Part 5 (2/2)
[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.]
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