The Old Romance

The next day, Gottschalk, his shepherd’s staff pointed with iron on his shoulder, set forth at noon on his lonely way, knowing that the monster was seeking prey in distant meadows. He knew his path again by the stones and branches he had dropped the day before as he went along. The mountains looked more and more wild, the passes grew more and more narrow, till even the slender youth could hardly pass through them. The streams murmured mournfully, and the fir-trees groaned as before a coming storm; all nature seemed to say, “Return, return, poor shepherd-boy, or all is over with thee! Thou wilt perish on the bleak mountains, and not even find a grave.” Gottschalk’s heart had almost failed him, but he still drew forth cheerful sounds from his pipe, and sang this song at intervals: —

“When other shepherds sleep
In the quiet noontide shade,
Gottschalk leaves his sheep,
And seeks a distant glade.

Whither away, rash youth?
Slumberers, ye may not know;
My distant haunts, in sooth,
Are much too high for you.”

And the notes of his pipe fell softly, as if breathing forth a sweet secret. A light seemed to spring up in his heart, and he darted on. But may he trust to this light? He stopped, and knelt down reverently, as if at the altar of his village-church, and poured forth this prayer: — “O Lord God, Who knowest that I go forth at my prince’s command to destroy the wicked brood, and to deliver my countrymen from danger; if it be a sin that I cherish yet another and glorious hope, root it out of my heart, or deny me the sweet prize, and give it to a better Christian; but yet grant me now victory, in Thy strength, for the good of my country; or, if this may not be, grant me a joyful death.”

He seemed to hear within the words, “Go on, good servant.”

–The Shepherd of the Giant Mountains

__________

It’s surprising how few men saw the French Revolution for what it was. It was not a mere palace revolution, a change from one ruler to another; the French Revolution marked the end of the Europeans’ Christian romance. Christianity would survive for centuries after the French Revolution, but it would survive only as an intellectual faith, not as a poetic vision which set souls on fire. Burke saw this clearly:

But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators, has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever. Never, never more shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom. The unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise, is gone! It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that charity of honor, which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil, by losing all its grossness. – Reflections on the French Revolution

There is a direct link between Burke’s vision of European Christianity and St. Paul’s vision: both men were romantics. St. Paul told us not to rely on “miracles, healings, helps, governments,” or “diversities of tongues.” Instead we were to rely on that charity of honor that never faileth. The modern Europeans are wandering blindly over the face of what used to be Christian Europe, because they have lost the Pauline-Burkean vision of Christ, the vision of that perfect Knight of charity and honor who enters human hearts. Negro worship flourishes because the Christ-bearing people have lost the vision of Christ as the divine Knight Errant.

The devil’s own know that people need more than an abstraction to fuel their faith. They need to see their faith enfleshed. This is why Trotsky, the Jacobin-Marxist, advised his fellow revolutionaries to look to the negro as the focal point of the anti-European revolution. As the complete antithesis of white men, negroes could serve as the living symbols of pure creatures of nature, and they could serve as the revolutionary shock troops that could be counted upon, when given free rein, to kill the whites without pity or remorse. In the old horror films we tremble for the fate of innocent victims at the mercy of subhuman brutes that are under the influence of satanic, mad scientists. But aren’t the real life enactments of those horror films so much worse than the fantasies? The mad-scientists, the Jacobin utopians, have unleashed the bloodthirsty negroes on the white race, and the whites will not defend themselves, because they have no vision. The liberals see the sacred negro presiding over a new world order in which the white man’s vineyard, filled with the grapes of wrath, have been trampled underfoot and destroyed by a crusading army of white utopians and noble black savages. That vision has carried the day throughout all of the once white, European nations. The Christian churches succumbed to that new vision of a Christless utopia as quickly as the French succumbed in World War II, because their Maginot line was guarded by Christian intellects without Christian hearts.

In Moby Dick Ahab’s first mate confronts Ahab and denounces his mad attempt to risk all their lives in the pursuit of Moby Dick. But Starbuck cannot maintain his opposition to Ahab: His soul is “overmanned.” Ahab has a vision, albeit a demonic vision, in which he passionately believes. Starbuck is an intellectual Christian, and as such he has no vision with which he can oppose Ahab. So all save one perish.

The conservatives of the 20^th century were utilitarian Starbucks. They thought they could build Liberaldom more efficiently by their methods than their liberal cousins could. Twentieth century conservatism was never about destroying liberalism, it was about who could better manage the new, democratic, racially egalitarian society. Our European forefathers had an entirely different vision, an undemocratic, racially prejudiced vision of one people with one faith, who were loyal to their own racial hearth fire and rejected all others. That is the essence of the European romance: Fidelity to one particular people and one particular God. When that visionary romance makes way for the romance of the sacred negro, no think-tank, no army, no democratic sleight-of-hand, can bring the European people back to life.

No doubt the false portrayal of Aslan in the churches contributed greatly to the death of the Christian romance. I once read one of those religious pamphlets in which Calvin debated a Thomist. I did not finish the pamphlet with a rousing cheer for either theologian; I experienced a vague feeling of disgust for the whole business. Was this what Christianity was all about? Some men need to reduce that which is poetical to a more mundane theory that their button-down, bureaucratic minds can understand, but should we then let them drive their theoretical chaise carts over our faith? St. Paul never defined charity, but we know what charity is, by virtue of what St. Paul said about it. Nor did St. John define the light, but we know who the Light is, because of St. John’s description of the light.

Even if we grant the terrible effects that the presentation of a false image of Aslan has had on the European people, that still does not completely explain why the Europeans came to believe in the sacred negro romance over the Christian romance. Maybe it was the advent of the liberals’ holy ghost, Science, which completed the unholy trinity (Abstract Reason, the father; The Negro, the son; and Science, the holy ghost) that finally turned the Europeans to the new romance of negro-worshipping liberalism. But whatever the path the Europeans took to negro worship, the terrible reality is that the European people are surrounded by the walls of Liberaldom, and they cannot see any other world beyond that world. They need vision, but the type of vision they need cannot simply be purchased at the local drugstore or supermarket.

The liberals are now involved in what resembles a mop-up campaign after a victory in a major war. They are looking for small pockets of resistance from enemy soldiers who do not know that the war is over or who have refused to obey their commanders’ orders to surrender. The liberals also seek to tear down all statues and monuments of the enemy. This is why the Southern war memorials are being torn down. They are part of ‘racist’ Europe, and as such they must be destroyed. All symbols of the old romance must be eliminated so the new romance can shine all the more brightly in its radiant glory. But once the cultural remnants of old Europe are destroyed, won’t there still be living remnants, won’t there still be white people? Yes, there will, and they will be destroyed as well. The satanically logical brain that rules Liberaldom will demand it.

The white conservatives, who do not want to conserve white people, are forever telling liberals that they are the good, non-racist whites. But their white skins make them part of the old romance, whether they denounce the old romance or not. Even the liberals will perish in their own anti-white stew that they have prepared for thee and me. There is more wisdom in the Gordon Scott movie called Tarzan and the Lost Safari than in the thousands upon thousands of books written by liberals on the ‘race issue.’ A great white hunter who has delivered up his own people to be tortured and murdered by the black natives, is falsely accused of burning the natives’ village. His protests are in vain: “You betray your own people, you betray me,” is the assessment of the native chief. The liberals will be the last whites in the stew pots, but the liberals will go there despite their dreams of To Kill a Mockingbird darkies, bowing down in humble reverence and awe to their Atticus Finch imitations.

The French Revolution, so heralded by the radical poets such as Keats, Shelley, and Byron, was the embodiment of a new romance that was destined to supplant the old Christian romance. Reason, unfettered by God, was triumphant. But the revolution was a work in progress. It was left to radicals such as Trotsky to add the negro and science into the Jacobin mix. The history of the West since the French Revolution has been a history of compromise with the forces of evil. ‘How much can we concede without losing everything to the devil?’ was the unspoken strategy of the European people in the post-French Revolution era. Compromise, not victory, was the goal. But the devil does not compromise, nor does he give quarter. He demands unconditional surrender. Modern Europe, which is best described as Liberaldom, is the result of the Europeans’ attempt to compromise with the devil. We can hear the white grazers asking why they are hated so. They mean no one harm.

‘Whither should I fly?
I have done no harm. But I remember now
I am in this earthly world, where to do harm
Is often laudable, to do good sometime
Accounted dangerous folly.’

Will the devil cease to prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls because white people say nice things about negroes? The exact opposite is true. The more the white man worships the negro, the further the white man slides into the pit of hell. Part of the old romance, an essential part, was the knight who harmed those who harmed his people. The great German writer De La Motte Fouque, in his Christian romance, The Shepherd of the Giant Mountains, shows us why a truly gentle and loving heart must kill for mercy’s sake.

At length he reached the spot whence he could see into the nest of the hateful monster; and as he listened to the angry sounds of the young griffins, and saw their fiery eyes and their sharp beaks he thought to himself that old Hans was right, and that in time they would devour even men. He determined to make an end at once; he was glad they were so hideous and so fierce, for it made the task of destroying them less painful.

The great compromise has failed, because there is a devil. The modern Europeans’ disbelief in the devil did not make him disappear, it simply allowed him to expand his influence unopposed. Enter the Christian knight. With or without armor and sword, he is the man who sees evil for what it is, and he sees the good, he sees the one, pure and perfect Knight, weeping for His lost sheep who have left their white, Christian hearth fire in order to live in Liberaldom. The Knight must bring that other forgotten world, the world of Christian romance, into Liberaldom. Then that one, tiny spark of romantic fire will take hold, and the one true romance, the romance between Christ and the European people, will begin anew. +