But the Great War has given an irresistible impulse to the movement toward particularism as against cosmopolitanism. Whether we like it or not, we must admit that the tide has turned in the other direction and that it will be many years, perhaps more than one generation, before there will be the freedom of trade, intercourse, and migration that prevailed at the beginning of the twentieth century. Even England has abandoned free trade, and every country will hereafter strive to secure economic independence by developing its own resources. Even before the war there was a tendency toward the sort of local differentiation of which Chesterton gave a fantastic forecast in "The Napoleon of Notting Hill." This tendency manifested itself in a variety of ways; in the cultivation of local industries, the revival of folk dances and historic costumes, in pageantry and community celebrations, in the interest in town history and in the struggle to reëstablish disappearing languages, like Gaelic, Czech, and Ruthenian.
From Chesterton's latest book devoted to the crimes of Germany, and characteristically entitled "The Crimes of England",[6] we can see that it is the primitive little peasant kingdom of Montenegro that he most admires and the machine-like efficiency of the German empire that he most abhors. Montenegro, since he wrote this volume, has been overwhelmed by the tide of war, but probably Chesterton has faith to believe that it will reappear like Ararat when the waters subside. This faith he expressed in the poem, "The March of the Black Mountain", written during the Balkan war which Montenegro initiated by a single-handed attack upon the Turk:
But men shall remember the Mountain,
Though it fall down like a tree,
They shall see the sign of the Mountain
Faith cast into the sea;
Though the crooked swords overcome it
And the Crooked Moon ride free,
When the Mountain comes to Mahomet
It has more life than he.
Chesterton has a better right to appear now as the champion of small nationalities than some other English authors we could name, for he first entered the lists of public life to break a lance in defense of the Boers at a time when it was most unpopular if not dangerous to say a word in their favor. He refers to these youthful days in his "Song of Defeat", published some ten years afterward. I quote part of one stanza:
I dream of the days when work was scrappy,
And rare in our pockets the mark of the mint:
When we were angry and poor and happy,
And proud of seeing our names in print.
For so they conquered and-so we scattered,
When the Devil rode and his dogs smelt gold,
And the peace of a harmless folk was shattered,
When I was twenty and odd years old.
When mongrel men that the market classes,
Had slimy hands on England's rod
And sword in hand upon Afric's passes
Her last Republic cried to God![7]
One of his youthful dreams was to see a reunion of the United States and England which he imagined would come about in some great foreign war. But by 1905, when he included the poem on "The Anglo-Saxon Alliance" in a volume,[8] he had lost faith in such ethnic generalities as the Anglo-Saxon race, so he explains in his preface:
I have come to see that our hopes of brotherhood with America are the same in kind as our hopes of brotherhood with any other of the great independent nations of Christendom. And a very small study of history was sufficient to show me that the American nation, which-is a hundred years old, is at least fifty years older than the Anglo-Saxon race.
But the poem, both because he wrote it and because he repudiated it, has an especial interest now when American sympathy with England is stronger than ever before, the traditional hostility has been largely swept away, and there is talk of joining England in this bloodiest of all wars.
This is the weird of a world-old folk,
That not till the last link breaks
Not till the night is blackest,
The blood of Hengist wakes.
When the sun is black in heaven,
The moon as blood above,
And the earth is full of hatred,
This people tells its love.
In change, eclipse and peril,
Under the whole world's scorn,
By blood and death and darkness
The Saxon peace is sworn;
That all our fruit be gathered,
And all our race take hands,
And the sea be a Saxon river
That runs through Saxon lands.
* * * * * * *
Deep grows the hate of kindred.
Its roots take hold on hell;
No peace or praise can heal it,
But a stranger heals it well.
Seas shall be red as sunsets,
And kings' bones float as foam,
And heaven be dark with vultures,
The night our son comes home.
In some respects we should expect Chesterton to go better in verse than in prose. He thinks in metaphors and pictures, vivid, fantastic, and colorful. The peculiarities of his prose style that grate upon the taste of some readers, such as the repetition of the same words, the alliteration, the unqualified assertion of half truths, the queer rhythms, the verbal tricks, and the superabundance of tropes, are by tradition permissible in poetry and so arouse no resentment.