ablest
captains and by some of the most chivalrous gentlemen of the age.
For curiously enough, the host contained more than one cultured
gentleman who was as simple a Christian as any peasant,
and as recklessly ready to be butchered or tortured for the mere
name of Christ.

It is a tag of the materialists that the truth about history
rubs away the romance of history. It is dear to the modern mind
because it is depressing; but it does not happen to be true.
Nothing emerges more clearly from a study that is truly realistic,
than the curious fact that romantic people were really romantic.
It is rather the historical novels that will lead a modern
man vaguely to expect to find the leader of the new knights,
Godfrey de Bouillon, to have been merely a brutal baron.
The historical facts are all in favour of his having been much
more like a knight of the Round Table. In fact he was a far
better man than most of the knights of the Round Table, in whose
characters the fabulist, knowing that he was writing a fable,
was tactful enough to introduce a larger admixture of vice. Truth is
not only stranger than fiction, but often saintlier than fiction.
For truth is real, while fiction is bound to be realistic.
Curiously enough Godfrey seems to have been heroic even in those
admirable accidents which are generally and perhaps rightly regarded
as the trappings of fiction. Thus he was of heroic stature,
a handsome red-bearded man of great personal strength and daring;
and he was himself the first man over the wall of Jerusalem,
like any boy hero in a boy's adventure story. But he was also,
the realist will be surprised to hear, a perfectly honest man,
and a perfectly genuine practiser of the theoretical magnanimity
of knighthood. Everything about him suggests it; from his first
conversion from the imperial to the papal (and popular) cause, to his
great refusal of the kinghood of the city he had taken; "I will
not wear a crown of gold where my Master wore a crown of thorns."
He was a just ruler, and the laws he made were full of the plainest
public spirit. But even if we dismiss all that was written
of him by Christian chroniclers because they might be his friends
(which would be a pathetic and exaggerated compliment to the harmonious
unity of Crusaders and of Christians) he would still remain
sufficiently assoiled and crowned with the words of his enemies.
For a Saracen chronicler wrote of him, with a fine simplicity,
that if