THE FALL OF CHIVALRY

On the back of this book is the name of the New Jerusalem and on the first page of it a phrase about the necessity of going back to the old even to find the new, as a man retraces his steps to a sign-post.  The common sense of that process is indeed most mysteriously misunderstood.  Any suggestion that progress has at any time taken the wrong turning is always answered by the argument that men idealise the past, and make a myth of the Age of Gold.  If my progressive guide has led me into a morass or a man-trap by turning to the left by the red pillar-box, instead of to the right by the blue palings of the inn called the Rising Sun, my progressive guide always proceeds to soothe me by talking about the myth of an Age of Gold.  He says I am idealising the right turning.  He says the blue palings are not so blue as they are painted.  He says they are only blue with distance.  He assures me there are spots on the sun, even on the rising sun.  Sometimes he tells me I am wrong in my fixed conviction that the blue was of solid sapphires, or the sun of solid gold.  In short he assures me I am wrong in supposing that the right turning was right in every possible respect; as if I had ever supposed anything of the sort.  I want to go back to that particular place, not because it was all my fancy paints it, or because it was the best place my fancy can paint; but because it was a many thousand times better place than the man-trap in which he and his like have landed me.  But above all I want to go back to it, not because I know it was the right place but because I think it was the right turning.  And the right turning might possibly have led me to the right place; whereas the progressive guide has quite certainly led me to the wrong one.

Now it is quite true that there is less general human testimony to the notion of a New Jerusalem in the future than to the notion of a Golden Age in the past.  But neither of those ideas, whether or no they are illusions, are any answer to the question of a plain man in the plain position of this parable; a man who has to find some guidance in the past if he is to get any good in the future.  What he positively knows, in any case, is the complete collapse of the present.  Now that is the exact truth about the thing so often rebuked as a romantic and unreal return of modern men to medieval things.  They suppose they have taken the wrong turning, because they know they are in the wrong place.  To know that, it is necessary not to idealise the medieval world, but merely to realise the modern world.  It is not so much that they suppose the medieval world was above the average as that they feel sure the modern world is below the average.  They do not start either with the idea that man is meant to live in a New Jerusalem of pearl and sapphire in the future, or that a man was meant to live in a picturesque and richly-painted tavern of the past; but with a strong inward and personal persuasion that a man was not meant to live in a man-trap.