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Page 18
I introduce, therefore, the Normans to you, on their first entering
France, under his descriptive terms of them.[12]
[Footnote 12: Article "Architecture," vol. i., p. 138.]
"As soon as they were established on the soil, these barbarians became
the most hardy and active builders. Within the space of a century
and a half, they had covered the country on which they had definitely
landed, with religious, monastic, and civil edifices, of an extent and
richness then little common. It is difficult to suppose that they had
brought from Norway the elements of art,[13] but they were possessed
by a persisting and penetrating spirit; their brutal force did not
want for grandeur. Conquerors, they raised castles to assure their
domination; they soon recognized the Moral force of the clergy, and
endowed it richly. Eager always to attain their end, when once they
saw it, they _never left one of their enterprises unfinished_, and
in that they differed completely from the Southern inhabitants of
Gaul. Tenacious extremely, they were perhaps the only ones among the
barbarians established in France who had ideas of order; the only ones
who knew how to preserve their conquests, and compose a state. They
found the remains of the Carthaginian arts on the territory where they
planted themselves, they mingled with those their national genius,
positive, grand, and yet supple."
[Footnote 13: They _had_ brought some, of a variously Charybdic,
Serpentine, and Diabolic character.--J.R.]
Supple, 'Deli�,'--capable of change and play of the mental muscle, in
the way that savages are not. I do not, myself, grant this suppleness
to the Norman, the less because another sentence of M. le Duc's,
occurring incidentally in his account of the archivolt, is of extreme
counter-significance, and wide application. "The Norman arch," he
says, "is _never derived from traditional classic forms_, but only
from mathematical arrangement of line." Yes; that is true: the
Norman arch is never derived from classic forms. The cathedral,[14]
whose aisles you saw or might have seen, yesterday, interpenetrated
with light, whose vaults you might have heard prolonging the sweet
divisions of majestic sound, would have been built in that stately
symmetry by Norman law, though never an arch at Rome had risen round
her field of blood,--though never her Sublician bridge had been
petrified by her Augustan pontifices. But the _decoration_, though not
the structure of those arches, they owed to another race,[15] whose
words they stole without understanding, though three centuries before,
the Saxon understood, and used, to express the most solemn majesty of
his Kinghood,--
"EGO, EDGAR, TOTIVS ALBIONIS"--
not Rex, that would have meant the King of Kent or Mercia, not of
England,--no, nor Imperator; that would have meant only the profane
power of Rome, but _BASILEVS_, meaning a King who reigned with sacred
authority given by Heaven and Christ.
[Footnote 14: Of Oxford, during the afternoon service.]
[Footnote 15: See the concluding section of the lecture.]
With far meaner thoughts, both of themselves and their powers, the
Normans set themselves to build impregnable military walls, and
sublime religious ones, in the best possible practical ways; but
they no more made books of their church fronts than of their bastion
flanks; and cared, in the religion they accepted, neither for its
sentiments nor its promises, but only for its immediate results on
national order.
As I read them, they were men wholly of this world, bent on doing the
most in it, and making the best of it that they could;--men, to their
death, of _Deed_, never pausing, changing, repenting, or anticipating,
more than the completed square, [Greek: 'aneu psogou], of their
battle, their keep, and their cloister. Soldiers before and after
everything, they learned the lockings and bracings of their stones
primarily in defence against the battering-ram and the projectile, and
esteemed the pure circular arch for its distributed and equal strength
more than for its beauty. "I believe again," says M. le Duc,[16] "that
the feudal castle never arrived at its perfectness till after the
Norman invasion, and that this race of the North was the first to
apply a defensive system under unquestionable laws, soon followed by
the nobles of the Continent, after they had, at their own expense,
learned their superiority."
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