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Page 29
No idle sacrifices or symbols, these gifts of courtesy! The Saxon King
rebuilt on the highest hill that is bathed by Tiber, the Saxon street
and school, the Borgo,[29] of whose miraculously arrested burning
Raphael's fresco preserves the story to this day. And further
he obtained from Leo the liberty of all Saxon men from bonds
in penance;--a first phase this of Magna Charta, obtained more
honourably, from a more honourable person, than that document, by
which Englishmen of this day, suppose they live, move, and have being.
[Footnote 29: "Qu� in eorum lingua Burgus dicitur,--the place where it
was situated was called the Saxon street, Saxonum vicum" (Anastasius,
quoted by Turner). There seems to me some evidence in the scattered
passages I have not time to collate, that at this time the Saxon Burg,
or tower, of a village, included the idea of its school.]
How far into Alfred's soul, at seven years old, sank any true image of
what Rome was, and had been; of what her Lion Lord was, who had saved
her from the Saracen, and her Lion Lord had been, who had saved her
from the Hun; and what this Spiritual Dominion was, and was to be,
which could make and unmake kings, and save nations, and put armies to
flight; I leave those to say, who have learned to reverence childhood.
This, at least, is sure, that the days of Alfred were bound each to
each, not only by their natural piety, but by the actual presence and
appeal to his heart, of all that was then in the world most noble,
beautiful, and strong against Death.
In this living Book of God he had learned to read, thus early; and
with perhaps nobler ambition than of getting the prize of a gilded
psalm-book at his mother's knee, as you are commonly told of him. What
sort of psalm-book it was, however, you may see from this leaf in my
hand. For, as his father and he returned from Rome that year, they
stayed again at the Court of Charlemagne's grandson, whose daughter,
the Princess Judith, Ethelwolf was wooing for Queen of England, (not
queen-consort, merely, but crowned queen, of authority equal to his
own.) From whom Alfred was like enough to have had a reading lesson or
two out of her father's Bible; and like enough, the little prince, to
have stayed her hand at this bright leaf of it, the Lion-leaf, bearing
the symbol of the Lion of the tribe of Judah.
You cannot, of course, see anything but the glittering from where
you sit; nor even if you afterwards look at it near, will you find
a figure the least admirable or impressive to you. It is not like
Landseer's Lions in Trafalgar Square; nor like Tenniel's in 'Punch';
still less like the real ones in Regent's Park. Neither do I show it
you as admirable in any respect of art, other than that of skilfullest
illumination. I show it you, as the most interesting Gothic type of
the imagination of Lion; which, after the Roman Eagle, possessed the
minds of all European warriors; until, as they themselves grew selfish
and cruel, the symbols which at first meant heaven-sent victory, or
the strength and presence of some Divine spirit, became to them only
the signs of their own pride or rage: the victor raven of Corvus sinks
into the shamed falcon of Marmion, and the lion-heartedness which gave
the glory and the peace of the gods to Leonidas, casts the glory and
the might of kinghood to the dust before Chalus.[30]
[Footnote 30: 'Fors Clavigera,' March, 1871, p. 19. Yet read the
preceding pages, and learn the truth of the lion heart, while you
mourn its pride. Note especially his absolute law against usury.]
That death, 6th April, 1199, ended the advance of England begun
by Alfred, under the pure law of Religious Imagination. She began,
already, in the thirteenth century, to be decoratively, instead of
vitally, religious. The history of the Religious Imagination expressed
between Alfred's time and that of Coeur de Lion, in this symbol of the
Lion only, has material in it rather for all my seven lectures than
for the closing section of one; but I must briefly specify to you the
main sections of it. I will keep clear of my favourite number seven,
and ask you to recollect the meaning of only Five, Mythic Lions.
First of all, in Greek art, remember to keep yourselves clear about
the difference between the Lion and the Gorgon.
The Gorgon is the power of evil in heaven, conquered by Athena, and
thenceforward becoming her �gis, when she is herself the inflictor of
evil. Her helmet is then the helmet of Orcus.
But the Lion is the power of death on earth, conquered by Heracles,
and becoming thenceforward both his helmet and �gis. All ordinary
architectural lion sculpture is derived from the Heraclean.
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