Next I turn to the page where men come to Alfred on the island of Athelney and beg him to become the ruler of all England. This gives Chesterton a chance to expound his anti-imperialism.
And Alfred in the orchard,
Among apples green and red,
With the little book in his bosom,
Looked at green leaves and said:
"When all philosophies shall fail,
This word alone shall fit;
That a sage feels too small for life,
And a fool too large for it.
"Asia and all imperial plains
Are all too little for a fool:
But for one man whose eyes can see,
The little island of Athelney
Is too large a land to rule.
* * * * * * *
"An island like a little book,
Full of a hundred tales,
Like the gilt page the good monks pen
That is all smaller than a wren,
Yet hath high towers, meteors and" men,
And suns and spouting whales.
"A land having a light in it,
In a river dark and fast,
An isle with utter, clearness lit,
Because a saint has stood in it,
Where flowers are flowers indeed and fit,
And trees are trees at last."
As his men clear the weeds from the White Horse that had ages before been cut upon the chalk bluff, Alfred has a vision of the day when the ancient symbol shall be again overgrown and forgotten and when a new and less manly kind of heathen than the Danes shall overrun England:
I know that weeds shall grow in it
Faster than man can burn:
And though they scatter now and go,
In some far century, sad and slow,
I have a vision, and I know
The heathen shall return.
They shall not come with war-ships,
They shall not waste with brands,
But books be all their eating,
And ink be on their hands.
* * * * * * *
The dear sun dwarfed of dreadful suns,
Like fiercer flowers on stalk,
Earth lost and little like a pea,
In high heaven's towering forestry
—These be the small weeds ye shall see
Crawl, covering the chalk.
* * * * * * *
By terror and the cruel tales
Of curse in bone and kin,
By weird and weakness winning,
Accursed from the beginning,
By detail of the sinning,
And denial of the sin:
By thought a crawling ruin,
By life a leaping mire,
By a broken heart in the breast of the world,
And the end of the world's desire:
By God and man dishonored,
By death and life made vain,
Know ye the old barbarian,
The barbarian come again.
When is great talk of trend and tide,
And wisdom and destiny,
Hail that undying heathen
That is sadder than the sea.
In this specification of "the marks of the Beast" we may recognize Chesterton's antipathies; materialism, commercialism, Darwinism, imperialism, cosmopolitanism, pacifism, and Socialism. He is haunted by the same nightmare as Samuel Butler, that the day may come when machines will master the world and men be merely their slaves. For relief he looks to a revolution like the French Revolution, only worse. Chesterton is like the Eton boys who, after a debate over woman suffrage, passed a unanimous resolution disapproving of the aim of the suffragettes but approving of their methods. The socialists say we must have a revolution, peaceful if possible. Chesterton would say, "we must have a revolution, bloody if possible." The guillotine, he says somewhere, had many sins to answer for, but, at least, there was nothing evolutionary about it. And he makes the English people say:
It may be we shall rise the last as Frenchmen rose the first.
Our wrath come after Russia's wrath and our wrath be the worst.
Like Hilaire Belloc and other Neo-Catholics, he manages somehow to combine an admiration for the French Revolution with a devotion to Catholicism. They are ardent advocates of democracy notwithstanding the very explicit condemnations of popular government by the Popes. They are more inclined toward syndicalism than Socialism and place their hopes in the peasant proprietorship instead of in the nationalized trust. It is an interesting novelty in the labor problem, for it cuts across the old classifications, and I hope it will have a chance to develop into something concrete. The similar movement in France, the Sillon of Marc Sangnier, was crushed out by a papal encyclical in 1912. Chesterton might be called an English Sillonist, and in a literal sense if we recall his essay on The Furrows in "Alarms and Discursions." Chesterton sometimes praises the achievements of modern science and industry, but always as ingenious toys. He is convinced that mankind in the mass will never take the city seriously.
When the rest of the world was looking for the advent of cosmopolitanism and the reign of peace, the earth lapped in universal law and all the local idiosyncrasies ironed out, wherein all obstacles to freedom of movement had been crushed out and one could buy a tourist ticket to Timbuktu with the same accommodation all along the route, Chesterton set his bugle to his lips and blew a fanfare of audacious challenge to the spirit of the times in the form of a nonsensical romance, "The Napoleon of Notting Hill." In this he carries particularism to an extreme, breaking up London again into warring wards, each with its own banner and livery, its gilds and folk ways. The book is inscribed, as we might expect, to his friend, Hilaire Belloc, and I quote part of the dedication as it sums up the message of the volume and is strangely prophetic:
For every tiny town or place
God made the stars especially:
Babies look up with owlish face
And see them tangled in a tree;
You saw a moon from Sussex Downs,
A Sussex moon, untraveled still.
I saw a moon that was the town's,
The largest lamp on Campden Hill.
Yes, Heaven is everywhere at home,
The big blue cap that always fits,
And so it is (be calm; they come
To goal at last, my wandering wits),
So it is with the heroic thing
This shall not end for the world's end,
And though the sullen engines swing,
Be you not much afraid, my friend.
This did not end by Nelson's urn
Where an immortal England sits—
Nor where your tall young men in turn
Drank death like wine at Austerlitz.
And when the pedants bade us mark
What cold mechanic happenings
Must come; our souls said in the dark,
"Belike; but there are likelier things."
Likelier across these flats afar,
These sulky levels smooth and free,
The drums shall crash a waltz of war
And Death shall dance with Liberty!
Likelier the barricades shall flare
Slaughter below and smoke above,
And death and hate and hell declare
That men have found a thing to love.[5]
Remember this was written in 1904, at a time when it was commonly thought that the last of the wars had been fought and the nations might disarm, for henceforth the Hague Court would hold sway; when the socialists were becoming opportunists and the anarchists had laid aside their bombs; when such scientists as Metchnikoff were saying that self-sacrifice and heroism of the fighting sort were antiquated virtues for which the peaceful and sanitary world of the future would have little use. Chesterton was wrong about the nature of the catastrophe. He was looking and, I fear, hoping for a social revolution, and that has not yet come although it seems now less improbable than it did then.