ion of the whole
adventure was not that of Henry, but of the populace who turned Henry
into Harry. There were a thousand Harries in the army at Agincourt, and
not one. For the figure that Shakespeare framed out of the legends of
the great victory is largely the figure that all men saw as the
Englishman of the Middle Ages. He did not really talk in poetry, like
Shakespeare's hero, but he would have liked to. Not being able to do so,
he sang; and the English people principally appear in contemporary
impressions as the singing people. They were evidently not only
expansive but exaggerative; and perhaps it was not only in battle that
they drew the long bow. That fine farcical imagery, which has descended
to the comic songs and common speech of the English poor even to-day,
had its happy infancy when England thus became a nation; though the
modern poor, under the pressure of economic progress, have partly lost
the gaiety and kept only the humour. But in that early April of
patriotism the new unity of the State still sat lightly upon them; and a
cobbler in Henry's army, who would at home have thought first that it
was the day of St. Crispin of the Cobblers, might truly as well as
sincerely have hailed the splintering of the French lances in a storm of
arrows, and cried, "St. George for Merry England."

Human things are uncomfortably complex, and while it was the April of
patriotism it was the Autumn of mediaeval society. In the next chapter I
shall try to trace the forces that were disintegrating the civilization;
and even here, after the first victories, it is necessary to insist on
the bitterness and barren ambition that showed itself more and more in
the later stages, as the long French wars dragged on. France was at the
time far less happy than England--wasted by the treason of its nobles
and the weakness of its kings almost as much as by the invasion of the
islanders. And yet it was this very despair and humiliation that seemed
at last to rend the sky, and let in the light of what it is hard for the
coldest historian to call anything but a miracle.

It may be this apparent miracle that has apparently made Nationalism
eternal. It may be conjectured, though the question is too difficult to
be developed here, that there was something in the great moral change
which turned the Roman Empire into Christendom, by which each great
thing, to which it afterwards gave birth, was baptized into a promise,
or at least into a hope of