Alfred the Great

The celebrations in connection with the millenary of King Alfred struck
a note of sympathy in the midst of much that was unsympathetic, because,
altogether apart from any peculiar historical opinions, all men feel the
sanctifying character of that which is at once strong and remote; the
ancient thing is always the most homely, and the distant thing the most
near. The only possible peacemaker is a dead man, ever since by the
sublime religious story a dead man only could reconcile heaven and
earth. In a certain sense we always feel the past ages as human, and our
own age as strangely and even weirdly dehumanised. In our own time the
details overpower us; men's badges and buttons seem to grow larger and
larger as in a horrible dream. To study humanity in the present is like
studying a mountain with a magnifying glass; to study it in the past is
like studying it through a telescope.

For this reason England, like every other great and historic nation, has
sought its typical hero in remote and ill-recorded times. The personal
and moral greatness of Alfred is, indeed, beyond question. It does not
depend any more than the greatness of any other human hero upon the
accuracy of any or all of the stories that are told about him. Alfred
may not have done one of the things which are reported of him, but it is
immeasurably easier to do every one of those things than to be the man
of whom such things are reported falsely. Fable is, generally speaking,
far more accurate than fact, for fable describes a man as he was to his
own age, fact describes him as he is to a handful of inconsiderable
antiquarians many centuries after. Whether Alfred watched the cakes for
the neat-herd's wife, whether he sang songs in the Danish camp, is of no
interest to anyone except those who set out to prove under considerable
disadvantages that they are genealogically descended from him. But the
man is better pictured in these stories than in any number of modern
realistic trivialities about his favourite breakfast and his favourite
musical composer. Fable is more historical than fact, because fact tells
us about one man and fable tells us about a million men. If we read of a
man who could make green grass red and turn the sun into the moon, we
may not believe these particular details about him, but we learn
something infinitely more important than such trivialities, the fact
that men could look into his face and believe it possible. The glory and
greatness of Alfred, therefore, is like that of all the heroes of the
morning of the world, set far beyond the chance of that strange and
sudden dethronement which may arise from the unsealing of a manuscript
or the turning over of a stone. Men may have told lies when they said
that he first entrapped the