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Chapter IV - RacePart II
Part II
I found plenty of well-marked English types, the ruddy complexion, fair
and plump, robust men, with faces cut like a die, and a strong island speech
and accent; a Norman type, with a complacency that belongs to that
constitution. Others, who might be Americans, for anything that appeared in
their complexion or form: and their speech was much less marked, and their
thought much less bound. We will call them Saxons. Then the Roman has
implanted his dark complexion in the trinity or quaternity of bloods.
1. The sources from which tradition derives their stock are mainly three.
And, first, they are of the oldest blood of the world, - the Celtic. Some
peoples are deciduous or transitory. Where are the Greeks? where the
Etrurians? where the Romans? But the Celts or Sidonides are an old family, of
whose beginning there is no memory, and their end is likely to be still more
remote in the future; for they have endurance and productiveness. They planted
Britain, and gave to the seas and mountains names which are poems, and imitate
the pure voices of nature. They are favorably remembered in the oldest records
of Europe. They had no violent feudal tenure, but the husbandman owned the
land. They had an alphabet, astronomy, priestly culture, and a sublime creed.
They have a hidden and precarious genius. They made the best popular
literature of the Middle Ages in the songs of Merlin and the tender and
delicious mythology of Arthur.
2. The English come mainly from the Germans, whom the Romans found hard
to conquer in two hundred and ten years, - say, impossible to conquer, - when
one remembers the long sequel; a people about whom, in the old empire, the
rumor ran, there was never any that meddled with them that repented it not.
3. Charlemagne, halting one day in a town of Narbonnese Gaul, looked out
of a window, and saw a fleet of Northmen cruising in the Mediterranean. They
even entered the port of the town where he was, causing no small alarm and
sudden manning and arming of his galleys. As they put out to sea again, the
emperor gazed long after them, his eyes bathed in tears. "I am tormented with
sorrow," he said, "when I foresee the evils they will bring on my posterity."
There was reason for these Xerxes` tears. The men who have built a ship and
invented the rig, - cordage, sail, compass, and pump, - the working in and out
of port, have acquired much more than a ship. Now arm them, and every shore is
at their mercy. For, if they have not numerical superiority where they anchor
they have only to sail a mile or two to find it. Bonaparte`s art of war,
namely of concentrating force on the point of attack, must always be theirs
who have the choice of the battle-ground. Of course they come into the fight
from a higher ground of power than the land-nations; and can engage them on
shore with a victorious advantage in the retreat. As soon as the shores are
sufficiently peopled to make piracy a losing business, the same skill and
courage are ready for the service of trade.
The Heimskringla,^2 or Sagas of the Kings of Norway, collected by Snorro
Sturleson, is the Iliad and Odyssey of English history. Its portraits, like
Homer`s, are strongly individualized. The Sagas describe a monarchical
republic like Sparta. The government disappears before the importance of
citizens. In Norway, no Persian masses fight and perish to aggrandize a king,
but the actors are bonders or landholders, every one of whom is named and
personally and patronymically described, as the king`s friend and companion. A
sparse population gives this high worth to every man. Individuals are often
noticed as very handsome persons, which trait only brings the story nearer to
the English race. Then the solid material interest predominates, so dear to
English understanding, wherein the association is logical, between merit and
land. The heroes of the Sagas are not the knights of South Europe. No vaporing
of France and Spain has corrupted them. They are substantial farmers, whom the
rough times have forced to defend their properties. They have weapons which
they use in a determined manner, by no means for chivalry, but for their
acres. They are people considerably advanced in rural arts, living
amphibiously on a rough coast, and drawing half their food from the sea, and
half from the land. They have herds of cows, and malt, wheat, bacon, butter,
and cheese. They fish in the fiord, and hunt the deer. A king among these
farmers has a varying power, sometimes not exceeding the authority of a
sheriff. A king was maintained much as, in some of our country districts, a
winter schoolmaster is quartered, a week here, a week there, and a fortnight
on the next farm, - on all the farmers in rotation. This the king calls going
into guest-quarters; and it was the only way in which, in a poor country, a
poor king, with many retainers, could be kept alive, when he leaves his own
farm to collect his dues through the kingdom.
[Footnote 2: Heimskringla. Translated by Samuel Laing, Esq. London, 1844.]
These Norsemen are excellent persons in the main, with good sense,
steadiness, wise speech, and prompt action. But they have a singular turn for
homicide; their chief end of man is to murder, or to be murdered; oars,
scythes, harpoons, crowbars, peatknives, and hayforks are tools valued by them
all the more for their charming aptitude for assassinations. A pair of kings,
after dinner, will divert themselves by thrusting each his sword through the
other`s body, as did Yngve and Alf. Another pair ride out on a morning for a
frolic, and, finding no weapon near, will take the bits out of their horses`
mouths, and crush each other`s heads with them, as did Alric and Eric. The
sight of a tent-cord or a cloak-string puts them on hanging somebody, a
wife, or a husband, or, best of all, a king. If a farmer has so much as a
hayfork, he sticks it into a King Dag. King Ingiald finds it vastly amusing to
burn up half a dozen kings in a hall, after getting them drunk. Never was poor
gentleman so surfeited with life, so furious to be rid of it, as the Northman.
If he cannot pick any other quarrel, he will get himself comfortably gored by
a bull`s horns, like Egil, or slain by a landslide, like the agricultural King
Onund. Odin died in his bed, in Sweden; but it was a proverb of ill condition,
to die the death of old age. King Hake of Sweden cuts and slashes in battle,
as long as he can stand, then orders his war-ship, loaded with his dead men
and their weapons, to be taken out to sea, the tiller shipped, and the sails
spread; being left alone, he sets fire to some tarwood, and lies down
contented on deck. The wind blew off the land, the ship flew burning in clear
flame, out between the islets into the ocean, and there was the right end of
King Hake.
The early Sagas are sanguinary and piratical; the later are of a noble
strain. History rarely yields us better passages than the conversation between
King Sigurd the Crusader and King Eystein, his brother, on their respective
merits, - one, the soldier, and the other, a lover of the arts of peace.
But the reader of the Norman history must steel himself by holding fast
the remote compensations which result from animal vigor. As the old fossil
world shows that the first steps of reducing the chaos were confided to
saurians and other huge and horrible animals, so the foundations of the new
civility were to be laid by the most savage men.
The Normans came out of France into England worse men than they went into
it, one hundred and sixty years before. They had lost their own language, and
learned the Romance or barbarous Latin of the Gauls; and had acquired, with
the language, all the vices it had names for. The conquest has obtained in the
chronicles the name of the "memory of sorrow." Twenty thousand thieves landed
at Hastings. These founders of the House of Lords were greedy and ferocious
dragoons, sons of greedy and ferocious pirates. They were all alike, they took
everything they could carry, they burned, harried, violated, tortured, and
killed, until everything English was wrought to the verge of ruin. Such,
however, is the illusion of antiquity and wealth, that decent and dignified
men now existing boast their descent from these filthy thieves, who showed a
far juster conviction of their own merits, by assuming for their types the
swine, goat, jackal, leopard, wolf, and snake, which they severally resembled.
England yielded to the Danes and Northmen in the tenth and eleventh
centuries, and was the receptacle into which all the mettle of that strenuous
population was poured. The continued draught of the best men in Norway,
Sweden, and Denmark to these piratical expeditions, exhausted those countries,
like a tree which bears much fruit when young, and these have been second -
rate powers ever since. The power of the race migrated, and left Norway void.
King Olaf said, "When King Harold, my father, went westward to England, the
chosen men in Norway followed him: but Norway was so emptied then, that such
men have not since been to find in the country, nor especially such a leader
as King Harold was for wisdom and bravery."
It was a tardy recoil of these invasions, when, in 1801, the British
government sent Nelson to bombard the Danish forts in the Sound; and, in 1807,
Lord Cathcart, at Copenhagen, took the entire Danish fleet, as it lay in the
basins, and all the equipments from the Arsenal, and carried them to England.
Konghelle, the town where the kings of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark were wont
to meet, is now rented to a private English gentleman for a hunting ground.
It took many generations to trim, and comb, and perfume the first boat -
load of Norse pirates into royal highnesses and most noble Knights of the
Garter: but every sparkle of ornament dates back to the Norse boat. There will
be time enough to mellow this strength into civility and religion. It is a
medical fact that the children of the blind see; the children of felons have a
healthy conscience. Many a mean, dastardly boy is, at the age of puberty,
transformed in a serious and generous youth.
The mildness of the following ages has not quite effaced these traits of
Odin; as the rudiment of a structure matured in the tiger is said to be still
found unabsorbed in the Caucasian man. The nation has a tough, acrid, animal
nature, which centuries of churching and civilizing have not been able to
sweeten. Alfieri said, "The crimes of Italy were the proof of the superiority
of the stock;" and one may say of England that this watch moves on a splinter
of adamant. The English uncultured are a brutal nation. The crimes recorded in
their calendars leave nothing to be desired in the way of cold malignity. Dear
to the English heart is a fair standup fight. The brutality of the manners in
the lower class appears in the boxing, bear-baiting, cock-fighting, love
of executions, and in the readiness for a set-to in the streets, delightful
to the English of all classes. The costermongers of London streets hold
cowardice in loathing: - "We must work our fists well; we are all handy with
our fists." The public schools are charged with being bear-gardens of brutal
strength, and are liked by the people for that cause. The fagging is a trait
of the same quality. Medwin, in the Life of Shelley, relates that, at a
military school, they rolled up a young man in a snowball, and left him so in
his room, while the other cadets went to church; - and crippled him for life.
They have retained impressment, deck-flogging, army-flogging, and school -
flogging. Such is the ferocity of the army discipline, that a soldier
sentenced to flogging, sometimes prays that his sentence may be commuted to
death. Flogging, banished from the armies of Western Europe, remains here by
the sanction of the Duke of Wellington. The right of the husband to sell the
wife has been retained down to our times. The Jews have been the favorite
victims of royal and popular persecution. Henry III. mortgaged all the Jews in
the kingdom to his brother, the Earl of Cornwall, as security for money which
he borrowed. The torture of criminals, and the rack for extorting evidence,
were slowly disused. Of the criminal statutes, Sir Samuel Romilly said, "I
have examined the codes of all nations, and ours is the worst, and worthy of
the Anthropophagi." In the last session, the House of Commons was listening to
details of flogging and torture practised in the jails.
As soon as this land, thus geographically posted, got a hardy people into
it, they could not help becoming the sailors and factors of the globe. From
childhood, they dabbled in water, they swum like fishes, their playthings were
boats. In the case of the ship-money, the judges delivered it for law, that
"England being an island, the very midland shires therein are all to be
accounted maritime;" and Fuller adds, "the genius even of landlocked counties
driving the natives with a maritime dexterity." As early as the conquest, it
is remarked in explanation of the wealth of England, that its merchants trade
to all countries.
The English, at the present day, have great vigor of body and endurance.
Other countrymen look slight and undersized beside them, and invalids. They
are bigger men than the Americans. I suppose a hundred English taken at random
out of the street, would weigh a fourth more than so many Americans. Yet, I am
told, the skeleton is not larger. They are round, ruddy and handsome; at
least, the whole bust is well formed; and there is a tendency to stout and
powerful frames. I remarked the stoutness, on my first landing at Liverpool;
porter, drayman, coachman, guard, - what substantial, respectable,
grandfatherly figures, with costume and manners to suit. The American has
arrived at the old mansion-house, and finds himself among uncles, aunts, and
grandsires. The pictures on the chimney-tiles of his nursery were pictures
of these people. Here they are in the identical costumes and air which so took
him.
It is the fault of their forms that they grow stocky, and the women have
that disadvantage, - few tall, slender figures of flowing shapes, but stunted
and thickset persons. The French say that the English women have two left
hands. But, in all ages, they are a handsome race. The bronze monuments of
crusaders lying cross-legged, in the Temple Church at London, and those in
Worcester and in Salisbury Cathedrals, which are seven hundred years old, are
of the same type as the best youthful heads of men now in England; - please by
beauty of the same character, an expression blending good nature, valor, and
refinement, and, mainly, by that uncorrupt youth in the face of manhood, which
is daily seen in the streets of London.
Both branches of the Scandinavian race are distinguished for beauty. The
anecdote of the handsome captives which Saint Gregory found at Rome, A.D. 600,
is matched by the testimony of the Norman chroniclers, five centuries later,
who wondered at the beauty and long flowing hair of the young English
captives. Meantime, the Heimskringla has frequent occasion to speak of the
personal beauty of its heroes. When it is considered what humanity, what
resources of mental and moral power, the traits of the blond race betoken, -
its accession to empire marks a new and finer epoch, wherein the old mineral
force shall be subjugated at last by humanity, and shall plough in its furrow
henceforward. It is not a final race, once a crab always a crab, but a race
with a future.
On the English face are combined decision and nerve, with the fair
complexion, blue eyes, and open and florid aspect. Hence the love of truth,
hence the sensibility, the fine perception, and poetic construction. The fair
Saxon man, with open front, and honest meaning, domestic,affectionate, is not
the wood out of which cannibal, or inquisitor, or assassin is made, but he is
moulded for law, lawful trade, civility, marriage, the nurture of children,
for colleges, churches, charities, and colonies.
They are rather manly than warlike. When the war is over, the mask falls
from the affectionate and domestic tastes, which make them women in kindness.
This union of qualities is fabled in their national legend of Beauty and the
Beast, or long before, in the Greek legend of Hermaphrodite. The two sexes are
co-present in the English mind. I apply to Britannia, queen of seas and
colonies, the words in which her latest novelist portrays his heroine: "She is
as mild as she is game, and as game as she is mild." The English delight in
the antagonism which combines in one person the extremes of courage and
tenderness. Nelson, dying at Trafalgar, sends his love to Lord Collingwood,
and, like an innocent schoolboy that goes to bed, says, "Kiss me, Hardy," and
turns to sleep. Lord Collingwood, his comrade, was of a nature the most
affectionate and domestic. Admiral Rodney`s figure approached to delicacy and
effeminacy, and he declared himself very sensible to fear, which he surmounted
only by considerations of honor and public duty. Clarendon says, the Duke of
Buckingham was so modest and gentle, that some courtiers attempted to put
affronts on him, until they found that this modesty and effeminacy was only a
mask for the most terrible determination. And Sir James Parry said, the other
day, of Sir John Franklin, that, "if he found Wellington Sound open, he
explored it; for he was a man who never turned his back on a danger, yet of
that tenderness, that he would not brush away a mosquito." Even for their
highwaymen the same virtue is claimed, and Robin Hood comes described to us as
mitissimus praedonum, the gentlest thief. But they know where their wardogs
lie. Cromwell, Blake, Marlborough, Chatham, Nelson, and Wellington are not to
be trifled with, and the brutal strength which lies at the bottom of society,
the animal ferocity of the quays and cockpits, the bullies of the
costermongers of Shoreditch, Seven Dials, and Spitalfields, they know how to
wake up.
They have a vigorous health, and last well into middle and old age. The
old men are as red as roses, and still handsome. A clear skin, a peachbloom
complexion, and good teeth are found all over the island. They use a plentiful
and nutritious diet. The operative cannot subsist on water-cresses. Beef,
mutton, wheatbread, and malt-liquors are universal among the first-class
laborers. Good feeding is a chief point of national pride among the vulgar,
and, in their caricatures, they represent the Frenchman as a poor, starved
body. It is curious that Tacitus found the English beer already in use among
the Germans: "They make from barley or wheat a drink corrupted into some
resemblance to wine." Lord Chief Justice Fortescue, in Henry VI.`s time, says,
"The inhabitants of England drink no water, unless at certain times, on a
religious score, and by way of penance." The extremes of poverty and ascetic
penance, it would seem, never reach cold water in England. Wood, the
antiquary, in describing the poverty and maceration of Father Lacey, an
English Jesuit, does not deny him beer. He says, "His bed was under a
thatching, and the way to it up a ladder; his fare was coarse; his drink, of a
penny a gawn, or gallon."
They have more constitutional energy than any other people. They think,
with Henri Quatre, that manly exercises are the foundation of that elevation
of mind which gives one nature ascendant over another; or, with the Arabs,
that the days spent in the chase are not counted in the length of life. They
box, run, shoot, ride, row, and sail from pole to pole. They eat, and drink,
and live jolly in the open air, putting a bar of solid sleep between day and
day. They walk and ride as fast as they can, their head bent forward, as if
urged on some pressing affair. The French say that Englishmen in the street
always walk straight before them, like mad dogs. Men and women walk with
infatuation. As soon as he can handle a gun, hunting is the fine art of every
Englishman of condition. They are the most voracious people of prey that ever
existed. Every season turns out the aristocracy into the country, to shoot and
fish. The more vigorous run out of the island to Europe, to America, to Asia,
to Africa, and Australia, to hunt with fury by gun, by trap, by harpoon, by
lasso; with dog, with horse, with elephant, or with dromedary, all the game
that is in nature. These men have written the game-books of all countries,
as Hawker, Scrope, Murray, Herbert, Maxwell, Cumming, and a host of
travellers. The people at home are addicted to boxing, running, leaping, and
rowing matches.
I suppose, the dogs and horses must be thanked for the fact that the men
have muscles almost as tough and supple as their own. If in every efficient
man there is first a fine animal, in the English race it is of the best breed,
a wealthy, juicy, broad-chested creature, steeped in ale and good cheer, and
a little overloaded by his flesh. Men of animal nature rely, like animals, on
their instincts. The Englishman associates well with dogs and horses. His
attachment to the horse arises from the courage and address required to manage
it. The horse finds out who is afraid of it, and does not disguise its
opinion. Their young boiling clerks and lusty collegians like the company of
horses better than the company of professors. I suppose the horses are better
company for them. The horse has more uses than Buffon noted. If you go into
the streets, every driver in `bus or dray is a bully, and, if I wanted a good
troop of soldiers I should recruit among the stables. Add a certain degree of
refinement to the vivacity of these riders, and you obtain the precise quality
which makes the men and women of polite society formidable.
They come honestly by their horsemanship, with Hengst and Horsa for their
Saxon founders. The other branch of their race had been Tartar nomads. The
horse was all their wealth. The children were fed on mares` milk. The pastures
of Tartary were still remembered by the tenacious practice of the Norsemen to
eat horse-flesh at religious feasts. In the Danish invasions, the marauders
seized upon horses where they landed, and were at once converted into a body
of expert cavalry.
At one time this skill seems to have declined. Two centuries ago the
English horse never performed any eminent service beyond the seas; and the
reason assigned was that the genius of the English hath always more inclined
them to foot-service, as pure and proper manhood, without any mixture;
whilst, in a victory on horseback, the credit ought to be divided betwixt the
man and his horse. But in two hundred years a change has taken place. Now,
they boast that they understand horses better than any people in the world,
and that their horses are become their second selves.
"William the Conqueror being," says Camden, "better affected to beasts
than to men, imposed heavy fines and punishments on those that should meddle
with his game." The Saxon Chronicle says, "He loved the tall deer as if he
were their father." And rich Englishmen have followed his example, according
to their ability, ever since, in encroaching on the tillage and commons with
their game-preserves. It is a proverb in England that it is safer to shoot a
man than a hare. The severity of the game-laws certainly indicates an
extravagant sympathy of the nation with horses and hunters. The gentlemen are
always on horseback, and have brought horses to an ideal perfection, - the
English racer is a factitious breed. As score or two of mounted gentlemen may
frequently be seen running like centaurs down a hill nearly as steep as the
roof of a house. Every inn-room is lined with pictures of races; telegraphs
communicate, every hour, tidings of the heats from Newmarket and Ascot: and
the House of Commons adjourns over the "Derby Day."
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