The Byronic spirit was really a sort of operatic Calvinism.It brought the villain upon the stage;the lost soul;the modern version of King John.But the contemporaries of King John did not feel like that about him,even when they detested him.They instinctively felt him to be a man of mixed passions like themselves,who was allowing his evil passions to have much too good a time of it.They might have spoken of him as a man in considerable danger of going to hell;but they would have not talked of him as if he had come from there.In the ballads of Percy or Robin Hood it frequently happens that the King comes upon the scene,and his ultimate decision makes the climax of the tale.But we do not feel,as we do in the Byronic or modern romance,that there is a definite stage direction "Enter Tyrant."Nor do we behold a deus ex machina who is certain to do all that is mild and just.The King in the ballad is in a state of virile indecision.Sometimes he will pass from a towering passion to the most sweeping magnanimity and friendliness;sometimes he will begin an act of vengeance and be turned from it by a jest.Yet this august levity is not moral indifference;it is moral freedom.It is the strong sense in the writer that the King,being the type of man with power,will probably sometimes use it badly and sometimes well.In this sense John is certainly misrepresented,for he is pictured as something that none of his own friends or enemies saw.In that sense he was certainly not so black as he is painted,for he lived in a world where every one was piebald.
King John would be represented in a modern play or novel as a kind of degenerate;a shiftyeyed moral maniac with a twist in his soul's backbone and green blood in his veins.The mediaevals were quite capable of boiling him in melted lead,but they would have been quite incapable of despairing of his soul in the modern fashion.A striking a fortiori case is that of the strange mediaeval legend of Robert the Devil.Robert was represented as a monstrous birth sent to an embittered woman actually in answer to prayers to Satan,and his earlier actions are simply those of the infernal fire let loose upon earth.Yet though he can be called almost literally a child of hell,yet the climax of the story is his repentance at Rome and his great reparation.That is the paradox of mediaeval morals:as it must appear to the moderns.We must try to conceive a race of men who hated John,and sought his blood,and believed every abomination about him,who would have been quite capable of assassinating or torturing him in the extremity of their anger.And yet we must admit that they would not really have been fundamentally surprised if he had shaved his head in humiliation,given all his goods to the poor,embraced the lepers in a lazar-house,and been canonised as a saint in heaven.So strongly did they hold that the pivot of Will should turn freely,which now is rusted,and sticks.
For we,whatever our political opinions,certainly never think of our public men like that.If we hold the opinion that Mr.Lloyd George is a noble tribune of the populace and protector of the poor,we do not admit that he can ever have paltered with the truth or bargained with the powerful.If we hold the equally idiotic opinion that he is a red and rabid Socialist,maddening mobs into mutiny and theft,then we expect him to go on maddening them--and us.We do not expect him,let us say,suddenly to go into a monastery.We have lost the idea of repentance;especially in public things;that is why we cannot really get rid of our great national abuses of economic tyranny and aristocratic avarice.
Progress in the modern sense is a very dismal drudge;and mostly consists of being moved on by the police.We move on because we are not allowed to move back.But the really ragged prophets,the real revolutionists who held high language in the palaces of kings,they did not confine themselves to saying,"Onward,Christian soldiers,"still less,"Onward,Futurist soldiers";what they said to high emperors and to whole empires was,"Turn ye,turn ye,why will ye die?"
