One silver morning I walked into a small grey town of stone, like twenty
other grey western towns, which happened to be called Glastonbury; and
saw the magic thorn of near two thousand years growing in the open air
as casually as any bush in my garden.
In Glastonbury, as in all noble and humane things, the myth is more
important than the history. One cannot say anything stronger of the
strange old tale of St. Joseph and the Thorn than that it dwarfs St.
Dunstan. Standing among the actual stones and shrubs one thinks of the
first century and not of the tenth; one's mind goes back beyond the
Saxons and beyond the greatest statesman of the Dark Ages. The tale that
Joseph of Arimathea came to Britain is presumably a mere legend. But
it is not by any means so incredible or preposterous a legend as many
modern people suppose. The popular notion is that the thing is quite
comic and inconceivable; as if one said that Wat Tyler went to Chicago,
or that John Bunyan discovered the North Pole. We think of Palestine as
little, localized and very private, of Christ's followers as poor folk,
astricti globis, rooted to their towns or trades; and we think of vast
routes of travel and constant world-communications as things of recent
and scientific origin. But this is wrong; at least, the last part of it
is. It is part of that large and placid lie that the rationalists
tell when they say that Christianity arose in ignorance and barbarism.
Christianity arose in the thick of a brilliant and bustling cosmopolitan
civilization. Long sea-voyages were not so quick, but were quite as
incessant as to-day; and though in the nature of things Christ had not
many rich followers, it is not unnatural to suppose that He had some.
And a Joseph of Arimathea may easily have been a Roman citizen with a
yacht that could visit Britain. The same fallacy is employed with
the same partisan motive in the case of the Gospel of St. John;
which critics say could not have been written by one of the first few
Christians because of its Greek transcendentalism and its Platonic tone.
I am no judge of the philology, but every human being is a divinely
appointed judge of the philosophy: and the Platonic tone seems to me to
prove nothing at all. Palestine was not a secluded valley of barbarians;
it was an open province of a polyglot empire, overrun with all sorts of
people of all kinds of education. To take a rough parallel: suppose some
great prophet arose among the Boers in South Africa. The prophet himself
might be a simple or unlettered man. But no one who knows the modern
world would be surprised if one of his closest followers were a
Professor from Heidelberg or an M.A. from Oxford.
All this is not urged here with any notion of proving that the tale of
the thorn is not a myth; as I have said, it probably is a myth. It is
urged with the much more important object of pointing out the proper
attitude towards such myths.. The proper attitude is one of doubt
and hope and of a kind of light mystery. The tale is certainly not
impossible; as it is certainly not certain. And through all the ages
since the Roman Empire men have fed their healthy fancies and their
historical imagination upon the very twilight condition of such tales.
But to-day real agnosticism has declined along with real theology.
People cannot leave a creed alone; though it is the essence of a creed
to be clear. But neither can they leave a legend alone; though it is
the essence of a legend to be vague. That sane half scepticism which was
found in all rustics, in all ghost tales and fairy tales, seems to be
a lost secret. Modern people must make scientifically certain that St.
Joseph did or did not go to Glastonbury, despite the fact that it is
now quite impossible to find out; and that it does not, in a religious
sense, very much matter. But it is essential to feel that he may have
gone to Glastonbury: all songs, arts, and dedications branching and
blossoming like the thorn, are rooted in some such sacred doubt. Taken
thus, not heavily like a problem but lightly like an old tale, the thing
does lead one along the road of very strange realities, and the thorn is
found growing in the heart of a very secret maze of the soul. Something
is really present in the place; some closer contact with the thing which
covers Europe but is still a secret. Somehow the grey town and the green
bush touch across the world the strange small country of the garden and
the grave; there is verily some communion between the thorn tree and the
crown of thorns.
A man never knows what tiny thing will startle him to such ancestral and
impersonal tears. Piles of superb masonry will often pass like a common
panorama; and on this grey and silver morning the ruined towers of the
cathedral stood about me somewhat vaguely like grey clouds. But down in
a hollow where the local antiquaries are making a fruitful excavation, a
magnificent old ruffian with a pickaxe (whom I believe to have been St.
Joseph of Arimathea) showed me a fragment of the old vaulted roof which
he had found in the earth; and on the whitish grey stone there was just
a faint brush of gold. There seemed a piercing and swordlike pathos, an
unexpected fragrance of all forgotten or desecrated things, in the bare
survival of that poor little pigment upon the imperishable rock. To the
strong shapes of the Roman and the Gothic I had grown accustomed; but
that weak touch of colour was at once tawdry and tender, like some
popular keepsake. Then I knew that all my fathers were men like me;
for the columns and arches were grave, and told of the gravity of the
builders; but here was one touch of their gaiety. I almost expected it
to fade from the stone as I stared. It was as if men had been able to
preserve a fragment of a sunset.
And then I remembered how the artistic critics have always praised the
grave tints and the grim shadows of the crumbling cloisters and abbey
towers, and how they themselves often dress up like Gothic ruins in the
sombre tones of dim grey walls or dark green ivy. I remembered how they
hated almost all primary things, but especially primary colours. I knew
they were appreciating much more delicately and truly than I the sublime
skeleton and the mighty fungoids of the dead Glastonbury. But I stood
for an instant alive in the living Glastonbury, gay with gold and
coloured like the toy-book of a child.