To speak in the one breath of mythos (or myth) and poetry can easily cause confusion, for they are not the same thing; yet, if done carefully, it can help us focus on their compatibility and harmony without our losing a sense of the identity of each. This strategy can tell us a good bit about the voice of the poet in question and how this relates to his larger perspectives. These are admittedly broad-ranging interests, and, when meant to relate to The Ballad of the White Horse and to its author, G. K. Chesterton, admittedly ambitious for our limited space here. At any rate, my claim in this paper is that The Ballad is a substantive poetic statement of Chesterton's pervasive myth, which asserts the importance of the Christian life of faith and hope in the creation and the redemption as the center of truly human values and hence of a vital human culture. Let me begin, then, by clarifying some words and ideas that matter much in our discussion, and in this way try to set it in proper context.

Myth in real life is usually taken as an intuitive statement in narrative form of the values a people live by. It is something of a philosophy, in a generic and non-systematic sense, or what is sometimes called an anthropology. It was in its richest form in prehistoric primitive societies: (1) emotively intuitive in its perception, (2) social or corporate in assessing life's values, (3) cosmic in scope, (4) numinous in its pervasive reach, and (5) generating a real-life commitment to the values expressed. In all this it asserted a sense of mystery, a sense of reality's being larger and richer than we can account for.

Such myth and the consciousness that goes with it have long since passed from our scene, though they are still extant among contemporary primitive peoples in stark contrast to our dominant and merely discursive and matter-of-fact present cultures. In fact, among us today the word myth frequently tends to evoke the bogus, rationalistic sense of not being factually true. A further use, almost as negligible, refers to what is popularly called one's “image,” in great part the product of the advertizing industry and the media. Neither of these is of direct interest to us here. Though our consciousness has significantly and quite understandably changed since primitive humanity, we still have place for a habitual intuitive assessment of our values, and we find myth in its substantive sense alive and effective at least in certain religious and patriotic forms, including their ritual expressions, where these values are genuinely appreciated. For all the mutations the centuries have witnessed, the basic instinct for genuine myth in a broad sense still survives. Two examples can be found in legend and in the heroic tale as rallying centers of a people's values and heritage. This, it seems clear, is well verified in what Chesterton accepts and develops in poetic fashion in The Ballad. While King Alfred's immediate concerns are English and for the defense of his land, by their very nature they are as broad as the Christian tradition, especially as realized in Europe, once called with vigorous meaning Christendom. The word signified a life, culture, and civilization growing out of the Christian faith, as historically yet mysteriously developed in the early centuries of the West, of which Alfred was a part.

An indication that the poem's theme has its source for Chesterton in the myth of Alfred as a myth of legend and heroic tale can be found in his “Prefatory Note” to The Ballad.¹Tradition and popular legend, which he sees as more vital than merely factual history, are indeed myth for him. The poem:

is meant to emphasize tradition rather than history. King Alfred is not a legend in the sense that King Arthur may be [b]ut … in this broader and more human sense, that the legends are the most important things about him.

The cult of Alfred was a popular cult, from the darkness of the ninth century to the deepening twilight of the twentieth. It is wholly as a popular legend that I deal with him here. (Crown 1)

Then the Christian dimension transforms the myth's national qualities:

Alfred has come down to us in the best way … because he fought for the Christian civilization against the heathen nihilism. (Crown 2)

Chesterton's myth of Alfred in The Ballad, which is clearly Chesterton's own both here and elsewhere, is essentially and eminently Christian. It is that of a man of Christian faith and hope in the face of the challenge of life, with a mighty sense of wonder at the realities of the creation and the redemption, which make special sense of the human scene without robbing it of its native character. The author shows a Christian optimism, not edenic but hard-headedly realistic, for the all-important salvation and for the culture that derives from its concerns and is its temporal support.² What all this implies for a Christian humanism would take books to develop; we shall see some of this in our reading of the poem in a moment.

Specifically this myth in being Christian imitates and reflects the paschal mystery of Christ's death and resurrection, which, as I have shown elsewhere, frequently expresses the life of the Christian on earth and the pattern of the Christian imagination dealing with it (Boyd, “Christian Imaginative Patterns” 6-7). Briefly for our purposes we recall that St. Paul refers to Christ's redemptive act of death and resurrection as in no way separable, not an ordeal with a reward attached, but as a single unit. The risen Christ is not just the term of his dying but its sum and its crown, the goal that set the entire action and towards which it moved from the beginning. His wounds were glorious in his rising, because emerging victory burned in his wounds as he died. Paul stresses that the significant Christian life imitates and participates in this action, from baptism, through life's struggles, to the victory of dying in Christ. And the Christian imagination in its own order presents the same action in art. At the substantive level its action is neither comic nor tragic and hence not ironic, that is, not showing one's expectations of one reality or its issue being replaced by another. Rather the paschal action and its imitation are essentially paradoxical, revealing the coexistence of two realities, of the divine and the human, of grace and nature, of the power and wisdom of God made manifest in Christ and all his work, that incorporate the values of this world and the next in the redeeming Christ. Hence, the action is single in purpose and in form, paradoxical rather than ironic.³

The Ballad manifests this pattern in its structure and in local texture. Alfred does not actually die, as do many of his followers, but his victory both real and symbolic must pay its price. “‘Man shall not taste of victory / Till he throws his sword away’” (V: 263-64), Alfred's words about Colan are true of himself as well. The grain of wheat must die. The conflict of good and evil, of Christian and heathen values, has issue in the same manner. At every turn the pattern of Christian paradox as the price and substance of Christian life and its values is eminently in evidence.

We may now consider how real-life myth differs from the use of myth in poetry. One telling way is to note how the attitude in author, participant, and audience differs in the two forms, how the poet's voice, an actor's involvement, and the audience's assent frequently diverge from their analogues in a real-life situation of myth. An author may assume one or many personae in the course of his composition, which do not necessarily or per se represent his convictions. The actor presenting Othello does not actually kill his Desdemona every night, given his respect for conscience and the law. You and I may strongly differ from Yeats's real-life personal myth of The Vision or from the myth of Housman's pessimism, and yet be genuinely enriched by their poetic rendering of ideas they hold. Yet what is at stake is not a matter of illusion or escape or some hollow view of the poetic art as simply entertaining. There is an important distinction between real-life and aesthetic intention, involvement, and assent; both kinds when genuine are of human value.

The basic difference lies in the new, imaginative insights into the material at stake, generated in the art structure itself, and this is because of the creative response of the poet, who is a maker, energizing his work and the themes it achieves. These themes, though analogous to his real-life myth or philosophy, offer richer vistas for contemplation of his subject matter by his creative interpretation of it. Creative here means not only something new in insight but something that has come about through the making or forming power given to the art structure by the poet. Philip Wheelwright puts the difference in these words—he is speaking here of philosophy, which for our purposes is the equivalent of myth:

A poem whose meaningful utterances were confined strictly to general propositions in their abstract character would be little more than a didactic tract, and any concrete details which it might employ would function as allegory rather than as poetic symbolism. … Where a poem succeeds in conveying a specific philosophy and in being good poetry at the same time, this combination is mainly a result of its employing language in such a way as to generate implicit insights, adumbrated by poetic rather than logical means, so as to deepen and enliven the explicit teachings that furnish the scenario of the poem. (615, emphasis mine)

Later he cites Eliot with approval saying that, though Dante uses Aquinas's philosophical and theological vision, the Commedia is constructed according to a “logic of sensibility” representing “a complete scale of the depth and height of human emotion,” that is, the intuitional power of poetry, working through the fresh energy of its images. The real-life myth must be thus creatively transformed into the structure of the poem, which, working on its own terms, generates its proper meaning.

If real-life myth and poetry thus differ, it is also true that they are similar, and this is especially true for an intuitive realist such as Chesterton. Though this claim may seem to be contradictory, it is really asserting the positive analogy between the two and closing in on how Chesterton's real-life beliefs can influence the central theme of his poem. His realistic grasp of his materials is essentially poetic in image, sound, and language, and hence is open to the contemplative view of all, whether or not they are in personal agreement with him. His poetic persona, though genuine, is more outward-going than those of many poets of this and the last century. At root it bespeaks a sensibility of immediacy to things and of wonder at them, what Aristotle and Aquinas thought of as the starting point, the essentially human occupation of contemplation, which Heraclitus happily described as “listening to the essence of things” (Pieper 95, 88, 33). While in real life an author may disagree with the views of a persona he presents, he may also agree with it; and with the realist this is usually the case.⁴ The difference between one's philosophical view and one's poetic persona is essentially between ways of perceiving and expressing, not per se between the specifics or “contents” of the points of view. Chesterton's poetic voice is rooted in his deep Christian realism without in any way ceasing to be poetic, of which the poem itself is the ultimate proof. If we revert for a moment to our title, “Christian Mythos as Theme in Chesterton's The Ballad of the White Horse,” the intrinsic analogy of myth in the two forms, especially for a realist, should become clear. I use the Greek morpheme mythos deliberately (I hope not stuffily!) in the modern heightening or isolating sense to represent this analogy. To the Greeks mythos meant myth but also theme and purpose, and for Aristotle in particular it meant the plot of a play, based usually on real-life myth, as the artistic source of a play's theme.

At this point I would like to add that The Ballad is good and substantive poetry, a claim best tested by its epic sweep and by its local texture, to both of which we shall turn in a moment. Surely it is sustained as art, not an easy achievement for a ballad of more than a hundred pages, and especially for one that champions the point of view it does, anachronistic as it is for our time, and healthily such; yet it is very rare, even in the long battle scenes in three of its eight books, that his performance is at the expense of art. The Ballad is surely his best poetry and, more important, it is the best poetic statement of his own comprehensive view of things, of what in so many volumes he labored to say about so many matters. Then too, in that inclusive sense of the word poet, easily open to abuse, yet just as easily rightly understood, in all his efforts I think Chesterton was primarily a poet. These are added reasons that The Ballad stand firmly as the expression of his personal myth poetically achieved.

We now turn to the second part of our paper, to a detailed reading of the poem. So much of it is eminently quotable that it would take all day to remind ourselves of this. But we shall try to show in some detail how our theoretical claims thus far are verified.

“DEDICATION”

The sweep of the “Dedication” of ninety-four lines starts with a glance at the prehistoric origins of the poem's materials: “Of great limbs gone to chaos, / A great face turned to night—” (1-2). Then via a brief reference to “seven sunken Englands” (6) it focuses on Alfred and his struggle with the Danes to found a Christian civilization “Too English to be true” (28). The poem is dedicated to Frances Chesterton, Gilbert's wife, with whom he visited Somersetshire, the land of this Westland king: “Your face, that is a wandering home, / A flying home for me” (75-76), and who helped bring Gilbert to a serious conviction and practice of Christianity, which from then on became his ultimate perspective, the point of view pervasive of this poem.

Lady, by one light only
We look from Alfred's eyes,
We know he saw athwart the wreck
The sign that hangs about your neck,
Where One more than Melchizedek
Is dead and never dies.
Therefore I bring these rhymes to you,
Who brought the cross to me,
Since on you flaming without flaw
I saw the sign that Guthrum saw
When he let break his ships of awe,
And laid peace on the sea.

(47-58)

The genuinely romantic mood of his love for Frances, and somewhat in a nineteenth-century sense of the word, Chesterton's romantic expression of his ideals, which he finds so rare these days in the welter of modern paganism: “the silent earthquake lands, / Wide as a waste is wide” (77-78), are at root intuitively realistic. His perspective, whether in myth, romance, fantasy, even in Christian apocalyptic, or sheer clowning, is never far from his Christian realism we have been speaking of, to characterize his truly ultimate assertion. This, I think, is true in all he says in this poem or elsewhere.⁵

“BOOK I: THE VISION OF THE KING”

The poem proper begins by drawing attention to its central symbol, the White Horse. It is the image of a horse cut out of the grass, about a football field in length, on a hillside of white stone or chalk, prehistoric in origin, from “Before the gods that made the gods” (I: 1). Chesterton is referring from among others in England to the horse at Effington in Berkshire, overlooking the battlefield of Ethandune, featured towards the end of the poem (Crown 144). Whatever its original significance and purpose, in The Ballad the White Horse stands for civilization, which needs constant human attention in order to survive, here the cutting of the grass to keep the image clear, sharp and white. Behind this is the goodness of creation in the full Christian view, as first indicated in the Book of Genesis, and the redemption with its message of salvation and its Pauline transformation of all things in Christ. The struggle to keep the horse clear thus partakes in the paschal action spoken of earlier. Alfred's love of the land blends throughout the poem with his islander's sense of being at home there—“This little land I know” (I: 193)—and being safe from the invasions from the sea, which bring in the Northmen in hordes:

The Northmen came about our land
A Christless chivalry:
Who knew not of the arch or pen,
Great, beautiful, half-witted men
From the sunrise and the sea.
Misshapen ships stood on the deep
Full of strange gold and fire,
And hairy men, as huge as sin,
With hornèd heads, came wading in
Through the long, low sea-mire.

(I: 81-90)

In his vision of the Lady in this book he is reminded of hard times to come: “‘the sky grows darker yet / And the sea rises higher’” (I: 256-57). Hence the sea in this poem is generally a symbol of hostility, yet not without exception. For example, when Alfred goes gathering his chiefs for battle, we are told:

In the slopes away to the western bays,
Where blows not ever a tree,
He washed his soul in the west wind
And his body in the sea.

(II: 5-8)

Yet with a variety of nuance and emphasis throughout the poem the White Horse and the land are opposed to the sea, goodness to evil, Christian values and civilization to paganism old and new, the blind chaos of “the gods that made the gods” (I: 1) and “Pride and a little scratching pen” (“Dedication” 80) of our own day.

We then find Alfred in an “hour of panting peace” (I: 77), defeated by the invaders, a true metonym of all of Christendom in Europe of the ninth century, struggling to be born. His part in the struggle begins with a vision of Mary, the Mother of God, world-shaking in significance yet in utter simplicity:

She stood and stroked the tall live grass
As a man strokes his steed.
Her face was like an open word
When brave men speak and choose,
The very colours of her coat
Were better than good news.

(I: 166-71)

Alfred casts at her feet an ancestral jewel from his battered armor, and she reveals to him the mysterious nature of the Christian life and, inside this, the need to struggle once again against huge odds. Alfred says he does not seek to know the secrets of heaven but only the simple future of his life on earth: “‘if our hearts shall break with bliss, / Seeing the stranger go?’” (I: 195-96). Mary, who pondered the revelation in her heart (Luke 2: 19), answers:

“The gates of heaven are lightly locked,
We do not guard our gain,
The heaviest hind may easily
Come silently and suddenly
Upon me in a lane.
“And any little maid that walks
In good thoughts apart,
May break the guard of the Three Kings
And see the dear and dreadful things
I hid within my heart.
“The meanest man in grey fields gone
Behind the set of sun,
Heareth between star and other star,
Through the door of the darkness fallen ajar,
The council, eldest of things that are,
The talk of the Three in One.”

(I: 209-24)

Rather, man's great test in faith and hope is to accept God's providence regarding the things of earth, especially the outcome of his efforts: “‘But if he fail or if he win / To no good man is told’” (I: 229-30). Eastern magic does not work; it is the complete antithesis of the Christian religion:

“The men of the East may search the scrolls
For sure fates and fame,
But the men that drink the blood of God
Go singing to their shame.”

(I: 235-38)⁶

Alfred's struggle will mirror the paschal mystery—in Mary's words:

“I tell you naught for your comfort,
Yea, naught for your desire,
Save that the sky grows darker yet
And the sea rises higher.
“Night shall be thrice night over you,
And heaven an iron cope.
Do you have joy without a cause,
Yea, faith without a hope?”

(I: 254-61)

With this she is silent and vanishes, but the joy with its cause and the faith with its driving hope are enough for Alfred, and the venture begins.

“BOOK II: THE GATHERING OF THE CHIEFS”

Alfred's paradoxical quest now cuts across the swath of European history and culture, and the fusion of the two is Christendom of the time and is the source of much that Chesterton prized as Christian European culture but which he regretted to see on its wane. In gathering the fictional Eldred, Mark, and Colan he was blending the Anglo-Saxon, and through it much of its Germanic origins, with the Mediterranean and the Celtic elements of this impressive tradition. All three were Christian—they “made the Christian sign” (II: 225)—yet each stood for qualitative differences in the blend.

Eldred the Franklin was massive of body and especially of hearty good nature, reminiscent of Chaucer's Franklin, the patron of English hospitality—“It snewed in his hous of mete and drynke”—and reminiscent too of the long English tradition of good feasting, so often met in literature and history, a thing Chesterton cherished no little bit, himself too so large of body and of heart.

A mighty man was Eldred,
A bulk for casks to fill,
His face a dreaming furnace,
His body a walking hill.

(II: 42-45)

But, as was Alfred, Eldred was discouraged by past defeats and was unwilling to go off to battle again: “‘Come not to me, King Alfred, / Save always for the ale’” (II: 52-53). It took something transcending all this to have him change his mind. Alfred's answer, which is substantially what he later says to his other chiefs, recalls his own experience already seen:

“Out of the mouth of the Mother of God
Like a little word come I;
For I go gathering Christian men
From sunken paving and ford and fen,
To die in a battle, God knows when,
By God, but I know why.”

(II: 74-79)

Eldred does change his mind and enters with Alfred into his share of the paschal mystery.

Then there is “Mark, the man from Italy” (II: 119). He reflects the rule of reason and order in life, in his soldiers, his vines, the serried ranks of his olive trees and his orchards. Even his looks are typically Roman: “A bronzed man, with a bird's bright eye, / And a strong bird's beak and brow” (II: 125-26), and deeper, “his soul remembered Rome” (II: 141). He too can see no reason to fight needlessly and fruitlessly, until Alfred speaks of his vision of Mary, and then passes on.

Finally there is Colan of the Gaels, with whom Chesterton seems to have the most fun. He finds him paradoxical at many levels, the blend of the pagan Celt and the Christian, of the boastful yet the unselfish and generous, of the warrior and the bard. He has all of Irish history and prehistory running in his blood and pulsing in his brain:

His harp was carved and cunning,
His sword prompt and sharp,
And he was gay when he held the sword,
Sad when he held the harp.
For the great Gaels of Ireland
Are the men that God made mad,
For all their wars are merry,
And all their songs are sad.
He kept the Roman order,
He made the Christian sign;
But his eyes grew often blind and bright,
And the sea that rose in the rocks at night
Rose to his head like wine.
He made the sign of the cross of God,
He knew the Roman prayer,
But he had unreason in his heart
Because of the gods that were.

(II: 216-32)

If the other two chiefs hesitated about another battle, Colan embraced the challenge heartily: “‘And if the sea and sky be foes, / We will tame the sea and sky’” (II: 266-67). Nevertheless the cause he joined was beyond normal human conflict. Apart from representing three ethnic traditions, these chiefs are meant as metonyms of the empirical, the rational, and the emotive emphases, that is, significant focuses of these, not merely isolated qualities personified. And further, in Chesterton's reckoning together they signify a rich humanity, as their blood lines do the deep streams blending in the Christian cultural tradition of Europe.

“BOOK III: THE HARP OF ALFRED”

With his military forces garnered as best he could, Alfred now turns in the next two books to a concern for some of the cardinal values essential to the Christian life, of which Mary spoke in her challenge to him: “ ‘Do you have joy without a cause, / Yea, faith without a hope?’” (I: 260-61). These values at the center of the action are laced with Christian paradox, continually fresh from the creative hand of God and his redeeming love. Though overtly contemplative in their development, they are presented indeed as part of the action. In Book III this is done as art, in song, when Alfred chances to meet his foes, known as one of the Christians, yet in personal disguise as the King; and they press him to sing of his heroes and their battles. In Book IV he is tried by the ultimate temptation, pride, and rejects it by opting for humility, prompted under grace through Christian laughter at himself.

Book III is the best known and most frequently anthologized part of the poem. After Alfred half-heartedly complies with his foes’ demand that he sing of his people's prowess, they interrupt him to scoff at their failure and their faith and to sing of their own pessimism. This occasions Alfred's ringing assertion of his Christian belief in the goodness and ultimate success of creation and redemption, which amounts to his articles of war, for this ultimately is what the war means in its strong religious dimension and worth.

Three earls and their king, Guthrum, enunciate their pagan pessimism, as fashionable today as it was then, as Chesterton sees. The first to sing is Harold, “A big youth, beardless like a child” (III: 93). He mocks Christianity and craves conquest and its rewards of selfish pleasure: “ ‘But we, but we shall enjoy the world,/ The whole huge world a toy’” (III: 106-07).

“Smells that a man might swill in a cup,
Stones that a man might eat,
And the great smooth women like ivory
That the Turks sell in the street.”
He sang the song of the thief of the world
And the gods that love the thief;
And he yelled aloud at the cloister-yards,
Where men go gathering grief.

(III: 112-19)

Harold is followed by Elf, the King's nephew, who is more sensitive, yet utterly sad, reminiscent of a certain strain in Germanic and Scandinavian romanticism memorably caught in these stanzas:

“There is always a thing forgotten
When all the world goes well;
A thing forgotten, as long ago,
When the gods forgot the mistletoe;
As soundless as an arrow of snow
The arrow of anguish fell.
“The thing on the blind side of the heart,
On the wrong side of the door,
The green plant groweth, menacing
Almighty lovers in the spring;
There is always a forgotten thing,
And love is not secure.”

(III: 164-75)

Ogier is next, an elderly warrior, who finds nothing attractive in life save violence: “he was sad at board and bed / And savage in the fight” (III: 184-85). Whatever pleasures he knew earlier, now he can only be stern, and not the least of his reasons is “‘gods behind the gods, / Gods that are best unsung’” (III: 189-90). Despite his fierce ideal, its poetic statement is a pleasure:

“While there is one tall shrine to shake,
Or one live man to rend;
For the wrath of the gods behind the gods
Who are weary to make an end.
“There lives one moment for a man
When the door at his shoulder shakes,
When the taut rope parts under the pull,
And the barest branch is beautiful
One moment, while it breaks.”

(III: 201-09)

In his sophistication Guthrum the king is impatient of them all. He stands as a cultured barbarian, a man of unredeemed reason, wisdom, and common sense. His is the ultimate pessimism and frustration, that of the convinced agnostic, older, wiser, and more experienced than all his earls together, yet utterly unfulfilled in all his alertness. He speaks in several magnificent stanzas of his view of the human lot. For all the beauty of the world and the culture of life, the heart must fail at what truth one may know, must hunger yet live without hope: “‘And a man may still lift up his head / But never more his heart’” (III: 264-65); for death is the end of all. And he ends thus, not very far from the modern work ethic and its despair:

“And the heart of the locked battle
Is the happiest place for men;
When shrieking souls as shafts go by
And many have died and all may die;
Though this word be a mystery,
Death is most distant then.
“Death blazes bright above the cup,
And clear above the crown;
But in that dream of battle
We seem to tread it down.
“Wherefore I am a great king
And waste the world in vain,
Because man hath not other power,
Save that in dealing death for dower,
He may forget it for an hour
To remember it again.”

(III: 278-93)

“‘Dealing death for dower’” here should be understood in its ultimately transcending sense, the final frustration of all things and of life itself implied in the pessimism of the agnostic.

Alfred's answer is to turn the tide completely in his hymn to God's generous creation and redemption of the world. A sense of the given quality of all things and especially of human life reveals Chesterton's intuitive Christian realism at its best. His song, easily worth quoting in its entirety, is filled with Christian paradox, climaxed in that of our share in the paschal action. God created man, gave him freedom, through which he could and did betray him, yet Alfred “‘would rather fall with Adam / Than rise with all your gods’” (III: 313-14). Further, “‘Guthrum sits on a hero's throne / And asks if he is dead?’” (III: 317-18). The Danes mock Christian warriors in defeat and monks in fasting; yet Alfred replies: “‘You are more tired of victory, / Than we are tired of shame’” (III: 333-34). And he asks: “‘If it be not better to fast for joy / Than feast for misery’” (III: 355-56). For these and similar reasons the White Horse fades in the grass under the rule of the invaders; creation and with it all life has been neglected. Finally the book ends with these stanzas, climaxing the Christian sense of paradox, with a certain “reverse English” on the part of the Danes. The main point is not simply sociological or sectarian but utterly ontological and intuitively real:

“Therefore your end is on you,
Is on you and your kings,
Not for a fire in Ely fen,
Not that your gods are nine or ten,
But because it is only Christian men
Guard even heathen things.
“For our God hath blessed creation,
Calling it good. I know
What spirit with whom you blindly band
Hath blessed destruction with his hand;
Yet by God's death the stars shall stand
And the small apples grow.”
And the King, with harp on shoulder,
Stood up and ceased his song;
And the owls moaned from the mighty trees,
And the Danes laughed loud and long.

(III: 367-82)

“BOOK IV: THE WOMAN IN THE FOREST”

As Alfred makes his way to the gathering place of his forces, he chances upon a poor woman in the forest needing help with her work and he agrees to assist her by tending a cake she has cooking on the fire. In his meditation upon her poor and laboring lot he is immediately put in mind of the scriptural “My Father is at work until now, and I too am at work” (John 5: 17), and of Christ's identification with the poor. He sees “‘God like a good giant, / That, labouring, lifts the world’” (IV: 122-23); the Creator is his gardener, his armourer, his great grey servant:

“Did not a great grey servant
Of all my sires and me,
Build this pavillion of the pines,
And herd the fowls and fill the vines,
And labour and pass and leave no signs
Save mercy and mystery?”

(IV: 97-102)

As he wept for the woman's lot, Alfred let the cake slip into the fire and it burned. In anger she caught it “And struck him suddenly on the face, / Leaving a scarlet scar” (IV: 163-64). Mindful of his status as king and of his power with his troops gathering, he momentarily thinks of revenge: “And torture stood and the evil things / That are in the childish hearts of kings / An instant in his eyes” (IV: 167-69). But had not Christ left him the ultimate example of Christian humility: “He humbled himself, becoming obedient unto death” (Phil. 2: 8)? “‘Wherefore was God in Golgotha, / Slain as a serf is slain’” (IV: 124-25), and later: “‘Now here is a good warrant,’ / Cried Alfred, ‘by my sword; / For he that is struck for an ill servant / Should be a kind lord’” (IV: 248-51).

Alfred's final preparation for entering fully into the paschal mystery is to join in this humility by way of laughter at himself: “one man laughing at himself / Under the greenwood tree—” (IV: 234-35). Included in this incident are well-known stanzas on Christian laughter, derived from a Christmas sense of the Incarnation, and telling why Alfred's scar will be a star to guide his men in battle. In fact, they are as enlightening a comment as ever was made on the meaning of the unique commodity of human laughter:

Then Alfred laughed out suddenly,
Like thunder in the spring,
Till shook aloud the lintel-beams,
And the squirrels stirred in dusty dreams,
And the startled birds went up in streams,
For the laughter of the King.
And the beasts of the earth and the birds looked down,
In a wild solemnity,
On a stranger sight than a sylph or elf,
On one man laughing at himself
Under the greenwood tree—
The giant laughter of Christian men
That roars through a thousand tales,
Where greed is an ape and pride is an ass,
And Jack's away with his master's lass,
And the miser is banged with all his brass,
The farmer with all his flails;
Tales that tumble and tales that trick,
Yet end not all in scorning—
Of kings and clowns in a merry plight,
And the clock gone wrong and the world gone right,
That the mummers sing upon Christmas night
And Christmas Day in the morning.

(IV: 225-47)

The book ends with several enthusiastic stanzas foretelling the transcendent victory that will attend this self-abandoning yet redeeming act of humility, an evident share in the final aspect of the paschal action.

“BOOK V: ETHANDUNE: THE FIRST STROKE”

“BOOK VI: ETHANDUNE: THE SLAYING OF THE CHIEFS”

“BOOK VII: ETHANDUNE: THE LAST CHARGE”

The next three books describe the battle, in which the Danes are defeated along with the culture of paganism and its attendant evil. Because of the obvious constraints of space, treatment of them will be telescoped. Actually these books would be all but impossible to paraphrase in any abbreviated way, so well told and executed are the incidents and clashes dealt with, and the values of mythos have for the most part been explicated in the earlier books. It remains mainly to test and defend them in the action that follows. The earls and thanes fight and are slain, as are many of their soldiers. Here the paschal mystery is fully and personally explored in action, and the outcome is the resurrection, the establishment of the Christian cause and its civilization, and the baptism of the Danish King, Guthrum. There will be place, however, for three observations, rounding out the epic tradition and the aspect of values in the Christian mythos.

In the first place, the thought of war is hardly welcome in any modern civilized scheme of things, Christian or otherwise. The threat of atomic devastation is too straitening for all. That Chesterton's treatment of warfare has gusto may suggest to some that he was a militarist or at least a crusader. He surely showed a romantic streak here as in other expressions of his ideals, but I think it only fair to see it as under the control of his pervasive realism. Crusader he was, when the stakes were high, and surely the values already discussed were what this war contested. Here, as in “Lepanto” and “A Christmas Song for the Three Guilds” human freedom and full human dignity were being challenged, made all the more human for being Christian. His enthusiasm can also be more kindly appreciated, when the warfare of personal combat he envisaged here was natively more personally challenging and even more exhilarating than our modern push-button warfare can be.

Secondly, we should notice instances of the epic tradition of the warriors' boasts on the eve of battle and other forms of exhortation to their troops, poetically achieved and sprinkled through these books. And at times they are even given a Christian flavor. For example, the wild young Harold scoffs at Colan about the Gael's ragged condition: “‘What broken bits of earth / Are here? For what their clothes are worth / I would sell them for a song’” (V: 194-96). The Irishman's answer is not wanting in words or in sentiment:

“Oh, truly we be broken hearts,
For that cause, it is said,
We light our candles to that Lord
That broke himself for bread.
But though we hold but bitterly
What land the Saxon leaves,
Though Ireland be but a land of saints,
And Wales a land of thieves,
I say you yet shall weary
Of the working of your word,
That striken spirits never strike
Nor lean hands hold a sword.
And if ever ye ride in Ireland,
The jest may yet be said,
There is the land of broken hearts,
And the land of broken heads.”

(V: 209-24)

Finally, we find a Christian variant of this boast, really a complete transformation of it, namely, the medieval custom of soldiers confessing their sins to one another before joining in mortal conflict, when no priest was at hand to absolve them. In a similar situation, Ignatius Loyola is recorded as doing the same at Pamplona. It is a realistic way of preparing for death through a final assertion of one's faith. Here in Book V on the part of Alfred and his thanes it is especially a last acknowledgement of the gifts of creation and of their abuse. Each of these confessions offers rewarding reading; here we offer Alfred's as a warming example:

“I wronged a man to his slaying,
And a woman to her shame,
And once I looked on a sworn maid
That was wed to the Holy Name.
And once I took my neighbor's wife,
That was bound to an eastland man,
In the starkness of my evil youth,
Before my griefs began.
People, if you have any prayers,
Say prayers for me;
And lay me under a Christian stone
In that lost land I thought my own,
To wait till the holy horn is blown,
And all poor men are free.”

(V: 68-81)

“BOOK VIII: THE SCOURING OF THE HORSE”

The spirit of the last book, indeed of the entire poem, asserts that eternal vigilance is the price of freedom. This is the meaning of the pervasive symbol that gives The Ballad its name. Civilization and peace are fruits of the struggle and freedom is the motive that demanded it; and indeed for the Christian they are a foretaste of the resurrection. At the beginning of this book we find Alfred momentarily at rest in Wessex: “And Wessex lay in a patch of peace, / Like a dog in a patch of sun—” (VIII: 27-28). The works of peace are symbolized by the scouring of the Horse; they are various and energetic, constant and quite time-consuming. He made good laws, ruled his people kindly, gathered the songs of simple men, translated books, helped the poor, and received from afar legates who would partake of his wisdom. But he was not interested in building an empire, even when urged to it by his counsellors. His little island of Athelney is large enough for him to rule, large enough for his heart's desire at a very deep reach of wisdom:

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 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.”

(VIII: 90-102)

Though he dedicates his land to the Mother of God and her protection: “‘Though I give this land to Our Lady, / That helped me in Athelney’” (VIII: 236-37), he knows that the Horse must continually be scoured through human effort. Guthrum, for example, remains a threat to peace, despite his conversion; part of Alfred's plans for peace must include one more battle. Only in this way can the Horse be kept white; and the poem ends simply yet definitively with: “And the king took London town” (VIII: 371).

.....

Chesterton's intuitive realism, seen here only in outline as the heart of The Ballad of the White Horse, is, I think, essentially characteristic of his entire output; it continues to fascinate even our skeptical and fragmented times, for the sizeable present interest in him is not limited to his backers. Some twenty titles of his are still in print continuously since his own day—his death was more than half a century ago—with a new edition of his complete works gradually appearing; book-length studies of him continue to be written, along with articles and a scholarly journal dedicated to his work. All this is especially interesting, when one remembers that this realism was fed by his appetite for mystery, hardly a characteristic of contemporary culture. Perhaps this fascination in many quarters is dictated precisely by what can only be a dissatisfaction with such skepticism and its fragmentation. This interest signals, one hopes, some sense of the need for a new realism in philosophy, literature, aesthetics, and critical theory, currently in good part “silent earthquake lands, / Wide as a waste is wide” (“Dedication” 77-78), and, on a much larger horizon, an inkling of the satisfaction available in their far richer analogues, the theme and substance of his realistic Christian mythos.

Notes

1. References to The Ballad are to The Collected Poems. Since the “Prefatory Note” is not included in this edition, references to it are to the school text, here called the Crown Book Edition. I use this edition also for the convenience it affords of referring by numbers to the lines of each passage quoted. Though this edition is at times somewhat triumphalist in tone, it offers valuable factual and historical notes.

2. In saying that Chesterton's is a myth of Christian realism I include what is normally implied in a truly Christian sense of the creation and the redemption as richly present to one's awareness, though shrouded in mystery, with strong psychological and ontological overtones of a transcendently realistic metaphysics, but in a more intuitive than systematic sense. One thinks of Chesterton's immense admiration for St. Thomas Aquinas's characteristic realism, to be found in his book about him. “After his own ‘twenty or thirty years [spent] in studying' Aquinas,” the distinguished Thomist, Étienne Gilson, said in high esteem of the book: “ ‘I consider it as being without possible exception the best book ever written on St. Thomas’ ”; (quoted in Clemens 150). And again, “‘How can that man, who never really studied philosophy, say the right things about St. Thomas and in just the right way?’” (quoted in Shook 218). Chesterton's aesthetic sensibility, in turn, is a part of this realism, richly intuitive in being object-centered and outward-going, without being for that reason any less personal and imaginative. See note 4 below.

3. The theology supporting my view of the paschal action as an imaginative phenomenon can be found in Durrwell (especially ch. II). He founds his statements on St. Paul: I Cor. 15; Phil. 2, 5-11; Rom. 6, 8; Col. 2, 11 ff; and on John 12, 14.

4. “Introducing Hugh Kenner's The Paradox in Chesterton, Marshall McLuhan observes that Chesterton was not a poet but a ‘metaphysical moralist,’ because his mind was outward-going. ‘The artist offers us not a system but a world. An inner world is explored and developed and then projected as an object. But that was never Chesterton's way. “All my mental doors open outwards into a world I have not made,” he said in a basic formulation. And this distinction must always remain between the artist who is engaged in making a world and the metaphysician who is occupied in contemplating a world.’ The dichotomy is extreme and would nullify all Classical theory and practice. Chesterton's claim about his mental doors is an apt description of the needfully mimetic gesture of all art, the root of the cognitive which we have been discussing. Else's formula, which makes the poet an imitator inasmuch as he is a maker, is true of all art, but only if it is convertible: that he is a maker only by being an imitator as well.” (Boyd, Mimesis 128-29) The priority of transcendental being in both the cognitive and the structural elements of all art, since it is primarily by nature a being, that is, a symbolic being, is forgotten here by McLuhan. (See Boyd, “A New Mimesis.”)

5. It is clear that the concept of myth being developed here, both real-life and poetic, is philosophically speaking much more realistic than is often the case. John LeVay's article “The Whiteness of the Horse: Apocalypticism in The Ballad of the White Horse” cites passim a set of apocalyptic images largely from the Book of Revelation as visionary myth in elaborate analogy with the story line and characters of The Ballad and applicable to it. The author presents a mix of depth-psychological patterns, including Guthrum as the Dark Brother of Alfred, the one leading his three earls and the other his three thanes, forming twin sets of the Four Horsemen, each character linked in one way or another with the four colors of the horses, standing for tyranny, war, famine, and pestilence (even Alfred and his followers?), the four elements; these together with the White Goddess of Robert Graves, Eastern lore, Welsh lore, Beowulf's Grendel and his Dam; and he symbolically identifies the apocalyptic white horse with Chesterton's. The array is surely much too distracting—as well as at times contradictory—to combine poetically for an understanding of The Ballad. Whatever may be said of the genuine sense of the Book of Revelation and of its own apocalyptic conventions and their visionary and psychological sources, it should be remembered that this book is religious rhetoric and not poetry, and its imagery rhetorically allegorical, meant to illustrate doctrines rather than build a coherent poetic structure. For the sake of this poetic coherence in The Ballad it would be wise to keep to metaphor what imagery Chesterton borrows from the holy Book, unless we wish to accuse him of wide-ranging poetic inconsistency. Chesterton, it seems to me, even when—and especially when—dealing with mystery, is not a visionary in the sense of this tradition, but rather intuitively realistic. Further, there are limits in applying depth psychology to poetic imagery, so as not to render it quite generic and seemingly at times close to a priori, easily too systematic and even schematic, much as the theory of myth and symbolism, both in and out of poetry, has been too long all but exclusively in the hands of idealistic philosophers, to the genuine neglect of their obviously mimetic aspects, whatever else can be said about them.

6. There is an interesting parallel to this passage of Christian rejection of magic in Eliot's discussion of various forms of fortune telling as escape from the conditions of time in The Dry Salvages, beginning with “To communicate with Mars” and ending with “on the shores of Asia, or in the Edgware Road.”

Works Cited

Boyd, John D., S.J. “A New Mimesis.” Renascence 37 (1985), 136-61.

———. “Christian Imaginative Patterns and the Poetry of Thomas Merton.” Greyfriar: Siena Studies in Literature 13 (1972), 3-14.

———. The Function of Mimesis and Its Decline. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1968.

Chesterton, Gilbert K. The Collected Poems of G. K. Chesterton, New York: Dodd, 1946.

———. The Ballad of the White Horse. Crown Book Edition. Ed. Sister Mary Bernadette, I.H.M., Brother John Totten, S.M., and Brother George Schuster, S.M. Kirkwood: Catholic Authors P, 1950.

Clemens, Cyril. Chesterton as Seen by his Contemporaries. Webster Groves: Mark Twain Society, 1939.

Durrwell, F. X., C.SS.R. The Resurrection. Trans. Rosemary Sheed. New York: Sheed, 1960.

Eliot, T. S. The Dry Salvages. The Complete Poems and Plays. New York: Harcourt, 1952.

LeVay, John. “The Whiteness of the Horse: Apocalypticism in The Ballad of the White Horse.” The Chesterton Review 13 (1987), 73-82.

Pieper, Josef. Leisure the Basis of Culture. Trans. Alexander Dru. New York: Pantheon, 1952.

Shook, Laurence K. Étienne Gilson. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1984.

Wheelwright, Philip. “Philosophy and Poetry.” Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Ed. Alex Preminger. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1965.