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Page 15
But, if you will not do this, if you have not courage nor heart enough
to break away the fetters of earth, and take up the sensual bed of
it, and walk; if you say that you are _bound_ to win this thing, and
become the other thing, and that the wishes of your friends,--and
the interests of your family,--and the bias of your genius,--and the
expectations of your college,--and all the rest of the bow-wow-wow
of the wild dog-world, must be attended to, whether you like it
or no,--then, at least, for shame give up talk about being free or
independent creatures; recognize yourselves for slaves in whom the
thoughts are put in ward with their bodies, and their hearts manacled
with their hands: and then at least also, for shame, if you refuse to
believe that ever there were men who gave their souls to God,--know
and confess how surely there are those who sell them to His adversary.
LECTURE III.
THE PLEASURES OF DEED.
_ALFRED TO COEUR DE LION._
It was my endeavour, in the preceding lecture, to vindicate the
thoughts and arts of our Saxon ancestors from whatever scorn might lie
couched under the terms applied to them by Dean Stanley,--'fantastic'
and 'childish.' To-day my task must be carried forward, first, in
asserting the grace in fantasy, and the force in infancy, of the
English mind, before the Conquest, against the allegations contained
in the final passage of Dean Stanley's description of the first
founded Westminster; a passage which accepts and asserts, more
distinctly than any other equally brief statement I have met with,
the to my mind extremely disputable theory, that the Norman invasion
was in every respect a sanitary, moral, and intellectual blessing to
England, and that the arrow which slew her Harold was indeed the Arrow
of the Lord's deliverance.
"The Abbey itself," says Dean Stanley,--"the chief work of the
Confessor's life,--was the portent of the mighty future. When Harold
stood beside his sister Edith, on the day of the dedication, and
signed his name with hers as witness to the Charter of the Abbey, he
might have seen that he was sealing his own doom, and preparing for
his own destruction. The solid pillars, the ponderous arches, the huge
edifice, with triple tower and sculptured stones and storied windows,
that arose in the place and in the midst of the humble wooden churches
and wattled tenements of the Saxon period, might have warned the
nobles who were present that the days of their rule were numbered,
and that the _avenging, civilizing, stimulating_ hand of another and a
mightier race was at work, which would change the whole face of their
language, their manners, their Church, and their commonwealth. The
Abbey, so far exceeding the demands of the _dull and stagnant_ minds
of our Anglo-Saxon ancestors, was founded not only in faith, but in
hope: in the hope that England had yet a glorious career to run; that
the line of her sovereigns would not be broken, even when the race of
Alfred had ceased to reign."
There must surely be some among my hearers who are startled, if
not offended, at being told in the terms which I emphasized in
this sentence, that the minds of our Saxon fathers were, although
fantastic, dull, and, although childish, stagnant; that farther, in
their fantastic stagnation; they were savage,--and in their innocent
dullness, criminal; so that the future character and fortune of
the race depended on the critical advent of the didactic and
disciplinarian Norman baron, at once to polish them, stimulate, and
chastise.
Before I venture to say a word in distinct arrest of this judgment,
I will give you a chart, as clear as the facts observed in the two
previous lectures allow, of the state and prospects of the Saxons,
when this violent benediction of conquest happened to them: and
especially I would rescue, in the measure that justice bids, the
memory even of their Pagan religion from the general scorn in which
I used Carlyle's description of the idol of ancient Prussia as
universally exponent of the temper of Northern devotion. That
Triglaph, or Triglyph Idol, (derivation of Triglaph wholly unknown to
me--I use Triglyph only for my own handiest epithet), last set up, on
what is now St. Mary's hill in Brandenburg, in 1023, belonged indeed
to a people wonderfully like the Saxons,--geographically their close
neighbours,--in habits of life, and aspect of native land, scarcely
distinguishable from them,--in Carlyle's words, a "strong-boned,
iracund, herdsman and fisher people, highly averse to be interfered
with, in their religion especially, and inhabiting a moory flat
country, full of lakes and woods, but with plenty also of alluvial
mud, grassy, frugiferous, apt for the plough"--in all things like
the Saxons, except, as I read the matter, in that 'aversion to be
interfered with' which you modern English think an especially Saxon
character in you,--but which is, on the contrary, you will find on
examination, by no means Saxon; but only Wendisch, Czech, Serbic,
Sclavic,--other hard names I could easily find for it among the tribes
of that vehemently heathen old Preussen--"resolutely worshipful
of places of oak trees, of wooden or stone idols, of Bangputtis,
Patkullos, and I know not what diabolic dumb blocks." Your English
"dislike to be interfered with" is in absolute fellowship with these,
but only gathers itself in its places of Stalks, or chimneys, instead
of oak trees, round its idols of iron, instead of wood, diabolically
_vocal_ now; strident, and sibilant, instead of dumb.
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