ENGLISH HISTORICAL MEMORY.
Q IR FREDERICK POLLOCK'S lecture on King Alfred 1C., delivered on Monday at Oxford to University Extension students is both instructive and entertaining, but it misses one point which is to us of great interest. What is the reason, in his judgment, why the English people as a com- munity retain a tradition of King Alfred? Supposing the legends about him to be generally false, what did he actually do which so pleased his people that legends, always of the favourable kind, accreted to him rather than to any other King ? The ignorance of the English commcnalty about their own history is for the most part profound. Of its events the common folk, if over fifty, so that they have not passed through Board-schools, know absolutely nothing. They are not aware that they are of Teutonic race, or that they were conquered by men from France, or that the House of Commons had a beginning, or that Scotland gave them a King, or that there was a "Great Rebellion" or a "glorious Revolution," or why they have recently been governed by a dynasty which came from Germany. That the dynasty is German they do know, because their grandfathers used to curse about it; but that it also represents the unbroken English house as old as the nation itself they do not know, still less the steps in what ought to be to them the most interesting of all pedigrees. The personality of most of their Sovereigns has made no impression upon them. • They have no tradition of their qualities, their feats, their failures, or their fates. They know, we believe, in a vague way, that there was once a Conqueror named William, but apart from that blank fact taey know nothing of the Normans, or the Plantagenets, or, with two exceptions, of the Tudor a, or, again with an exception, of the Stuarts, or of William the Dutchman, or, except in the thinnest way, of the house of Hanover. They are aware that Crecy and Agincourt were battles and were won, and that the Armada was defeated, but the remainder of the long history, with its wonderful scenes and interesting persons, is to them a blank. They have no stories about it, sing no ballads, have no feelings. History for them begins with Waterloo. That being the case, how does it happen that they remember two names with favour and even admiration,—King Alfred and Queen Elizabeth under her vulgar title of Queen Bess ? They must have done something that, in the midst of an otherwise perfect ignorance, their memory should have kept itself green, and what was it ? Alfred died exactly a thousand years ago, and why is he recalled when Sovereigns hundreds of years nearer their own time are utterly forgotten ? Sir F. Pollock says most of the stories about him are without foundation, though the incident of the cakes, an incident of no interest in itself, may, he admits, have happened ; but that only pushes the inquiry one step back. Why did the popular imagination attribute a series of acts, all praiseworthy, to Alfred rather than any other King? What made English people, in fact, think that this far-away personage was so very good to them ? The answer that he, and he alone, had a sacer vales in the person of his biographer Asser seems to us meaningless or beside the question, for the people knew no more of Asser and his writings than of the despatches preserved. at Simanca,s. It seems to us that there is only one possible answer to the question, namely, that the reign of Alfred was a break in the long-continued misery of that period; that the people therefore remembered it with pleasure, and handed on an oral tradition of it which was made almost sacred by the awful days of the early Normans, and being bitten into the popular memory, lasted down to our own time. Details, usually false, were inserted into the sketch, but the broad fact that there had been a great Saxon King, who governed successfully said made the humble swum, lived because,
speaking broadly, it was true. The endurance of Elizabeth's fame was due to the same cause. Whatever was her real character, whether she was as great as Shakespeare thought her, or as vacillating, mean, and selfish as Fronde would prove her to have been, she rescued the land from an awfal tyranny—which the people so hated that they quitted the creed which sanctioned it, as evidently not of God's ordaining— and she gave it peace, and therefore she was from that time forth the "good Queen Bess." Men love in their misery to dream of a past golden age, and if they can find any reason they attribute it to some individual, be it Xing Solomon, or Augustus Caesar, or King Alfred, or Charlemagne, or Frederic Barbarossa, or Gustavus Vasa. The details are always can. fused, the stories are mostly inventions, the character is frequently misapprehended, but the person is, the present writer believes, never a pure illusion. We shall even find, he ventures to suggest, before we have done inquiring, who King Arthur was, and why around his meniory there grew up in a land of romance and poetry that wonderful vision.
We have always been puzzled to understand why English tradition is so exceptionally feeble and imperfect. It is not due to race, for the Lowland Scots are of our own blood and know their history in its broad outlines well enough. It is not ignorance, for the English have never been more ignorant than Arabs, and each tribe in Arabia preserves, often with singular accuracy, the memory of its chiefs. No great convul- sion has occurred among us blotting out, as the Revolution blotted out in France, the memory of the past. Nor are we a people eager for change, or careless of precedent, or indifferent to what has been. On the contrary, the first thing which occurs to an Englishman when asked to do anything is to inquire what was done before, and if possible, so to shape his conduct that it shall not be in contradiction with its previous action. Something is due no doubt to the strenuous- ness of the people, which disinclines them to consider anything but the work in hand, and to neglect alike past and future until the present emergency has been happily disposed of. The main reason, however, is the defect of imagination, which has prevented the rise of a ballad literature, and rendered it as difficult for them to call up the past as to comprehend fully the motives and conditions govern- ing other races. An English ploughman is as incapable of realising to himself an England without roads as of realising to himself a civilised people all brown and wear- ing very few or transparent clothes. The history of the past being nothing to him, the personages are nothing either, and he sees only one or two figures which have as he gazes something like a halo round them. Bad figures are forgotten, as we believe happens in all other countries, the single exception in this one being Bloody Queen Mary, who, it seems certain, excited in the common people a quite separate horror, kept up by the age-long contest with Roman Catholicism. It was so intense that to the British, who endured the awful penalties of treason without a shudder, and ornamented their bridges and archways with slowly-rotting heads of criminals, punishment by burning became impossible. The peculiar fate of William Rufus, too, has kept a dim tradition of him alive, but of his peculiar character, which excited such horror in the Church, the people, we believe, are entirely unaware.
We might quote also, as further proof of our argument, the neglect of the English to keep up any official record of their history, but that this neglect has, so far as we know, been universal among mankind. That is one of the most inexplicable facts in the history of the human mind. Every race wishes to keep in touch with its past. Every race is proud of its feats, and in some degree anxious that its great men should not be for- gotten, and every race has, or has had, embodied in it some priesthood and some aristocracy whose importance greatly depends upon the history of the past. Yet that history has nowhere in Europe or Asia been officially recorded. One would have thought that a College of Historians would have been as carefully kept up as a College of Heralds or a Roman Catholic Order, but it has not been so. Here and there at intervals a Ring has ordered his acts to be recorded, and it has been done, usually very badly, but of systematic effort to preserve the memory of historic facts there has nowhere been trace. It could have been done at very moderate expense either of time or money, and there have always been persons competent to hand on the torch, but it has never been
attempted. The Kings have been too unimaginative either to wish for or to dread the record, and the priesthoods have thought the task in some way beneath them. Records of property have been kept sometimes for ages, and in. sorec countries of laws, but events have been trusted to men's memory, which as the generations slip past breaks down. That is one of the worst and most continuous proofs of the dense stupidity of mankind with which we are acquainted.
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