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Page 4
Now of these races, the British (I avoid the word Celtic, because you
would expect me to say Keltic; and I don't mean to, lest you should
be wanting me next to call the patroness of music St. Kekilia), the
British, including Breton, Cornish, Welsh, Irish, Scot, and Pict, are,
I believe, of all the northern races, the one which has deepest love
of external nature;--and the richest inherent gift of pure music and
song, as such; separated from the intellectual gift which raises song
into poetry. They are naturally also religious, and for some centuries
after their own conversion are one of the chief evangelizing powers
in Christendom. But they are neither apprehensive nor receptive;--they
cannot understand the classic races, and learn scarcely anything from
them; perhaps better so, if the classic races had been more careful to
understand _them_.
Next, the Norman is scarcely more apprehensive than the Celt, but he
is more constructive, and uses to good advantage what he learns from
the Frank. His main characteristic is an energy, which never exhausts
itself in vain anger, desire, or sorrow, but abides and rules, like a
living rock:--where he wanders, he flows like lava, and congeals like
granite.
Next, I take in this first sketch the Saxon and Frank together, both
pre-eminently apprehensive, both docile exceedingly, imaginative in
the highest, but in life active more than pensive, eager in desire,
swift of invention, keenly sensitive to animal beauty, but with
difficulty rational, and rarely, for the future, wise. Under the
conclusive name of Ostrogoth, you may class whatever tribes are native
to Central Germany, and develope themselves, as time goes on, into
that power of the German C�sars which still asserts itself as an
empire against the licence and insolence of modern republicanism,--of
which races, though this general name, no description can be given in
rapid terms.
And lastly, the Lombards, who, at the time we have to deal with, were
sternly indocile, gloomily imaginative,--of almost Norman energy,
and differing from all the other western nations chiefly in this
notable particular, that while the Celt is capable of bright wit and
happy play, and the Norman, Saxon, and Frank all alike delight in
caricature, the Lombards, like the Arabians, never jest.
These, briefly, are the six barbaric nations who are to be taught: and
of whose native arts and faculties, before they receive any tutorship
from the south, I find no well-sifted account in any history:--but
thus much of them, collecting your own thoughts and knowledge, you
may easily discern--they were all, with the exception of the Scots,
practical workers and builders in wood; and those of them who
had coasts, first rate sea-boat builders, with fine mathematical
instincts and practice in that kind far developed, necessarily good
sail-weaving, and sound fur-stitching, with stout iron-work of nail
and rivet; rich copper and some silver work in decoration--the Celts
developing peculiar gifts in linear design, but wholly incapable
of drawing animals or figures;--the Saxons and Franks having enough
capacity in that kind, but no thought of attempting it; the Normans
and Lombards still farther remote from any such skill. More and more,
it seems to me wonderful that under your British block-temple, grimly
extant on its pastoral plain, or beside the first crosses engraved on
the rock at Whithorn--you English and Scots do not oftener consider
what you might or could have come to, left to yourselves.
Next, let us form the list of your tutor nations, in whom, it
generally pleases you to look at nothing but the corruptions. If we
could get into the habit of thinking more of our own corruptions and
more of _their_ virtues, we should have a better chance of learning
the true laws alike of art and destiny. But, the safest way of all, is
to assure ourselves that true knowledge of any thing or any creature
is only of the good of it; that its nature and life are in that, and
that what is diseased,--that is to say, unnatural and mortal,--you
must cut away from it in contemplation, as you would in surgery.
Of the six tutor nations, two, the Tuscan and Arab, have no effect on
early Christian England. But the Roman, Greek, Syrian, and Egyptian
act together from the earliest times; you are to study the influence
of Rome upon England in Agricola, Constantius, St. Benedict, and
St. Gregory; of Greece upon England in the artists of Byzantium and
Ravenna; of Syria and Egypt upon England in St. Jerome, St. Augustine,
St. Chrysostom, and St. Athanase.
St. Jerome, in central Bethlehem; St. Augustine, Carthaginian by
birth, in truth a converted Tyrian, Athanase, Egyptian, symmetric and
fixed as an Egyptian aisle; Chrysostom, golden mouth of all; these
are, indeed, every one teachers of all the western world, but
St. Augustine especially of lay, as distinguished from monastic,
Christianity to the Franks, and finally to us. His rule, expanded into
the treatise of the City of God, is taken for guide of life and policy
by Charlemagne, and becomes certainly the fountain of Evangelical
Christianity, distinctively so called, (and broadly the lay
Christianity of Europe, since, in the purest form of it, that is
to say, the most merciful, charitable, variously applicable, kindly
wise.) The greatest type of it, as far as I know, St. Martin of Tours,
whose character is sketched, I think in the main rightly, in the
Bible of Amiens; and you may bind together your thoughts of its
course by remembering that Alcuin, born at York, dies in the Abbey
of St. Martin, at Tours; that as St. Augustine was in his writings
Charlemagne's Evangelist in faith, Alcuin was, in living presence,
his master in rhetoric, logic, and astronomy, with the other physical
sciences.
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