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Chesterton's "Ballad of the White Horse": From Conception to Critical Reception

2016; Mythopoeic Society; Volume: 35; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

0146-9339

Nick Milne,

Mormonism, Religion, and History

INTRODUCTION As August of 1911 drew to a close, the first copies of G.K. Chesterton's The Ballad of the White Horse began to hit the stalls in England. The romantic verse epic of King Alfred the Great--just under twenty-seven hundred lines of rhymed ballad stanzas, putting somewhere between Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight for length--was the product of nearly a decade of sustained creative effort on the part of its author, unprecedented at the time, for him, and never again to be repeated by a man more accustomed to writing four or five books a year in addition to hundreds of essays, articles, letters and poems. The Ballad was also the first of Chesterton's published in book form since the modestly-successful volumes--Greybeards at Play (1900) and The Wild Knight (1900)--of ten years earlier. Though few would have known at the time, for Chesterton himself there was much at stake. While the previous year's biography of William Blake was well-received and his work of social criticism, What's Wrong With the World, had made a provocative splash, the Ballad had become for Chesterton a very personal work. Into he had poured his passions and his hopes, the substance of his dreams and the urgings of his friends. was a labor of love for things both great and small. Most significantly of all to Chesterton, the Ballad was very important to his wife, Frances, and so became to its author a sort of icon of the love they shared. If James Stephens is right in his suggestion that poetry is a very private matter--and in his criticism that Chesterton was ignorant of this fact (Stephens 66)--then what a heart must have been that Chesterton laid bare to the reading public in those late summer days. The substance of the Ballad is described easily enough: Alfred the Great (840-899), the Saxon king of Christian Wessex, rallies his troops for their last desperate stand at Ethandune against the invading pagan Danes in 878. The cause seems hopeless; the poem begins with Alfred already having been defeated once, and the Danes, under the war-king Guthrum and his three savage earls, Ogier, Harold and Elf, seem poised to conquer Wessex completely. In the moment of his greatest despair, Alfred is confronted with a vision of the Blessed Virgin, who will not comfort him with a prophecy of victory, but rather only affirms to Alfred that the coming time will be hard and that the just cause must always be upheld (1.209-61). (1) Thus encouraged, Alfred calls together his three chiefs, Eldred the Franklin, Marcus the Roman, and Colan the Celt, bidding them join a possibly doomed enterprise for the greater glory of God. All three agree, in their differing ways, and so Alfred and his motley horde hurl themselves once more upon the Danes, suffering many setbacks and defeats. But when things seem at their darkest, the Virgin is seen again, and with one last rush the Wessex men lay their enemies low and win the day (VII.189-370). The victory is not a permanent one, but is a victory, and thus both Alfred's subjects and the newly-baptized Danes face an uncertain future that looks very much like our present. is a work of heavy philosophy and message, and the sheer weight of Chesterton's desired point sometimes overwhelms the being used to express it. Though is an historical work, is not historical in the generally accepted sense, tending rather towards the legendary and the mystic than the purely factual. Chesterton is aware of this himself, though, and admits as much in his prefatory note to the Ballad: It is the chief value of legend to mix up the centuries while preserving the sentiment; to see all ages in a sort of splendid foreshortening. That is the use of tradition, he concludes; it telescopes history (xxxvi). is a work with both rhyme and meter, eschewing some of the more experimental methods of the period, (2) and is devoted to issues of war, religion, and the ongoing struggle to preserve civilization from collapse. …