Hope and Glory in 800 A.D.
IRVINE, KEITH
Hope and Glory in 800 A.D. Charlemagne: From the Hammer to the Cross. By Richard Winston. Bobbs-Merrill. 346 pp. $3.75. Revieived by Keith Irvine British writer and critic "We do not carry...
...For while the past, distilled into a tradition, may be a great and glorious thing in the stream of which many lives can find their fulfilment, it may also, when neglected or ignored, wreak destruction upon the present...
...The "new" mystique of Nazism, calling back to life from the unconscious past the pagan gods so long thought dead and gone, allowed them to wreak a barbaric revenge upon a society grown too "good," too artificial, too sophisticated...
...With all that, it is a curious experience to try to translate oneself into Charlemagne's world...
...A link between the Roman Empire and the modern technological world, Charlemagne was, indeed, a man of destiny...
...Be that as it may, popular legend has always some kernel of truth in it—in the spirit if not in the letter—and popular legend for a thousand years and more has held that Charlemagne was the greatest, the strongest, the bravest, the wisest and the best king that ever ruled in Christendom...
...The campaign consequently proved a chastening failure...
...Yet, how much of this was legend ? "How great was the man and how dark the age...
...Winston is, in a sense, the converse of Michelet—the great people's historian, so often untrustworthy in details, so unmistakably true in the spirit of what happened...
...One of the most interesting parts of the book is the investigation of the legend of Roland and his heroic death in defeat at Roncevaux...
...Since we can never be rid of the past, it is better to keep it in mind, lest we expose ourselves to its blind fury...
...Insofar as he drew on the Roman past, it was not to play, like Mussolini, with a childish dream of personal greatness, but with a vision of how that past could be reshaped, restated, reborn in other cultural terms...
...Something of the hope and glory of his coronation as Holy Roman Emperor on Christmas Day 300 AD still lingers about the corridors of European history, like the afterglow of a love affair which persists into old age...
...Winston can make us believe...
...For Charlemagne did, indeed, represent the moment of conception of the Middle Ages, the opening of a long, glorious and terrible chapter in human history...
...There is one theory which holds that his reputation has been inflated by the poets, musicians and troubadors—for he filled his court with scholars, ballad-makers and foreigners...
...He Christianized it...
...Winston, what actually happened was as follows: Charlemagne sent an expeditionary force into Spain to liberate the Christian population from the cruel pagan yoke...
...Winston has seized the principles?and the phraseology—of power politics, and effectively applies them to medieval situations, it is more difficult for him to recreate the early medieval atmosphere—an atmosphere we have left so far behind that, although a part of our cultural heritage, it sometimes seems to belong to another world...
...It is surprising that we should know so little about a man who has made so deep a mark on Western history...
...It is startling to learn that a people who today are "French," rather than the fierce anti-Christian Moors of medieval propaganda, perpetrated the tragedy that, in song and story, has gone ringing down the centuries...
...Thus, advanced Germany, outdat-ing its own institutions by the very pace of its technical progress, suffered a destructive uprush from the collective psyche...
...Geo-politically, the waves of time distorted his empire and fragmented his work...
...So much having been said, all praise to Mr...
...But they could not prevent others from trying, again and again, to recreate the pattern he had once established...
...According to Mr...
...How hard to recreate a mystical absolute understanding of religion from the fragmented Christian creeds of today...
...They are still trying today...
...is the question that Richard Winston set himself to answer...
...Yet, to ignore the past is sometimes to expose oneself to its dangers...
...Amid this melee of conflicting customs, races and religions, there is no doubt about Charlemagne's role or its importance...
...How hard to imagine a Europe in which the Saxons practice ritual cannibalism, where Lombardy is a power to be reckoned with, and where a savage race lurks in the bogs beyond the Breton marches...
...He united church and state...
...Few men can have exercised such a formative influence upon history?or set themselves so squarely to refashion so much of the past—as Charles the Great, a monarch who so personified greatness that it was, at last, built into his name, "Charlemagne...
...Freedom from the past enables Americans to "travel light...
...He made Europe one...
...He is so careful to avoid extremes, so chary of judgments, that there is hardly one striking and characteristic episode revealing the great man's character in which Mr...
...Popular legend transmuted the actual events into a fight to the last by Christian knights against the Saracen hordes thundering at the gates of Europe...
...How hard to identify oneself with a society which held the nobility in absolute veneration...
...How strange to read of Christian missionaries who lead expeditions against the heathen—armed with tongue and sword—and of a Europe where sacred trees play a religious role even more vital than they do in the animistic Africa of today...
...The Christian population, however, finding the Saracen yoke by no means uncomfortable, failed to welcome their Christian liberators...
...His biography is a careful and readable compilation of known facts, through which the personality of the historical Charlemagne still emerges mistily...
...Retreating gloomily across the Pyrenees, the rear guard of Charlemagne's army was ambushed by Gascons as they passed through the mountains, and was wiped out to the last man...
...Although Mr...
...Revieived by Keith Irvine British writer and critic "We do not carry enough of our past with us," Lewis Mumford once remarked...
...Winston's research and to the value of its fruits...
...He formed the synthesis from which the Middle Ages was to develop into its flower...
...So doubtful is he of the accuracy of all the information that he transmits to us that we are finally left with all the available facts and none of the living Charlemagne...
...This is at once a strength and a potential weakness...
Vol. 38 • March 1955 • No. 13
