Reviews of the Week
Prologue to Archaeology
British Antiquity. By T. D. Kendrick. (Methuen. 21s.)
MR. T. D. KENDRICK, recently appointed to the Directorship of the British Museum, is a wise man who has avoided all the perils of a professorial post and whose liveliness of disposition has always given colour, courage and energy to his antiquarian researches. The jacket of this hook, by John Piper, and its brisk Latin dedica- tion to Piper and Betjeman (" Lelandi discipulos") advise the reader that, whatever he will find here, he will make no discovery of dull- ness or heaviness in style.
This book is indeed an exemplar for all those who write archae- ology. In general, archaeological writers vacillate wretchedly between the intolerably arid presentation of their facts and their figures on the one hand and a frantic effort to be human, popular and even jocose on the other. It is not so with Mr. Kendrick. The facts and the figures are here, but he knows how to present them in a manner which is uniform, easy and entertaining ; his work is that of a man highly gifted in the art of literature and endowed with a mettlesome wit. In this way he conveys his own interest and enjoy- ment. and it matters little whether his reader has or has not been dipped already in the waters of learning Moreover, he has this unusual merit that, without being indiscriminately rude in his treat- ment of.legend, he firmly demolishes the fabulous while frequently admitting the essential graces of mythology.
The history of British antiquarian writings, from Geoffrey of Monmouth up to Leland, is largely a record of credulity and irresponsible invention. This book is chiefly remarkable as an account of the gradual emergence of genuine archaeological method after the strange gullibility of the Mediaeval mind, which accepted the Aristotelian cosmology and the fables of giants, and so blandly invented legends of its own. Such credulity persisted well into the eighteenth century, and even today there are monstrous lapses on the part of those who, thirsty for marvels, have allowed a little archaeological knowledge to become an exceedingly dangerous thing. Mr. Kendrick shows admirably the sad inconvenience of a literal belief in Brutus, the Trojan founder of London, and the irrepres- sible Arthur. Of Geoffrey's Historia he observes in felicitous phrase that it was 'snot a static system of antiquarian belief . . . but a thriving garden of spurious history in which any transitory non- sense about the remote past might take root and flourish." There was, in fact, a continuous growth of nonsense for centuries, but with many flowers among the seeds.
To some extent the slow emergence of true archaeology may be described as the victory of empiricism over mysticism and romance. One has to remember, as Mr. Kendrick shows very clearly, that the belief in Brutus and Arthur was not merely a popular superstition ; it was held in all sobriety by scholars of eminence. Much of this book is concerned with the battle over the body of Arthur, in which the preliminary skirmish was led by the Italian, Polydore Vergil. Was not the true body of Arthur buried at Glastonbury, and was it not discovered and easily identified by the monks in 1191 ? And yet the defence of Arthur and "the Brut" came to nothing ; and long before Tennyson introduced Arthur to the drawing-rooms of the early Victorian ladies, the king and his knights were pushed into the limbo of misty legend. If Leland was lingering among the shadows, Camden took his position with Polydore Vergil and the critics.
Nothing in this book is more remarkable than the amount of knowledge and of study which has been compressed, without any muddiness or confusion, in a space which is relatively small. The battle of "the Brute," as Mr. Kendrick presents it, reads as fluently and easily as the story of any other campaign, where all the strategy is analysed and all the moves are described with accuracy and enlivening zeal. But this book is much more than mere archaeology. Its lessons are pertinent in the domain of philosophy and also in that of social evolution. It shows how, between the twelfth and seventeenth centuries, the mind of Western Europe was moving away from the fogs of scholasticism towards the more illuminated region of knowledge, experiment and research. The study of the Saxons became, in Mr. Kendrick's words, "a calamity for the ancient Britons of mediaeval imagining," and the painted Picts, with Brutus and his Trojan Londoners, exist only in the harmless pantomime of disordered fantasy. Yet we must remember that Milton in 1670 and Stillingfleet (the opponent of Locke) in 1685 could not make up their minds to abandon "the Trojan Brut," the grandson of Aeneas, and thought there might be at least a few grains of truth in the Historia Regum. So loth are men to renounce even the fabled supporters of their dignity.
This first-rate book is well presented, well illustrated and in every way commendable The ending is perhaps a little abrupt, and one might have wished that Mi. Kendrick had indulged in a summary— an exercise in which his wit and learning would have had equal
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