'Death to the gods of Death.'
Whether it be to victory or defeat, the last charge grips the imagination, just as the latest words of a great man are remembered long after he has turned to dust. The final charge of the Old Guard, the remnant of Napoleon's ill-fated army at Waterloo, the dying words of Nelson, these are the things that produce great poetry.
Some of the verses describing the last charge at Enthandune are the finest lines Chesterton has so far written. It will not be out of place to quote one or two of the best--the challenge of Alfred to his followers to make an effort against the dreaded Danes, at whose very name strong men would pale:
'Brothers-at-arms,' said Alfred, 'On this side lies the foe; Are slavery and starvation flowers, That you should pluck them so?'
Or the death of the Danish leader, who would have pierced Alfred through and through:
'Short time had shaggy Ogier To pull his lance in line-- He knew King Alfred's axe on high, He heard it rushing through the sky; He cowered beneath it with a cry-- It split him to the spine; And Alfred sprang over him dead, And blew the battle sign.'
The last part of the poem is that which gives an account of the scouring of the White Horse, in the years of peace:
'When the good king sat at home.'
But through everything the White Horse remained--
'Untouched except by the hand of Nature: The turf crawled and the fungus crept, And the little sorrel, while all men slept, Unwrought the work of man.'
'The Ballad of the White Horse' is in its way one of the best things Chesterton has done: it is a fine poem about a very picturesque piece of English legend, which may or may not be based on history. Poetry can, and very often does, fulfil a great patriotic mission in arousing interest in those distant times when Englishmen, with their backs to the wall, responded to the cry of Alfred, as they did when, centuries later, the hordes of Germans attempted to cut the knot of Haig's army.
For hundreds of years Alfred has been turned to dust, but the White Horse remains, a perpetual monument to the great days when England was invaded by the Danes. 'The Ballad of the White Horse' is a ballad worthy of the immortal horse that will remain centuries after the author of the poem has passed out of mortal sight.
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In an early volume of light verse Chesterton wrote of the kind of games that old men with beards would delight in. 'Greybeards at Play' is a delightful set of satirical verses in which the ardent philosopher confers a favour on Nature by being on intimate and patronising terms with her.
This dear old philosopher, with grey beard and presumably long nose and large spectacles, is full of admiration for the heavenly beings:
'I love to see the little stars All dancing to one tune; I think quite highly of the Sun, And kindly of the Moon.'
Coming to earth, this same philosopher is full of friendly relations with America, for--
'The great Niagara waterfall Is never shy with me.'
In the same volume Chesterton writes of the spread of aestheticism, and that the cult of the Soul had a terrible effect on trade:
'The Shopmen, when their souls were still, Declined to open shops-- And Cooks recorded frames of mind In sad and subtle chops.'
In a small volume of poems called 'Wine, Water, and Song,' we have some of the poems that appear in Chesterton's novels. They have a delightful air of brilliancy and satire, about dogs and grocers and that peculiar king of the Jews, Nebuchadnezzar, who, when he is spoken of by scholars, alters his name to Nebuchadrezzar. We have but room for one quotation, and the place of honour must be given to the epic of the grocer who, like many of other trades, makes a fortune by giving short weights:
'The Hell-Instructed Grocer Has a Temple made of Tin, And the Ruin of good innkeepers Is loudly urged therein; But now the sands are running out From sugar of a sort, The Grocer trembles, for his time, Just like his weight, is short.'
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The hymn that Mr. Chesterton has written, called 'O God of Earth and Altar,' is unfortunately so good and so entirely sensible that the clergy on the whole have not used it much; rather they prefer to sing of heaven with a golden floor and a gate of pearl, ignoring a really fine hymn that pictures God as a sensible Being and not a Lord Chief Justice either of sickly sentimentality or of the type of a Judge Jeffreys.
It must be said that to many people who know Chesterton he is first and foremost an essayist and lastly a poet. The reason is that he has written comparatively little serious poetry; this is, I think, rather a pity--not that quantity is always consistent with quality, but that in some way it may not be too much to say that Chesterton is the best poet of the day; and I do not forget that he has as contemporaries Alfred Noyes and Walter de la Mare.
The strong characteristic of his poetry, as I have said, is the wealth of language; to this must be added the exceedingly pleasant rhythm that runs as easily as a well-oiled bicycle. If Mr. Chesterton is not known to posterity as one of the leading poets of the twentieth century it will be because his prose is so well known that his poetry is rather crowded out.
_Chapter Seven_
THE PLAYWRIGHT
Nearly eight years ago all literary and dramatic London focused its eyes on a theatre that was known as the Little Theatre. On the night of November 7th the critics might have been seen making their way along John Street with just the faintest suspicion of mirth in their eyes.
The reason was that the most eccentric genius of the day had written a play, and it was to be produced that night, and had the name of MAGIC, a title that might indicate something that turned princes into wolves, or transported people on carpets to distant lands, or might be more simply a play that dealt with Magic in the sense that there really was such a thing.
The play was a success--I could see that it would be at the moment Mr. Bernard Shaw so forgot himself as to be interested in something he had not himself written. The Press was charmed with the play and went so far as to say, with a gross burlesque of Chesterton, that it was 'real phantasy and had soul.' Chesterton by his one produced play had earned the right to call himself a dramatic author, who could make the public shiver and think at the same time, an unusual combination.
I rather fancy that Magic is a theological argument, disguised in the form of a play, that relies for its effects on clever conversation, the moving of pictures, and a mysterious person who may have been a conjurer and may have also been a magician.
When I say that the play is really a theological one, I do not mean to say that it has anything to do with the Thirty-Nine Articles, the Validity of the Anglican Orders, or even the truth of the Virgin Birth; rather it is about an indefinable 'something' that is so simple that it is misunderstood by every one.
The play turns upon five people who are thrown together in a room that has a nasty habit of becoming ghostly at times.
The five people are a doctor who is a scientist, who does not believe in anything not material being scientific; a vicar who is a typical clergyman, who thoroughly believes in supernatural things until they are proved, when he becomes an agnostic; a young American who is a cad and a fool; a girl who believes in fairies and goes to Holy Communion, which is the one thing that depicts she has a certain amount of sense; a duke who ends every sentence with a quotation from Tennyson to Bernard Shaw.
These five people are influenced by a Pied Piper kind of fellow who calls himself a conjurer, and is rather too clever for the company.
Apparently the conjurer has been strolling about the garden when he meets Patricia, who thinks he can produce fairies. In due course the conjurer comes into the room, where he has encounters with the various occupants, who don't believe in his tricks; the conjurer is unlucky enough to meet the young American cad Morris Carleon, who is really quite rude to the conjurer and discovers (so he thinks) all the tricks except one in which the conjurer turns the red lamp at the doctor's gate blue. This so worries Morris that he goes up to his room with a chance of going mad.
The others beseech the conjurer to explain the trick; he does so, and says it is done by magic, which is the whole point of the play, that we are left to wonder whether it was by magic or by a natural phenomenon.
The conjurer gets the better of the parson, the Rev. Cyril Smith, who believes in a model public house and the Old Testament, and takes a good stipend for pretending to believe in the supernatural.
The result of the whole matter is magic, by which we presume the trick may have been done.
* * * * *
The play is in some ways a difficult one: we are left wondering whether or not Chesterton believes in magic; if he does, then the conjurer need not have been so upset that he had gained so much power of a psychic nature; if he does not, then the conjurer was a clever fraud or a brilliant hypnotist.
One thing is quite certain, Chesterton brings out the weaknesses of the dialectic of the parson and doctor in a remarkable way; he makes us realise that there are some things we really know nothing about; if lamps turn blue suddenly it may quite well be a 'Something' that may be magic and might be God or Satan; anyhow, it cannot be explained by an American young man; it is of the things that the clergy profess to believe in and very often do not.
It is, I think, undoubtedly a problem play, and I doubt very much if Chesterton knows what was the agency that did the trick, but I rather think that 'Magic' is a great play, not because of the situations, but rather because the more the play is studied the more difficult is it to say exactly what is the lesson of it.
Magic is called a phantastic comedy; it might well be called a phantastic tragedy.
_Chapter Eight_
THE NOVELIST
There is perhaps no word in the English language which is more elastic than the word novel as applied to what is commonly known as fiction. The word novel is used to describe stories that are as far apart as the Poles. Thus it is used to describe a classic by Thackeray or Dickens, or a clever love tale by Miss Dell, or a brilliantly outspoken sex tale by Miss Elinor Glyn, or a romance by Miss Corelli, or a tale of adventure by Joseph Conrad, or a very modern type of analytical novel by very modern writers who are a little bit young and a big bit old.
I do not think that it is an exaggeration to say that Chesterton as a novelist carries the art yet a step farther and has added elasticity to the word. It would, I think, be probably untrue to say that Chesterton is a popular novelist; he is much too unlike one to be so. That he is read by a wide public is not the same thing; he has not the following of the millions that Charles Garvice had, for the millions who understood him might find Chesterton difficult. Really Chesterton is read by a select number of people who would claim to be intellectual; very up-to-date clergymen rave about his catholicity, high-brow ladies of smart clubs delight in his knave whimsicalities, but the girl in the suburban train to Wimbledon passes by on the other side.
One of the characteristic features of Chesterton's novels is his clever selection of titles that are by their very nature fit to designate his original works. If in journalism nine-tenths of the importance of an article depends upon its title, it is equally true that the title of a novel is of the same import. Either a title should give some indication of the nature of the book, or it should be of the kind that makes us want to read it; this is the case with regard to the Chesterton novels, their designations are so phantastic that our curiosity is aroused. Thus 'The Man who was Thursday' gives no possible explanation of what it is about, but it does suggest that it is interesting to know about a man who was Thursday; 'The Flying Inn' may be a forecast of prohibition or it may be a romance of the time when inns shall fly to the ends of the earth; 'The Napoleon of Notting Hill' leads us to suppose that perhaps there was a hidden history of that part of London, that Notting Hill can boast of a past that makes it worthy of having been a station on the first London tube.
It is unsafe to prophesy any limit to the versatility of Chesterton, but it is improbable that he could write an ordinary novel; the reason is, I fancy, that he cannot write of the ordinary emotions with the ease that he can construct grotesque situations. This is why I have said that, as a novelist, Chesterton is not popular in the sense that he is read by the masses (that word that the Church always uses to indicate those who form the bulk of the community). As a novelist, Chesterton stands apart, not because he is better than contemporary writers of fiction, but because his books are unlike those of any one else.
I have taken Chesterton's most famous novels and have written a short survey of their character. They are not always easy to understand--sometimes they seem to indicate alternative points of view; they teem with pungent wit and shrewd observations, they are without doubt phantastic, they are in the true sense clever.
'THE NAPOLEON OF NOTTING HILL'
At the time of the publication of this book the critics with astounding frankness admitted that, while this was a fine book, they had difficulty in deciphering what it meant. One, now a well-known Fleet Street editor, went farther, and said that possibly the author himself did not know what he meant--a situation in which quite a number of authors have found themselves, especially when they read the reviews of their books.
'The Napoleon of Notting Hill' is not an easy book to understand: it may be a satire, it may be a serious book, it may be a prophecy, it may be a joke, it may even be a novel! I think that it is a little bit of a joke, in a degree serious--something of a satire, possibly a prophecy.
The main thing about the book is that a king is so unwise as to make a joke, and an obscure poet is more unwise in taking this Royal joke seriously. Many who have laughed at monarchical wit have found that their heads had an alarming trick of falling on Tower Hill.
In 'The Napoleon of Notting Hill' we are living a hundred years on, and we are to believe that London hasn't much changed; a certain respectable gentleman has been made a king for no special reason--a very good way of having a versatile monarchy and a selection of kings.
Not far off in the kingdom of Notting Hill there resides a poet who has written poems that no one reads. He is a romantic youth, and loves Notting Hill with the love of a Roman for Rome or of a Jew for Whitechapel. The new king, by way of a joke, suggests that it would be quite a good idea to take the various parts of London and restore them to a mediaeval dignity; thus 'Clapham should have a city guard, Wimbledon a city wall, Surbiton tolling a bell to raise its citizens.'