They can tell good from evil at a glance. Tolkien’s great epic The Lord of the Rings. Men in his Middle Earth are plainly quite sure that they live in a created universe and are subject to powers high above them. This is why I am often puzzled when I consider the curious absence of any explained common religious belief in J. What men and women believe is so important that it is almost a solid fact, like an ocean or a castle. Prescott’s moving account of the Pilgrimage of Grace, The Man on a Donkey. One of the characters concludes-perhaps after stumbling on an unfinished breakfast of broiled fish and honeycomb-that Christ is literally physically present and nearby in her daily life, in the last era when it was possible for anyone in England to think such a thing.
There is, as it happens, another rather lovely literary evocation of this lost world in H. And their subjects, in turn, did not dare to touch the Lord’s anointed. Kings genuinely feared God and his justice. The men of that time were not people just like us, who happened to be clad in strange clothes, eating venison pasties and saying “forsooth.” Their individual lives were carried out in the shade of Christ’s reign. But even in my English childhood, in country districts, these things were really not so far away from the human mind, and in times of great distress and war they tend to reassert themselves in spasms of superstition, without the Christian understanding and the belief in the nearness of Christ and his saints that civilized them in the past.įor me, Conan Doyle’s description was a vital revelation. The Devil, too, raged openly upon the earth he skulked behind the hedgerows in the gloaming he laughed loudly in the night-time he clawed the dying sinner, pounced on the unbaptized babe, and twisted the limbs of the epileptic.Īn urban, industrialized society finds this assertion hard to cope with. God’s visible hand was everywhere, in the rainbow and the comet, in the thunder and the wind. Man walked in fear and solemnity, with Heaven very close above his head, and Hell below his very feet. It was this: In those simple times there was a great wonder and mystery in life. So I was only just in time to know what Conan Doyle meant when he explained something very important about the Middle Ages to his original Edwardian readers. Something, the spirit which gilded those pages for me, has departed from the world. They were polite and patient, but for them these are just inert volumes filled with dead words that cannot be awakened.
I tried and failed to introduce my own children to these wonders, which had me rapt on long summer evenings and beside winter firesides when I was their age. The modern world is too noisy and heedless for them. Winston Churchill was, alas, wrong when he declared that these works “have certainly found a permanent place in English literature.” Now, their ornate prose and pre-1914 wit are as baffling to a young mind as an Armenian grammar book might be to an Aztec. Even in Conan Doyle’s period of utmost fame, his great accounts of chivalry and old England never succeeded enough to please him. Poor Doyle wanted to be remembered above all for these stories, and ground his teeth to find that the public only cared about the Sherlock Holmes mysteries, which he wrote mainly for money. The remaining copies of these once-popular works now molder, unopened and slowly softening into pulp, in attic rooms in the houses of the elderly. No English child will ever again experience, as I did, the joys of Arthur Conan Doyle’s great historical romances The White Companyand Sir Nigel, set in the far-off fourteenth century.
0 kommentar(er)
