THE CAMP AND THE CATHEDRAL

IT MUST always be something of a problem how far the private amateur may venture merely to guess that the professional specialist is mistaken. On the other hand it is quite certain that the man who knows most about a thing is often quite wrong about it. He is often quite wrong in fact, and still more wrong in spirit. On the other hand, the fact that the learned man has lost humility is no reason why the unlearned man also should lose that humorous and healthy gift. On the whole, I think the test of the question is in the size and simplicity of the mistake. It depends on whether the scholar is blind to something because it is too small to be seen, or because it is too large to be seen. I cannot draw the learned man's attention to something recondite, for he knows far more of such obscure details than I do. But I may sometimes draw his attention to something obvious, for that is the sort of thing that the learned man has a way of falling over in the street.

History is the only hobby in which I have dabbled even in this tentative fashion; and it is to history that I should specially apply the test. I mean the test of whether the truth has been missed because it is small and hidden, or actually because it is big and plain. Cobbett, for instance, was an amateur historian in somewhat the same sense, though less amateurish than myself. And when he was right, as I think he generally was, it was because he had an eye for large and obvious things. His eye went across a great landscape like a bird, and was master of the lie of the land. Thus his broadest deduction was simply from the big churches in England, and especially from the very fact of their bigness. It was a fact filling the sky; a thing whose shadow lay at evening on the whole landscape. But it never seems to have occurred to anybody but Cobbett at that time, to ask whether a sparse remnant of ignorant savages were likely to have raised a sort of sacred tower of Babel to the stars, in half the hamlets of England.

The obscurantism of the Reformation, and the rationalists who were its heirs, was in this way quite unique. Nobody before or since ever kept a people quite so much in darkness as those who put out all the candles in the sixteenth century. In this, for instance, the anti-Catholic reaction in the sixteenth century was quite different from the first Catholic movement in the fourth or fifth century. The Early Christians had a great moral horror of the last phase of the great civilization of Rome; but they never attempted to pretend that it was not a great civilization, or that it had not been made by Rome. Their moral horror was in most matters justified; in some matters considerably exaggerated. But in its wildest exaggerations of fanaticism, it never talks as if the heathen had not built bridges or produced poetry. They did not call the classical architecture the Vandal architecture, as if it had been built only by the barbarians who destroyed it. Yet that would have been a parallel to the very word `Gothic' which we are still compelled by custom to use. The medieval world did not talk about Plato and Cicero as fools occupied with futilities; yet that is exactly how a more modern world talked of the philosophy of Aquinas and sometimes even of the purely philosophic parts of Dante. The Christians recognized an awful spiritual chasm dividing them from their great ancestors; but they recognized that their ancestors were great. At no moment in all those two thousand years was the legend lost that Virgil was something magnificent, whether as a magician in the Dark Ages or a model classic in the Middle Ages. In religion and morals there had indeed been a shuddering recoil; but it was a recoil from over civilization, not a complacent contempt for savagery. They thought the Coliseum had been the arena of bestial abominations; of beasts, employed by men in a spirit too base to be called beastly; and so it had. But they did not think the Coliseum had been made by beasts; or look at its labyrinth of arches with contemptuous curiosity, as at the rude instinctive architecture of an anthill. In all that mixture of regret and pain and fascination, with which paganism has haunted the Christian centuries, there was never a touch of the innocent vulgarity with which even the Victorians sometimes talked of monks as if they were monkeys.

Now the lifting of this load of obscurantism was a thing largely done by the light of nature, by men like William Cobbett or William Morris. And the light of nature showed them very simple and solid things like the large churches in the English countrysides. These things are the unanswerable arguments of the amateur. These are the big guns that he can really bring up in order to outflank the specialist. Constitutional historians like Hume and Hallam and Robertson might have read many things that the adventurous amateur could not read, but it was impossible to pretend that he could not have access to his own huge empty parish church. It required no spectacles to see a church spire; and the stones of Winchester needed no interpreter to translate them from the Latin. These facts were soon found sufficient, to anyone who would use his senses; and it became more and more selfevident that men had been about some very big business in medieval times. The researches of later and more learned scholars confirmed the random commonsense of Cobbett or Morris. But ignorant men had originally made the right guess; and made it merely because they refused to explain away a mountain, or ignore the presence of a whale.

I have remarked that nobody ever tried to do with Roman remains what was once done with Gothic remains. I mean the attempt to treat them not merely as ruins but as rudiments. I mean the attempt to look at the stone arches as we look at stone hatchets, or regard carved pillars as we regard chipped flints. Nobody ever condescended to heathen architecture, as they condescended to Christian architecture. As a matter of fact it is far more impossible for us to build a Gothic abbey than a Roman aqueduct. The engineering work of the pagan empire does in many ways resemble the works of more modern times. It resembles them largely because the method is scientific. It resembles them still more because the labour is servile. You could build a Roman aqueduct and improve on a Roman aqueduct with scientific appliances. But you cannot build a Gothic cathedral with servile labour. People who want to work in that way must put up with the Pyramids and the Eiffel Tower. And this brings me to a final consideration, in this matter of Roman and medieval remains, which has often intrigued and attracted me as an amateur in historical guesswork. It is a yet larger though somewhat looser application of the same principle, that the things that are hid from the wise and understanding are the things that are too large for them to see.

I have often wondered whether the vastness and vitality of the legends that descend from the Dark Ages, such as the legends of King Arthur and the Round Table, were due to this comparative continuity between the last strength of the Empire and the first strength of the Church. I mean that there may have been a moment, even in Britain, when that majesty of the old pagan civilization still stood unchanged, Save that it was no longer pagan. The combination of the old pride in being Roman with the new pride in being Christian may have created a militant morality really not unlike its later form of medieval chivalry. In other words, the popular tradition may not be so far wrong when it talks of some dim fighter in the fifth century as a knight. It may not be so far wrong when it talks of the table where those fighters feasted as the original model of knighthood. It is only by a sort of symbol that we clothe the body of that British king in thirteenth century armour; but it may be something more than a symbol which clothes his spirit with the thirteenth century conception of arms. If ever history did repeat itself, the mood of the first Crusaders who fought with the Saracens might really very well have repeated, as in a mirror, the mood of the last baptized Romans and Romanized Britons who fought with the Saxons. It is really a historical fallacy to say that the courtliness and polish of Sir Lancelot would not have existed in that barbarous time. Courtliness and polish are exactly the things that would have existed in one of the last of the Romanized Christians in comparison with his barbarous time. It is a blunder to say that the virginity and the vision of Sir Galahad are a later romantic fiction added to a half-heathen struggle. Virginity and visions are exactly the ideas that would have shone among the last champions of a Catholic culture in a half-heathen struggle. In this matter of Arthurian legend, I am disposed to suspect that the romantic view is really the realistic view, and the right view. If others doubt it, it will not be because of any realistic arguments of history against it. It will be because others do not feel as I do the enormous argument from the scale of popular stories; the sense that a story we have all heard from childhood is something solid and colossal, like a Gothic cathedral or a Roman camp.