John Ruskin - The Pleasures of England

449. Saxon invasion.

481. Clovis reigns and St. Benedict is born.

493. Theodoric conquers at Verona.

Then, roughly, a hundred years later, in 590, Ethelbert, the fifth from Hengist, and Bertha, the third from Clotilde, are king and queen of Kent. I cannot find the date of their marriage, but the date, 590, which you must recollect for cardinal, is that of Gregory's accession to the pontificate, and I believe Bertha was then in middle life, having persevered in her religion firmly, but inoffensively, and made herself beloved by her husband and people. She, in England, Theodolinda in Lombardy, and St. Gregory in Rome:—in their hands, virtually lay the destiny of Europe.

Then the period from Bertha to Osburga, 590 to 849—say 250 years—is passed by the Saxon people in the daily more reverent learning of the Christian faith, and daily more peaceful and skilful practice of the humane arts and duties which it invented and inculcated.

The statement given by Sir Edward Creasy of the result of these 250 years of lesson is, with one correction, the most simple and just that I can find.

"A few years before the close of the sixth century, the country was little more than a wide battle-field, where gallant but rude warriors fought with each other, or against the neighbouring Welsh or Scots; unheeding and unheeded by the rest of Europe, or, if they attracted casual attention, regarded with dread and disgust as the fiercest of barbarians and the most untameable of pagans. In the eighth century, England was looked up to with admiration and gratitude, as superior to all the other countries of Western Europe in piety and learning, and as the land whence the most zealous and successful saints and teachers came forth to convert and enlighten the still barbarous regions of the continent."

This statement is broadly true; yet the correction it needs is a very important one. England,—under her first Alfred of Northumberland, and under Ina of Wessex, is indeed during these centuries the most learned, thoughtful, and progressive of European states. But she is not a missionary power. The missionaries are always to her, not from her:—for the very reason that she is learning so eagerly, she does not take to preaching. Ina founds his Saxon school at Rome not to teach Rome, nor convert the Pope, but to drink at the source of knowledge, and to receive laws from direct and unquestioned authority. The missionary power was wholly Scotch and Irish, and that power was wholly one of zeal and faith, not of learning. I will ask you, in the course of my next lecture, to regard it attentively; to-day, I must rapidly draw to the conclusions I would leave with you.

It is more and more wonderful to me as I think of it, that no effect whatever was produced on the Saxon, nor on any other healthy race of the North, either by the luxury of Rome, or by her art, whether constructive or imitative. The Saxon builds no aqueducts—designs no roads, rounds no theatres in imitation of her,—envies none of her vile pleasures,—admires, so far as I can judge, none of her far-carried realistic art. I suppose that it needs intelligence of a more advanced kind to see the qualities of complete sculpture: and that we may think of the Northern intellect as still like that of a child, who cares to picture its own thoughts in its own way, but does not care for the thoughts of older people, or attempt to copy what it feels too difficult. This much at least is certain, that for one cause or another, everything that now at Paris or London our painters most care for and try to realize, of ancient Rome, was utterly innocuous and unattractive to the Saxon: while his mind was frankly open to the direct teaching of Greece and to the methods of bright decoration employed in the Byzantine Empire: for these alone seemed to his fancy suggestive of the glories of the brighter world promised by Christianity. Jewellery, vessels of gold and silver, beautifully written books, and music, are the gifts of St. Gregory alike to the Saxon and Lombard; all these beautiful things being used, not for the pleasure of the present life, but as the symbols of another; while the drawings in Saxon manuscripts, in which, better than in any other remains of their life, we can read the people's character, are rapid endeavours to express for themselves, and convey to others, some likeness of the realities of sacred event in which they had been instructed. They differ from every archaic school of former design in this evident correspondence with an imagined reality. All previous archaic art whatsoever is symbolic and decorative—not realistic. The contest of Herakles with the Hydra on a Greek vase is a mere sign that such a contest took place, not a picture of it, and in drawing that sign the potter is always thinking of the effect of the engraved lines on the curves of his pot, and taking care to keep out of the way of the handle;—but a Saxon monk would scratch his idea of the Fall of the angels or the Temptation of Christ over a whole page of his manuscript in variously explanatory scenes, evidently full of inexpressible vision, and eager to explain and illustrate all that he felt or believed.

Of the progress and arrest of these gifts, I shall have to speak in my next address; but I must regretfully conclude to-day with some brief warning against the complacency which might lead you to regard them as either at that time entirely original in the Saxon race, or at the present day as signally characteristic of it. That form of complacency is exhibited in its most amiable but, therefore, most deceptive guise, in the passage with which the late Dean of Westminster concluded his lecture at Canterbury in April, 1854, on the subject of the landing of Augustine. I will not spoil the emphasis of the passage by comment as I read, but must take leave afterwards to intimate some grounds for abatement in the fervour of its self-gratulatory ecstasy.

"Let any one sit on the hill of the little church of St. Martin, and look on the view which is there spread before his eyes. Immediately below are the towers of the great abbey of St. Augustine, where Christian learning and civilization first struck root in the Anglo-Saxon race; and within which now, after a lapse of many centuries, a new institution has arisen, intended to carry far and wide, to countries of which Gregory and Augustine never heard, the blessings which they gave to us. Carry your view on—and there rises high above all the magnificent pile of our cathedral, equal in splendour and state to any, the noblest temple or church that Augustine could have seen in ancient Rome, rising on the very ground which derives its consecration from him. And still more than the grandeur of the outward buildings that rose from the little church of Augustine and the little palace of Ethelbert have been the institutions of all kinds of which these were the earliest cradle. From Canterbury, the first English Christian city,—from Kent, the first English Christian kingdom—has by degrees arisen the whole constitution of Church and State in England which now binds together the whole British Empire. And from the Christianity here established in England has flowed, by direct consequence, first the Christianity of Germany; then, after a long interval, of North America; and lastly, we may trust, in time, of all India and all Australasia. The view from St. Martin's Church is indeed one of the most inspiriting that can be found in the world; there is none to which I would more willingly take any one who doubted whether a small beginning could lead to a great and lasting good;—none which carries us more vividly back into the past, or more hopefully forward into the future."

To this Gregorian canticle in praise of the British constitution, I grieve, but am compelled, to take these following historical objections. The first missionary to Germany was Ulphilas, and what she owes to these islands she owes to Iona, not to Thanet. Our missionary offices to America as to Africa, consist I believe principally in the stealing of land, and the extermination of its proprietors by intoxication. Our rule in India has introduced there, Paisley instead of Cashmere shawls: in Australasia our Christian aid supplies, I suppose, the pious farmer with convict labour. And although, when the Dean wrote the above passage, St. Augustine's and the cathedral were—I take it on trust from his description—the principal objects in the prospect from St. Martin's Hill, I believe even the cheerfullest of my audience would not now think the scene one of the most inspiriting in the world. For recent progress has entirely accommodated the architecture of the scene to the convenience of the missionary workers above enumerated; to the peculiar necessities of the civilization they have achieved. For the sake of which the cathedral, the monastery, the temple, and the tomb, of Bertha, contract themselves in distant or despised subservience under the colossal walls of the county gaol.