eady beginning to rise like towers of funereal
efficiency, this country clergyman's son moved to the last in a
luminous cloud, and acted a fairy tale. He shall remain as a lesson
to those who do not understand England, and a mystery to those who
think they do. In outward action he led his ships to victory and died
upon a foreign sea; but symbolically he established something
indescribable and intimate, something that sounds like a native
proverb; he was the man who burnt his ships, and who for ever set the
Thames on fire.

The _Ballad of the White Horse_ had been a poem about English legends
and origins. The _History_ too was called a poem by the reviewers.
And it was. It was a poem about Falstaff and Sam Weller and even the
Artful Dodger who in so many British colonies had turned into
Robinson Crusoe. His rulers had tried to educate him, they had tried
to Germanize him and to teach him "to embrace a Saxon because he was
the other half of an Anglo-Saxon." All English culture had been based
for a century and more on ardent admiration for German _Kultur_. And
then--

. . . the day came, and the ignorant fellow found he had other
things to learn. And he was quicker than his educated countrymen,
for he had nothing to unlearn.

He in whose honour all had been said and sung, stirred, and
stepped across the border of Belgium. Then were spread out before
men's eyes all the beauties of his culture and all the benefits of his
organization; then we beheld under a lifting daybreak what light
we had followed and after what image we had laboured to refashion
ourselves. Nor in any story of mankind has the irony of God chosen
the foolish things so catastrophically to confound the wise. For the
common crowd of poor and ignorant Englishmen, because they only
knew that they were Englishmen, burst through the filthy cobwebs
of four hundred years and stood where their fathers stood when they
knew that they were Christian men. The English poor, broken in
every revolt, bullied by every fashion, long despoiled of property,
and now being despoiled of liberty, entered history with a noise of
trumpets, and turned themselves in two years into one of the iron
armies of the world. And when the critic of politics and literature,
feeling that this war is after all heroic, looks around him to find the
hero, he can point to nothing but a mob.

CHAPTER XXII