on as they
had mastered the heathen madness of the time and preserved the Christian
rationality that had come from Rome. Arthur has his name because he
killed the heathen; the heathen who killed him have no names at all.
Englishmen who know nothing of English history, but less than nothing of
Irish history, have heard somehow or other of Brian Boru, though they
spell it Boroo and seem to be under the impression that it is a joke. It
is a joke the subtlety of which they would never have been able to
enjoy, if King Brian had not broken the heathen in Ireland at the great
Battle of Clontarf. The ordinary English reader would never have heard
of Olaf of Norway if he had not "preached the Gospel with his sword"; or
of the Cid if he had not fought against the Crescent. And though Alfred
the Great seems to have deserved his title even as a personality, he was
not so great as the work he had to do.

But the paradox remains that Arthur is more real than Alfred. For the
age is the age of legends. Towards these legends most men adopt by
instinct a sane attitude; and, of the two, credulity is certainly much
more sane than incredulity. It does not much matter whether most of the
stories are true; and (as in such cases as Bacon and Shakespeare) to
realize that the question does not matter is the first step towards
answering it correctly. But before the reader dismisses anything like an
attempt to tell the earlier history of the country by its legends, he
will do well to keep two principles in mind, both of them tending to
correct the crude and very thoughtless scepticism which has made this
part of the story so sterile. The nineteenth-century historians went on
the curious principle of dismissing all people of whom tales are told,
and concentrating upon people of whom nothing is told. Thus, Arthur is
made utterly impersonal because all legends are lies, but somebody of
the type of Hengist is made quite an important personality, merely
because nobody thought him important enough to lie about. Now this is to
reverse all common sense. A great many witty sayings are attributed to
Talleyrand which were really said by somebody else. But they would not
be so attributed if Talleyrand had been a fool, still less if he had
been a fable. That fictitious stories are told about a person is, nine
times out of ten, extremely good evidence that there was somebody to
tell them about. Indeed some allow that marvellous things were done, and
that there