Alfred the Great (849-901)
ALFRED OF WESSEX, one of the first four or five great men of the Dark Ages, was born in Wantage about the middle of the ninth century, probably in 849. He comes on the field of history, then almost continuously a field of battle, from under the shadow of the shield of Ethelred, his elder brother, already at war with the invading Danes; and there is always something about him indescribably humble and handy, like one who unpretentiously hammers away at an inherited task; a quality not at all inconsistent, but rather specially consistent, with his strong twist of personal originality. All his house was devoted to the Catholic faith; but Alfred was a sort of accident, who added to that devotion a dexterity and military instinct which saved it, apparently against all the chances of war. Thus it was he, while still a cadet, who really won the Battle of Ashdown against the barbarians, while his royal brother was praying in his tent; and it is supremely typical of the time that the chronicler records the victory and says that it was doubtless due to the prayers of Ethelred. Various victories and defeats followed; until the whole barbarian invasion gathered itself into one vast wave under Guthrum out of East Anglia and swept the West Country from end to end like a sea, leaving Alfred clinging, as it were, to an islet in the pool of Athelney, and waiting for better times. He gradually gathered round him the remnants of the Christian population, and in the spring of 878 appeared suddenly with an army before the Danish camp at Ethandune, possibly Edington; smashed in their palisades, captured their royal leader and his raven banner, and imposed on him the famous treaty of Wedmore, by which he and his people were baptised and withdrew their forces from Wessex, retaining only lands farther to the north and east. The rest of the story is sufficiently familiar; fresh outbreaks among the barbarians led to his extending his power over London and establishing a small navy in the Channel; and even obtaining a certain indefinite suzerainty over the north. But his best work was internal rather than external; and perhaps the best of all was the part that was purely educational. He clarified and codified the best laws of the West Saxon traditions; but he became a more important sort of legislator in the moral sphere when he translated Boethius for his people, with very characteristic additions of his own; and so brought into England the full tradition of Europe; the tradition of the Christian Creed resting upon the Pagan culture. He had been troubled all his life with a recurrent and rather mysterious disease; and he died at the early age of fifty-two, in the first year of the new century. The night of the barbarian peril was already over, and he died in the dawn.
A thousand years of thanks and praise have rightly concentrated upon Alfred a light of unique and universal admiration. From the first words of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle to the last wireless messages of the Anglo-Saxon clubs and dinners in Boston or Philadelphia, there has been a chiming unanimity, a chain of polite or popular compliment, in which there is actually no break at all. A Scottish rationalist like Hume, a romantic Tory like Scott, a Voltairean sceptic like Gibbon, a prudent Catholic like Lingard, an imprudent pro-Catholic like Cobbett, a practical and (spiritually) rather stupid Protestant like Macaulay, would all at any moment have testified to the solid and unquestioned moral reputation of Alfred. Men by the modern time had come to call him The Great; which was perhaps the only really true thing they knew about him. Everybody agreed to call him Great; and nothing perhaps has so completely obscured his greatness. He is one of two or three men who have been nearly obliterated by praise.
It would have been better for him, in the long run, or at least for his significance, if he had happened to be a cleric like Dunstan, that other maker of England in the Dark Ages; and so become, for a few foolish centuries, the butt of all the ravings of the anti-clerical superstition. Then there would have been subsequently, or eventually, a sort of excitement in digging him up from among the dead, and proving that he was not so unmistakably among the damned; the sort of pleasure felt by Ruskin or Rossetti in rediscovering medieval beauty in what had always been counted medizval ugliness. There would have been a thrill for the first Victorian thinker who maintained the paradox that a saint could be a good man. His real personality would probably be more vivid to us if he had been denounced by Hume and derided by Gibbon, and his real virtues dramatically rediscovered by Maitland or by Gasquet. It would have been better for him, in the same sense if he had lived a few centuries earlier, when the night of barbarism was denser, as did the mysterious Arthur; so that sceptics might turn him into a myth and romancers into a romance. Then he, too, might have lingered in florid old French love stories merely as a jealous husband; until modern research re-established him for the first time as a just ruler. In that case, again, the good might have been interred with his bones in the ninth century and never dug up again till the nineteenth. The disclosing and cleansing of such sacred relics might almost have awakened a part of the interest accorded to the chips off the skeleton of a hypothetical ape. Or again, it might have been better for him in this sense if he had been a foreigner, even a great foreigner like Charlemagne; who from the first, however much he was admired, aroused that insular subconscious suspicion of any attempt to reunite Europe; hating it if it excluded England; hating it more if it included England. So, when our national mood was narrowest, we hated in Austria even the flat and fading shadow of the Holy Roman Empire; and in Napoleon hated more vividly the return of the Romans. Then, once more, there might have been a belated understanding after a long misunderstanding; just as many are doing justice to the Austrian system after it has been destroyed; and there are even signs of a faint effort to be fair to Napoleon. But Alfred was picked out from the first by converging and unwavering beams of the limelight of conventional laudation; he stands in a dazzling light that hides him like darkness; he is covered with a sort of white radiance that has all the effect of whitewash, and which has hidden from generations of the readers of our history the least notion of the twilight in which he really wandered and the light by which he was really led.
Perhaps the best stage of the story was that of the old chronicles, which duly and dully recorded good and bad kings and very correctly recorded Alfred among the good. After that came a more narrow national motive, natural enough, but not exactly impartial, which presented Alfred as the inventor of the British Navy and the University of Oxford; and for twopence would have presented him as the inventor of the Union Jack and the Boat Race. But the patriotic partisanship which expressed the natural pride of a nation was a far finer and healthier thing than that queer and pedantic fashion which proclaimed only the pride of a race. Alfred really was in many ways extremely English, as we shall observe later; but, anyhow, he certainly was born in the British Isles and might be said to stand at the beginning of the British Empire. But, from the way the Victorian historians talked about Teutons and Saxons and the Germanic institutions, one might really suppose that Alfred was standing at the beginning of the German Empire. The whole thing was founded on a false conception of history; which supposed such a period to be the beginning of a glorious German or Germanic expansion, instead of the end and ebb of the old Roman expansion. Because it happens to be the beginning of our particular national history it is treated as if it were the morning of the world. The men who lived in that time felt it as the evening of the world; not to say the end of the world. And the greatest of the men who lived in that time certainly cannot be understood if that fact is not understood. But in the familiar picture everything is accentuated that suggests only the new Nordic adventure. King Alfred confronts us, blonde and bland, with the battle-axe and helmet of a Viking, but the face of a rather sleepy Quaker; ready to found Christianity, cricket, the AngloSaxon race, the Anglo-American alliance, the Boy Scouts or anything else that may require a friendly person in the ninth century to found it. Now, nobody in the ninth century, however friendly, felt in the least like that. It was not even anything so bright as the beginning of barbarism; it was, to all appearance, simply the end of civilisation. In some ways, and especially in some places, it was even the end of over-civilisation. The importance of Boethius is symbolic; the last of the old sages; the scholarly servant who already has a savage master. But Alfred was not himself of the type that indicates merely a lusty or even a normal time. He was as brave as a lion and as wary as a wild fox; but he had nothing whatever of the serenity and solidity that makes up the perfect ideal of the Blonde Beast. He was an original as well as an origin. There is something even of the eccentric about him, evidently catching the memories of men when they speak of his speeches and actions; his abrupt and casual confession of mortal sins in his youth, long after they had doubtless been normally absolved; his abstractions and absences, due probably to the unknown disease that struck him on his wedding-day; presumably something convulsive or epileptic; anyhow, something isolating him from mere social routine. His outlook also was individual rather than racial or national; his additions to Boethius show how vividly he understood the vital issue of his age. ”I say, as do all Christian men, that it is a Divine Providence that rules, and not Fate.” Then, even more than at most times, the fight with heathenism was the fight with fatalism. It was all century it was very doubtful whether there ever would be any Western civilisation at all. It was quite probable that the wild Western lands would be left for dead and Continental culture turn eastward to Byzantium and Asia; with what consequences none can say. And if there had never been any monasteries or camps or cathedrals, there would certainly never have been any shops or hotels or petrol-stations. But I doubt if anybody but myself was at that moment looking at the statue, or even realising the fact. Still, the statues are still standing in Wantage and Winchester; unless they have been since removed for the convenience of motorists.
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