VI. ON THE LANGUAGE AND POETRY OF SCHLESWIG-HOLSTEIN.
After all that has been written about the Schleswig-Holstein question, how little is known about those whom that question chiefly concerns,—the Schleswig-Holsteiners! There may be a vague recollection that, during the general turmoil of 1848, the German inhabitants of the Duchies rose against the Danes; that they fought bravely, and at last succumbed, not to the valor, but to the diplomacy of Denmark. But, after the treaty of London in 1852 had disposed of them as the treaty of Vienna had disposed of other brave people, they sank below the horizon of European interests, never to rise again, it was fondly hoped, till the present generation had passed away.
Yet these Schleswig-Holsteiners have an interest of their own, quite apart from the political clouds that have lately gathered round their country. Ever since we know anything of the history of Northern Europe, we find Saxon races established as the inhabitants of that northern peninsula which was then called the Cimbric Chersonese. The first writer who ever mentions the name of Saxons is Ptolemy,[18] and he speaks of them as settled in what is now called Schleswig-Holstein.[19] [pg 117] At the time of Charlemagne the Saxon race is described to us as consisting of three tribes: the Ostfalai, Westfalai, and Angrarii. The Westphalians were settled near the Rhine, the Eastphalians near the Elbe, and the intermediate country, washed by the Weser, was held by the Angrarii.[20] The name of Westphalia is still in existence; that of Eastphalia has disappeared, but its memory survives in the English sterling. Eastphalian traders, the ancestors of the merchant princes of Hamburg, were known in England by the name of Easterlings; and their money being of the purest quality, easterling, in Latin esterlingus, shortened to sterling, became the general name of pure or sterling money. The name of the third tribe, the Angrarii, continued through the Middle Ages as the name of a people; and to the present day, my own sovereign, the Duke of Anhalt, calls himself Duke of “Sachsen, Engern, und Westphalen.” But the name of the Angrarii was meant to fulfill another and more glorious destiny. The name Angrarii or Angarii[21] is a corruption of the older name, Angrivarii, the famous German race mentioned by Tacitus as the neighbors of the Cherusci. These Angrivarii are in later documents called Anglevarii. The termination varii[22] represents the same word which exists in A.-S. as ware; for instance, in Cant-ware, inhabitants of Kent, or Cant-ware-burh, Canterbury; burh-ware, inhabitants of a town, burghers. It is derived from werian, to defend, to hold, and may be connected with wer, a man. [pg 118] The same termination is found in Ansivarii or Ampsivarii; probably also in Teutonoarii instead of Teutoni, Chattuari instead of Chatti.
The principal seats of these Angrarii were, as we saw, between the Rhine and Elbe, but Tacitus[23] knows of Anglii, i.e. Angrii, east of the Elbe; and an offshoot of the same Saxon tribe is found very early in possession of that famous peninsula between the Schlei and the Bay of Flensburg on the eastern coast of Schleswig,[24] which by Latin writers was called Anglia, i.e. Angria. To derive the name of Anglia from the Latin angulus,[25] corner, is about as good an etymology as the kind-hearted remark of St. Gregory, who interpreted the name of Angli by angeli. From that Anglia, the Angli, together with the Saxons and Juts, migrated to the British Isles in the fifth century, and the name of the Angli, as that of the most numerous tribe, became in time the name of Englaland.[26] In the Latin laws ascribed to King Edward the Confessor, a curious supplement is found, which states “that the Juts (Guti) came formerly from the noble blood of the Angli, namely, from the state of Engra, and that the English came from the same blood. The Juts, therefore like the Angli of Germany, should always be received in England as brothers, and as citizens of the realm, because the Angli of England and Germany had always intermarried, and had fought together against the Danes.”[27]
Like the Angli of Anglia, the principal tribes clustering round the base of the Cimbric peninsula, and known by the general name of Northalbingi or Transalbiani, also Nordleudi, were all offshoots of the Saxon stem. Adam of Bremen (2, 15) divides them into Tedmarsgoi, Holcetae, and Sturmarii. In these it is easy to recognize the modern names of Dithmarschen, Holtseten or Holsten, and Stormarn. It would require more space than we can afford, were we to enter into the arguments by which Grimm has endeavored to identify the Dithmarschen with the Teutoni, the Stormarn with the Cimbri, and the Holsten with the Harudes. His arguments, if not convincing, are at least highly ingenious, and may be examined by those interested in these matters, in his “History of the German Language,” pp. 633-640.
For many centuries the Saxon inhabitants of those regions have had to bear the brunt of the battle between the Scandinavian and the German races. From the days when the German Emperor Otho I. (died 973) hurled his swift spear from the northernmost promontory of Jutland into the German Ocean to mark the true frontier of his empire, to the day when [pg 120] Christian IX. put his unwilling pen to that Danish constitution which was to incorporate all the country north of the Eider with Denmark, they have had to share in all the triumphs and all the humiliations of the German race, to which they are linked by the strong ties of a common blood and a common language.
Such constant trials and vicissitudes have told on the character of these German borderers, and have made them what they are, a hardy and determined, yet careful and cautious race. Their constant watchings and struggles against the slow encroachments or sudden inroads of an enemy more inveterate even than the Danes,—namely, the sea,—had imparted to them from the earliest times somewhat of that wariness and perseverance which we perceive in the national character of the Dutch and the Venetians. But the fresh breezes of the German Ocean and the Baltic kept their nerves well braced and their hearts buoyant; and for muscular development the arms of these sturdy ploughers of the sea and the land can vie with those of any of their neighbors on the isles or on the Continent. Holsten-treue, i.e. Holstein-truth, is proverbial throughout Germany, and it has stood the test of long and fearful trials.
There is but one way of gaining an insight into the real character of a people, unless we can actually live among them for years; and that is to examine their language and literature. Now it is true that the language spoken in Schleswig-Holstein is not German,—at least not in the ordinary sense of the word,—and one may well understand how travellers and correspondents of newspapers, who have picked up their German phrases from Ollendorf, and who, on the [pg 121] strength of this, try to enter into a conversation with Holstein peasants, should arrive at the conclusion that these peasants speak Danish, or, at all events, that they do not speak German.
The Germans of Schleswig-Holstein are Saxons, and all true Saxons speak Low-German, and Low-German is more different from High-German than English is from Lowland Scotch. Low-German, however, is not to be mistaken for vulgar German. It is the German which from time immemorial was spoken in the low countries and along the northern sea-coast of Germany, as opposed to the German of the high country, of Swabia, Thuringia, Bavaria, and Austria. These two dialects differ from each other like Doric and Ionic; neither can be considered as a corruption of the other; and however far back we trace these two branches of living speech, we never arrive at a point when they diverge from one common source. The Gothic of the fourth century, preserved in the translation of the Bible by Ulfilas, is not, as has been so often said, the mother both of High and Low German. It is to all intents and purposes Low-German, only Low-German in its most primitive form, and more primitive therefore in its grammatical framework than the earliest specimens of High-German also, which date only from the seventh or eighth century. This Gothic, which was spoken in the east of Germany, has become extinct. The Saxon, spoken in the north of Germany, continues its manifold existence to the present day in the Low-German dialects, in Frisian, in Dutch, and in English. The rest of Germany was and is occupied by High-German. In the West the ancient High-German dialect of the Franks has been absorbed in French, while the German spoken from [pg 122] the earliest times in the centre and south of Germany has supplied the basis of what is now called the literary and classical language of Germany.
Although the literature of Germany is chiefly High-German, there are a few literary compositions, both ancient and modern, in the different spoken dialects of the country, sufficient to enable scholars to distinguish at least nine distinct grammatical settlements; in the Low-German branch, Gothic, Saxon, Anglo-Saxon, Frisian, and Dutch; in the High-German branch, Thuringian, Frankish, Bavarian, and Alemannish. Professor Weinhold is engaged at present in publishing separate grammars of six of these dialects, namely, of Alemannish, Bavarian, Frankish, Thuringian, Saxon, and Frisian: and in his great German Grammar Jacob Grimm has been able to treat these, together with the Scandinavian tongues, as so many varieties of one common, primitive type of Teutonic speech.
But although, in the early days of German life, the Low and High German dialects were on terms of perfect equality, Low-German has fallen back in the race, while High-German has pressed forward with double speed. High-German has become the language of literature and good society. It is taught in schools, preached in church, pleaded at the bar; and, even in places where ordinary conversation is still carried on in Low-German, High-German is clearly intended to be the language of the future. At the time of Charlemagne this was not so; and one of the earliest literary monuments of the German language, the “Heliand,” i.e. the Saviour, is written in Saxon or Low-German. The Saxon Emperors, however, did little for German literature, while the Swabian Emperors were proud of being the patrons of art and poetry. [pg 123] The language spoken at their court being High-German, the ascendency of that dialect may be said to date from their days, though it was not secured till the time of the Reformation, when the translation of the Bible by Luther put a firm and lasting stamp on what has since become the literary speech of Germany.
But language, even though deprived of literary cultivation, does not easily die. Though at present people write the same language all over Germany, the towns and villages teem everywhere with dialects, both High and Low. In Hanover, Brunswick, Mecklenburg, Oldenburg, the Free Towns, and in Schleswig-Holstein, the lower orders speak their own German, generally called Platt-Deutsch, and in many parts of Mecklenburg, Oldenburg, Ostfriesland, and Holstein, the higher ranks too cling in their every-day conversation to this more homely dialect.[28] Children frequently [pg 124] speak two languages: High-German at school, Low-German at their games. The clergyman speaks High-German when he stands in the pulpit; but when he visits the poor, he must address them in their own peculiar Platt. The lawyer pleads in the language of Schiller and Goethe; but when he examines his witnesses he has frequently to condescend to the vulgar tongue. That vulgar tongue is constantly receding from the towns; it is frightened away by railways, it is ashamed to show itself in parliament. But it is loved all the more by the people; it appeals to their hearts, and it comes back naturally to all who have ever talked it together in their youth. It is the same with the local patois of High-German. Even where at school the correct High-German is taught and spoken, as in Bavaria and Austria, each town still keeps its own patois, and the people fall back on it as soon as they are among themselves. When Maria Theresa went to the Burgtheater to announce to the people of Vienna the birth of a son and heir, she did not address them in high-flown literary German. She bent forward from her box, and called out: “Hörts! der Leopold hot án Buebá”: “Hear! Leopold has a boy.” In German comedies, characters from Berlin, Leipzig, and Vienna are constantly introduced speaking their own local dialects. In Bavaria, Styria, and the Tyrol, much of the poetry of the people is written in their patois; and in some parts of Germany sermons even, and other religious tracts, continue to be published in the local vernaculars.
There are here and there a few enthusiastic champions of dialects, particularly of Low-German, who still cherish a hope that High-German may be thrown back, and Low-German restored to its rights and former dominion. Yet, whatever may be thought of the relative excellences of High and Low German,—and in several points, no doubt, Low-German has the advantage of High-German,—yet, practically, the battle between the two is decided, and cannot now be renewed. The national language of Germany, whether in the South or the North, will always be the German of Luther, Lessing, Schiller, and Goethe. This, however, is no reason why the dialects, whether of Low or High German, should be despised or banished. Dialects are everywhere the natural feeders of literary languages; and an attempt to destroy them, if it could succeed, would be like shutting up the tributaries of great rivers.
After these remarks it will be clear that, if people say that the inhabitants of Schleswig-Holstein do not speak German, there is some truth in such a statement, at least just enough of truth to conceal the truth. It might be said, with equal correctness, that the people of Lancashire do not speak English. But, if from this a conclusion is to be drawn that the Schleswig-Holsteiners, speaking this dialect, which is neither German nor Danish, might as well be taught in Danish as in German, this is not quite correct, and would deceive few if it were adduced as an argument for introducing French instead of English in the national schools of Lancashire.
The Schleswig-Holsteiners have their own dialect, and cling to it as they cling to many things which, in other parts of Germany, have been discarded as old-fashioned [pg 126] and useless. “Oll Knust hölt Hus,”—“Stale bread lasts longest,”—is one of their proverbs. But they read their Bible in High-German; they write their newspapers in High-German, and it is in High-German that their children are taught, and their sermons preached in every town and in every village. It is but lately that Low-German has been taken up again by Schleswig-Holstein poets; and some of their poems, though intended originally for their own people only, have been read with delight, even by those who had to spell them out with the help of a dictionary and a grammar. This kind of homespun poetry is a sign of healthy national life. Like the songs of Burns in Scotland, the poems of Klaus Groth and others reveal to us, more than anything else, the real thoughts and feelings, the every-day cares and occupations, of the people whom they represent, and to whose approval alone they appeal. But as Scotland, proud though she well may be of her Burns, has produced some of the best writers of English, Schleswig-Holstein, too, small as it is in comparison with Scotland, counts among its sons some illustrious names in German literature. Niebuhr, the great traveller, and Niebuhr, the great historian, were both Schleswig-Holsteiners, though during their lifetime that name had not yet assumed the political meaning in which it is now used. Karsten Niebuhr, the traveller, was a Hanoverian by birth; but, having early entered the Danish service, he was attached to a scientific mission sent by King Frederick V. to Egypt, Arabia, and Palestine, in 1760. All the other members of that mission having died, it was left to Niebuhr, after his return in 1767, to publish the results of his own observations and of those of his companions. His “Description of Arabia,” and [pg 127] his “Travels in Arabia and the Adjoining Countries,” though published nearly a hundred years ago, are still quoted with respect, and their accuracy has hardly ever been challenged. Niebuhr spent the rest of his life as a kind of collector and magistrate at Meldorf, a small town of between two and three thousand inhabitants, in Dithmarschen. He is described as a square and powerful man, who lived to a good old age, and who, even when he had lost his eyesight, used to delight his family and a large circle of friends by telling them of the adventures in his Oriental travels, of the starry nights of the desert, and of the bright moonlight of Egypt, where, riding on his camel, he could, from his saddle, recognize every plant that was growing on the ground. Nor were the listeners that gathered round him unworthy of the old traveller. Like many a small German town, Meldorf, the home of Niebuhr, had a society consisting of a few government officials, clergymen, and masters at the public school; most of them men of cultivated mind, and quite capable of appreciating a man of Niebuhr's powers. Even the peasants there were not the mere clods of other parts of Germany. They were a well-to-do race, and by no means illiterate. Their sons received at the Gymnasium of Meldorf a classical education, and they were able to mix with ease and freedom in the society of their betters. The most hospitable house at Meldorf was that of Boie, the High Sheriff of Dithmarschen. He had formerly, at Göttingen, been the life and soul of a circle of friends who have become famous in the history of German literature, under the name of “Hainbund.” That “Hainbund,” or Grove-club, included Bürger, the author of “Lenore;” Voss, the translator of Homer; the Counts Stolberg, Hölty, and [pg 128] others. With Goethe, too, Boie had been on terms of intimacy, and when, in after life, he settled down at Meldorf, many of his old friends, his brother-in-law Voss, Count Stolberg, Claudius, and others, came to see him and his illustrious townsman, Niebuhr. Many a seed was sown there, many small germs began to ripen in that remote town of Meldorf, which are yielding fruit at the present day, not in Germany only, but here in England. The sons of Boie, fired by the descriptions of the old, blind traveller, followed his example, and became distinguished as explorers and discoverers in natural history. Niebuhr's son, young Barthold, soon attracted the attention of all who came to see his father, particularly of Voss; and he was enabled by their help and advice, to lay, in early youth, that foundation of solid learning which fitted him, in the intervals of his checkered life, to become the founder of a new era in the study of Ancient History. And how curious the threads which bind together the destinies of men! how marvelous the rays of light which, emanating from the most distant centres, cross each other in their onward course, and give their own peculiar coloring to characters apparently original and independent! We have read, of late, in the Confessions of a modern St. Augustine, how the last stroke that severed his connection with the Church of England was the establishment of the Jerusalem bishopric. But for that event, Dr. Newman might now be a bishop, and his friends a strong party in the Church of England. Well, that Jerusalem bishopric owes something to Meldorf. The young schoolboy of Meldorf was afterwards the private tutor and personal friend of the Crown-Prince of Prussia, and he thus exercised an influence both on the political and the religious views of King Frederick [pg 129] William IV. He was likewise Prussian Ambassador at Rome, when Bunsen was there as a young scholar, full of schemes, and planning his own journey to the East. Niebuhr became the friend and patron of Bunsen, and Bunsen became his successor in the Prussian embassy at Rome. It is well known that the Jerusalem bishopric was a long-cherished plan of the King of Prussia, Niebuhr's pupil, and that the bill for the establishment of a Protestant bishopric at Jerusalem was carried chiefly through the personal influence of Bunsen, the friend of Niebuhr. Thus we see how all things are working together for good or for evil, though we little know of the grains of dust that are carried along from all quarters of the globe, to tell like infinitesimal weights in the scales that decide hereafter the judgment of individuals and the fate of nations.
If Holstein, and more particularly Dithmarschen, of which Meldorf had in former days been the capital, may claim some share in Niebuhr the historian,—if he himself, as the readers of his history are well aware, is fond of explaining the social and political institutions of Rome by references to what he had seen or heard of the little republic of Dithmarschen,—it is certainly a curious coincidence that the only worthy successor of Niebuhr, in the field of Roman history, Theodore Mommsen, is likewise a native of Schleswig. His History of Rome, though it did not produce so complete a revolution as the work of Niebuhr, stands higher as a work of art. It contains the results of Niebuhr's critical researches, sifted and carried on by a most careful and thoughtful disciple. It is, in many respects, a most remarkable work, particularly in Germany. The fact that it is readable, and has become a popular book, has excited the wrath of many critics, who evidently [pg 130] consider it beneath the dignity of a learned professor that he should digest his knowledge, and give to the world, not all and everything he has accumulated in his note-books, but only what he considers really important and worth knowing. The fact, again, that he does not load his pages with references and learned notes has been treated like a crimen lœsæ majestatis; and yet, with all the clamor and clatter that has been raised, few authors have had so little to alter or rectify in their later editions as Mommsen. To have produced two such scholars, historians, and statesmen as Niebuhr and Mommsen, would be an honor to any kingdom in Germany: how much more to the small duchy of Schleswig-Holstein, in which we have been told so often that nothing is spoken but Danish and some vulgar dialects of Low-German!
Well, even those vulgar dialects of Low-German, and the poems and novels that have been written in them by true Schleswig-Holsteiners, are well worth a moment's consideration. In looking at their language, an Englishman at once discovers a number of old acquaintances: words which we would look for in vain in Schiller or Goethe. We shall mention a few.
Black means black; in High-German it would be schwarz. De black is the black horse; black up wit is black on white; gif mek kil un blak, give me quill and ink. Blid is blithe, instead of the High-German mild. Bottervogel, or botterhahn, or botterhex, is butterfly, instead of schmetterling. It is a common superstition in the North of Germany, that one ought to mark the first butterfly one sees in spring. A white one betokens mourning, a yellow one a christening, a variegated one a wedding. Bregen or brehm is used instead of the High-German gehirn; it is the English brain. [pg 131] People say of a very foolish person, that his brain is frozen, de brehm is em verfrorn. The peculiar English but, which has given so much trouble to grammarians and etymologists, exists in the Holstein buten, literally outside, the Dutch buiten, the Old-Saxon bi-ûtan. Buten in German is a regular contraction, just as binnen, which means inside, within, during. Heben is the English heaven, while the common German name is Himmel. Hückup is a sigh, and no doubt the English hiccough. Düsig is dizzy; talkig is talkative.
There are some curious words which, though they have a Low-German look, are not to be found in English or Anglo-Saxon. Thus plitsch, which is used in Holstein in the sense of clever, turns out to be a corruption of politisch, i.e. political. Krüdsch means particular or over nice; it is a corruption of kritisch, critical. Katolsch means angry, mad, and is a corruption of catholic, i.e. Roman Catholic. Kränsch means plucky, and stands for courageux. Fränksch, i.e. Frankish, means strange; Flämsch, i.e. Flemish, means sulky, and is used to form superlatives; Polsch, i.e. Polish, means wild. Forsch means strong and strength, and comes from the French force. Klür is a corruption of couleur, and Kunkelfusen stands for confusion or fibs.
Some idiomatic and proverbial expressions, too, deserve to be noted. Instead of saying, “The sun has set,” the Holsteiners, fond as they are of their beer, particularly in the evening after a hard day's work, say, “De Sünn geiht to Beer,” “The sun goes to beer.” If you ask in the country how far it is to some town or village, a peasant will answer, “'n Hunnblaff,” “A dog's bark,” if it is quite close; or “'n Pip Toback,” “A pipe of tobacco,” meaning about half an hour. Of a conceited [pg 132] fellow they say, “Hê hört de Flégn hosten,” “He hears the flies coughing.” If a man is full of great schemes, he is told, “In Gedanken fört de Bur ôk in't Kutsch.” “In thought the peasant, too, drives in a coach.” A man who boasts is asked, “Pracher! häst ôk Lüs, oder schuppst di man so?” “Braggart! have you really lice, or do you only scratch yourself as if you had?”
“Holstein singt nicht,” “Holstein does not sing,” is a curious proverb; and if it is meant to express the absence of popular poetry in that country, it would be easy to convict it of falsehood by a list of poets whose works, though unknown to fame beyond the limits of their own country, are cherished, and deservedly cherished, by their own countrymen. The best known among the Holstein poets is Klaus Groth, whose poems, published under the title of “Quickborn,” i.e. quick bourn, or living spring, show that there is a well of true poetical feeling in that country, and that its strains are all the more delicious and refreshing if they bubble up in the native accent of the country. Klaus Groth was born in 1819. He was the son of a miller; and, though he was sent to school, he had frequently to work in the field in summer, and make himself generally useful. Like many Schleswig-Holsteiners, he showed a decided talent for mathematics; but, before he was sixteen, he had to earn his bread, and work as a clerk in the office of a local magistrate. His leisure hours were devoted to various studies: German, Danish, music, psychology, successively engaged his attention. In his nineteenth year he went to the seminary at Tondern to prepare himself to become a schoolmaster. There he studied Latin, French, Swedish; and, after three years, was appointed teacher at a girls' school. Though he had to give forty-three lessons a week, he [pg 133] found time to continue his own reading, and he acquired a knowledge of English, Dutch, Icelandic, and Italian. At last, however, his health gave way, and in 1847 he was obliged to resign his place. During his illness his poetical talent, which he himself had never trusted, became a source of comfort to himself and to his friends, and the warm reception which greeted the first edition of his “Quickborn” made him what he was meant to be,—the poet of Schleswig-Holstein.
His political poems are few; and, though a true Schleswig-Holsteiner at heart, he has always declined to fight with his pen when he could not fight with his sword. In the beginning of this year, however, he published “Five Songs for Singing and Praying,” which, though they fail to give an adequate idea of his power as a poet, may be of interest as showing the deep feelings of the people in their struggle for independence. The text will be easily intelligible with the help of a literal English translation.
DUTSCHE EHR AND DUTSCHE EER.
I.
Frühling, 1848.
Dar keemn Soldaten æwer de Elf,
Hurah, hurah, na't Norn!
Se keemn so dicht as Wagg an Wagg,
Un as en Koppel vull Korn.
Gundag, Soldaten! wo kamt jü her?
Vun alle Bargen de Krüz un Quer,
Ut dütschen Landen na't dütsche Meer—
So wannert un treckt dat Heer.
Wat liggt so eben as weert de See?
Wat schint so gel as Gold?
Dat is de Marschen er Saat un Staat,
Dat is de Holsten er Stoet.
Gundag jü Holsten op dütsche Eer!
Gundag jü Friesen ant dütsche Meer!
To leben un starben vær dütsche Ehr
So wannert un treckt dat Heer.
German Honor and German Earth.
Spring, 1848.
There came soldiers across the Elbe,
Hurrah, hurrah, to the North!
They came as thick as wave on wave,
And like a field full of corn.
Good day, soldiers! whence do you come?
From all the hills on the right and left,
From German lands to the German sea,—
Thus wanders and marches the host.
What lies so still as it were the sea?
What shines so yellow as gold?
The splendid fields of the Marshes they are,
The pride of the Holsten race.
Good day, ye Holsten on German soil!
Good day, ye Friesians, on the German sea
To live and to die for German honor,—
Thus wanders and marches the host.
II.
Sommer, 1851.
Dat treckt so trurig æwer de Elf,
In Tritt un Schritt so swar—
De Swalw de wannert, de Hatbar treckt—
Se kamt wedder to tokum Jahr.
Ade, ade, du dütsches Heer!
“Ade, ade, du Holsten meer!
Ade op Hoffen un Wiederkehr!”
Wi truert alleen ant Meer.
De Storch kumt wedder, de Swalw de singt
So fröhlich as all tovær—
Wann kumt de dütsche Adler un bringt
Di wedder, du dütsche Ehr?
Wak op du Floth, wak op du Meer!
Wak op du Dunner, un week de Eer!
Wi sitt op Hæpen un Wedderkehr—
Wi truert alleen ant Meer.
Summer, 1851.
They march so sad across the Elbe,
So heavy, step by step,—
The swallow wanders, the stork departs,—
They come back in the year to come.
Adieu, adieu, thou German host!
“Adieu, adieu, thou Holsten sea!
Adieu, in hope, and to meet again!”
We mourn alone by the sea.
The stork comes back, the swallow sings
As blithe as ever before,—
When will the German eagle return,
And bring thee back, thou German honor!
Wake up, thou flood! wake up, thou sea!
Wake up, thou thunder, and rouse the land!
We are sitting in hope to meet again,—
We mourn alone by the sea.
III.
Winter, 1863.
Dar kumt en Brusen as Værjahswind,
Dat dræhnt as wær dat de Floth,—
Will't Fröhjahr kamen to Wihnachtstid?
Hölpt Gott uns sülb'n inne Noth?
Vun alle Bargen de Krüz un Quer
Dar is dat wedder dat dütsche Heer!
Dat gelt op Nu oder Nimmermehr!
So rett se, de dütsche Ehr!
Wi hört den Adler, he kumt, he kumt!
Noch eenmal hæpt wi un harrt!
Is't Friheit endlich, de he uns bringt?
ls't Wahrheit, wat der ut ward?
Sunst hölp uns Himmel, nu geit't ni mehr!
Hölp du, un bring uns den Herzog her!
Denn wüllt wi starben vær dütsche Ehr!
Denn begravt uns in dütsche Eer!
30 December, 1863.
Winter, 1863.
There comes a blast like winter storm;
It roars as it were the flood.
Is the spring coming at Christmas-tide?
Does God himself help us in our need?
From all the hills on the right and left,
There again comes the German host!
It is to be now or never!
O, save the German honor!
We hear the eagle, he comes, he comes!
Once more we hope and wait!
Is it freedom at last he brings to us?
Is it truth what comes from thence?
Else Heaven help us, now it goes no more!
Help thou, and bring us our Duke!
Then will we die for German honor!
Then bury us in German earth!
December 30, 1863.
It is not, however, in war songs or political invective that the poetical genius of Klaus Groth shows to advantage. His proper sphere is the quiet idyl, a truthful and thoughtful description of nature, a reproduction of the simplest and deepest feelings of the human heart, and all this in the homely, honest, and heartfelt language of his own “Platt Deutsch.” That the example of Burns has told on Groth, that the poetry of the Scotch poet has inspired and inspirited the poet of Schleswig-Holstein, is not to be denied. But to imitate Burns, and to imitate him successfully, is no mean achievement, and Groth would be the last man to disown his master. The poem “Min Jehann” might have been written by Burns. I shall give a free metrical translation of it, but should advise the reader [pg 137] to try to spell out the original; for much of its charm lies in its native form, and to turn Groth even into High-German destroys his beauty as much as when Burns is translated into English.
MIN JEHANN.
Ik wull, wi weern noch kleen, Jehann,
Do weer de Welt so grot!
We seten op den Steen, Jehann,
Weest noch? by Nawers Sot.
An Heben sell de stille Maan,
Wi segen, wa he leep,
Un snacken, wa de Himmel hoch,
Un wa de Sot wul deep.
Weest noch, wa still dat weer, Jehann?
Dar röhr keen Blatt an Bom.
So is dat nu ni mehr, Jehann,
As höchstens noch in Drom.
Och ne, wenn do de Scheper sung—
Alleen in't wide Feld:
Ni wahr, Jehann? dat weer en Ton—
De eenzige op de Welt.
Mitünner inne Schummerntid
Denn ward mi so to Mod,
Denn löppt mi't langs den Rügg so hitt,
As domals bi den Sot.
Den dreih ik mi so hasti um,
As weer ik nich alleen:
Doch Allens, wat ik finn, Jehann,
Dat is—ik stah un ween.
MY JOHN.
I wish we still were little, John,
The world was then so wide!
When on the stone by neighbor's bourn
We rested side by side.
We saw the moon in silver veiled
Sail silent through the sky;
Our thoughts were deeper than the bourn,
And as the heavens high.
You know how still it was then, John;
All nature seemed at rest;
So is it now no longer, John,
Or in our dreams at best!
Think when the shepherd boy then sang
Alone o'er all the plain,
Aye, John, you know, that was a sound
We ne'er shall hear again.
Sometimes now, John, the eventides
The self-same feelings bring,
My pulses beat as loud and strong
As then beside the spring.
And then I turn affrighted round,
Some stranger to descry;
But nothing can I see, my John,—
I am alone and cry.
The next poem is a little popular ballad, relating to a tradition, very common on the northern coast of Germany, both east and west of the peninsula, of islands swallowed by the sea, their spires, pinnacles, and roofs being on certain days still visible, and their bells audible, below the waves. One of these islands was called Büsen, or Old Büsum, and is supposed to have been situated opposite the village now called Büsen, on the west coast of Dithmarschen. Strange to say, the inhabitants of that island, in spite of their tragic fate, are represented rather in a comical light, as the Bœotians of Holstein.
WAT SIK DAT VOLK VERTELLT.
Ol Büsum.
Ol Büsen hggt int wille Haff,
De Floth de keem un wöhl en Graff.
De Floth de keem un spöl un spöl,
Bet se de Insel ünner wöhl.
Dar blev keen Steen, dar blev keen Pahl,
Dat Water schæl dat all hendal.
Dar weer keen Beest, dar weer keen Hund,
De ligt nu all in depen Grund.
Un Allens, wat der lev un lach,
Dat deck de See mit depe Nach.
Mitünner in de holle Ebb
So süht man vunne Hüs' de Köpp.
Denn dukt de Thorn herut ut Sand,
As weert en Finger vun en Hand.
Denn hört man sach de Klocken klingn,
Denn hört man sach de Kanter singn;
Denn geit dat lisen dær de Luft:
“Begrabt den Leib in seine Gruft.”
WHAT THE PEOPLE TELL.
Old Büsum.
Old Büsen sank into the waves;
The sea has made full many graves;
The flood came near and washed around,
Until the rock to dust was ground.
No stone remained, no belfry steep;
All sank into the waters deep.
There was no beast, there was no hound;
They all were carried to the ground.
And all that lived and laughed around
The sea now holds in gloom profound.
At times, when low the water falls,
The sailor sees the broken walls;
The church tower peeps from out the sand,
Like to the finger of a hand.
Then hears one low the church bells ringing
Then hears one low the sexton singing;
A chant is carried by the gust:
“Give earth to earth, and dust to dust.”
In the Baltic, too, similar traditions are current of sunken islands and towns buried in the sea, which are believed to be visible at certain times. The most famous tradition is that of the ancient town of Vineta,—once, it is said, the greatest emporium in the north of Europe,—several times destroyed and built up again, till, in 1183, it was upheaved by an earthquake and swallowed by a flood. The ruins of Vineta are believed to be visible between the coast of Pomerania and the island of Rügen. This tradition has suggested one of Wilhelm Müller's—my father's—lyrical songs, published in his “Stones and Shells from the Island of [pg 140] Rügen,” 1825, of which I am able to give a translation by Mr. J. A. Froude.
VINETA.
I.
Aus des Meeres tiefem, tiefem Grunde
Klingen Abendglocken dumpf und matt,
Uns zu geben wunderbare Kunde
Von der schönen alten Wunderstadt.
II.
In der Fluthen Sehooss hinabgesunken
Blieben unten ihre Trümmer stehn,
Ihre Zinnen lassen goldne Funken
Wiederscheinend auf dem Spiegel sehn.
III.
Und der Schiffer, der den Zauberschimmer
Einmal sah im hellen Abendroth,
Nach derselben Stelle schifft er immer,
Ob auch rings umher die Klippe droht.
IV.
Aus des Herzens tiefem, tiefem Grunde
Klingt es mir, wie Glocken, dumpf und matt:
Ach, sie geben wunderbare Kunde
Von der Liebe, die geliebt es hat.
V.
Eine schöne Welt ist da versunken,
Ihre Trümmer blieben unten stehn,
Lassen sich als goldne Himmelsfunken
Oft im Spiegel meiner Träume sehn.
VI.
Und dann möcht' ich tauchen in die Tiefen,
Mich versenken in den Wiederschein,
Und mir ist als ob mich Engel riefen
In die alte Wunderstadt herein.
VINETA.
I.
From the sea's deep hollow faintly pealing,
Far off evening bells come sad and slow;
Faintly rise, the wondrous tale revealing
Of the old enchanted town below.
II.
On the bosom of the flood reclining,
Ruined arch and wall and broken spire,
Down beneath the watery mirror shining,
Gleam and flash in flakes of golden fire.
III.
And the boatman who at twilight hour
Once that magic vision shall have seen,
Heedless how the crags may round him lour,
Evermore will haunt the charméd scene.
IV.
From the heart's deep hollow faintly pealing,
Far I hear them, bell-notes sad and slow,
Ah, a wild and wondrous tale revealing
Of the drownéd wreck of love below.
V.
There a world, in loveliness decaying,
Lingers yet in beauty ere it die;
Phantom forms, across my senses playing,
Flash like golden fire-flakes from the sky.
VI.
Lights are gleaming, fairy bells are ringing,
And I long to plunge and wander free,
Where I hear the angel-voices singing
In those ancient towers below the sea.
I give a few more specimens of Klaus Groth's poetry, which I have ventured to turn into English verse, in the hope that my translations, though very imperfect, may, perhaps on account of their very imperfection, excite among some of my readers a desire to become acquainted with the originals.
HE SÄ MI SO VEL.
I.
He sä mi so vel, un ik sä em keen Wort,
Un all wat ik sä, weer: Jehann, ik mutt fort!
II.
He sä mi vun Lev un vun Himmel un Eer,
He sä mi vun allens—ik weet ni mal mehr!
III.
He sä mi so vel, un ik sä em keen Wort,
Un all wat ik sä, weer: Jehann, ik mutt fort!
IV.
He heeld mi de Hann, un he be mi so dull,
Ik schull em doch gut wen, un ob ik ni wull?
V.
Ik weer je ni bös, awer sä doch keen Wort,
Un all wat ik sä, weer: Jehann, ik mutt fort!
VI.
Nu sitt ik un denk, un denk jümmer deran
Mi düch, ik muss seggt hebbn: Wa geern, min Jehann!
VII.
Un doch, kumt dat wedder, so segg ik keen Wort,
Un hollt he mi, segg ik: Jehann, ik mutt fort!
HE TOLD ME SO MUCH.
I.
Though he told me so much, I had nothing to say,
And all that I said was, John, I must away!
II.
He spoke of his true love, and spoke of all that,
Of honor and heaven,—I hardly know what.
III.
Though he told me so much, I had nothing to say,
And all that I said was, John, I must away!
IV.
He held me, and asked me, as hard as he could,
That I too should love him, and whether I would?
V.
I never was wrath, but had nothing to say,
And all that I said was, John, I must away!
VI.
I sit now alone, and I think on and on,
Why did I not say then, How gladly, my John!
VII.
Yet even the next time, O what shall I say,
If he holds me and asks me?—John, I must away!
TÖF MAL!
Se is doch de stillste vun alle to Kark!
Se is doch de schönste vun alle to Mark!
So weekli, so bleekli, un de Ogen so grot,
So blau as en Heben un deep as en Sot.
Wer kikt wul int Water, un denkt ni sin Deel?
Wer kikt wul nan Himmel, un wünscht sik ne vel?
Wer süht er in Ogen, so blau un so fram,
Un denkt ni an Engeln, un allerhand Kram?
I.
In church she is surely the stillest of all,
She steps through the market so fair and so tall,
II.
So softly, so lightly, with wondering eyes,
As deep as the sea, and as blue as the skies.
III.
Who thinks not a deal when he looks on the main?
Who looks to the skies, and sighs not again?
IV.
Who looks in her eyes, so blue and so true,
And thinks not of angels and other things too?
KEEN GRAFF IS SO BRUT.
I.
Keen Graff is so brut un keen Müer so hoch,
Wenn Twe sik man gut sünd, so drapt se sik doch.
II.
Keen Wedder so gruli, so düster keen Nacht,
Wenn Twe sik man sehn wüllt, so seht se sik sacht.
III.
Dat gif wul en Maanschin, dar schint wul en Steern,
Dat gift noch en Licht oder Lücht un Lantern.
IV.
Dar fiunt sik en Ledder, en Stegelsch un Steg:
Wenn Twe sik man leef hebbt—keen Sorg vaer den Weg.
I.
No ditch is so deep, and no wall is so high,
If two love each other, they'll meet by and by.
II.
No storm is so wild, and no night is so black,
If two wish to meet, they will soon find a track.
III.
There is surely the moon, or the stars shining bright,
Or a torch, or a lantern, or some sort of light;
IV.
There is surely a ladder, a step, or a stile,
If two love each other, they'll meet ere long while.
JEHANN, NU SPANN DE SCHIMMELS AN!
I.
Jehann, nu spann de Schimmels an!
Nu fahr wi na de Brut!
Un hebbt wi nix as brune Per,
Jehann, so is't ok gut!
II.
Un hebbt wi nix as swarte Per,
Jehann, so is't ok recht!
Un bün ik nich uns Weerth sin Sœn,
So bün'k sin jüngste Knecht!
III.
Un hebbt wi gar keen Per un Wag',
So hebbt wi junge Been!
Un de so glückli is as ik,
Jehann, dat wüll wi sehn!
MAKE HASTE, MY JOHN, PUT TO THE GRAYS.
I.
Make haste, my John, put to the grays,
We'll go and fetch the bride,
And if we have but two brown hacks,
They'll do as well to ride.
II.
And if we've but a pair of blacks,
We still can bear our doom,
And if I'm not my master's son,
I'm still his youngest groom.
III.
And have we neither horse nor cart,
Still strong young legs have we,—
And any happier man than I,
John, I should like to see.
DE JUNGE WETFRU.
Wenn Abends roth de Wulken treckt,
So denk ik och! an di!
So trock verbi dat ganze Heer,
Un du weerst mit derbi.
Wenn ut de Böm de Blaeder fallt,
So denk ik glik an di:
So full so menni brawe Jung,
Un du weerst mit derbi.
Denn sett ik mi so truri hin,
Un denk so vel an di,
Ik et alleen min Abendbrot—
Un du büst nich derbi.
THE SOLDIER'S WIDOW.
When ruddy clouds are driving past,
'Tis more than I can bear;
Thus did the soldiers all march by,
And thou, too, thou wert there.
When leaves are falling on the ground,
'Tis more than I can bear;
Thus fell full many a valiant lad,
And thou, too, thou wert there.
And now I sit so still and sad,
'Tis more than I can bear;
My evening meal I eat alone,
For thou, thou art not there.
I wish I could add one of Klaus Groth's tales (“Vertellen,” as he calls them), which give the most truthful description of all the minute details of life in Dithmarschen, and bring the peculiar character of the country and of its inhabitants vividly before the eyes of the reader. But, short as they are, even the shortest of them would fill more pages than could here be spared for Schleswig-Holstein. I shall, therefore, conclude this sketch with a tale which has no author,—a simple tale from one of the local Holstein newspapers. It came to me in a heap of other papers, fly-sheets, pamphlets, and books, but it shone like a diamond in a heap of rubbish; and, as the tale of “The Old Woman of Schleswig-Holstein,” it may help to give to many who have been unjust to the inhabitants of the Duchies some truer idea of the stuff there is in that strong and staunch and sterling race to which England owes its language, its best blood, and its honored name.
“When the war against Denmark began again in the winter of 1863, offices were opened in the principal towns of Germany for collecting charitable contributions. At Hamburg, Messrs. L. and K. had set apart a large room for receiving lint, linen, and warm clothing, or small sums of money. One day, about Christmas, a poorly clad woman from the country stepped in and inquired, in the pure Holstein dialect, whether contributions were received here for Schleswig-Holstein. [pg 147] The clerk showed her to a table covered with linen rags and such like articles. But she turned away and pulled out an old leather purse, and, taking out pieces of money, began to count aloud on the counter: ‘One mark, two marks, three marks,’ till she had finished her ten marks. ‘That makes ten marks,’ she said, and shoved the little pile away. The clerk, who had watched the poor old woman while she was arranging her small copper and silver coins, asked her,—‘From whom does the money come?’
“ ‘From me,’ she said, and began counting again, ‘One mark, two marks, three marks.’ Thus she went on emptying her purse, till she had counted out ten small heaps of coin, of ten marks each. Then, counting each heap once over again, she said: ‘These are my hundred marks for Schleswig-Holstein; be so good as to send them to the soldiers.’
“While the old peasant woman was doing her sums, several persons had gathered round her; and, as she was leaving the shop, she was asked again in a tone of surprise from whom the money came.
“ ‘From me,’ she said; and, observing that she was closely scanned, she turned back, and looking the man full in the face, she added, smiling: ‘It is all honest money; it won't hurt the good cause.’
“The clerk assured her that no one had doubted her honesty, but that she herself had, no doubt, often known want, and that it was hardly right to let her contribute so large a sum, probably the whole of her savings.
“The old woman remained silent for a time, but, after she had quietly scanned the faces of all present, she said: ‘Surely it concerns no one how I got the [pg 148] money. Many a thought passed through my heart while I was counting that money. You would not ask me to tell you all? But you are kind gentlemen, and you take much trouble for us poor people. So I'll tell you whence the money came. Yes, I have known want; food has been scarce with me many a day, and it will be so again, as I grow older. But our gracious Lord watches over us. He has helped me to bear the troubles which He sent. He will never forsake me. My husband has been dead this many and many a year. I had one only son; and my John was a fine stout fellow, and he worked hard, and he would not leave his old mother. He made my home snug and comfortable. Then came the war with the Danes. All his friends joined the army; but the only son of a widow, you know, is free. So he remained at home, and no one said to him, “Come along with us,” for they knew that he was a brave boy, and that it broke his very heart to stay behind. I knew it all. I watched him when the people talked of the war, or when the schoolmaster brought the newspaper. Ah, how he turned pale and red, and how he looked away, and thought his old mother did not see it! But he said nothing to me, and I said nothing to him, Gracious God, who could have thought that it was so hard to drive our oppressors out of the land? Then came the news from Fredericia! That was a dreadful night. We sat in silence opposite each other. We knew what was in our hearts, and we hardly dared to look at each other. Suddenly he rose and took my hand, and said, “Mother!”—God be praised, I had strength in that moment—“John,” I said, “our time has come; go in God's name. I know how thou lovest me, and what thou hast suffered. God knows what will become [pg 149] of me if I am left quite alone, but our Lord Jesus Christ will forsake neither thee nor me.” John enlisted as a volunteer. The day of parting came. Ah, I am making a long story of it all! John stood before me in his new uniform. “Mother,” he said, “one request before we part—if it is to be”—“John,” I said to him, “I know what thou meanest,—O, I shall weep, I shall weep very much when I am alone; but my time will come, and we shall meet again in the day of our Lord, John! and the land shall be free, John! the land shall be free!” ’
“Heavy tears stood in the poor old woman's eyes as she repeated her sad tale; but she soon collected herself, and continued: ‘I did not think then it would be so hard. The heart always hopes even against hope. But for all that’—and here the old woman drew herself up, and looked at us like a queen—‘I have never regretted that I bade him go. Then came dreadful days; but the most dreadful of all was when we read that the Germans had betrayed the land, and that they had given up our land with all our dead to the Danes! Then I called on the Lord and said, “O Lord, my God, how is that possible? Why lettest Thou the wicked triumph and allowest the just to perish?” And I was told that the Germans were sorry for what they had done, but that they could not help it. But that, gentlemen, I could never understand. We should never do wrong, nor allow wrong to be done. And, therefore, I thought, it cannot always remain so; our good Lord knows his own good time, and in his own good time He will come and deliver us. And I prayed every evening that our gracious Lord would permit me to see that day when the land should be free, and our dear dead [pg 150] should sleep no more in Danish soil. And, as I had no other son against that day, I saved every year what I could save, and on every Christmas Eve I placed it before me on a table, where, in former years, I had always placed a small present for my John, and I said in my heart, The war will come again, and the land will be free, and thou shalt sleep in a free grave, my only son, my John! And now, gentlemen, the poor old woman has been told that the day has come, and that her prayer has been heard, and that the war will begin again; and that is why she has brought her money, the money she saved for her son. Good morning, gentlemen,’ she said, and was going quickly away.
“But, before she had left the room, an old gentleman said, loud enough for her to hear, ‘Poor body! I hope she may not be deceived.’
“ ‘Ah,’ said the old woman, turning back, ‘I know what you mean; I have been told all is not right yet. But have faith, men! the wicked cannot prevail against the just; man cannot prevail against the Lord. Hold to that, gentlemen; hold fast together, gentlemen! This very day I—begin to save up again.’
“Bless her, good old soul! And, if Odin were still looking out of his window in the sky as of yore, when he granted victory to the women of the Lombards, might he not say even now:—
“ ‘When women are heroes,
What must the men be like?
Theirs is the victory;
No need of me.’ ”
1864.
VII. JOINVILLE.[29]
Our attention was attracted a few months ago by a review published in the “Journal des Débats,” in which a new translation of Joinville's “Histoire de Saint Louis,” by M. Natalis de Wailly, a distinguished member of the French Institute, was warmly recommended to the French public. After pointing out the merits of M. de Wailly's new rendering of Joinville's text, and the usefulness of such a book for enabling boys at school to gain an insight into the hearts and minds of the Crusaders, and to form to themselves a living conception of the manners and customs of the people of the thirteenth century, the reviewer, whose name is well known in this country as well as in France by his valuable contributions to the history of medicine, dwelt chiefly on the fact that through the whole of Joinville's “Mémoires” there is no mention whatever [pg 152] of surgeons or physicians. Nearly the whole French army is annihilated, the King and his companions lie prostrate from wounds and disease, Joinville himself is several times on the point of death; yet nowhere, according to the French reviewer, does the chronicler refer to a medical staff attached to the army or to the person of the King. Being somewhat startled at this remark, we resolved to peruse once more the charming pages of Joinville's History; nor had we to read far before we found that one passage at least had been overlooked, a passage which establishes beyond the possibility of doubt the presence of surgeons and physicians in the camp of the French Crusaders. On page 78 of M. de Wailly's spirited translation, in the account of the death of Gautier d'Autrèche, we read that when that brave knight was carried back to his tent nearly dying, “several of the surgeons and physicians of the camp came to see him, and not perceiving that he was dangerously injured, they bled him on both his arms.” The result was what might be expected: Gautier d'Autrèche soon breathed his last.
Having once opened the “Mémoires” of Joinville, we could not but go on to the end, for there are few books that carry on the reader more pleasantly, whether we read them in the quaint French of the fourteenth century, or in the more modern French in which they have just been clothed by M. Natalis de Wailly. So vividly does the easy gossip of the old soldier bring before our eyes the days of St. Louis and Henry III., that we forget that we are reading an old chronicle, and holding converse with the heroes of the thirteenth century. The fates both of Joinville's “Mémoires” and of Joinville himself suggest in fact many reflections apart from mere mediæval history; and a few of [pg 153] them may here be given in the hope of reviving the impressions left on the minds of many by their first acquaintance with the old Crusader, or of inviting others to the perusal of a work which no one who takes an interest in man, whether past or present, can read without real pleasure and real benefit.
It is interesting to watch the history of books, and to gain some kind of insight into the various circumstances which contribute to form the reputation of poets, philosophers, or historians. Joinville, whose name is now familiar to the student of French history, as well as to the lover of French literature, might fairly have expected that his memory would live by his acts of prowess, and by his loyal devotion and sufferings when following the King of France, St. Louis, on his unfortunate crusade. When, previous to his departure for the Holy Land, the young Sénéchal de Champagne, then about twenty-four years of age, had made his confession to the Abbot of Cheminon; when, barefoot and in a white sheet, he was performing his pilgrimages to Blehecourt (Blechicourt), St. Urbain, and other sacred shrines in his neighborhood, and when on passing his own domain he would not once turn his eyes back on the castle of Joinville, “pour ce que li cuers ne me attendrisist dou biau chastel que je lessoie et de mes dous enfans” (“that the heart might not make me pine after the beautiful castle which I left behind, and after my two children”), he must have felt that, happen what might to himself, the name of his family would live, and his descendants would reside from century to century in those strong towers where he left his young wife, Alix de Grandpré, and his son and heir Jean, then but a few months old. After five years he returned from his crusade, full of honors and [pg 154] full of wounds. He held one of the highest positions that a French nobleman could hold. He was Sénéchal de Champagne, as his ancestors had been before him. Several members of his family had distinguished themselves in former crusades, and the services of his uncle Geoffroi had been so highly appreciated by Richard Cœur de Lion that he was allowed by that King to quarter the arms of England with his own. Both at the court of the Comtes de Champagne, who were Kings of Navarre, and at the court of Louis IX., King of France, Joinville was a welcome guest. He witnessed the reigns of six kings,—of Louis VIII., 1223-26; Louis IX., or St. Louis, 1226-70; Philip III., le Hardi, 1270-85 ; Philip IV., le Bel, 1285-1314; Louis X., le Hutin, 1314-16 ; and Philip V., le Long, 1316-22. Though later in life Joinville declined to follow his beloved King on his last and fatal crusade in 1270, he tells us himself how, on the day on which he took leave of him, he carried his royal friend, then really on the brink of death, in his arms from the residence of the Comte d'Auxerre to the house of the Cordeliers. In 1282 he was one of the principal witnesses when, previous to the canonization of the King, an inquest was held to establish the purity of his life, the sincerity of his religious professions, and the genuineness of his self-sacrificing devotion in the cause of Christendom. When the daughter of his own liege lord, the Comte de Champagne, Jeanne de Navarre, married Philip le Bel, and became Queen of France, she made Joinville Governor of Champagne, which she had brought as her dowry to the grandson of St. Louis. Surely, then, when the old Crusader, the friend and counselor of many kings, closed his earthly career, at the good age of ninety-five, he might have looked forward to an [pg 155] honored grave in the Church of St. Laurent, and to an eminent place in the annals of his country, which were then being written in more or less elegant Latin by the monks of St. Denis.
But what has happened? The monkish chroniclers, no doubt, have assigned him his proper place in their tedious volumes, and there his memory would have lived with that kind of life which belongs to the memory of Geoffroi, his illustrious uncle, the friend of Philip Augustus, the companion of Richard Cœur de Lion, whose arms were to be seen in the Church of St. Laurent, at Joinville, quartered with the royal arms of England. Such parchment or hatchment glory might have been his, and many a knight, as good as he, has received no better, no more lasting reward for his loyalty and bravery. His family became extinct in his grandson. Henri de Joinville, his grandson, had no sons; and his daughter, being a wealthy heiress, was married to one of the Dukes of Lorraine. The Dukes of Lorraine were buried for centuries in the same Church of St. Laurent where Joinville reposed, and where he had founded a chapel dedicated to his companion in arms, Louis IX., the Royal Saint of France; and when, at the time of the French Revolution, the tombs of St. Denis were broken open by an infuriated people, and their ashes scattered abroad, the vaults of the church at Joinville, too, shared the same fate, and the remains of the brave Crusader suffered the same indignity as the remains of his sainted King. It is true that there were some sparks of loyalty and self-respect left in the hearts of the citizens of Joinville. They had the bones of the old warrior and of the Dukes of Lorraine reinterred in the public cemetery; and there they now rest, mingled with the dust of [pg 156] their faithful lieges and subjects. But the Church of St. Laurent, with its tombs and tombstones, is gone. The property of the Joinvilles descended from the Dukes of Lorraine to the Dukes of Guise, and, lastly, to the family of Orleans. The famous Duke of Orleans, Egalité, sold Joinville in 1790, and stipulated that the old castle should be demolished. Poplars and fir-trees now cover the ground of the ancient castle, and the name of Joinville is borne by a royal prince, the son of a dethroned king, the grandson of Louis Egalité, who died on the guillotine.
Neither his noble birth, nor his noble deeds, nor the friendship of kings and princes, would have saved Joinville from that inevitable oblivion which has blotted from the memory of living men the names of his more eminent companions,—Robert, Count of Artois; Alphonse, Count of Poitiers; Charles, Count of Anjou; Hugue, Duke of Burgundy; William, Count of Flanders, and many more. A little book which the old warrior wrote or dictated,—for it is very doubtful whether he could have written it himself,—a book which for many years attracted nobody's attention, and which even now we do not possess in the original language of the thirteenth or the beginning of the fourteenth centuries—has secured to the name of Jean de Joinville a living immortality, and a fame that will last long after the bronze statue which was erected in his native place in 1853 shall have shared the fate of his castle, of his church, and of his tomb. Nothing could have been further from the mind of the old nobleman when, at the age of eighty-five, he began the history of his royal comrade, St. Louis, than the hope of literary fame. He would have scouted it. That kind of fame might have been good enough for monks [pg 157] and abbots, but it would never at that time have roused the ambition of a man of Joinville's stamp. How the book came to be written he tells us himself in his dedication, dated in the year 1309, and addressed to Louis le Hutin, then only King of Navarre and Count of Champagne, but afterwards King of France. His mother, Jeanne of Navarre, the daughter of Joinville's former liege lord, the last of the Counts of Champagne, who was married to Philip le Bel, the grandson of St. Louis, had asked him “to have a book made for her, containing the sacred words and good actions of our King, St. Looys.” She died before the book was finished, and Joinville, therefore, sent it to her son. How it was received by him we do not know; nor is there any reason to suppose that there were more than a few copies made of a work which was intended chiefly for members of the royal family of France and of his own family. It is never quoted by historical writers of that time; and the first historian who refers to it is said to be Pierre le Baud, who, toward the end of the fifteenth century, wrote his “Histoire de Bretagne.” It has been proved that for a long time no mention of the dedication copy occurs in the inventories of the private libraries of the Kings of France. At the death of Louis le Hutin his library consisted of twenty-nine volumes, and among them the History of St. Louis does not occur. There is, indeed, one entry, “Quatre caiers de Saint Looys;” but this could not be meant for the work of Joinville, which was in one volume. These four cahiers or quires of paper were more likely manuscript notes of St. Louis himself. His confessor, Geoffroy de Beaulieu, relates that the King, before his last illness, wrote down with his own hand some salutary counsels in French, of [pg 158] which he, the confessor, procured a copy before the King's death, and which he translated from French into Latin.
Again, the widow of Louis X. left at her death a collection of forty-one volumes, and the widow of Charles le Bel a collection of twenty volumes; but in neither of them is there any mention of Joinville's History.
It is not till we come to the reign of Charles V. (1364-80) that Joinville's book occurs in the inventory of the royal library, drawn up in 1373 by the King's valet de chambre, Gilles Mallet. It is entered as “La vie de Saint Loys, et les fais de son voyage d'outre mer;” and in the margin of the catalogue there is a note, “Le Roy l'a par devers soy,”—“The King has it by him.” At the time of his death the volume had not yet been returned to its proper place in the first hall of the Louvre; but in the inventory drawn up in 1411 it appears again, with the following description:[30]—
“Une grant partie de la vie et des fais de Monseigneur Saint Loys que fist faire le Seigneur de Joinville; très-bien escript et historié. Convert de cuir rouge, à empreintes, à deux fermoirs d'argent. Escript de lettres de forme en françois à deux coulombes; commençant au deuxième folio ‘et porceque,’ et au derrenier ‘en tele maniere.’ ”
This means, “A great portion of the life and actions of St. Louis which the Seigneur de Joinville had made, very well written and illuminated. Bound in red leather, tooled, with two silver clasps. Written in formal letters in French, in two columns, beginning on the second folio with the words ‘et porceque,’ and on the last with ‘en tele maniere.’ ”
During the Middle Ages and before the discovery [pg 159] of printing, the task of having a literary work published, or rather of having it copied, rested chiefly with the author; and as Joinville himself, at his time of life, and in the position which he occupied, had no interest in what we should call “pushing” his book, this alone is quite sufficient to explain its almost total neglect. But other causes, too, have been assigned by M. Paulin Paris and others for what seems at first sight so very strange,—the entire neglect of Joinville's work. From the beginning of the twelfth century the monks of St. Denis were the recognized historians of France. They at first collected the most important historical works of former centuries, such as Gregory of Tours, Eginhard, the so-called Archbishop Turpin, Nithard, and William of Jumièges. But beginning with the first year of Philip I., 1060-1108, the monks became themselves the chroniclers of passing events. The famous Abbot Suger, the contemporary of Abelard and St. Bernard, wrote the life of Louis le Gros; Rigord and Guillaume de Nangis followed with the history of his successors. Thus the official history of St. Louis had been written by Guillaume de Nangis long before Joinville thought of dictating his personal recollections of the King. Besides the work of Guillaume de Nangis, there was the “History of the Crusades,” including that of St. Louis, written by Guillaume, Archbishop of Tyre, and translated into French, so that even the ground which Joinville had more especially selected as his own was preoccupied by a popular and authoritative writer. Lastly, when Joinville's History appeared, the chivalrous King, whose sayings and doings his old brother in arms undertook to describe in his homely and truthful style, had ceased to be an ordinary mortal. He had become [pg 160] a saint, and what people were anxious to know of him were legends rather than history. With all the sincere admiration which Joinville entertained for his King, he could not compete with such writers as Geoffroy de Beaulieu (Gaufridus de Belloloco), the confessor of St. Louis, Guillaume de Chartres (Guillelmus Carnotensis), his chaplain, or the confessor of his daughter Blanche, each of whom had written a life of the royal saint. Their works were copied over and over again, and numerous MSS. have been preserved of them in public and private libraries. Of Joinville one early MS. only was saved, and even that not altogether a faithful copy of the original.
The first edition of Joinville was printed at Poitiers in 1547, and dedicated to François I. The editor, Pierre Antoine de Rieux, tells us that when, in 1542, he examined some old documents at Beaufort en Valée, in Anjou, he found among the MSS. the Chronicle of King Louis, written by a Seigneur de Joinville, Sénéchal de Champagne, who lived at that time, and had accompanied the said St. Louis in all his wars. But because it was badly arranged or written in a very rude language, he had it polished and put in better order, a proceeding of which he is evidently very proud, as we may gather from a remark of his friend Guillaume de Perrière, that “it is no smaller praise to polish a diamond than to find it quite raw” (toute brute).
This text, which could hardly be called Joinville's, remained for a time the received text. It was reproduced in 1595, in 1596, and in 1609.
In 1617 a new edition was published by Claude Menard. He states that he found at Laval a heap of old papers, which had escaped the ravages committed [pg 161] by the Protestants in some of the monasteries at Anjou. When he compared the MS. of Joinville with the edition of Pierre Antoine de Rieux, he found that the ancient style of Joinville had been greatly changed. He therefore undertook a new edition, more faithful to the original. Unfortunately, however, his original MS. was but a modern copy, and his edition, though an improvement on that of 1547, was still very far from the style and language of the beginning of the fourteenth century.
The learned Du Cange searched in vain for more trustworthy materials for restoring the text of Joinville. Invaluable as are the dissertations which he wrote on Joinville, his own text of the History, published in 1668, could only be based on the two editions that had preceded his own.
It was not till 1761 that real progress was made in restoring the text of Joinville. An ancient MS. had been brought from Brussels by the Maréchal Maurice de Saxe. It was carefully edited by M. Capperonnier, and it has served, with few exceptions, as the foundation of all later editions. It is now in the Imperial Library. The editors of the “Recueil des Historiens de France” express their belief that the MS. might actually be the original. At the end of it are the words, “Ce fu escript en l'an de grâce mil CCC et IX, on moys d'octovre.” This, however, is no real proof of the date of the MS. Transcribers of MSS., it is well known, were in the habit of mechanically copying all they saw in the original, and hence we find very commonly the date of an old MS. repeated over and over again in modern copies.
The arguments by which in 1839 M. Paulin Paris proved that this, the oldest MS. of Joinville, belongs [pg 162] not to the beginning, but to the end of the fourteenth century, seem unanswerable, though they failed to convince M. Daunou, who, in the twentieth volume of the “Historiens de France,” published in 1840, still looks upon this MS. as written in 1309, or at least during Joinville's life-time. M. Paulin Paris establishes, first of all, that this MS. cannot be the same as that which was so carefully described in the catalogue of Charles V. What became of that MS. once belonging to the private library of the Kings of France, no one knows, but there is no reason, even now, why it should not still be recovered. The MS. of Joinville, which now belongs to the Imperial Library, is written by the same scribe who wrote another MS. of “La Vie et les Miracles de Saint Louis.” Now, this MS. of “La Vie et les Miracles” is a copy of an older MS., which likewise exists at Paris. This more ancient MS., probably the original, and written, therefore, in the beginning of the fourteenth century, had been carefully revised before it served as the model for the later copy, executed by the same scribe who, as we saw, wrote the old MS. of Joinville. A number of letters were scratched out, words erased, and sometimes whole sentences altered or suppressed, a red line being drawn across the words which had to be omitted. It looks, in fact, like a manuscript prepared for the printer. Now, if the same copyist who copied this MS. copied likewise the MS. of Joinville, it follows that he was separated from the original of Joinville by the same interval which separates the corrected MSS. of “La Vie et les Miracles” from their original, or from the beginning of the fourteenth century. This line of argument seems to establish satisfactorily the approximate date of the oldest MS. of Joinville as belonging to the end of the fourteenth century.
Another MS. was discovered at Lucca. As it had belonged to the Dukes of Guise, great expectations were at one time entertained of its value. It was bought by the Royal Library at Paris in 1741 for 360 livres, but it was soon proved not to be older than about 1500, representing the language of the time of François I. rather than of St. Louis, but nevertheless preserving occasionally a more ancient spelling than the other MS. which was copied two hundred years before. This MS. bears the arms of the Princess Antoinette de Bourbon and of her husband, Claude de Lorraine, who was “Duc de Guise, Comte d'Aumale, Marquis de Mayence et d'Elbeuf, and Baron de Joinville.” Their marriage took place in 1513; he died in 1550, she in 1583.
There is a third MS. which has lately been discovered. It belonged to M. Brissart-Binet of Rheims, became known to M. Paulin Paris, and was lent to M. de Wailly for his new edition of Joinville. It seems to be a copy of the so-called MS. of Lucca, the MS. belonging to the Princess Antoinette de Bourbon, and it is most likely the very copy which that Princess ordered to be made for Louis Lasséré, canon of St. Martin of Tours who published an abridgment of it in 1541. By a most fortunate accident it supplies the passages from page 88 to 112, and from page 126 to 139, which are wanting in the MS. of Lucca.
It must be admitted, therefore, that for an accurate study of the historical growth of the French language, the work of Joinville is of less importance than it would have been if it had been preserved in its original orthography, and with all the grammatical peculiarities which mark the French of the thirteenth and the beginning of the fourteenth century. There may be [pg 164] no more than a distance of not quite a hundred years between the original of Joinville and the earliest MS. which we possess. But in those hundred years the French language did not remain stationary. Even as late as the time of Montaigne, when French has assumed a far greater literary steadiness, that writer complains of its constant change. “I wrote my book,” he says in a memorable passage (“Essais,” liv. 3, c. 9)—
“For few people and for a few years. If it had been a subject that ought to last, it should have been committed to a more stable language (Latin). After the continual variation which has followed our speech to the present day, who can hope that its present form will be used fifty years hence? It glides from our hands every day, and since I have lived it has been half changed. We say that at present it is perfect, but every century says the same of its own. I do not wish to hold it back, if it will fly away and go on deteriorating as it does. It belongs to good and useful writers to nail the language to themselves” (de le clouer à eux).
On the other hand, we must guard against forming an exaggerated notion of the changes that could have taken place in the French language within the space of less than a century. They refer chiefly to the spelling of words, to the use of some antiquated words and expressions, and to the less careful observation of the rules by which in ancient French the nominative is distinguished from the oblique cases, both in the singular and the plural. That the changes do not amount to more than this can be proved by a comparison of other documents which clearly preserve the actual language of Joinville. There is a letter of his which is preserved at the Imperial Library at Paris, addressed to Louis X. in 1315. It was first published by Du Cange, afterwards by M. Daunou, in the twentieth [pg 165] volume of the “Historiens de France,” and again by M. de Wailly. There are, likewise, some charters of Joinville, written in his chancellerie, and in some cases with additions from his own hand. Lastly, there is Joinville's “Credo,” containing his notes on the Apostolic Creed, preserved in a manuscript of the thirteenth century. This was published in the “Collection des Bibliophiles Français,” unfortunately printed in twenty-five copies only. The MS. of the “Credo,” which formerly belonged to the public library of Paris, disappeared from it about twenty years ago; and it now forms No. 75 of a collection of MSS. bought in 1849 by Lord Ashburnham from M. Barrois. By comparing the language of these thirteenth century documents with that of the earliest MS. of Joinville's History, it is easy to see that although we have lost something, we have not lost very much, and that, at all events, we need not suspect in the earliest MS. any changes that could in any way affect the historical authenticity of Joinville's work.[31]
To the historian of the French language, the language of Joinville, even though it gives us only a picture of the French spoken at the time of Charles V. or contemporaneously with Froissart, is still full of interest. That language is separated from the French of the present day by nearly five centuries, and we may be allowed to give a few instances to show the curious changes both of form and meaning which many words have undergone during that interval.
Instead of sœur, sister, Joinville still uses sereur, which was the right form of the oblique case, but was afterwards replaced by the nominative suer or sœur. Thus, p. 424 E, we read, quant nous menames la serour le roy, i.e. quand nous menâmes la sœur du roi; but p. 466 A, l'abbaïe que sa suer fonda, i.e. l'abbaïe que sa sœur fonda. Instead of ange, angel, he has both angle and angre, where the r stands for the final l of angele, the more ancient French form of angelus. The same transition of final l into r may be observed in apôtre for apostolus, chapitre for capitulum, chartre for cartula, esclandre for scandalum. Instead of vieux, old, Joinville uses veil or veel (p. 132 C, le veil le fil au veil, i.e. le vieux fils du vieux); but in the nom. sing., viex, which is the Latin vetulus (p. 302 A, li Viex de [pg 167] la Montaingne, i.e. le Vieux de la Montagne; but p. 304 A, li messaige le Vieil, i.e. les messagers du Vieux.) Instead of coude, m., elbow, we find coute, which is nearer to the Latin cubitus, cubit. The Latin t in words like cubitus was generally softened in old French, and was afterwards dropped altogether. As in coude, the d is preserved in aider for adjutare, in fade for fatuus. In other words, such as chaîne for catena, roue for rota, épée for spatha, aimêe for amata, it has disappeared altogether. True is voir, the regular modification of verum, like soir of serum, instead of the modern French vrai; e.g., p. 524 B, et sachiez que voirs estait, i.e. et sachez que c'était vrai. We still find ester, to stand (“Et ne pooit ester sur ses pieds,” “He could not stand on his legs”). At present the French have no single word for “standing,” which has often been pointed out as a real defect of the language. “To stand” is ester, in Joinville; “to be” is estre.
In the grammatical system of the language of Joinville we find the connecting link between the case terminations of the classical Latin and the prepositions and articles of modern French. It is generally supposed that the terminations of the Latin declension were lost in French, and that the relations of the cases were expressed by prepositions, while the s as the sign of the plural was explained by the s in the nom. plur. of nouns of the third declension. But languages do not thus advance per saltum. They change slowly and gradually, and we can generally discover in what is, some traces of what has been.
Now the fact is that in ancient French, and likewise in Provençal, there is still a system of declension more or less independent of prepositions. There are, so to [pg 168] say, three declensions in old French, of which the second is the most important and the most interesting. If we take a Latin word like annus, we find in old French two forms in the singular, and two in the plural. We find sing. an-s, an, plur. an, ans. If an occurs in the nom. sing. or as the subject, it is always ans; if it occur as a gen., dat., or acc., it is always an. In the plural, on the contrary, we find in the nom. an, and in all the oblique cases ans. The origin of this system is clear enough, and it is extraordinary that attempts should have been made to derive it from German or even from Celtic, when the explanation could be found so much nearer home. The nom. sing. has the s, because it was there in Latin; the nom. plur. has no s, because there was no s there in Latin. The oblique cases in the singular have no s, because the accusative in Latin, and likewise the gen., dat., and abl., ended either in vowels, which became mute, or in m, which was dropped. The oblique cases in the plural had the s, because it was there in the acc. plur., which became the general oblique case, and likewise in the dat. and abl. By means of these fragments of the Latin declension, it was possible to express many things without prepositions which in modern French can no longer be thus expressed. Le fils Roi was clearly the son of the King; il fil Roi, the sons of the King. Again we find li roys, the King, but au roy, to the King. Pierre Sarrasin begins his letter on the crusade of St. Louis by A seigneur Nicolas Arode, Jehan-s Sarrasin, chambrelen-s le roy de France, salut et bonne amour.
But if we apply the same principle to nouns of the first declension, we shall see at once that they could not [pg 169] have lent themselves to the same contrivance. Words like corona have no s in the nom. sing., nor in any of the oblique cases; it would therefore be in French corone throughout. In the plural indeed there might have been a distinction between the nom. and the acc. The nom. ought to have been without an s, and the acc. with an s. But with the exception of some doubtful passages, where a nom. plur. is supposed to occur in old French documents without an s, we find throughout, both in the nom. and the other cases, the s of the accusative as the sign of the plural.
Nearly the same applies to certain words of the third declension. Here we find indeed a distinction between the nom. and the oblique cases of the singular, such as flor-s, the flower, with flor, of the flower; but the plural is flor-s throughout. This form is chiefly confined to feminine nouns of the third declension.
There is another very curious contrivance by which the ancient French distinguished the nom. from the acc. sing., and which shows us again how the consciousness of the Latin grammar was by no means entirely lost in the formation of modern French. There are many words in Latin which change their accent in the oblique cases from what it was in the nominative. For instance, cantátor, a singer, becomes cantatórem, in the accusative. Now in ancient French the nom., corresponding to cantator, is chántere, but the gen. chanteór, and thus again a distinction is established of great importance for grammatical purposes. Most of these words followed the analogy of the second declension, and added an s in the nom. sing., dropped it in the nom. plur., and added it again in the oblique cases of the plural. Thus we get—
| Singular. | Plural. | ||
| Nom. | Oblique Cases. | Nom. | Oblique Cases. |
| chántere | chanteór | chanteór | chanteórs |
| From baro, baronis | baron | baron | barons |
| (O. Fr. ber) | |||
| latro, latronis | larron | larron | larrons |
| (O. Fr. lierre) | |||
| senior, senioris | seignor | seignor | seignors |
| (O. Fr. sendre) (sire) |
Thus we read in the beginning of Joinville's History:—
A son bon signour Looys, Jehans sires de Joinville salut et amour;
and immediately afterwards, Chiers sire, not Chiers seigneur.
If we compare this old French declension with the grammar of modern French, we find that the accusative or the oblique form has become the only recognized form, both in the singular and plural. Hence—
| [Corone] | [Ans] | [Flors] | [Chántere] le chantre. |
| Corone | An | Flor | Chanteór le chanteur. |
| [Corones] | [An] | [Flors] | [Chanteór]. |
| Corones | Ans | Flors | Chanteórs. |
A few traces only of the old system remain in such words as fils, bras, Charles, Jacques, etc.
Not less curious than the changes of form are the changes of meaning which have taken place in the French language since the days of Joinville. Thus, la viande, which now only means meat, is used by Joinville in its original and more general sense of victuals, the Latin vivenda. For instance (p. 248 D), “Et nous requeismes que en nous donnast la viande,” “And we asked that one might give us something to eat.” And soon after, “Les viandes que il nous donnèrent, ce furent begniet de fourmaiges qui estoient roti au soliel, pour ce que li ver n'i venissent, et oef dur [pg 171] cuit de quatre jours ou de cinc,” “And the viands which they gave us were cheese-cakes roasted in the sun, that the worms might not get at them, and hard eggs boiled four or five days ago.”
Payer, to pay, is still used in its original sense of pacifying or satisfying, the Latin pacare. Thus a priest who has received from his bishop an explanation of some difficulty and other ghostly comfort “se tint bin pour paié” (p. 34 C), he “considered himself well satisfied.” When the King objected to certain words in the oath which he had to take, Joinville says that he does not know how the oath was finally arranged, but he adds, “Li amiral se tindrent lien apaié,” “The admirals considered themselves satisfied” (p. 242 C). The same word, however, is likewise used in the usual sense of paying.
Noise, a word which has almost disappeared from modern French, occurs several times in Joinville; and we can watch in different passages the growth of its various meanings. In one passage Joinville relates (p. 198) that one of his knights had been killed, and was lying on a bier in his chapel. While the priest was performing his office, six other knights were talking very loud, and “Faisoient noise au prestre,” “They annoyed or disturbed the priest; they caused him annoyance.” Here noise has still the same sense as the Latin nausea, from which it is derived. In another passage, however, Joinville uses noise as synonymous with bruit (p. 152 A), Vint li roys à toute sa bataille, à grant noyse et à grant bruit de trompes et nacaires, i.e. vint le roi avec tout son corps de bataille, à grand cris et à grand bruit de trompettes et de timbales. Here noise may still mean an annoying noise, but we can see the easy transition from that to noise in general.
Another English word, “to purchase,” finds its explanation in Joinville. Originally pourchasser meant to hunt after a thing, to pursue it. Joinville frequently uses the expression “par son pourchas” (p. 458 E) in the sense of “by his endeavors.” When the King had reconciled two adversaries, peace is said to have been made par son pourchas. “Pourchasser” afterwards took the sense of “procuring,” “catering,” and lastly, in English, of “buying.”
To return to Joinville's History, the scarcity of MSS. is very instructive from an historical point of view. As far as we know at present, his great work existed for centuries in two copies only, one preserved in his own castle, the other in the library of the Kings of France. We can hardly say that it was published, even in the restricted sense which that word had during the fourteenth century, and there certainly is no evidence that it was read by any one except by members of the royal family of France, and possibly by descendants of Joinville. It exercised no influence; and if two or three copies had not luckily escaped (one of them, it must be confessed, clearly showing the traces of mice's teeth), we should have known very little indeed either of the military or of the literary achievements of one who is now ranked among the chief historians of France, or even of Europe. After Joinville's History had once emerged from its obscurity, it soon became the fashion to praise it, and to praise it somewhat indiscriminately. Joinville became a general favorite both in and out of France; and after all had been said in his praise that might be truly and properly said, each successive admirer tried to add a little more, till at last, as a matter of course, he was compared to Thucydides, and lauded for the graces of [pg 173] his style, the vigor of his language, the subtlety of his mind, and his worship of the harmonious and the beautiful, in such a manner that the old bluff soldier would have been highly perplexed and disgusted, could he have listened to the praises of his admirers. Well might M. Paulin Paris say, “I shall not stop to praise what everybody has praised before me; to recall the graceful naïveté of the good Sénéchal, would it not be, as the English poet said, ‘to gild the gold and paint the lily white?’ ”
It is surprising to find in the large crowd of indiscriminate admirers a man so accurate in his thoughts and in his words as the late Sir James Stephen. Considering how little Joinville's History was noticed by his contemporaries, how little it was read by the people before it was printed during the reign of François I., it must seem more than doubtful whether Joinville really deserved a place in a series of lectures, “On the Power of the Pen in France.” But, waiving that point, is it quite exact to say, as Sir James Stephen does, “that three writers only retain, and probably they alone deserve, at this day the admiration which greeted them in their own,—I refer to Joinville, Froissart, and to Philippe de Comines?” And is the following a sober and correct description of Joinville's style?—
“Over the whole picture the genial spirit of France glows with all the natural warmth which we seek in vain among the dry bones of earlier chroniclers. Without the use of any didactic forms of speech, Joinville teaches the highest of all wisdom—the wisdom of love. Without the pedantry of the schools, he occasionally exhibits an eager thirst of knowledge, and a graceful facility of imparting it, which attest that he is of the lineage of the great father of history, and of those modern historians who have taken Herodotus for their model.” (Vol. ii. pp. 209, 219.)
Now, all this sounds to our ears just an octave too high. There is some truth in it, but the truth is spoilt by being exaggerated. Joinville's book is very pleasant to read, because he gives himself no airs, and tells us as well as he can what he recollects of his excellent King, and of the fearful time which they spent together during the crusade. He writes very much as an old soldier would speak. He seems to know that people will listen to him with respect, and that they will believe what he tells them. He does not weary them with arguments. He rather likes now and then to evoke a smile, and he maintains the glow of attention by thinking more of his hearers than of himself. He had evidently told his stories many times before he finally dictated them in the form in which we read them, and this is what gives to some of them a certain finish and the appearance of art. Yet, if we speak of style at all,—not of the style of thought, but of the style of language,—the blemishes in Joinville's History are so apparent that one feels reluctant to point them out. He repeats his words, he repeats his remarks, he drops the thread of his story, begins a new subject, leaves it because, as he says himself, it would carry him too far, and then, after a time, returns to it again. His descriptions of the scenery where the camp was pitched, and the battles fought, are neither sufficiently broad nor sufficiently distinct to give the reader that view of the whole which he receives from such writers as Cæsar, Thiers, Carlyle, or Russell. Nor is there any attempt at describing or analyzing the character of the principal actors in the crusade of St. Louis, beyond relating some of their remarks or occasional conversations. It is an ungrateful task to draw up these indictments against a man whom one [pg 175] probably admires much more sincerely than those who bespatter him with undeserved praise. Joinville's book is readable, and it is readable even in spite of the antiquated and sometimes difficult language in which it is written. There are few books of which we could say the same. What makes his book readable is partly the interest attaching to the subject of which it treats, but far more the simple, natural, straightforward way in which Joinville tells what he has to tell. From one point of view it may be truly said that no higher praise could be bestowed on any style than to say that it is simple, natural, straightforward, and charming. But if his indiscriminate admirers had appreciated this artless art, they would not have applied to the pleasant gossip of an old general epithets that are appropriate only to the masterpieces of classical literature.
It is important to bear in mind what suggested to Joinville the first idea of writing his book. He was asked to do so by the Queen of Philip le Bel. After the death of the Queen, however, Joinville did not dedicate his work to the King, but to his son, who was then the heir apparent. This may be explained by the fact that he himself was Sénéchal de Champagne, and Louis, the son of Philip le Bel, Comte de Champagne. But it admits of another and more probable explanation. Joinville was dissatisfied with the proceedings of Philip le Bel, and from the very beginning of his reign he opposed his encroachments on the privileges of the nobility and the liberties of the people. He was punished for his opposition, and excluded from the assemblies in Champagne in 1287; and though his name appeared again on the roll in 1291, Joinville then occupied only the sixth instead of the first place. In [pg 176] 1314 matters came to a crisis in Champagne, and Joinville called together the nobility in order to declare openly against the King. The opportune death of Philip alone prevented the breaking out of a rebellion. It is true that there are no direct allusions to these matters in the body of Joinville's book, yet an impression is left on the reader that he wrote some portion of the Life of St. Louis as a lesson to the young prince to whom it is dedicated. Once or twice, indeed, he uses language which sounds ominous, and which would hardly be tolerated in France, even after the lapse of five centuries. When speaking of the great honor which St. Louis conferred on his family, he says “that it was, indeed, a great honor to those of his descendants who would follow his example by good works, but a great dishonor to those who would do evil. For people would point at them with their fingers, and would say that the sainted King from whom they descended would have despised such wickedness.” There is another passage even stronger than this. After relating how St. Louis escaped from many dangers by the grace of God, he suddenly exclaims, “Let the King who now reigns (Philip le Bel) take care, for he has escaped from as great dangers—nay, from greater ones—than we; let him see whether he cannot amend his evil ways, so that God may not strike him and his affairs cruelly.”
This surely is strong language, considering that it was used in a book dedicated to the son of the then reigning King. To the father of Philip le Bel, Joinville seems to have spoken with the same frankness as to his son; and he tells us himself how he reproved the King, Philip le Hardi, for his extravagant dress, and admonished him to follow the example of his [pg 177] father. Similar remarks occur again and again; and though the Life of St. Louis was certainly not written merely for didactic purposes, yet one cannot help seeing that it was written with a practical object. In the introduction Joinville says, “I send the book to you, that you and your brother and others who hear it may take an example, and that they may carry it out in their life, for which God will bless them.” And again (p. 268), “These things shall I cause to be written, that those who hear them may have faith in God in their persecutions and tribulations, and God will help them, as He did me.” Again (p. 380), “These things I have told you, that you may guard against taking an oath without reason, for, as the wise say, ‘He who swears readily, forswears himself readily.’ ”
It seems, therefore, that when Joinville took to dictating his recollections of St. Louis, he did so partly to redeem a promise given to the Queen, who, he says, loved him much, and whom he could not refuse, partly to place in the hands of the young princes a book full of historical lessons which they might read, mark, and inwardly digest.
And well might he do so, and well might his book be read by all young princes, and by all who are able to learn a lesson from the pages of history; for few kings, if any, did ever wear their crowns so worthily as Louis IX. of France; and few saints, if any, did deserve their halo better than St. Louis. Here lies the deep and lasting interest of Joinville's work. It allows us an insight into a life which we could hardly realize, nay, which we should hardly believe in, unless we had the testimony of that trusty witness, Joinville, the King's friend and comrade. The legendary lives of St. Louis would have destroyed in the eyes of [pg 178] posterity the real greatness and the real sanctity of the King's character. We should never have known the man, but only his saintly caricature. After reading Joinville, we must make up our mind that such a life as he there describes was really lived, and was lived in those very palaces which we are accustomed to consider as the sinks of wickedness and vice. From other descriptions we might have imagined Louis IX. as a bigoted, priest-ridden, credulous King. From Joinville we learn that, though unwavering in his faith, and most strict in the observance of his religious duties, the King was by no means narrow in his sympathies, or partial to the encroachments of priestcraft. We find Joinville speaking to the King on subjects of religion with the greatest freedom, and as no courtier would have dared to speak during the later years of Louis XIV.'s reign. When the King asked him whether in the holy week he ever washed the feet of the poor, Joinville replied that he would never wash the feet of such villains. For this remark he was, no doubt, reproved by the King, who, as we are told by Beaulieu, with the most unpleasant details, washed the feet of the poor every Saturday. But the reply, though somewhat irreverent, is, nevertheless, highly creditable to the courtier's frankness. Another time he shocked his royal friend still more by telling him, in the presence of several priests, that he would rather have committed thirty mortal sins than be a leper. The King said nothing at the time, but he sent for him the next day, and reproved him in the most gentle manner for his thoughtless speech.
Joinville, too, with all the respect which he entertained for his King, would never hesitate to speak his mind when he thought that the King was in the [pg 179] wrong. On one occasion the Abbot of Cluny presented the King with two horses, worth five hundred livres. The next day the Abbot came again to the King to discuss some matters of business. Joinville observed that the King listened to him with marked attention. After the Abbot was gone, he went to the King, and said, “ ‘Sire, may I ask you whether you listened to the Abbot more cheerfully because he presented you yesterday with two horses?’ The King meditated for a time, and then said to me, ‘Truly, yes.’ ‘Sire,’ said I, ‘do you know why I asked you this question?’ ‘Why?’ said he. ‘Because, Sire,’ I said, ‘I advise you, when you return to France, to prohibit all sworn counselors from accepting anything from those who have to bring their affairs before them. For you may be certain, if they accept anything, they will listen more cheerfully and attentively to those who give, as you did yourself with the Abbot of Cluny.’ ”
Surely a king who could listen to such language is not likely to have had his court filled with hypocrites, whether lay or clerical. The bishops, though they might count on the King for any help he could give them in the great work of teaching, raising, and comforting the people, tried in vain to make him commit an injustice in defense of what they considered religion. One day a numerous deputation of prelates asked for an interview. It was readily granted. When they appeared before the King, their spokesman said, “Sire, these lords who are here, archbishops and bishops, have asked me to tell you that Christianity is perishing at your hands.” The King signed himself with the cross, and said, “Tell me how can that be?” “Sire,” he said, “it is because people care so little [pg 180] nowadays for excommunication that they would rather die excommunicated than have themselves absolved and give satisfaction to the Church. Now, we pray you, Sire, for the sake of God, and because it is your duty, that you command your provosts and bailiffs that by seizing the goods of those who allow themselves to be excommunicated for the space of one year, they may force them to come and be absolved.” Then the King replied that he would do this willingly with all those of whom it could be proved that they were in the wrong (which would, in fact, have given the King jurisdiction in ecclesiastical matters). The bishops said that they could not do this at any price; they would never bring their causes before his court. Then the King said he could not do it otherwise, for it would be against God and against reason. He reminded them of the case of the Comte de Bretagne, who had been excommunicated by the prelates of Brittany for the space of seven years, and who, when he appealed to the Pope, gained his cause, while the prelates were condemned. “Now then,” the King said, “if I had forced the Comte de Bretagne to get absolution from the prelates after the first year, should I not have sinned against God and against him?”
This is not the language of a bigoted man; and if we find in the life of St. Louis traces of what in our age we might feel inclined to call bigotry or credulity, we must consider that the religious and intellectual atmosphere of the reign of St. Louis was very different from our own. There are, no doubt, some of the sayings and doings recorded by Joinville of his beloved King which at present would be unanimously condemned even by the most orthodox and narrow-minded. Think of an assembly of theologians in the monastery [pg 181] of Cluny who had invited a distinguished rabbi to discuss certain points of Christian doctrine with them. A knight, who happened to be staying with the abbot, asked for leave to open the discussion, and he addressed the Jew in the following words: “Do you believe that the Virgin Mary was a virgin and Mother of God?” When the Jew replied, “No!” the knight took his crutch and felled the poor Jew to the ground. The King, who relates this to Joinville, draws one very wise lesson from, it—namely, that no one who is not a very good theologian should enter upon a controversy with Jews on such subjects. But when he goes on to say that a layman who hears the Christian religion evil spoken of should take to the sword as the right weapon of defense, and run it into the miscreant's body as far as it would go, we perceive at once that we are in the thirteenth and not in the nineteenth century. The punishments which the King inflicted for swearing were most cruel. At Cesarea, Joinville tells us that he saw a goldsmith fastened to a ladder, with the entrails of a pig twisted round his neck right up to his nose, because he had used irreverent language. Nay, after his return from the Holy Land, he heard that the King ordered a man's nose and lower lip to be burnt for the same offense. The Pope himself had to interfere to prevent St. Louis from inflicting on blasphemers mutilation and death. “I would myself be branded with a hot iron,” the King said, “if thus I could drive away all swearing from my kingdom.” He himself, as Joinville assures us, never used an oath, nor did he pronounce the name of the Devil except when reading the lives of the saints. His soul, we cannot doubt, was grieved when he heard the names which to him were the most sacred, [pg 182] employed for profane purposes; and this feeling of indignation was shared by his honest chronicler. “In my castle,” says Joinville, “whosoever uses bad language receives a good pommeling, and this has nearly put down that bad habit.” Here again we see the upright character of Joinville. He does not, like most courtiers, try to outbid his sovereign in pious indignation; on the contrary, while sharing his feelings, he gently reproves the King for his excessive zeal and cruelty, and this after the King had been raised to the exalted position of a saint.
To doubt of any points of the Christian doctrine was considered at Joinville's time, as it is even now, as a temptation of the Devil. But here again we see at the court of St. Louis a wonderful mixture of tolerance and intolerance. Joinville, who evidently spoke his mind freely on all things, received frequent reproofs and lessons from the King; and we hardly know which to wonder at most, the weakness of the arguments, or the gentle and truly Christian spirit in which the King used them. The King once asked Joinville how he knew that his father's name was Symon. Joinville replied he knew it because his mother had told him so. “Then,” the King said, “you ought likewise firmly to believe all the articles of faith which the Apostles attest, as you hear them sung every Sunday in the Creed.” The use of such an argument by such a man leaves an impression on the mind that the King himself was not free from religious doubts and difficulties, and that his faith was built upon ground which was apt to shake. And this impression is confirmed by a conversation which immediately follows after this argument. It is long, but it is far too important to be here omitted. The Bishop of Paris had [pg 183] told the King, probably in order to comfort him after receiving from him the confession of some of his own religious difficulties, that one day he received a visit from a great master in divinity. The master threw himself at the Bishop's feet and cried bitterly. The Bishop said to him,—
“ ‘Master, do not despair; no one can sin so much that God could not forgive him.’
“The master said, ‘I cannot help crying, for I believe I am a miscreant: for I cannot bring my heart to believe the sacrament of the altar, as the holy Church teaches it, and I know full well that it is the temptation of the enemy.’
“ ‘Master,’ replied the Bishop, ‘tell me, when the enemy sends you this temptation, does it please you?’
“And the master said, ‘Sir, it pains me as much as anything can pain.’
“ ‘Then I ask you,’ the Bishop continued, ‘would you take gold or silver in order to avow with your mouth anything that is against the sacrament of the altar, or against the other sacred sacraments of the Church?’
“And the master said, ‘Know, sir, that there is nothing in the world that I should take; I would rather that all my limbs were torn from my body than openly avow this.’
“ ‘Then,’ said the Bishop, ‘I shall tell you something else. You know that the King of France made war against the King of England, and you know that the castle which is nearest to the frontier is La Rochelle, in Poitou. Now, I shall ask you, if the King had trusted you to defend La Rochelle, and he had trusted me to defend the Castle of Laon, which is in the heart of France, where the country is at peace, to [pg 184] whom ought the King to be more beholden at the end of the war,—to you who had defended La Rochelle without losing it, or to me who kept the Castle of Laon?’
“ ‘In the name of God,’ said the master, ‘to me who had kept La Rochelle with losing it.’
“ ‘Master,’ said the Bishop, ‘I tell you that my heart is like the Castle of Laon (Montleheri), for I feel no temptation and no doubt as to the sacrament of the altar; therefore, I tell you, if God gives me one reward because I believe firmly and in peace, He will give you four, because you keep your heart for Him in this fight of tribulation, and have such goodwill toward Him that for no earthly good, nor for any pain inflicted on your body, you would forsake Him. Therefore, I say to you, be at ease; your state is more pleasing to our Lord than my own.’ ”
When the master had heard this, he fell on his knees before the Bishop, and felt again at peace.
Surely, if the cruel punishment inflicted by St. Louis on blasphemers is behind our age, is not the love, the humility, the truthfulness of this Bishop,—is not the spirit in which he acted toward the priest, and the spirit in which he related this conversation to the King, somewhat in advance of the century in which we live?
If we only dwell on certain passages of Joinville's memoirs, it is easy to say that he and his King, and the whole age in which they moved, were credulous, engrossed by the mere formalities of religion, and fanatical in their enterprise to recover Jerusalem and the Holy Land. But let us candidly enter into their view of life, and many things which at first seem strange and startling will become intelligible. Joinville does not relate many miracles; and such is his good faith [pg 185] that we may implicitly believe the facts, such as he states them, however we may differ as to the interpretation by which, to Joinville's mind, these facts assumed a miraculous character. On their way to the Holy Land it seems that their ship was windbound for several days, and that they were in danger of being taken prisoners by the pirates of Barbary. Joinville recollected the saying of a priest who had told him that, whatever had happened in his parish, whether too much rain or too little rain, or anything else, if he made three processions for three successive Saturdays, his prayer was always heard. Joinville, therefore, recommended the same remedy. Seasick as he was, he was carried on deck, and the procession was formed round the two masts of the ship. As soon as this was done, the wind rose, and the ship arrived at Cyprus the third Saturday. The same remedy was resorted to a second time, and with equal effect. The King was waiting at Damietta for his brother, the Comte de Poitiers, and his army, and was very uneasy about the delay in his arrival. Joinville told the legate of the miracle that had happened on their voyage to Cyprus. The legate consented to have three processions on three successive Saturdays, and on the third Saturday the Comte de Poitiers and his fleet arrived before Damietta. One more instance may suffice. On their return to France a sailor fell overboard, and was left in the water. Joinville, whose ship was close by, saw something in the water; but, as he observed no struggle, he imagined it was a cask. The man, however, was picked up; and when asked why he did not exert himself, he replied that he saw no necessity for it. As soon as he fell into the water he commended himself to Nostre Dame, and she supported him by his shoulders [pg 186] till he was picked up by the King's galley. Joinville had a window painted in his chapel to commemorate this miracle; and there, no doubt, the Virgin would be represented as supporting the sailor exactly as he described it.
Now, it must be admitted that before the tribunal of the ordinary philosophy of the nineteenth century, these miracles would be put down either as inventions or as exaggerations. But let us examine the thoughts and the language of that age, and we shall take a more charitable, and, we believe, a more correct view. Men like Joinville did not distinguish between a general and a special providence, and few who have carefully examined the true import of words would blame him for that. Whatever happened to him and his friends, the smallest as well as the greatest events were taken alike as so many communications from God to man. Nothing could happen to any one of them unless God willed it. “God wills it,” they exclaimed, and put the cross on their breasts, and left house and home, and wife and children, to fight the infidels in the Holy Land. The King was ill and on the point of death, when he made a vow that if he recovered, he would undertake a crusade. In spite of the dangers which threatened him and his country, where every vassal was a rival, in spite of the despair of his excellent mother, the King fulfilled his vow, and risked not only his crown, but his life, without a complaint and without a regret. It may be that the prospect of Eastern booty, or even of an Eastern throne, had some part in exciting the pious zeal of the French chivalry. Yet if we read of Joinville, who was then a young and gay nobleman of twenty-four, with a young wife and a beautiful castle in Champagne, giving up everything, [pg 187] confessing his sins, making reparation, performing pilgrimages, and then starting for the East, there to endure for five years the most horrible hardships; when we read of his sailors singing a Veni, Creator Spiritus, before they hoisted their sails; when we see how every day, in the midst of pestilence and battle, the King and his Sénéchal and his knights say their prayers and perform their religious duties; how in every danger they commend themselves to God or to their saints; how for every blessing, for every escape from danger, they return thanks to Heaven,—we easily learn to understand how natural it was that such men should see miracles in every blessing vouchsafed to them, whether great or small, just as the Jews of old, in that sense the true people of God, saw miracles, saw the finger of God in every plague that visited their camp, and in every spring of water that saved them from destruction. When the Egyptians were throwing the Greek fire into the camp of the Crusaders, St. Louis raised himself in his bed at the report of every discharge of those murderous missiles, and, stretching forth his hands towards heaven, he said, crying, “Good Lord God, protect my people.” Joinville, after relating this, remarks, “And I believe truly that his prayers served us well in our need.” And was he not right in this belief, as right as the Israelites were when they saw Moses lifting up his heavy arms, and they prevailed against Amalek? Surely this belief was put to a hard test when a fearful plague broke out in the camp, when nearly the whole French army was massacred, when the King was taken prisoner, when the Queen, in childbed, had to make her old chamberlain swear that he would kill her at the first approach of the enemy, when the small remnant of that [pg 188] mighty French army had to purchase its return to France by a heavy ransom. Yet nothing could shake Joinville's faith in the ever-ready help of our Lord, of the Virgin, and of the saints. “Be certain,” he writes, “that the Virgin helped us, and she would have helped us more if we had not offended her, her and her Son, as I said before.” Surely, with such faith, credulity ceases to be credulity. Where there is credulity without that living faith which sees the hand of God in everything, man's indignation is rightly roused. That credulity leads to self-conceit, hypocrisy, and unbelief. But such was not the credulity of Joinville or of his King, or of the Bishop who comforted the great master in theology. A modern historian would not call the rescue of the drowning sailor, nor the favorable wind which brought the Crusaders to Cyprus, nor the opportune arrival of the Comte de Poitiers miracles, because the word “miracle” has a different sense with us from what it had during the Middle Ages, from what it had at the time of the Apostles, and from what it had at the time of Moses. Yet to the drowning sailor his rescue was miraculous; to the despairing King the arrival of his brother was a godsend; and to Joinville and his crew, who were in imminent danger of being carried off as slaves by Moorish pirates, the wind that brought them safe to Cyprus was more than a fortunate accident. Our language differs from the language of Joinville, yet in our heart of hearts we mean the same thing.
And nothing shows better the reality and healthiness of the religion of those brave knights than their cheerful and open countenance, their thorough enjoyment of all the good things of this life, their freedom in thought and speech. You never catch Joinville [pg 189] canting, or with an expression of blank solemnity. When his ship was surrounded by the galleys of the Sultan, and when they held a council as to whether they should surrender themselves to the Sultan's fleet or to his army on shore, one of his servants objected to all surrender. “Let us all be killed,” he said to Joinville, “and then we shall all go straight to Paradise.” His advice, however, was not followed, because, as Joinville says, “we did not believe it.”
If we bear in mind that Joinville's History was written after Louis has been raised to the rank of a saint, his way of speaking of the King, though always respectful, strikes us, nevertheless, as it must have struck his contemporaries, as sometimes very plain and familiar. It is well known that an attempt was actually made by the notorious Jesuit, le Père Hardouin, to prove Joinville's work as spurious, or, at all events, as full of interpolations, inserted by the enemies of the Church. It was an attempt which thoroughly failed, and which was too dangerous to be repeated; but, on reading Joinville after reading the life and miracles of St. Louis, one can easily understand that the soldier's account of the brave King was not quite palatable or welcome to the authors of the legends of the royal saint. At the time when the King's bones had begun to work wretched miracles, the following story could hardly have sounded respectful: “When the King was at Acre,” Joinville writes, “some pilgrims on their way to Jerusalem wished to see him. Joinville went to the King, and said, ‘Sire, there is a crowd of people who have asked me to show them the royal saint, though I have no wish as yet to kiss your bones.’ The King laughed loud, and asked me to bring the people.”
In the thick of the battle, in which Joinville received five wounds and his horse fifteen, and when death seemed almost certain, Joinville tells us that the good Count of Soissons rode up to him and chaffed him, saying, “Let those dogs loose, for, par la quoife Dieu,”—as he always used to swear,—“we shall still talk of this day in the rooms of our ladies.”
The Crusades and the Crusaders, though they are only five or six centuries removed from us, have assumed a kind of romantic character, which makes it very difficult even for the historian to feel towards them the same human interest which we feel for Cæsar or Pericles. Works like that of Joinville are most useful in dispelling that mist which the chroniclers of old and the romances of Walter Scott and others have raised round the heroes of these holy wars. St. Louis and his companions, as described by Joinville, not only in their glistening armor, but in their everyday attire, are brought nearer to us, become intelligible to us, and teach us lessons of humanity which we can learn from men only, and not from saints and heroes. Here lies the real value of real history. It makes us familiar with the thoughts of men who differ from us in manners and language, in thought and religion, and yet with whom we are able to sympathize, and from whom we are able to learn. It widens our minds and our hearts, and gives us that true knowledge of the world and of human nature in all its phases which but few can gain in the short span of their own life, and in the narrow sphere of their friends and enemies. We can hardly imagine a better book for boys to read or for men to ponder over; and we hope that M. de Wailly's laudable efforts may be crowned with complete success, and that, whether in France or in England, [pg 191] no student of history will in future imagine that he knows the true spirit of the Crusades and the Crusaders who has not read once, and more than once, the original Memoirs of Joinville, as edited, translated, and explained by the eminent Keeper of the Imperial Library at Paris, M. Natalis de Wailly.
1866.
VIII. THE JOURNAL DES SAVANTS AND THE JOURNAL DE TRÉVOUX.[32]
For a hundred persons who, in this country, read the “Revue des Deux Mondes,” how many are there who read the “Journal des Savants?” In France the authority of that journal is indeed supreme; but its very title frightens the general public, and its blue cover is but seldom seen on the tables of the salles de lecture. And yet there is no French periodical so well suited to the tastes of the better class of readers in England. Its contributors are all members of the Institut de France; and, if we may measure the value of a periodical by the honor which it reflects on those who form its staff, no journal in France can vie with the “Journal des Savants.” At the present moment we find on its roll such names as Cousin, Flourens, Villemain, Mignet, Barthélemy Saint-Hilaire, Naudet, Prosper Mérimé, Littré, Vitet—names which, if now and then seen on the covers of the “Revue des Deux Mondes,” the “Revue Contemporaine,” or the “Revue Moderne,” confer an exceptional lustre on these fortnightly or monthly issues. The articles which are [pg 193] admitted into this select periodical may be deficient now and then in those outward charms of diction by which French readers like to be dazzled; but what in France is called trop savant, trop lourd, is frequently far more palatable than the highly spiced articles which are no doubt delightful to read, but which, like an excellent French dinner, make you almost doubt whether you have dined or not. If English journalists are bent on taking for their models the fortnightly or monthly contemporaries of France, the “Journal des Savants” might offer a much better chance of success than the more popular revues. We should be sorry indeed to see any periodical published under the superintendence of the “Ministre de l'Instruction Publique,” or of any other member of the Cabinet; but, apart from that, a literary tribunal like that formed by the members of the “Bureau du Journal des Savants” would certainly be a great benefit to literary criticism. The general tone that runs through their articles is impartial and dignified. Each writer seems to feel the responsibility which attaches to the bench from which he addresses the public, and we can of late years recall hardly any case where the dictum of “noblesse oblige” has been disregarded in this the most ancient among the purely literary journals of Europe.
The first number of the “Journal des Savants” was published more than two hundred years ago, on the 5th of January, 1655. It was the first small beginning in a branch of literature which has since assumed immense proportions. Voltaire speaks of it as “le père de tous les ouvrages de ce genre, dont l'Europe est aujourd'hui remplie.” It was published at first once a week, every Monday; and the responsible editor was M. de Sallo, who, in order to avoid the [pg 194] retaliations of sensitive authors, adopted the name of Le Sieur de Hedouville, the name, it is said, of his valet de chambre. The articles were short, and in many cases they only gave a description of the books, without any critical remarks. The Journal likewise gave an account of important discoveries in science and art, and of other events that might seem of interest to men of letters. Its success must have been considerable, if we may judge by the number of rival publications which soon sprang up in France and in other countries of Europe. In England, a philosophical journal on the same plan was started before the year was over. In Germany, the “Journal des Savants” was translated into Latin by F. Nitzschius in 1668, and before the end of the seventeenth century the “Giornale de' Letterati” (1668), the “Bibliotheca Volante” (1677), the “Acta Eruditorum” (1682), the “Nouvelles de la République des Lettres” (1684), the “Bibliothèque Universelle et Historique” (1686), the “Histoire des Ouvrages des Savants” (1687), and the “Monatliche Unterredungen” (1689), had been launched in the principal countries of Europe. In the next century it was remarked of the journals published in Germany, “Plura dixeris pullulasse brevi tempore quam fungi nascuntur unâ nocte.”
Most of these journals were published by laymen, and represented the purely intellectual interests of society. It was but natural, therefore, that the clergy also should soon have endeavored to possess a journal of their own. The Jesuits, who at that time were the most active and influential order, were not slow to appreciate this new opportunity for directing public opinion, and they founded in 1701 their famous journal, the “Mémoires de Trévoux.” Famous indeed it [pg 195] might once be called, and yet at present how little is known of that collection! how seldom are its volumes called for in our public libraries! It was for a long time the rival of the “Journal des Savants.” Under the editorship of Le Père Berthier it fought bravely against Diderot, Voltaire, and other heralds of the French Revolution. It weathered even the fatal year of 1762, but, after changing its name, and moderating its pretensions, it ceased to appear in 1782. The long rows of its volumes are now piled up in our libraries likes rows of tombstones, which we pass by without even stopping to examine the names and titles of those who are buried in these vast catacombs of thought.
It was a happy idea that led the Père P. C. Sommervogel, himself a member of the order of the Jesuits, to examine the dusty volumes of the “Journal de Trévoux,” and to do for it the only thing that could be done to make it useful once more, at least to a certain degree, namely, to prepare a general index of the numerous subjects treated in its volumes, on the model of the great index, published in 1753, of the “Journal des Savants.” His work, published at Paris in 1865, consists of three volumes. The first gives an index of the original dissertations; the second and third, of the works criticised in the “Journal de Trévoux.” It is a work of much smaller pretensions than the index to the “Journal des Savants;” yet, such as it is, it is useful, and will amply suffice for the purposes of those few readers who have from time to time to consult the literary annals of the Jesuits in France.
The title of the “Mémoires de Trévoux” was taken from the town of Trévoux, the capital of the principality of Dombes, which Louis XIV. had conferred on the Duc de Maine, with all the privileges of a sovereign. [pg 196] Like Louis XIV., the young prince gloried in the title of a patron of art and science, but, as the pupil of Madame de Maintenon, he devoted himself even more zealously to the defense of religion. A printing-office was founded at Trévoux, and the Jesuits were invited to publish a new journal, “où l'on eût principalement en vûë la défense de la religion.” This was the “Journal de Trévoux,” published for the first time in February, 1701, under the title of “Mémoires pour l'Histoire des Sciences et des Beaux Arts, recueillis par l'ordre de Son Altesse Sérénissime, Monseigneur Prince Souverain de Dombes.” It was entirely and professedly in the hands of the Jesuits, and we find among its earliest contributors such names as Catrou, Tournemine, and Hardouin. The opportunities for collecting literary and other intelligence enjoyed by the members of that order were extraordinary. We doubt whether any paper, even in our days, has so many intelligent correspondents in every part of the world. If any astronomical observation was to be made in China or America, a Jesuit missionary was generally on the spot to make it. If geographical information was wanted, eye-witnesses could write from India or Africa to state what was the exact height of mountains or the real direction of rivers. The architectural monuments of the great nations of antiquity could easily be explored and described, and the literary treasures of India or China or Persia could be ransacked by men ready for any work that required devotion and perseverance, and that promised to throw additional splendor on the order of Loyola. No missionary society has ever understood how to utilize its resources in the interest of science like the Jesuits; and if our own missionaries may on many points take [pg 197] warning from the history of the Jesuits, on that one point at least they might do well to imitate their example.
Scientific interests, however, were by no means the chief motive of the Jesuits in founding their journal, and the controversial character began soon to preponderate in their articles. Protestant writers received but little mercy in the pages of the “Journal de Trévoux,” and the battle was soon raging in every country of Europe between the flying batteries of the Jesuits and the strongholds of Jansenism, of Protestantism, or of liberal thought in general. Le Clerc was attacked for his “Harmonia Evangelica;” Boileau even was censured for his “Epître sur l'Amour de Dieu.” But the old lion was too much for his reverend satirists. The following is a specimen of his reply:—
“Mes Révérends Pères en Dieu,
Et mes confrères en Satire.
Dans vos Escrits dans plus d'un lieu
Je voy qu'à mes dépens vous affectés de rire;
Mais ne craignés-vous point, que pour rire de Vous,
Relisant Juvénal, refeuilletant Horace,
Je ne ranime encor ma satirique audace?
Grands Aristarques de Trévoux,
N'allés point de nouveau faire courir aux armes,
Un athlète tout prest à prendre son congé,
Qui par vos traits malins au combat rengagé
Peut encore aux Rieurs faire verser des larmes.
Apprenés un mot de Régnier,
Notre célèbre Devancier,
Corsaires attaquant Corsaires
No font pas, dit-il, leurs affaires.”
Even stronger language than this became soon the fashion in journalistic warfare. In reply to an attack on the Marquis Orsi, the “Giornale de' Letterati d'Italia” accused the “Journal de Trévoux” of menzogna and impostura, and in Germany the “Acta Eruditorum Lipsiensium” poured out even more violent [pg 198] invectives against the Jesuitical critics. It is wonderful how well Latin seems to lend itself to the expression of angry abuse. Few modern writers have excelled the following tirade, either in Latin or in German:—
“Quæ mentis stupiditas! At si qua est, Jesuitarum est.... Res est intoleranda, Trevoltianos Jesuitas, toties contusos, iniquissimum in suis diariis tribunal erexisse, in eoque non ratione duce, sed animi impotentia, non æquitatis legibus, sed præjudiciis, non veritatis lance, sed affectus aut odi pondere, optimis exquisitissimisque operibus detrahere, pessima ad cœlum usque laudibus efferre: ignaris auctoribus, modo secum sentiant, aut sibi faveant, ubique blandiri, doctissimos sibi non plane pleneque deditos plus quam canino dente mordere.”
What has been said of other journals was said of the “Journal de Trévoux:”—
“Les auteurs de ce journal, qui a son mérite, sont constants à louer tous les ouvrages de ceux qu'ils affectionnent, et pour éviter une froide monotonie, ils exercent quelquefois la critique sur les écrivans à qui rien ne les oblige de faire grâce.”
It took some time before authors became at all reconciled to these new tribunals of literary justice. Even a writer like Voltaire, who braved public opinion more than anybody, looked upon journals, and the influence which they soon gained in France and abroad, as a great evil. “Rien n'a plus nui à la littérature,” he writes, “plus répandu le mauvais goût, et plus confondu le vrai avec le faux.” Before the establishment of literary journals, a learned writer had indeed little to fear. For a few years, at all events, he was allowed to enjoy the reputation of having published a book; and this by itself was considered a great distinction by the world at large. Perhaps his book was never noticed at all, or, if it was, it was only criticised in one of those elaborate letters which the learned men of the [pg 199] sixteenth and seventeenth centuries used to write to each other, which might be forwarded indeed to one or two other professors, but which never influenced public opinion. Only in extreme cases a book would be answered by another book, but this would necessarily require a long time; nor would it at all follow that those who had read and admired the original work would have an opportunity of consulting the volume that contained its refutation. This happy state of things came to an end after the year 1655. Since the invention of printing, no more important event had happened in the republic of letters than the introduction of a periodical literature. It was a complete revolution, differing from other revolutions only by the quickness with which the new power was recognized even by its fiercest opponents.
The power of journalism, however, soon found its proper level, and the history of its rise and progress, which has still to be written, teaches the same lesson as the history of political powers. Journals which defended private interests, or the interests of parties, whether religious, political, or literary, never gained that influence which was freely conceded to those who were willing to serve the public at large in pointing out real merit wherever it could be found, and in unmasking pretenders, to whatever rank they might belong. The once all-powerful organ of the Jesuits, the “Journal de Trèvoux,” has long ceased to exist, and even to be remembered; the “Journal des Savants” still holds, after more than two hundred years, that eminent position which was claimed for it by its founder, as the independent advocate of justice and truth.
1866.
IX. CHASOT.[33]
History is generally written en face. It reminds us occasionally of certain royal family pictures, where the centre is occupied by the king and queen, while their children are ranged on each side like organ-pipes, and the courtiers and ministers are grouped behind, according to their respective ranks. All the figures seem to stare at some imaginary spectator, who would require at least a hundred eyes to take in the whole of the assemblage. This place of the imaginary spectator falls generally to the lot of the historian, and of those who read great historical works; and perhaps this is inevitable. But it is refreshing for once to change this unsatisfactory position, and, instead of always looking straight in the faces of kings, and queens, and generals, and ministers, to catch, by a side-glance, a view of the times, as they appeared to men occupying a less central and less abstract position than that of the general historian. If we look at the Palace of Versailles from the terrace in front of the edifice, we are impressed with its broad magnificence, but we are soon tired, and all that is left in our memory is a vast expanse of windows, columns, statues, and wall. But let us retire to some of the bosquets on each side of the main [pg 201] avenue, and take a diagonal view of the great mansion of Louis XIV., and though we lose part of the palace, the whole picture gains in color and life, and it brings before our mind the figure of the great monarch himself, so fond of concealing part of his majestic stateliness under the shadow of those very groves where we are sitting.
It was a happy thought of M. Kurd von Schlözer to try a similar experiment with Frederic the Great, and to show him to us, not as the great king, looking history in the face, but as seen near and behind another person, for whom the author has felt so much sympathy as to make him the central figure of a very pretty historical picture. This person is Chasot. Frederic used to say of him, C'est le matador de ma jeunesse,—a saying which is not found in Frederic's works, but which is nevertheless authentic. One of the chief magistrates of the old Hanseatic town of Lübeck, Syndicus Curtius,—the father, we believe, of the two distinguished scholars, Ernst and Georg Curtius,—was at school with the two sons of Chasot, and he remembers these royal words, when they were repeated in all the drawing-rooms of the city where Chasot spent many years of his life. Frederic's friendship for Chasot is well known, for there are two poems of the king addressed to this young favorite. They do not give a very high idea either of the poetical power of the monarch, or of the moral character of his friend; but they contain some manly and straightforward remarks, which make up for a great deal of shallow declamation. This young Chasot was a French nobleman, a fresh, chivalrous, buoyant nature,—adventurous, careless, extravagant, brave, full of romance, happy with the happy, and galloping [pg 202] through life like a true cavalry officer. He met Frederic in 1734. Louis XV. had taken up the cause of Stanislas Lesczynski, King of Poland, his father-in-law, and Chasot served in the French army which, under the Duke of Berwick, attacked Germany on the Rhine, in order to relieve Poland from the simultaneous pressure of Austria and Russia. He had the misfortune to kill a French officer in a duel, and was obliged to take refuge in the camp of the old Prince Eugène. Here the young Prince of Prussia soon discovered the brilliant parts of the French nobleman, and when his father, Frederic William I., no longer allowed him to serve under Eugène, he asked Chasot to follow him to Prussia. The years from 1735 to 1740 were happy years for the prince, though he, no doubt, would have preferred taking an active part in the campaign. He writes to his sister:—
“J'aurais répondu plus tôt, si je n'avais été très-affligé de ce que le roi ne veut pas me permettre d'aller en campagne. Je le lui ai demandé quatre fois, et lui ai rappelé la promesse qu'il m'en avait faite; mais point de nouvelle; il m'a dit qu'il avait des raisons très-cachées qui l'en empêchaient. Je le crois, car je suis persuadé qu'il ne les sait pas lui-même.”
But, as he wished to be on good terms with his father, he stayed at home, and travelled about to inspect his future kingdom. “C'est un peu plus honnête qu'en Sibérie,” he writes, “mais pas de beaucoup.” Frederic, after his marriage, took up his abode in the Castle of Rheinsberg, near Neu-Ruppin, and it was here that he spent the happiest part of his existence. M. de Schlözer has described this period in the life of the king with great art; and he has pointed out how Frederic, while he seemed to live for nothing but [pg 203] pleasure,—shooting, dancing, music, and poetry,—was given at the same time to much more serious occupations,—reading and composing works on history, strategy, and philosophy, and maturing plans which, when the time of their execution came, seemed to spring from his head full-grown and full-armed. He writes to his sister, the Markgravine of Baireuth, in 1737:—
“Nous nous divertissons de rien, et n'avons aucun soin des choses de la vie, qui la rendent désagréable et qui jettent du dégoût sur les plaisirs. Nous faisons la tragédie et la comédie, nous avons bal, mascarade, et musique à toute sauce. Voilà un abrégé de nos amusements.”
And again, he writes to his friend Suhm, at Petersburg:—
“Nous allons représenter l'Œdipe de Voltaire, dans lequel je ferai le héros de théâtre; j'ai choisi le rôle de Philoctéte.”
A similar account of the royal household at Rheinsberg is given by Bielfeld:—
“C'est ainsi que les jours s'écoulent ici dans une tranquillité assaisonneé de tous les plaisirs qui peuvent flatter une âme raisonnable. Chère de roi, vin des dieux, musique des anges, promenades délicieuses dans les jardins et dans les bois, parties sur l'eau, culture des lettres et des beaux-arts, conversation spirituelle, tout concourt à repandre dans ce palais enchanté des charmes sur la vie.”
Frederic, however, was not a man to waste his time in mere pleasure. He shared in the revelries of his friends, but he was perhaps the only person at Rheinsberg who spent his evenings in reading Wolff's “Metaphysics.” And here let us remark, that this German prince, in order to read that work, was obliged to have the German translated into French by his friend Suhm, the Saxon minister at Petersburg. Chasot, who had no very definite duties to perform at [pg 204] Rheinsberg, was commissioned to copy Suhm's manuscript,—nay, he was nearly driven to despair when he had to copy it a second time, because Frederic's monkey, Mimi, had set fire to the first copy. We have Frederic's opinion on Wolff's “Metaphysics,” in his “Works,” vol. i. p. 263:—
“Les universités prosperaient en même temps. Halle et Francfort étaient fournies de savants professeurs: Thomasius, Gundling, Ludewig, Wolff, et Stryke tenaient le premier rang pour la célébrité et faisaient nombre de disciples. Wolff commenta l'ingénieux système de Leibnitz sur les monades, et noya dans un déluge de paroles, d'arguments, de corollaires, et de citations, quelques problèmes que Leibnitz avait jetées peut-être comme une amorce aux métaphysiciens. Le professeur de Halle écrivait laborieusement nombre de volumes, qui, au lieu de pouvoir instruire des hommes faits, servirent tout au plus de catéchisme de didactique pour des enfants. Les monades ont mis aux prises les métaphysiciens et les géomêtres d'Allemagne, et ils disputent encore sur la divisibilité de la matière.”
In another place, however, he speaks of Wolff with greater respect, and acknowledges his influence in the German universities. Speaking of the reign of his father, he writes:—
“Mais la faveur et les brigues remplissaient les chaires de professeurs dans les universités; les dévots, qui se mêlent de tout, acquirent une part à la direction des universités; ils y persécutaient le bon sens, et surtout la classe des philosophes: Wolff fut exilé pour avoir dèduit avec un ordre admirable les preuves sur l'existence de Dieu. La jeune noblesse qui se vouait aux armes, crût déroger en étudiant, et comme l'esprit humain donne toujours dans les excès, ils regardèrent l'ignorance comme un titre de mérite, et le savoir comme une pédanterie absurde.”
During the same time, Frederic composed his “Refutation of Macchiavelli,” which was published in 1740, and read all over Europe; and besides the gay parties of the court, he organized the somewhat [pg 205] mysterious society of the Ordre de Bayard, of which his brothers, the Duke Ferdinand of Brunswick, the Duke Wilhelm of Brunswick-Bevern, Keyserling, Fouqué, and Chasot, were members. Their meetings had reference to serious political matters, though Frederic himself was never initiated by his father into the secrets of Prussian policy till almost on his death-bed. The king died in 1740, and Frederic was suddenly called away from his studies and pleasures at Rheinsberg, to govern a rising kingdom which was watched with jealousy by all its neighbors. He describes his state of mind, shortly before the death of his father, in the following words:—
“Vous pouvez bien juger que je suis assez tracassé dans la situation où je me trouve. On me laisse peu de repos, mais l'intérieur est tranquille, et je puis vous assurer que je n'ai jamais été plus philosophe qu'en cette occasion-ci. Je regards avec des yeux d'indifférence tout ce qui m'attend, sans désirer la fortune ni la craindre, plein de compassion pour ceux qui souffrent, d'estime pour les honnêtes gens, et de tendresse pour mes amis.”
As soon, however as he had mastered his new position, the young king was again the patron of art, of science, of literature, and of social improvements of every kind. Voltaire had been invited to Berlin, to organize a French theatre, when suddenly the news of the death of Charles VI., the Emperor of Germany, arrived at Berlin. How well Frederic understood what was to follow, we learn from a letter to Voltaire:—
“Mon cher Voltaire,—L'événement le moins prévu du monde m'empêche, pour cette fois, d'ouvrir mon âme à la vôtre comme d'ordinaire, et de bavarder comme je le voudrais. L'empereur est mort. Cette mort dérange toutes mes idées pacifiques, et je crois qu'il s'agira, au mois de juin, plutôt de poudre à canon, de soldats, de tranchées, que d'actrices, de ballets et de théâtre.”
He was suffering from fever, and he adds:—
“Je vais faire passer ma fièvre, car j'ai besoin de ma machine, et il en faut tirer à présent tout le parti possible.”
Again he writes to Algarotti:—
“Une bagatelle comme est la mort de l'empereur ne demande pas de grands mouvements. Tout était prévu, tout était arrangé. Ainsi il ne s'agit que d'exécuter des desseins que j'ai roulés depuis long temps dans ma tête.”
We need not enter into the history of the first Silesian war; but we see clearly from these expressions, that the occupation of Silesia, which the house of Brandenburg claimed by right, had formed part of the policy of Prussia long before the death of the emperor; and the peace of Breslau, in 1742, realized a plan which had probably been the subject of many debates at Rheinsberg. During this first war, Chasot obtained the most brilliant success. At Mollwitz, he saved the life of the king; and the following account of this exploit was given to M. de Schlözer by members of Chasot's family: An Austrian cavalry officer, with some of his men, rode up close to the king. Chasot was near. “Where is the king?” the officer shouted; and Chasot, perceiving the imminent danger, sprang forward, declared himself to be the king, and sustained for some time single-handed the most violent combat with the Austrian soldiers. At last he was rescued by his men, but not without having received a severe wound across his forehead. The king thanked him, and Voltaire afterwards celebrated his bravery in the following lines:—
“Il me souvient encore de ce jour mémorable
Où l'illustre Chasot, ce guerrier formidable,
Sauva par sa valeur le plus grand de nos rois.
O Prusse! élève un temple à ses fameux exploits.”
Chasot soon rose to the rank of major, and received [pg 207] large pecuniary rewards from the king. The brightest event, however, of his life was still to come; and this was the battle of Hohenfriedberg, in 1745. In spite of Frederic's successes, his position before that engagement was extremely critical. Austria had concluded a treaty with England, Holland and Saxony against Prussia. France declined to assist Frederic, Russia threatened to take part against him. On the 19th of April, the king wrote to his minister:—
“La situation présente est aussi violente que désagréable. Mon parti est tout pris. S'il s'agit de se battre, nous le ferons en désespérés. Enfin, jamais crise n'a été plus grande que la mienne. Il faut laisser au temps de débrouiller cette fusée, et au destin, s'il y en a un, à décider de l'événement.”
And again:—
“J'ai jeté le bonnet pardessus les moulins; je me prépare à tous les événements qui peuvent m'arriver. Que la fortune me soit contraire ou favorable, cela ne m'abaissera ni m'enorgueillira; et s'il faut périr, ce sera avec gloire et l'épée à la main.”
The decisive day arrived—“le jour le plus décisif de ma fortune.” The night before the battle, the king said to the French ambassador—“Les ennemis sont où je les voulais, et je les attaque demain;” and on the following day the battle of Hohenfriedberg was won. How Chasot distinguished himself, we may learn from Frederic's own description:—
“Muse dis-moi, comment en ces moments
Chasot brilla, faisant voler des têtes,
De maints uhlans faisant de vrais squelettes,
Et des hussards, devant lui s'echappant,
Fandant les uns, les autres transperçant,
Et, maniant sa flamberge tranchante,
Mettait en fuite, et donnait l'épouvante
Aux ennemis effarés et tremblants.
Tel Jupiter est peint armé du foudre,
Et tel Chasot réduit l'uhlan en poudre.”
In his account of the battle, the king wrote:—
“Action inouie dans l'histoire, et dont le succès est dû aux Généraux Gessler et Schmettau, au Colonel Schwerin et au brave Major Chasot, dont la valeur et la conduite se sont fait connaître dans trois batailles également.”
And in his “Histoire de mon Temps,” he wrote:—
“Un fait aussi rare, aussi glorieux, mérite d'être écrit en lettres d'or dans les fastes prussiens. Le Général Schwerin, le Major Chasot et beaucoup d'officiers s'y firent un nom immortel.”
How, then, is it that, in the later edition of Frederic's “Histoire de mon Temps,” the name of Chasot is erased? How is it that, during the whole of the Seven Years' War, Chasot is never mentioned? M. de Schlözer gives us a complete answer to this question, and we must say that Frederic did not behave well to the matador de sa jeunesse. Chasot had a duel with a Major Bronickowsky, in which his opponent was killed. So far as we can judge from the documents which M. de Schlözer has obtained from Chasot's family, Chasot had been forced to fight; but the king believed that he had sought a quarrel with the Polish officer, and, though a court-martial found him not guilty, Frederic sent him to the fortress of Spandau. This was the first estrangement between Chasot and the king; and though after a time he was received again at court, the friendship between the king and the young nobleman who had saved his life had received a rude shock.
Chasot spent the next few years in garrison at Treptow; and, though he was regularly invited by Frederic to be present at the great festivities at Berlin, he seems to have been a more constant visitor at the small court of the Duchess of Strelitz, not far from his garrison, than at Potsdam. The king employed him on a diplomatic mission, and in this also Chasot was [pg 209] successful. But notwithstanding the continuance of this friendly intercourse, both parties felt chilled, and the least misunderstanding was sure to lead to a rupture. The king, jealous perhaps of Chasot's frequent visits at Strelitz, and not satisfied with the drill of his regiment, expressed himself in strong terms about Chasot at a review in 1751. The latter asked for leave of absence in order to return to his country and recruit his health. He had received fourteen wounds in the Prussian service, and his application could not be refused. There was another cause of complaint, on which Chasot seems to have expressed himself freely. He imagined that Frederic had not rewarded his services with sufficient liberality. He expressed himself in the following words:—
“Je ne sais quel malheureux guignon poursuit le roi: mais ce guignon se reproduit dans tout ce que sa majesté entrepend ou ordonne. Toujours ses vues sont bonnes, ses plans sont sages, réfléchis et justes; et toujours le succès est nul ou très-imparfait, et pourquoi? Toujours pour la même cause! parce qu'il manque un louis à l'exécution! un louis de plus, et tout irait à merveille. Son guignon veut que partout il retienne ce maudit louis; et tout se fait mal.”
How far this is just, we are unable to say. Chasot was reckless about money, and whatever the king might have allowed him, he would always have wanted one louis more. But on the other hand, Chasot was not the only person who complained of Frederic's parsimony; and the French proverb, “On ne peut pas travailler pour le roi de Prusse,” probably owes its origin to the complaints of Frenchmen who flocked to Berlin at that time in great numbers, and returned home disappointed. Chasot went to France, where he was well received, and he soon sent an intimation to the king that he did not mean to return to Berlin. In [pg 210] 1752 his name was struck off the Prussian army-list. Frederic was offended, and the simultaneous loss of many friends, who either died or left his court, made him de mauvaise humeur. It is about this time that he writes to his sister:—
“J'étudie beaucoup, et cela me soulage réellement; mais lorsque mon esprit fait des retours sur les temps passés, alors les plaies du cœur se rouvrent et je regrette inutilement les pertes que j'ai faites.”
Chasot, however, soon returned to Germany, and probably in order to be near the court of Strelitz, took up his abode in the old free town of Lübeck. He became a citizen of Lübeck in 1754, and in 1759 was made commander of its militia. Here his life seems to have been very agreeable, and he was treated with great consideration and liberality. Chasot was still young, as he was born in 1716, and he now thought of marriage. This he accomplished in the following manner. There was at that time an artist of some celebrity at Lübeck,—Stefano Torelli. He had a daughter whom he had left at Dresden to be educated, and whose portrait he carried about on his snuff-box. Chasot met him at dinner, saw the snuff-box, fell in love with the picture, and proposed to the father to marry his daughter Camilla. Camilla was sent for. She left Dresden, travelled through the country, which was then occupied by Prussian troops, met the king in his camp, received his protection, arrived safely at Lübeck, and in the same year was married to Chasot. Frederic was then in the thick of the Seven Years' War, but Chasot, though he was again on friendly terms with the king, did not offer him his sword. He was too happy at Lübeck with his Camilla, and he made himself useful to the king by sending him recruits. [pg 211] One of the recruits he offered was his son, and in a letter, April 8, 1760, we see the king accepting this young recruit in the most gracious terms:—
“J'accepte volontiers, cher de Chasot, la recrue qui vous doit son être, et je serai parrain de l'enfant qui vous naîtra, au cas que ce soit un fils. Nous tuons les hommes, tandis que vous en faites.”
It was a son, and Chasot writes:—
“Si ce garçon me ressemble, Sire, il n'aura pas une goutte de sang dans ses veines qui ne soit à vous.”
M. de Schlözer, who is himself a native of Lübeck, has described the later years of Chasot's life in that city with great warmth and truthfulness. The diplomatic relations of the town with Russia and Denmark were not without interest at that time, because Peter III., formerly Duke of Holstein, had declared war against Denmark in order to substantiate his claims to the Danish crown. Chasot had actually the pleasure of fortifying Lübeck, and carrying on preparations for war on a small scale, till Peter was dethroned by his wife, Catherine. All this is told in a very comprehensive and luminous style; and it is not without regret that we find ourselves in the last chapter, where M. de Schlözer describes the last meetings of Chasot and Frederic in 1779, 1784, and 1785. Frederic had lost nearly all his friends, and he was delighted to see the matador de sa jeunesse once more. He writes:—
“Une chose qui n'est presque arrivée qu'à moi est que j'ai perdu tous mes amis de cœur et mes anciennes connaissances; ce sont des plaies dont le cœur saigne long-temps, que la philosophie apaise, mais que sa main ne saurait guérir.”
How pleasant for the king to find at least one man with whom he could talk of the old days of Rheinsberg,—of Fräulein von Schack and Fräulein von Walmoden, [pg 212] of Cæsarion and Jordan, of Mimi and le Tourbillon! Chasot's two sons entered the Prussian service, though, in the manner in which they are received, we find Frederic again acting more as king than as friend. Chasot in 1784 was still as lively as ever, whereas the king: was in bad health. The latter writes to his old friend, “Si nous ne nous revoyons bientôt, nous ne nous reverrons jamais;” and when Chasot had arrived, Frederic writes to Prince Heinrich, “Chasot est venu ici de Lübeck; il ne parle que de mangeaille, de vins de Champagne, du Rhin, de Madère, de Hongrie, et du faste de messieurs les marchands de la bourse de Lübeck.”
Such was the last meeting of these two knights of the Ordre de Bayard. The king died in 1786, without seeing the approach of the revolutionary storm which was soon to upset the throne of the Bourbons. Chasot died in 1797. He began to write his memoirs in 1789, and it is to some of their fragments, which had been preserved by his family, and were handed over to M. Kurd de Schlözer, that we owe this delightful little book. Frederic the Great used to complain that Germans could not write history:—
“Ce siècle ne produisit aucun bon historien. On chargea Teissier d'écrire l'histoire de Brandebourg: il en fit le panégyrique. Pufendorf écrivit la vie de Frédéric-Guillaume, et, pour ne rien omettre, il n'oublia ni ses clercs de chancellerie, ni ses valets de chambre dont il put recueillir les noms. Nos auteurs ont, ce me semble, toujours péché, faute de discerner les choses essentielles des accessoires, d'éclaircir les faits, de reserrer leur prose traînante et excessivement sujette aux inversions, aux nombreuses épithètes, et d'écrire en pédants plutôt qu'en hommes de génie.”
We believe that Frederic would not have said this [pg 213] of a work like that of M. de Schlözer; and as to Chasot, it is not too much to say that, after the days of Mollwitz and Hohenfriedberg, the day on which M. de Schlözer undertook to write his biography was perhaps the most fortunate for his fame.
1856.
X. SHAKESPEARE.[34]
The city of Frankfort, the birthplace of Goethe, sends her greeting to the city of Stratford-on-Avon, the birthplace of Shakespeare. The old free town of Frankfort, which, since the days of Frederick Barbarossa, has seen the Emperors of Germany crowned within her walls, might well at all times speak in the name of Germany. But to-day she sends her greeting, not as the proud mother of German Emperors, but as the prouder mother of the greatest among the poets of Germany; and it is from the very house in which Goethe lived, and which has since become the seat of “the Free German Institute for Science and Art,” that this message of the German admirers and lovers of Shakespeare has been sent, which I am asked to present to you, the Mayor and Council of Stratford-on-Avon.
When honor was to be done to the memory of Shakespeare, Germany could not be absent, for next to Goethe and Schiller there is no poet so truly loved by us, so thoroughly our own, as your Shakespeare. He is no stranger with us, no mere classic, like Homer, or Virgil, or Dante, or Corneille, whom we admire as we [pg 215] admire a marble statue. He has become one of ourselves, holding his own place in the history of our literature, applauded in our theatres, read in our cottages, studied, known, loved, “as far as sounds the German tongue.” There is many a student in Germany who has learned English solely in order to read Shakespeare in the original, and yet we possess a translation of Shakespeare with which few translations of any work can vie in any language. What we in Germany owe to Shakespeare must be read in the history of our literature. Goethe was proud to call himself a pupil of Shakespeare. I shall at this moment allude to one debt of gratitude only which Germany owes to the poet of Stratford-on-Avon. I do not speak of the poet only, and of his art, so perfect because so artless; I think of the man with his large, warm heart, with his sympathy for all that is genuine, unselfish, beautiful, and good; with his contempt for all that is petty, mean, vulgar, and false. It is from his plays that our young men in Germany form their first ideas of England and the English nation, and in admiring and loving him we have learned to admire and to love you who may proudly call him your own. And it is right that this should be so. As the height of the Alps is measured by Mont Blanc, let the greatness of England be measured by the greatness of Shakespeare. Great nations make great poets, great poets make great nations. Happy the nation that possesses a poet like Shakespeare. Happy the youth of England whose first ideas of this world in which they are to live are taken from his pages. The silent influence of Shakespeare's poetry on millions of young hearts in England, in Germany, in all the world, shows the almost superhuman power of human genius. If we [pg 216] look at that small house, in a small street of a small town of a small island, and then think of the world-embracing, world-quickening, world-ennobling spirit that burst forth from that small garret, we have learned a lesson and carried off a blessing for which no pilgrimage would have been too long. Though the great festivals which in former days brought together people from all parts of Europe to worship at the shrine of Canterbury exist no more, let us hope, for the sake of England, more even than for the sake of Shakespeare, that this will not be the last Shakespeare festival in the annals of Stratford-on-Avon. In this cold and critical age of ours the power of worshipping, the art of admiring, the passion of loving what is great and good are fast dying out. May England never be ashamed to show to the world that she can love, that she can admire, that she can worship the greatest of her poets! May Shakespeare live on in the love of each generation that grows up in England! May the youth of England long continue to be nursed, to be fed, to be reproved and judged by his spirit! With that nation—that truly English, because truly Shakespearian nation—the German nation will always be united by the strongest sympathies; for, superadded to their common blood, their common religion, their common battles and victories, they will always have in Shakespeare a common teacher, a common benefactor, and a common friend.
April, 1864.
XI. BACON IN GERMANY.[35]
“If our German philosophy is considered in England and in France as German dreaming, we ought not to render evil for evil, but rather to prove the groundlessness of such accusations by endeavoring ourselves to appreciate, without any prejudice, the philosophers of France and England, such as they are, and doing them that justice which they deserve; especially as, in scientific subjects, injustice means ignorance.” With these words M. Kuno Fischer introduces his work on Bacon to the German public; and what he says is evidently intended, not as an attack upon the conceit of French, and the exclusiveness of English philosophers, but rather as an apology which the author feels that he owes to his own countrymen. It would seem, indeed, as if a German was bound to apologize for treating Bacon as an equal of Leibnitz, Kant, Hegel, and Schelling. Bacon's name is never mentioned by German writers without some proviso that it is only by a great stretch of the meaning of the word, or by courtesy, that he can be called a philosopher. His philosophy, it is maintained, ends where all true philosophy begins; and his style or method has frequently been described [pg 218] as unworthy of a systematic thinker. Spinoza, who has exercised so great an influence on the history of thought in Germany, was among the first who spoke slightingly of the inductive philosopher. When treating of the causes of error, he writes, “What he (Bacon) adduces besides, in order to explain error, can easily be traced back to the Cartesian theory; it is this, that the human will is free and more comprehensive than the understanding, or, as Bacon expresses himself in a more confused manner, in the forty-ninth aphorism, ‘The human understanding is not a pure light, but obscured by the will.’ ” In works on the general history of philosophy, German authors find it difficult to assign any place to Bacon. Sometimes he is classed with the Italian school of natural philosophy, sometimes he is contrasted with Jacob Boehme. He is named as one of the many who helped to deliver mankind from the thralldom of scholasticism. But any account of what he really was, what he did to immortalize his name, and to gain that prominent position among his own countrymen which he has occupied to the present day, we should look for in vain even in the most complete and systematic treatises on the history of philosophy published in Germany. Nor does this arise from any wish to depreciate the results of English speculation in general. On the contrary, we find that Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume are treated with great respect. They occupy well-marked positions in the progress of philosophic thought. Their names are written in large letters on the chief stations through which the train of human reasoning passed before it arrived at Kant and Hegel. Locke's philosophy took for a time complete possession of the German mind, and called forth some of the most important [pg 219] and decisive writings of Leibnitz; and Kant himself owed his commanding position to the battle which he fought and won against Hume. Bacon alone has never been either attacked or praised, nor have his works, as it seems, ever been studied very closely by Germans. As far as we can gather, their view of Bacon and of English philosophy is something as follows. Philosophy, they say, should account for experience; but Bacon took experience for granted. He constructed a cyclopædia of knowledge, but he never explained what knowledge itself was. Hence philosophy, far from being brought to a close by his “Novum Organon,” had to learn again to make her first steps immediately after his time. Bacon had built a magnificent palace, but it was soon found that there was no staircase in it. The very first question of all philosophy, “How do we know?” or, “How can we know?” had never been asked by him. Locke, who came after him, was the first to ask it, and he endeavored to answer it in his “Essay concerning Human Understanding.” The result of his speculations was, that the mind is a tabula rasa, that this tabula rasa becomes gradually filled with sensuous perceptions, and that these sensuous perceptions arrange themselves into classes, and thus give rise to more general ideas or conceptions. This was a step in advance; but there was again one thing taken for granted by Locke,—the perceptions. This led to the next step in English philosophy, which was made by Berkeley. He asked the question, “What are perceptions?” and he answered it boldly: “Perceptions are the things themselves, and the only cause of these perceptions is God.” But this bold step was in reality but a bold retreat. Hume accepted the results both of Locke and Berkeley. He [pg 220] admitted with Locke that the impressions of the senses are the source of all knowledge; he admitted with Berkeley that we know nothing beyond the impressions of our senses. But when Berkeley speaks of the cause of these impressions, Hume points out that we have no right to speak of anything like cause and effect, and that the idea of causality, of necessary sequence, on which the whole fabric of our reasoning rests, is an assumption; inevitable, it may be, yet an assumption. Thus English philosophy, which seemed to be so settled and positive in Bacon, ended in the most unsettled and negative skepticism in Hume; and it was only through Kant that, according to the Germans, the great problem was solved at last, and men again knew how they knew.
From this point of view, which we believe to be that generally taken by German writers of the historical progress of modern philosophy, we may well understand why the star of Bacon should disappear almost below their horizon. And if those only are to be called philosophers who inquire into the causes of our knowledge, or into the possibility of knowing and being, a new name must be invented for men like him, who are concerned alone with the realities of knowledge. The two are antipodes,—they inhabit two distinct hemispheres of thought. But German Idealism, as M. Kuno Fischer says, would have done well if it had become more thoroughly acquainted with its opponent:—
“And if it be objected,” he says, “that the points of contact between German and English philosophy, between Idealism and Realism, are less to be found in Bacon than in other philosophers of his kind; that it was not Bacon, but Hume, who influenced Kant; that it was not Bacon, but Locke, who influenced Leibnitz; that Spinoza, if he received any impulse at all from [pg 221] those quarters, received it from Hobbes, and not from Bacon, of whom he speaks in several places very contemptuously,—I answer, that it was Bacon whom Des Cartes, the acknowledged founder of dogmatic Idealism, chose for his antagonist. And as to those realistic philosophers who have influenced the opposite side of philosophy in Spinoza, Leibnitz, and Kant, I shall be able to prove that Hobbes, Locke, Hume, are all descendants of Bacon, that they have their roots in Bacon, that without Bacon they cannot be truly explained and understood, but only be taken up in a fragmentary form, and, as it were, plucked off. Bacon is the creator of realistic philosophy. Their age is but a development of the Baconian germs; every one of their systems is a metamorphosis of Baconian philosophy. To the present day, realistic philosophy has never had a greater genius than Bacon, its founder; none who has manifested the truly realistic spirit that feels itself at home in the midst of life, in so comprehensive, so original and characteristic, so sober, and yet at the same time so ideal and aspiring a manner; none, again, in whom the limits of this spirit stand out in such distinct and natural relief. Bacon's philosophy is the most healthy and quite inartificial expression of Realism. After the systems of Spinoza and Leibnitz had moved me for a long time, had filled, and, as it were, absorbed me, the study of Bacon was to me like a new life, the fruits of which are gathered in this book.”
After a careful perusal of M. Fischer's work, we believe that it will not only serve in Germany as a useful introduction to the study of Bacon, but that it will be read with interest and advantage by many persons in England who are already acquainted with the chief works of the philosopher. The analysis which he gives of Bacon's philosophy is accurate and complete; and, without indulging in any lengthy criticisms, he has thrown much light on several important points. He first discusses the aim of his philosophy, and characterizes it as Discovery in general, as the conquest of nature by man (Regnum hominis, interpretatio naturæ). He then enters into the means which it supplies for accomplishing this conquest, and which consist chiefly in experience:—
“The chief object of Bacon's philosophy is the establishment and extension of the dominion of man. The means of accomplishing this we may call culture, or the application of physical powers toward human purposes. But there is no such culture without discovery, which produces the means of culture; no discovery without science, which understands the laws of nature; no science without natural science; no natural science without an interpretation of nature; and this can only be accomplished according to the measure of our experience.”
M. Fischer then proceeds to discuss what he calls the negative or destructive part of Bacon's philosophy (pars destruens),—that is to say, the means by which the human mind should be purified and freed from all preconceived notions before it approaches the interpretation of nature. He carries us through the long war which Bacon commenced against the idols of traditional or scholastic science. We see how the idola tribus, the idola specus, the idola fori, and the idola theatri, are destroyed by his iconoclastic philosophy. After all these are destroyed, there remains nothing but uncertainty and doubt; and it is in this state of nudity, approaching very nearly to the tabula rasa of Locke, that the human mind should approach the new temple of nature. Here lies the radical difference between Bacon and Des Cartes, between Realism and Idealism. Des Cartes also, like Bacon, destroys all former knowledge. He proves that we know nothing for certain. But after he has deprived the human mind of all its imaginary riches, he does not lead it on, like Bacon, to a study of nature, but to a study of itself as the only subject which can be known for certain, Cogito, ergo sum. His philosophy leads to a study of the fundamental laws of knowing and being; that of Bacon enters at once into the gates of nature, with the innocence of a child (to use his [pg 223] own expression) who enters the kingdom of God. Bacon speaks, indeed, of a Philosophia prima as a kind of introduction to Divine, Natural, and Human Philosophy; but he does not discuss in this preliminary chapter the problem of the possibility of knowledge, nor was it with him the right place to do so. It was destined by him as a “receptacle for all such profitable observations and axioms as fall not within the compass of the special parts of philosophy or sciences, but are more common, and of a higher stage.” He mentions himself some of these axioms, such as—“Si inæqualibus æqualia addas, omnia erunt inæqualia;” “Quæ in eodem tertio conveniunt, et inter se conveniunt;” “Omnia mutantur, nil interit.” The problem of the possibility of knowledge would generally be classed under metaphysics; but what Bacon calls Metaphysique is, with him, a branch of philosophy treating only on Formal and Final Causes, in opposition to Physique, which treats on Material and Efficient Causes. If we adopt Bacon's division of philosophy, we might still expect to find the fundamental problem discussed in his chapter on Human Philosophy; but here, again, he treats man only as a part of the continent of Nature, and when he comes to consider the substance and nature of the soul or mind, he declines to enter into this subject, because “the true knowledge of the nature and state of soul must come by the same inspiration that gave the substance.” There remains, therefore, but one place in Bacon's cyclopædia where we might hope to find some information on this subject,—namely, where he treats on the faculties and functions of the mind, and in particular, of understanding and reason. And here he dwells indeed on the doubtful evidence of [pg 224] the senses as one of the causes of error so frequently pointed out by other philosophers. But he remarks that, though they charged the deceit upon the senses, their chief errors arose from a different cause, from the weakness of their intellectual powers, and from the manner of collecting and concluding upon the reports of the senses. And he then points to what is to be the work of his life,—an improved system of invention, consisting of the Experientia Literata, and the Interpretatio Naturæ.
It must be admitted, therefore, that one of the problems which has occupied most philosophers,—nay, which, in a certain sense, may be called the first impulse to all philosophy,—the question whether we can know anything, is entirely passed over by Bacon; and we may well understand why the name and title of philosopher has been withheld from one who looked upon human knowledge as an art, but never inquired into its causes and credentials. This is a point which M. Fischer has not overlooked; but he has not always kept it in view, and in wishing to secure to Bacon his place in the history of philosophy, he has deprived him of that more exalted place which Bacon himself wished to occupy in the history of the world. Among men like Locke, Hume, Kant, and Hegel, Bacon is, and always will be, a stranger. Bacon himself would have drawn a very strong line between their province and his own. He knows where their province lies; and if he sometimes speaks contemptuously of formal philosophy, it is only when formal philosophy has encroached on his own ground, or when it breaks into the enclosure of revealed religion, which he wished to be kept sacred. There, he holds, the human mind should not enter, except in the attitude of the Semnones, with chained hands.
Bacon's philosophy could never supplant the works of Plato and Aristotle, and though his method might prove useful in every branch of knowledge,—even in the most abstruse points of logic and metaphysics,—yet there has never been a Baconian school of philosophy, in the sense in which we speak of the school of Locke or Kant. Bacon was above or below philosophy. Philosophy, in the usual sense of the word, formed but a part of his great scheme of knowledge. It had its place therein, side by side with history, poetry, and religion. After he had surveyed the whole universe of knowledge, he was struck by the small results that had been obtained by so much labor, and he discovered the cause of this failure in the want of a proper method of investigation and combination. The substitution of a new method of invention was the great object of his philosophical activity; and though it has been frequently said that the Baconian method had been known long before Bacon, and had been practiced by his predecessors with much greater success than by himself or his immediate followers, it was his chief merit to have proclaimed it, and to have established its legitimacy against all gainsayers. M. Fischer has some very good remarks on Bacon's method of induction, particularly on the instantiæ prærogativæ which, as he points out, though they show the weakness of his system, exhibit at the same time the strength of his mind, which rises above all the smaller considerations of systematic consistency, where higher objects are at stake.
M. Fischer devotes one chapter to Bacon's relation to the ancient philosophers, and another to his views on poetry. In the latter, he naturally compares Bacon with his contemporary, Shakespeare. We recommend this chapter, as well as a similar one in a work on [pg 226] Shakespeare by Gervinus, to the author of the ingenious discovery that Bacon was the real author of Shakespeare's plays. Besides an analysis of the constructive part of Bacon's philosophy, or the Instauratio Magna, M. Fischer gives us several interesting chapters, in which he treats of Bacon as an historical character, of his views on religion and theology, and of his reviewers. His defense of Bacon's political character is the weakest part of his work. He draws an elaborate parallel between the spirit of Bacon's philosophy and the spirit of his public acts. Discovery, he says, was the object of the philosopher; success that of the politician. But what can be gained by such parallels? We admire Bacon's ardent exertions for the successful advancement of learning, but, if his acts for his own advancement were blamable, no moralist, whatever notions he may hold on the relation between the understanding and the will, would be swayed in his judgment of Lord Bacon's character by such considerations. We make no allowance for the imitative talents of a tragedian, if he stands convicted of forgery, nor for the courage of a soldier, if he is accused of murder. Bacon's character can only be judged by the historian, and by a careful study of the standard of public morality in Bacon's times. And the same may be said of the position which he took with regard to religion and theology. We may explain his inclination to keep religion distinct from philosophy by taking into account the practical tendencies of all his labors. But there is such a want of straightforwardness, and we might almost say, of real faith, in his theological statements, that no one can be surprised to find that, while he is taken as the representative of orthodoxy by some, he has been attacked by others as the most dangerous and [pg 227] insidious enemy of Christianity. Writers of the school of De Maistre see in him a decided atheist and hypocrite.
In a work on Bacon, it seems to have become a necessity to discuss Bacon's last reviewer, and M. Fischer therefore breaks a lance with Mr. Macaulay. We give some extracts from this chapter (page 358 seq.), which will serve, at the same time, as a specimen of our author's style:—
“Mr. Macaulay pleads unconditionally in favor of practical philosophy, which he designates by the name of Bacon, against all theoretical philosophy. We have two questions to ask: 1. What does Mr. Macaulay mean by the contrast of practical and theoretical philosophy, on which he dwells so constantly? and 2. What has his own practical philosophy in common with that of Bacon?
“Mr. Macaulay decides on the fate of philosophy with a ready formula, which, like many of the same kind, dazzles by means of words which have nothing behind them,—words which become more obscure and empty the nearer we approach them. He says, Philosophy was made for Man, not Man for Philosophy. In the former case it is practical; in the latter, theoretical. Mr. Macaulay embraces the first, and rejects the second. He cannot speak with sufficient praise of the one, nor with sufficient contempt of the other. According to him, the Baconian philosophy is practical; the pre-Baconian, and particularly the ancient philosophy, theoretical. He carries the contrast between the two to the last extreme, and he places it before our eyes, not in its naked form, but veiled in metaphors, and in well-chosen figures of speech, where the imposing and charming image always represents the practical, the repulsive the theoretical, form of philosophy. By this play he carries away the great mass of people, who, like children, always run after images. Practical philosophy is not so much a conviction with him, but it serves him to make a point; whereas theoretical philosophy serves as an easy butt. Thus the contrast between the two acquires a certain dramatic charm. The reader feels moved and excited by the subject before him, and forgets the scientific question. His fancy is caught by a kind of metaphorical [pg 228] imagery, and his understanding surrenders what is due to it.... What is Mr. Macaulay's meaning in rejecting theoretical philosophy, because philosophy is here the object, and man the means; whereas he adopts practical philosophy, because man is here the object, and philosophy the means? What do we gain by such comparisons, as when he says that practical and theoretical philosophy are like works and words, fruits and thorns, a high-road and a treadmill? Such phrases always remind us of the remark of Socrates: They are said indeed, but are they well and truly said? According to the strict meaning of Mr. Macaulay's words, there never was a practical philosophy; for there never was a philosophy which owed its origin to practical considerations only. And there never was a theoretical philosophy, for there never was a philosophy which did not receive its impulse from a human want, that is to say, from a practical motive. This shows where playing with words must always lead. He defines theoretical and practical philosophy in such a manner that his definition is inapplicable to any kind of philosophy. His antithesis is entirely empty. But if we drop the antithesis, and only keep to what it means in sober and intelligible language, it would come to this,—that the value of a theory depends on its usefulness, on its practical influence on human life, on the advantage which we derive from it. Utility alone is to decide on the value of a theory. Be it so. But who is to decide on utility? If all things are useful which serve to satisfy human wants, who is to decide on our wants? We take Mr. Macaulay's own point of view. Philosophy should be practical; it should serve man, satisfy his wants, or help to satisfy them; and if it fails in this, let it be called useless and hollow. But if there are wants in human nature which demand to be satisfied, which make life a burden unless they are satisfied, is that not to be called practical which answers to these wants? And if some of them are of that peculiar nature that they can only be satisfied by knowledge, or by theoretical contemplation, is this knowledge, is this theoretical contemplation, not useful,—useful even in the eyes of the most decided Utilitarian? Might it not happen that what he calls theoretical philosophy seems useless and barren to the Utilitarian, because his ideas of men are too narrow? It is dangerous, and not quite becoming, to lay down the law, and say from the very first, ‘You must not have more than certain wants, and therefore you do not want more than a certain philosophy!’ If we may judge from Mr. [pg 229] Macaulay's illustrations, his ideas of human nature are not very liberal. ‘If we were forced,’ he says, ‘to make our choice between the first shoemaker and Seneca, the author of the books on Anger, we should pronounce for the shoemaker. It may be worse to be angry than to be wet. But shoes have kept millions from being wet; and we doubt whether Seneca ever kept anybody from being angry.’ I should not select Seneca as the representative of theoretical philosophy, still less take those for my allies whom Mr. Macaulay prefers to Seneca, in order to defeat theoretical philosophers. Brennus threw his sword into the scale in order to make it more weighty. Mr. Macaulay prefers the awl. But whatever he may think about Seneca, there is another philosopher more profound than Seneca, but in Mr. Macaulay's eyes likewise an unpractical thinker. And yet in him the power of theory was greater than the powers of nature and the most common wants of man. His meditations alone gave Socrates his serenity when he drank the fatal poison. Is there, among all evils, one greater than the dread of death? And the remedy against this, the worst of all physical evils, is it not practical in the best sense of the word? True, some people might here say, that it would have been more practical if Socrates had fled from his prison, as Criton suggested, and had died an old and decrepit man in Bœotia. But to Socrates it seemed more practical to remain in prison, and to die as the first witness and martyr of the liberty of conscience, and to rise from the sublime height of his theory to the seats of the immortals. Thus it is the want of the individual which decides on the practical value of an act or of a thought, and this want depends on the nature of the human soul. There is a difference between individuals in different ages, and there is a difference in their wants.... As long as the desire after knowledge lives in our hearts, we must, with the purely practical view of satisfying this want, strive after knowledge in all things, even in those which do not contribute towards external comfort, and have no use except that they purify and invigorate the mind.... What is theory in the eyes of Bacon? ‘A temple in the human mind, according to the model of the world.’ What is it in the eyes of Mr. Macaulay? A snug dwelling, according to the wants of practical life. The latter is satisfied if knowledge is carried far enough to enable us to keep ourselves dry. The magnificence of the structure, and its completeness according to the model of the world, is to him useless by-work, superfluous [pg 230] and even dangerous luxury. This is the view of a respectable rate-payer, not of a Bacon. Mr. Macaulay reduces Bacon to his own dimensions, while he endeavors at the same time to exalt him above all other people.... Bacon's own philosophy was, like all philosophy, a theory; it was the theory of the inventive mind. Bacon has not made any great discoveries himself. He was less inventive than Leibnitz, the German metaphysician. If to make discoveries be practical philosophy, Bacon was a mere theorist, and his philosophy nothing but the theory of practical philosophy.... How far the spirit of theory reached in Bacon may be seen in his own works. He did not want to fetter theory, but to renew and to extend it to the very ends of the universe. His practical standard was not the comfort of the individual, but human happiness, which involves theoretical knowledge.... That Bacon is not the Bacon of Mr. Macaulay. What Bacon wanted was new, and it will be eternal. What Mr. Macaulay and many people at the present day want, in the name of Bacon, is not new, but novel. New is what opposes the old, and serves as a model for the future. Novel is what flatters our times, gains sympathies, and dies away.... And history has pronounced her final verdict. It is the last negative instance which we oppose to Mr. Macaulay's assertion. Bacon's philosophy has not been the end of all theories, but the beginning of new theories,—theories which flowed necessarily from Bacon's philosophy, and not one of which was practical in Mr. Macaulay's sense. Hobbes was the pupil of Bacon. His ideal of a State is opposed to that of Plato on all points. But one point it shares in common,—it is as unpractical a theory as that of Plato. Mr. Macaulay, however, calls Hobbes the most acute and vigorous spirit. If, then, Hobbes was a practical philosopher, what becomes of Macaulay's politics? And if Hobbes was not a practical philosopher, what becomes of Mr. Macaulay's philosophy, which does homage to the theories of Hobbes?”
We have somewhat abridged M. Fischer's argument, for, though he writes well and intelligibly, he wants condensation; and we do not think that his argument has been weakened by being shortened. What he has extended into a volume of nearly five hundred pages, might have been reduced to a pithy essay of [pg 231] one or two hundred, without sacrificing one essential fact, or injuring the strength of any one of his arguments. The art of writing in our times is the art of condensing; and those who cannot condense write only for readers who have more time at their disposal than they know what to do with.
Let us ask one question in conclusion. Why do all German writers change the thoroughly Teutonic name of Bacon into Baco? It is bad enough that we should speak of Plato; but this cannot be helped. But unless we protest against Baco, gen. Baconis, we shall soon be treated to Newto, Newtonis, or even to Kans, Kantis.
1857.
XII. A GERMAN TRAVELLER IN ENGLAND.[36]
A. D. 1598.
Lessing, when he was Librarian at Wolfenbüttel, proposed to start a review which should only notice forgotten books,—books written before reviewing was invented, published in the small towns of Germany, never read, perhaps, except by the author and his friends, then buried on the shelves of a library, properly labeled and catalogued, and never opened again, except by an inquisitive inmate of these literary mausoleums. The number of those forgotten books is great, and as in former times few authors wrote more than one or two works during the whole of their lives, the information which they contain is generally of a much more substantial and solid kind than our literary palates are now accustomed to. If a man now travels to the unexplored regions of Central Africa, his book is written and out in a year. It remains on the drawing-room [pg 233] table for a season; it is pleasant to read, easy to digest, and still easier to review and to forget. Two or three hundred years ago this was very different. Travelling was a far more serious business, and a man who had spent some years in seeing foreign countries, could do nothing better than employ the rest of his life in writing a book of travels, either in his own language, or, still better, in Latin. After his death his book continued to be quoted for a time in works on history and geography, till a new traveller went over the same ground, published an equally learned book, and thus consigned his predecessor to oblivion. Here is a case in point: Paul Hentzner, a German, who, of course, calls himself Paulus Hentznerus, travelled in Germany, France, England, and Italy; and after his return to his native place in Silesia, he duly published his travels in a portly volume, written in Latin. There is a long title-page, with dedications, introductions, a preface for the Lector benevolus, Latin verses, and a table showing what people ought to observe in travelling. Travelling, according to our friend, is the source of all wisdom; and he quotes Moses and the Prophets in support of his theory. We ought all to travel, he says,—“vita nostra peregrinatio est;” and those who stay at home like snails (cochlearum instar) will remain “inhumani, insolentes, superbi,” etc.
It would take a long time to follow Paulus Hentznerus through all his peregrinations; but let us see what he saw in England. He arrived here in the year 1598. He took ship with his friends at Depa, vulgo Dieppe, and after a boisterous voyage, they landed at Rye. On their arrival they were conducted to a Notarius, who asked their names, and inquired for what object they came to England. After they had satisfied [pg 234] his official inquiries, they were conducted to a Diversorium, and treated to a good dinner, pro regionis more, according to the custom of the country. From Rye they rode to London, passing Flimwolt, Tumbridge, and Chepsted on their way. Then follows a long description of London, its origin and history, its bridges, churches, monuments, and palaces, with extracts from earlier writers, such as Paulus Jovius, Polydorus Vergilius, etc. All inscriptions are copied faithfully, not only from tombs and pictures, but also from books which the travellers saw in the public libraries. Whitehall seems to have contained a royal library at that time, and in it Hentzner saw, besides Greek and Latin MSS., a book written in French by Queen Elizabeth, with the following dedication to Henry VIII.:—
“A Tres haut et Tres puissant et Redoubte Prince Henry VIII. de ce nom, Roy d'Angleterre, de France, et d'Irlande, defenseur de la foy, Elizabeth, sa Tres humble fille, rend salut et obedience.”
After the travellers had seen St. Paul's, Westminster, the House of Parliament, Whitehall, Guildhall, the Tower, and the Royal Exchange, commonly called Bursa,—all of which are minutely described,—they went to the theatres and to places Ursorum et Taurorum venationibus destinata, where bears and bulls, tied fast behind, were baited by bull-dogs. In these places, and everywhere, in fact, as our traveller says, where you meet with Englishmen, they use herba nicotiana, which they call by an American name Tobaca or Paetum. The description deserves to be quoted in the original:—
“Fistulæ in hunc finem ex argillâ factæ orificio posteriori dictam herbam probe exiccatam, ita ut in pulverem facile redigi possit, immittunt, et igne admoto accendunt, unde fumus ab [pg 235] anteriori parte ore attrahitur, qui per nares rursum, tamquam per infurnibulum exit, et phlegma ac capitis defluxiones magnâ copiâ secum educit.”
After they had seen everything in London—not omitting the ship in which Francis Drake, nobilissimus pyrata, was said to have circumnavigated the world,—they went to Greenwich. Here they were introduced into the presence-chamber, and saw the Queen. The walls of the room were covered with precious tapestry, the floor strewed with hay. The Queen had to pass through on going to chapel. It was a Sunday, when all the nobility came to pay their respects. The Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London were present. When divine service began, the Queen appeared, preceded and followed by the court. Before her walked two barons, carrying the sceptre and the sword, and between them the Great Chancellor of England with the seal. The Queen is thus minutely described:—
“She was said (rumor erat) to be fifty-five years old. Her face was rather long, white, and a little wrinkled. Her eyes small, black, and gracious; her nose somewhat bent; her lips compressed, her teeth black (from eating too much sugar). She had ear-rings of pearls; red hair, but artificial, and wore a small crown. Her breast was uncovered (as is the case with all unmarried ladies in England), and round her neck was a chain with precious gems. Her hands were graceful, her fingers long. She was of middle stature, but stepped on majestically. She was gracious and kind in her address. The dress she wore was of white silk, with pearls as large as beans. Her cloak was of black silk with silver lace, and a long train was carried by a marchioness. As she walked along she spoke most kindly with many people, some of them ambassadors. She spoke English, French, and Italian; but she knows also Greek and Latin, and understands Spanish, Scotch, and Dutch. Those whom she addressed bent their knees, and some she lifted up with her hand. To a Bohemian nobleman of the name of Slawata, who had brought some letters to the Queen, she gave her right hand after [pg 236] taking off her glove, and he kissed it. Wherever she turned her eyes, people fell on their knees.”
There was probably nobody present who ventured to scrutinize the poor Queen so impertinently as Paulus Hentznerus. He goes on to describe the ladies who followed the Queen, and how they were escorted by fifty knights. When she came to the door of the chapel, books were handed to her, and the people called out, “God save the Queen Elizabeth!” whereupon the Queen answered, “I thanke you myn good peuple.” Prayers did not last more than half an hour, and the music was excellent. During the time that the Queen was in chapel, dinner was laid, and this again is described in full detail.
But we cannot afford to tarry with our German observer, nor can we follow him to Grantbridge (Cambridge) or Oxenford, where he describes the colleges and halls (each of them having a library), and the life of the students. From Oxford he went to Woodstock, then back to Oxford, and from thence to Henley and Madenhood to Windsor. Eton also was visited, and here, he says, sixty boys were educated gratuitously, and afterwards sent to Cambridge. After visiting Hampton Court and the royal palace of Nonesuch, our travellers returned to London.
We shall finish our extracts with some remarks of Hentzner on the manners and customs of the English:—
“The English are grave, like the Germans, magnificent at home and abroad. They carry with them a large train of followers and servants. These have silver shields on their left arm, and a pig-tail. The English excel in dancing and music. They are swift and lively, though stouter than the French. They shave the middle portion of the face, but leave the hair untouched on each side. They are good sailors and famous [pg 237] pirates; clever, perfidious, and thievish. About three hundred are hanged in London every year. At table they are more civil than the French. They eat less bread, but more meat, and they dress it well. They throw much sugar into their wine. They suffer frequently from leprosy, commonly called the white leprosy, which is said to have come to England in the time of the Normans. They are brave in battle, and always conquer their enemies. At home they brook no manner of servitude. They are very fond of noises that fill the ears, such as explosions of guns, trumpets, and bells. In London, persons who have got drunk are wont to mount a church tower, for the sake of exercise, and to ring the bells for several hours. If they see a foreigner who is handsome and strong, they are sorry that he is not an Anglicus,—vulgo Englishman.”
On his return to France, Hentzner paid a visit to Canterbury, and, after seeing some ghosts on his journey, arrived safely at Dover. Before he was allowed to go on board, he had again to undergo an examination, to give his name, to explain what he had done in England, and where he was going; and, lastly, his luggage was searched most carefully, in order to see whether he carried with him any English money, for nobody was allowed to carry away more than ten pounds of English money: all the rest was taken away and handed to the royal treasury. And thus farewell, Carissime Hentzneri! and slumber on your shelf until the eye of some other benevolent reader, glancing at the rows of forgotten books, is caught by the quaint lettering on your back, “Hentzneri Itin.”
1857.
XIII. CORNISH ANTIQUITIES.[37]
It is impossible to spend even a few weeks in Cornwall without being impressed with the air of antiquity which pervades that county, and seems, like a morning mist, half to conceal and half to light up every one of its hills and valleys. It is impossible to look at any pile of stones, at any wall, or pillar, or gate-post, without asking one's self the question, Is this old, or is this new? Is it the work of Saxon, or of Roman, or of Celt? Nay, one feels sometimes tempted to ask, Is this the work of Nature or of man?
“Among these rocks and stones, methinks I see
More than the heedless impress that belongs
To lonely Nature's casual work: they bear
A semblance strange of power intelligent,
And of design not wholly worn away.”—Excursion.
The late King of Prussia's remark about Oxford, that in it everything old seemed new, and everything new seemed old, applies with even greater truth to Cornwall. There is a continuity between the present and the past of that curious peninsula, such as we seldom find in any other place. A spring bubbling up in a natural granite basin, now a meeting-place for Baptists [pg 239] or Methodists, was but a few centuries ago a holy well, attended by busy friars, and visited by pilgrims, who came there “nearly lame,” and left the shrine “almost able to walk.” Still further back the same spring was a centre of attraction for the Celtic inhabitants, and the rocks piled up around it stand there as witnesses of a civilization and architecture certainly more primitive than the civilization and architecture of Roman, Saxon, or Norman settlers. We need not look beyond. How long that granite buttress of England has stood there, defying the fury of the Atlantic, the geologist alone, who is not awed by ages, would dare to tell us. But the historian is satisfied with antiquities of a more humble and homely character; and in bespeaking the interest, and, it may be, the active support of our readers, in favor of the few relics of the most ancient civilization of Britain, we promise to keep within strictly historical limits, if by historical we understand, with the late Sir G. C. Lewis, that only which can be authenticated by contemporaneous monuments.
But even thus, how wide a gulf seems to separate us from the first civilizers of the West of England, from the people who gave names to every headland, bay, and hill of Cornwall, and who first planned those lanes that now, like throbbing veins, run in every direction across that heath-covered peninsula! No doubt it is well known that the original inhabitants of Cornwall were Celts, and that Cornish is a Celtic language; and that, if we divide the Celtic languages into two classes, Welsh with Cornish and Breton forms one class, the Cymric; while the Irish with its varieties, as developed in Scotland and the Isle of Man, forms another class, which is called the Gaelic or Gadhelic. [pg 240] It may also be more or less generally known that Celtic, with all its dialects, is an Aryan or Indo-European language, closely allied to Latin, Greek, German, Slavonic, and Sanskrit, and that the Celts, therefore, were not mere barbarians, or people to be classed together with Finns and Lapps, but heralds of true civilization wherever they settled in their worldwide migrations, the equals of Saxons and Romans and Greeks, whether in physical beauty or in intellectual vigor. And yet there is a strange want of historical reality in the current conceptions about the Celtic inhabitants of the British Isles; and while the heroes and statesmen and poets of Greece and Rome, though belonging to a much earlier age, stand out in bold and sharp relief on the table of a boy's memory, his notions of the ancient Britons may generally be summed up “in houses made of wicker-work, Druids with long white beards, white linen robes, and golden sickles, and warriors painted blue.” Nay, strange to say, we can hardly blame a boy for banishing the ancient bards and Druids from the scene of real history, and assigning to them that dark and shadowy corner where the gods and heroes of Greece live peacefully together with the ghosts and fairies from the dreamland of our own Saxon forefathers. For even the little that is told in “Little Arthur's History of England” about the ancient Britons and the Druids is extremely doubtful. Druids are never mentioned before Cæsar. Few writers, if any, before him were able to distinguish between Celts and Germans, but spoke of the barbarians of Gaul and Germany as the Greeks spoke of Scythians, or as we ourselves speak of the negroes of Africa, without distinguishing between races so different from each other as Hottentots and Kaffirs. Cæsar was [pg 241] one of the first writers who knew of an ethnological distinction between Celtic and Teutonic barbarians, and we may therefore trust him when he says that the Celts had Druids, and the Germans had none. But his further statements about these Celtic priests and sages are hardly more trustworthy than the account which an ordinary Indian officer at the present day might give us of the Buddhist priests and the Buddhist religion of Ceylon. Cæsar's statement that the Druids worshipped Mercury, Apollo, Mars, Jupiter, and Minerva, is of the same base metal as the statements of more modern writers that the Buddhists worship the Trinity, and that they take Buddha for the Son of God. Cæsar most likely never conversed with a Druid, nor was he able to control, if he was able to understand, the statements made to him about the ancient priesthood, the religion and literature of Gaul. Besides, Cæsar himself tells us very little about the priests of Gaul and Britain; and the thrilling accounts of the white robes and the golden sickles belong to Pliny's “Natural History,” by no means a safe authority in such matters.[38]
We must be satisfied, indeed, to know very little [pg 242] about the mode of life, the forms of worship, the religious doctrines, or the mysterious wisdom of the Druids and their flocks. But for this very reason it is most essential that our minds should be impressed strongly with the historical reality that belongs to the Celtic inhabitants, and to the work which they performed in rendering these islands for the first time fit for the habitation of man. That historical lesson, and a very important lesson it is, is certainly learned more quickly, and yet more effectually, by a visit to Cornwall or Wales, than by any amount of reading. We may doubt many things that Celtic enthusiasts tell us; but where every village and field, every cottage and hill, bear names that are neither English, nor Norman, nor Latin, it is difficult not to feel that the Celtic element has been something real and permanent in the history of the British Isles. The Cornish language is no doubt extinct, if by extinct we mean that it is no longer spoken by the people. But in the names of towns, castles, rivers, mountains, fields, manors, and families, and in a few of the technical terms of mining, husbandry, and fishing, Cornish lives on, and probably will live on, for many ages to come. There is a well-known verse:—
“By Tre, Ros, Pol, Lan, Caer, and Pen,
You may know most Cornish men.”[39]
But it will hardly be believed that a Cornish antiquarian, Dr. Bannister, who is collecting materials for a glossary of Cornish proper names, has amassed no less than 2,400 names with Tre, 500 with Fen, 400 with Ros, 300 with Lan, 200 with Pol, and 200 with Caer.
A language does not die all at once, nor is it always possible to fix the exact date when it breathed its last. Thus, in the case of Cornish, it is by no means easy to reconcile the conflicting statements of various writers as to the exact time when it ceased to be the language of the people, unless we bear in mind that what was true with regard to the higher classes was not so with regard to the lower, and likewise that in some parts of Cornwall the vitality of the language might continue, while in others its heart had ceased to beat. As late as the time of Henry VIII., the famous physician Andrew Borde tells us that English was not understood by many men and women in Cornwall. “In Cornwal is two speeches,” he writes; “the one is naughty Englyshe, and the other the Cornyshe speche. And there be many men and women the which cannot speake one worde of Englyshe, but all Cornyshe.” During the same King's reign, when an attempt was made to introduce a new church service composed in English, a protest was signed by the Devonshire and Cornish men utterly refusing this new English:—
“We will not receive the new Service, because it is but like a Christmas game; but we will have our old Service of Matins, Mass, Evensong, and Procession, in Latin as it was before. And so we the Cornish men (whereof certain of us understand no English) utterly refuse this new English.”[40]
Yet in the reign of Elizabeth, when the liturgy was appointed by authority to take the place of the mass, the Cornish, it is said,[41] desired that it should be in the English language. About the same time we are told [pg 244] that Dr. John Moreman[42] taught his parishioners the Lord's Prayer, the Creed, and the Ten Commandments, in the English tongue. From the time of the Reformation onward, Cornish seems constantly to have lost ground against English, particularly in places near Devonshire. Thus Norden, whose description of Cornwall was probably written about 1584, though not published till 1728, gives a very full and interesting account of the struggle between the two languages:—
“Of late,” he says (p. 26), “the Cornishe men have muche conformed themselves to the use of the Englishe tounge, and their Englishe is equall to the beste, espetially in the easterne partes; even from Truro eastwarde it is in manner wholly Englishe. In the weste parte of the countrye, as in the hundreds of Penwith and Kerrier, the Cornishe tounge is moste in use amongste the inhabitantes, and yet (whiche is to be marveyled), though the husband and wife, parentes and children, master and servantes, doe mutually communicate in their native language, yet ther is none of them in manner but is able to convers with a straunger in the Englishe tounge, unless it be some obscure people, that seldome conferr with the better sorte: But it seemeth that in few yeares the Cornishe language will be by litle and litle abandoned.”
Carew, who wrote about the same time, goes so far as to say that most of the inhabitants “can no word of Cornish, but very few are ignorant of the English, though they sometimes affect to be.” This may have been true with regard to the upper classes, particularly in the west of Cornwall, but it is nevertheless a fact that, as late as 1640, Mr. William Jackman, the vicar of Feock,[43] was forced to administer the sacrament in Cornish, because the aged people did not understand English; nay, the rector of Landewednak [pg 245] preached his sermons in Cornish as late as 1678. Mr. Scawen, too, who wrote about that time, speaks of some old folks who spoke Cornish only, and would not understand a word of English; but he tells us at the same time that Sir Francis North, the Lord Chief Justice, afterwards Lord Keeper, when holding the assizes at Lanceston in 1678, expressed his concern at the loss and decay of the Cornish language. The poor people, in fact, could speak, or at least understand, Cornish, but he says, “They were laughed at by the rich, who understood it not, which is their own fault in not endeavoring after it.” About the beginning of the last century, Mr. Ed. Lhuyd (died 1709), the keeper of the Ashmolean Museum, was still able to collect from the mouths of the people a grammar of the Cornish language, which was published in 1707. He says that at this time Cornish was only retained in five or six villages towards the Land's End; and in his “Archæologia Britannica” he adds, that although it was spoken in most of the western districts from the Land's End to the Lizard, “a great many of the inhabitants, especially the gentry, do not understand it, there being no necessity thereof in regard there's no Cornish man but speaks good English.” It is generally supposed that the last person who spoke Cornish was Dolly Pentreath, who died in 1778, and to whose memory Prince Louis Lucien Bonaparte has lately erected a monument in the churchyard at Paul. The inscription is:—
“Here lieth interred Dorothy Pentreath, who died in 1778, said to have been the last person who conversed in the ancient Cornish, the peculiar language of this country from the earliest records till it expired in this parish of St. Paul. This stone is erected by the Prince Louis Lucien Bonaparte, in union with the Rev. John Garret, vicar of St. Paul, June, 1860.”
It seems hardly right to deprive the old lady of her fair name; but there are many people in Cornwall who maintain that when travellers and grandees came to see her, she would talk anything that came into her head, while those who listened to her were pleased to think that they had heard the dying echoes of a primeval tongue.[44] There is a letter extant, written in Cornish by a poor fisherman of the name of William Bodener. It is dated July 3, 1776, that is, two years before the death of Dolly Pentreath; and the writer says of himself in Cornish:—
“My age is threescore and five. I am a poor fisherman. I learnt Cornish when I was a boy. I have been to sea with my father and five other men in the boat, and have not heard one word of English spoke in the boat for a week together. I never saw a Cornish book. I learned Cornish going to sea with old men. There is not more than four or five in our town can talk Cornish now,—old people fourscore years old. Cornish is all forgot with young people.”[45]
It would seem, therefore, that Cornish died with the [pg 247] last century, and no one now living can boast to have heard its sound when actually spoken for the sake of conversation. It seems to have been a melodious and yet by no means an effeminate language, and Scawen places it in this respect above most of the other Celtic dialects:—
“Cornish,” he says, “is not to be gutturally pronounced, as the Welsh for the most part is, nor mutteringly, as the Armorick, nor whiningly as the Irish (which two latter qualities seem to have been contracted from their servitude), but must be lively and manly spoken, like other primitive tongues.”
Although Cornish must now be classed with the extinct languages, it has certainly shown a marvelous vitality. More than four hundred years of Roman occupation, more than six hundred years of Saxon and Danish sway, a Norman conquest, a Saxon Reformation, and civil wars, have all passed over the land; but, like a tree that may bend before a storm but is not to be rooted up, the language of the Celts of Cornwall has lived on in an unbroken continuity for at least two thousand years. What does this mean? It means that through the whole of English history to the accession of the House of Hanover, the inhabitants of Cornwall and the western portion of Devonshire, in spite of intermarriages with Romans, Saxons, and Normans, were Celts, and remained Celts. People speak indeed of blood, and intermingling of blood, as determining the nationality of a people; but what is meant by blood? It is one of those scientific idols, that crumble to dust as soon as we try to define or grasp them; it is a vague, hollow, treacherous term, which, for the present at least, ought to be banished from the dictionary of every true man of science. We can give a scientific definition of a Celtic language; but no one has [pg 248] yet given a definition of Celtic blood, or a Celtic skull. It is quite possible that hereafter chemical differences may be discovered in the blood of those who speak a Celtic, and of those who speak a Teutonic language. It is possible, also, that patient measurements, like those lately published by Professor Huxley, in the “Journal of Anatomy and Physiology,” may lead in time to a really scientific classification of skulls, and that physiologists may succeed in the end in carrying out a classification of the human race, according to tangible and unvarying physiological criteria. But their definitions and their classifications will hardly ever square with the definitions or classifications of the student of language, and the use of common terms can only be a source of constant misunderstandings. We know what we mean by a Celtic language, and in the grammar of each language we are able to produce a most perfect scientific definition of its real character. If, therefore, we transfer the term Celtic to people, we can, if we use our words accurately, mean nothing but people who speak a Celtic language, the true exponent, aye, the very life of Celtic nationality. Whatever people, whether Romans, or Saxons, or Normans, or, as some think, even Phœnicians and Jews, settled in Cornwall, if they ceased to speak their own language and exchanged it for Cornish, they are, before the tribunal of the science of language, Celts, and nothing but Celts; while, whenever Cornishmen, like Sir Humphrey Davy or Bishop Colenso, have ceased to speak Cornish, and speak nothing but English, they are no longer Celts, but true Teutons or Saxons, in the only scientifically legitimate sense of that word. Strange stories, indeed, would be revealed, if blood could cry out and tell of its repeated mixtures since [pg 249] the beginning of the world. If we think of the early migrations of mankind; of the battles fought before there were hieroglyphics to record them; of conquests, leadings into captivity, piracy, slavery, and colonization, all without a sacred poet to hand them down to posterity,—we shall hesitate, indeed, to speak of pure races, or unmixed blood, even at the very dawn of real history. Little as we know of the early history of Greece, we know enough to warn us against looking upon the Greeks of Asia or Europe as an unmixed race. Ægyptus, with his Arabian, Ethiopian, and Tyrian wives; Cadmus, the son of Libya; Phœnix, the father of Europa,—all point to an intercourse of Greece with foreign countries, whatever else their mythological meaning may be. As soon as we know anything of the history of the world, we know of wars and alliances between Greeks and Lydians and Persians, of Phœnician settlements all over the world, of Carthaginians trading in Spain and encamped in Italy, of Romans conquering and colonizing Gaul, Spain, Britain, the Danubian Principalities and Greece, Western Asia and Northern Africa. Then again, at a later time, follow the great ethnic convulsions of Eastern Europe, and the devastation and re-population of the ancient seats of civilization by Goths, and Lombards, and Vandals, and Saxons; while at the same time, and for many centuries to come, the few strongholds of civilization in the East were again and again overwhelmed by the irresistible waves of Hunnish, Mongolic, and Tartaric invaders. And, with all this, people at the latter end of the nineteenth century venture to speak, for instance, of pure Norman blood as something definite or definable, forgetting how the ancient Norsemen carried their [pg 250] wives away from the coasts of Germany or Russia, from Sicily or from the very Piræus; while others married whatever wives they could find in the North of France, whether of Gallic, Roman, or German extraction, and then settled in England, where they again contracted marriages with Teutonic, Celtic, or Roman damsels. In our own days, if we see the daughter of an English officer and an Indian Ranee married to the son of a Russian nobleman, how are we to class the offspring of that marriage? The Indian Ranee may have had Mongol blood, so may the Russian nobleman; but there are other possible ingredients of pure Hindu and pure Slavonic, of Norman, German, and Roman blood,—and who is the chemist bold enough to disengage them all? There is, perhaps, no nation which has been exposed to more frequent admixture of foreign blood, during the Middle Ages, than the Greeks. Professor Fallmerayer maintained that the Hellenic population was entirely exterminated, and that the people who at the present day call themselves Greeks are really Slavonians. It would be difficult to refute him by arguments drawn either from the physical or the moral characteristics of the modern Greeks as compared with the many varieties of the Slavonic stock. But the following extract from “Felton's Lectures on Greece, Ancient and Modern,” contains the only answer that can be given to such charges, without point or purpose: “In one of the courses of lectures,” he says, “which I attended in the University of Athens, the Professor of History, a very eloquent man as well as a somewhat fiery Greek, took this subject up. His audience consisted of about two hundred young men from every part of Greece. His indignant comments on the learned [pg 251] German, that notorious Μισέλλην or Greek-hater, as he stigmatized him, were received by his hearers with a profound sensation. They sat with expanded nostrils and flashing eyes—a splendid illustration of the old Hellenic spirit, roused to fury by the charge of barbarian descent. ‘It is true,’ said the eloquent professor, ‘that the tide of barbaric invaders poured down like a deluge upon Hellas, filling with its surging floods our beautiful plains, our fertile valleys. The Greeks fled to their walled towns and mountain fastnesses. By and by the water subsided and the soil of Hellas reappeared. The former inhabitants descended from the mountains as the tide receded, resumed their ancient lands and rebuilt their ruined habitations, and, the reign of the barbarians over, Hellas was herself again.’ Three or four rounds of applause followed the close of the lectures of Professor Manouses, in which I heartily joined. I could not help thinking afterwards what a singular comment on the German anti-Hellenic theory was presented by this scene,—a Greek professor in a Greek university, lecturing to two hundred Greeks in the Greek language, to prove that the Greeks were Greeks, and not Slavonians.”[46]
And yet we hear the same arguments used over and over again, not only with regard to the Greeks, but with regard to many other modern nations; and even men whose minds have been trained in the school of exact science, use the term “bloods,” in this vague and thoughtless manner. The adjective Greek may connote many things, but what it denotes is language. People who speak Greek as their mother [pg 252] tongue are Greeks, and if a Turkish-speaking inhabitant of Constantinople could trace his pedigree straight to Pericles, he would still be a Turk, whatever his name, his faith, his hair, features, and stature—whatever his blood might be. We can classify languages, and as languages presuppose people that speak them, we can so far classify mankind, according to their grammars and dictionaries; while all who possess scientific honesty must confess and will confess that, as yet, it has been impossible to devise any truly scientific classification of skulls, to say nothing of blood, or bones, or hair. The label on one of the skulls in the Munich Collection, “Etruscan-Tyrol, or Inca-Peruvian,” characterizes not too unfairly the present state of ethnological craniology. Let those who imagine that the great outlines, at least, of a classification of skulls have been firmly established, consult Mr. Brace's useful manual of “The Races of the World,” where he has collected the opinions of some of the best judges on the subject. We quote a few passages:[47]—
“Dr. Bachmann concludes, from the measurements of Dr. Tiedemann and Dr. Morton, that the negro skull, though less than the European, is within one inch as large as the Persian and the Armenian, and three square inches larger than the Hindu and Egyptian. The scale is thus given by Dr. Morton: European skull, 87 cubic inches; Malay, 85; Negro 83; Mongol, 82; Ancient Egyptian, 80; American, 79. The ancient Peruvians and Mexicans, who constructed so elaborate a civilization, show a capacity only of from 75 to 79 inches.... Other observations by Huschke make the average capacity of the skull of Europeans 40.88 oz.; of Americans, 39.13; of Mongols, 38.39; of Negroes, 37.57; of Malays, 36.41.”
“Of the shape of the skull, as distinctive of different origin, [pg 253] Professor M. J. Weber has said there is no proper mark of a definite race from the cranium so firmly attached that it may not be found in some other race. Tiedemann has met with Germans whose skulls bore all the characters of the negro race; and an inhabitant of Nukahiwa, according to Silesius and Blumenbach, agreed exactly in his proportions with the Apollo Belvedere.”
Professor Huxley, in his “Observations on the Human Skulls of Engis and Neanderthal,” printed in Sir Charles Lyell's “Antiquity of Man,” p. 81, remarks that “the most capacious European skull yet measured had a capacity of 114 cubic inches, the smallest (as estimated by weight of brain) about 55 cubic inches; while, according to Professor Schaaffhausen, some Hindu skulls have as small a capacity as 46 cubic inches (27 oz. of water);” and he sums up by stating that “cranial measurements alone afford no safe indication of race.”
And even if a scientific classification of skulls were to be carried out, if, instead of merely being able to guess that this may be an Australian and this a Malay skull, we were able positively to place each individual skull under its own definite category, what should we gain in the classification of mankind? Where is the bridge from skull to man in the full sense of that word? Where is the connecting link between the cranial proportions and only one other of man's characteristic properties, such as language? And what applies to skulls applies to color and all the rest. Even a black skin and curly hair are mere outward accidents as compared with language. We do not classify parrots and magpies by the color of their plumage, still less by the cages in which they live; and what is the black skin or the white skin but the mere outward covering, not to say the mere cage, in [pg 254] which that being which we call man lives, moves, and has his being? A man like Bishop Crowther, though a negro in blood, is, in thought and speech, an Aryan. He speaks English, he thinks English, he acts English; and, unless we take English in a purely historical, and not in its truly scientific, i.e. linguistic sense, he is English. No doubt there are many influences at work—old proverbs, old songs and traditions, religious convictions, social institutions, political prejudices, besides the soil, the food, and the air of a country—that may keep up, even among people who have lost their national language, that kind of vague similarity which is spoken of as national character.[48] This is a subject on which many volumes have been written, and yet the result has only been to supply newspapers with materials for international insults or international courtesies, as the case may be. Nothing sound or definite has been gained by such speculations, and in an age that prides itself on the careful observance of the rules of inductive reasoning, nothing is more surprising than the sweeping assertions with regard to national character, and the reckless way in which casual observations that may be true of one, two, three, or it may be ten or even a hundred individuals, are extended to millions. However, if there is one safe exponent of national character, it is language. Take away the language of a people, and you destroy at once that powerful chain [pg 255] of tradition in thought and sentiment which holds all the generations of the same race together, if we may use an unpleasant simile, like the chain of a gang of galley-slaves. These slaves, we are told, very soon fall into the same pace, without being aware that their movements depend altogether on the movements of those who walk before them. It is nearly the same with us. We imagine we are altogether free in our thoughts, original and independent, and we are not aware that our thoughts are manacled and fettered by language, and that, without knowing and without perceiving it, we have to keep pace with those who walked before us thousands and thousands of years ago. Language alone binds people together, and keeps them distinct from others who speak different tongues. In ancient times particularly, “languages and nations” meant the same thing; and even with us our real ancestors are those whose language we speak, the fathers of our thoughts, the mothers of our hopes and fears. Blood, bones, hair, and color, are mere accidents, utterly unfit to serve as principles of scientific classification for that great family of living beings, the essential characteristics of which are thought and speech, not fibrine, serum, coloring matter, or whatever else enters into the composition of blood.
If this be true, the inhabitants of Cornwall, whatever the number of Roman, Saxon, Danish, or Norman settlers within the boundaries of that county may have been, continued to be Celts as long as they spoke Cornish. They ceased to be Celts when they ceased to speak the language of their forefathers. Those who can appreciate the charms of genuine antiquity will not, therefore, find fault with the enthusiasm of Daines [pg 256] Barrington or Sir Joseph Banks in listening to the strange utterances of Dolly Pentreath; for her language, if genuine, carried them back and brought them, as it were, into immediate contact with people who, long before the Christian era, acted an important part on the stage of history, supplying the world with two of the most precious metals, more precious then than gold or silver, with copper and tin, the very materials, it may be, of the finest works of art in Greece, aye, of the armor wrought for the heroes of the Trojan War, as described so minutely by the poets of the “Iliad.” There is a continuity in language which nothing equals, and there is an historical genuineness in ancient words, if but rightly interpreted, which cannot be rivaled by manuscripts, or coins, or monumental inscriptions.
But though it is right to be enthusiastic about what is really ancient in Cornwall,—and there is nothing so ancient as language,—it is equally right to be discriminating. The fresh breezes of antiquity have intoxicated many an antiquarian. Words, purely Latin or English, though somewhat changed after being admitted into the Cornish dictionary, have been quoted as the originals from which the Roman or English were in turn derived. The Latin liber, book, was supposed to be derived from the Welsh llyvyr; litera, letter, from Welsh llythyr; persona, person, from Welsh person, and many more of the same kind. Walls built within the memory of men have been admitted as relics of British architecture; nay, Latin inscriptions of the simplest character have but lately been interpreted by means of Cornish, as containing strains of a mysterious wisdom. Here, too, a study of the language gives some useful hints as to the proper method of disentangling the truly ancient from the more modern [pg 257] elements. Whatever in the Cornish dictionary cannot be traced back to any other source, whether Latin, Saxon, Norman, or German, may safely be considered as Cornish, and therefore as ancient Celtic. Whatever in the antiquities of Cornwall cannot be claimed by Romans, Saxons, Danes, or Normans, may fairly be considered as genuine remains of the earliest civilization of this island, as the work of the Celtic discoverers of Britain.
The Cornish language is by no means a pure or unmixed language,—at least we do not know it in its pure state. It is, in fact, a mere accident that any literary remains have been preserved, and three or four small volumes would contain all that is left to us of Cornish literature. “There is a poem,” to quote Mr. Norris, “which we may by courtesy call epic, entitled ‘Mount Calvary.’ ” It contains 259 stanzas of eight lines each, in heptasyllabic metre, with alternate rhyme. It is ascribed to the fifteenth century, and was published for the first time by Mr. Davies Gilbert in 1826.[49] There is, besides, a series of dramas, or mystery-plays, first published by Mr. Norris for the University Press of Oxford, in 1858. The first is called “The Beginning of the World,” the second “The Passion of our Lord,” the third “The Resurrection.” The last is interrupted by another play, “The Death of Pilate.” The oldest MS. in the Bodleian Library belongs to the fifteenth century, and Mr. Norris is not inclined to refer the composition of these plays to a much earlier date. Another MS., likewise in the Bodleian Library, contains both the text and a [pg 258] translation by Keigwyn (1695). Lastly, there is another sacred drama, called “The Creation of the World, with Noah's Flood.” It is in many places copied from the dramas, and, according to the MS., it was written by William Jordan in 1611. The oldest MS. belongs again to the Bodleian Library, which likewise possesses a MS. of the translation by Keigwyn in 1691.[50]
These mystery-plays, as we may learn from a passage in Carew's “Survey of Cornwall” (p. 71), were still performed in Cornish in his time, i.e. at the beginning of the seventeenth century. He says:—
“Pastimes to delight the minde, the Cornish men have Guary miracles and three mens songs; and, for the exercise of the body, hunting, hawking, shooting, wrastling, hurling, and such other games.
“The Guary miracle—in English, a miracle-play—is a kind of enterlude, compiled in Cornish out of some Scripture history, with that grossenes which accompanied the Romanes vetus Comedia. For representing it, they raise an earthen amphitheatre in some open field, having the diameter of his enclosed playne some forty or fifty foot. The country people flock from all sides, many miles off, to heare and see it, for they have therein devils and devices, to delight as well the eye as the eare; the players conne not their parts without booke, but are prompted by one called the Ordinary, who followeth at their back with the booke in his hand, and telleth them softly what they must pronounce aloud. Which manner once gave occasion to a pleasant conceyted gentleman, of practising a mery pranke; for he undertaking (perhaps of set purpose) an actor's roome, was accordingly lessoned (beforehand) by the Ordinary, that he [pg 259] must say after him. His turn came. Quoth the Ordinary, Goe forth man and shew thy selfe. The gentleman steps out upon the stage, and like a bad Clarke in Scripture matters, cleaving more to the letter than the sense, pronounced those words aloud. Oh! (sayes the fellowe softly in his eare) you marre all the play. And with this his passion the actor makes the audience in like sort acquainted. Hereon the prompter falls to flat rayling and cursing in the bitterest termes he could devise: which the gentleman, with a set gesture and countenance, still soberly related, untill the Ordinary, driven at last into a madde rage, was faine to give all over. Which trousse, though it brake off the enterlude, yet defrauded not the beholders, but dismissed them with a great deale more sport and laughter than such Guaries could have afforded.”[51]
Scawen, at the end of the seventeenth century, speaks of these miracle-plays, and considers the suppression of the Guirrimears,[52] or Great Plays or Speeches,[53] as one of the chief causes of the decay of the Cornish language.
“These Guirrimears,” he says, “which were used at the great conventions of the people, at which they had famous interludes celebrated with great preparations, and not without shows of devotion in them, solemnized in great and spacious downs of great capacity, encompassed about with earthen banks, and some in part stone-work, of largeness to contain thousands, the shapes of which remain in many places at this day, though the use of them long since gone.... This was a great means to keep in use the tongue with delight and admiration. They had recitations [pg 260] in them, poetical and divine, one of which I may suppose this small relique of antiquity to be, in which the passion of our Saviour, and his resurrection, is described.”
If to these mystery-plays and poems we add some versions of the Lord's Prayer, the Commandments, and the Creed, a protestation of the bishops in Britain to Augustine the monk, the Pope's legate, in the year 600 after Christ (MS. Gough, 4), the first chapter of Genesis, and some songs, proverbs, riddles, a tale and a glossary, we have an almost complete catalogue of what a Cornish library would be at the present day.
Now if we examine the language as preserved to us in these fragments, we find that it is full of Norman, Saxon, and Latin words. No one can doubt, for instance, that the following Cornish words are all taken from Latin, that is, from the Latin of the Church:—
Abat, an abbot; Lat. abbas.
Alter, altar; Lat. altare.
Apostol, apostle; Lat. apostolus.
Clauster, cloister; Lat. claustrum.
Colom, dove; Lat. columba.
Gwespar, vespers; Lat. vesper.
Cantuil, candle; Lat. candela.
Cantuilbren, candlestick; Lat. candelabrum.
Ail, angel; Lat. angelus.
Archail, archangel; Lat. archangelus.
Other words, though not immediately connected with the service and the doctrine of the Church, may nevertheless have passed from Latin into Cornish, either directly from the daily conversation of monks, priests, and schoolmasters, or indirectly from English or Norman, in both of which the same Latin words had naturally been adopted, though slightly modified according to the phonetic peculiarities of each. Thus:—
Ancar, anchor; the Latin, ancora. This might have come indirectly through English or Norman-French.
Aradar, plough; the Latin, aratrum. This must have come direct from Latin, as it does not exist in Norman or English.
Arghans, silver; argentum.
Keghin, kitchen; coquina. This is taken from the same Latin word from which the Romance languages formed cuisine, cucina; not from the classical Latin, culina.
Liver, book; liber, originally the bark of trees on which books were written.
Dinair, coin; denarius. Seth, arrow; sagitta. Caus, cheese; caseus. Caul, cabbage; caulis.
These words are certainly foreign words in Cornish and the other Celtic languages in which they occur, and to attempt to supply for some of them a purely Celtic etymology shows a complete want of appreciation both of the history of words and of the phonetic laws that govern each family of the Indo-European languages. Sometimes, no doubt, the Latin words have been considerably changed and modified, according to the phonetic peculiarities of the dialects into which they were received. Thus, gwespar for vesper, seth for sagitta, caus for caseus, hardly look like Latin words. Yet no real Celtic scholar would claim them as Celtic; and the Rev. Robert Williams, the author of the “Lexicon Cornu-Britannicum,” in speaking of a list of words borrowed from Latin by the Welsh during the stay of the Romans in Britain, is no doubt right in stating “that it will be found much more extensive than is generally imagined.”
Latin words which have reached the Cornish after they had assumed a French or Norman disguise, are, for instance,—
Emperur, instead of Latin imperator (Welsh, ymherawdwr).
Laian, the French loyal, but not the Latin legalis. Likewise, dislaian, disloyal.
Fruit, fruit; Lat. fructus; French, fruit.
Funten, fountain, commonly pronounced fenton; Lat. fontana; French, fontaine.
Gromersy, i.e. grand mercy, thanks.
Hoyz, hoyz, hoyz! hear, hear! The Norman-French, Oyez.
The town-crier of Aberconwy may still be heard prefacing his notices with the shout of “Hoyz, hoyz, hoyz!” which in other places has been corrupted to “O yes.”
The following words, adopted into Cornish and other Celtic dialects, clearly show their Saxon origin:—
Cafor, a chafer; Germ, käfer. Craft, art, craft. Redior, a reader. Storc, a stork. Let, hindrance, let; preserved in the German, verletzen.[54]
Considering that Cornish and other Celtic dialects are members of the same family to which Latin and German belong, it is sometimes difficult to tell at once whether a Celtic word was really borrowed, or whether it belongs to that ancient stock of words which all the Aryan languages share in common. This is a point which can be determined by scholars only, and by means of phonetic tests. Thus the Cornish huir, or hoer, is clearly the same word as the Latin soror, sister. But the change of s into h would not have taken place if the word had been simply borrowed from Latin, while many words beginning with s in Sanskrit, Latin, and German, change the s into h in Cornish as well as in Greek and Persian. The Cornish hoer, sister, is indeed curiously like the Persian kháher, the regular representative of the Sanskrit svasar, the Latin soror. The same applies to braud, brother, dedh, day, dri, three, and many more words which form the primitive stock of Cornish, and were common to all the Aryan languages before their earliest dispersion.
What applies to the language of Cornwall, applies with equal force to the other relics of antiquity of that curious county. It has been truly said that Cornwall is poor in antiquities, but it is equally true that it is rich in antiquity. The difficulty is to discriminate, and to distinguish what is really Cornish or Celtic from what may be later additions, of Roman, Saxon, Danish, and Norman origin. Now here, as [pg 264] we said before, the safest rule is clearly the same as that which we followed in our analysis of language. Let everything be claimed for English, Norman, Danish, and Roman sources that can clearly be proved to come from thence; but let what remains unclaimed be considered as Cornish or Celtic. Thus, if we do not find in countries exclusively inhabited by Romans or Saxons anything like a cromlech, surely we have a right to look upon these strange structures as remnants of Celtic times. It makes no difference if it can be shown that below these cromlechs coins have occasionally been found of the Roman Emperors. This only proves that even during the days of Roman supremacy the Cornish style of public monuments, whether sepulchral or otherwise, remained. Nay, why should not even a Roman settled in Cornwall have adopted the monumental style of his adopted country? Roman and Saxon hands may have helped to erect some of the cromlechs which are still to be seen in Cornwall, but the original idea of such monuments, and hence their name, is purely Celtic.
Cromlêh in Cornish, or cromlech in Welsh, means a bent slab, from the Cornish crom, bent, curved, rounded, and lêh, a slab. Though many of these cromlechs have been destroyed, Cornwall still possesses some fine specimens of these ancient stone tripods. Most of them are large granite slabs, supported by three stones fixed in the ground. These supporters are likewise huge flat stones, but the capstone is always the largest, and its weight inclining towards one point, imparts strength to the whole structure. At Lanyon, however, where the top-stone of a cromlech was thrown down in 1816 by a violent storm, the supporters remained standing, [pg 265] and the capstone was replaced in 1824, though not, it would seem, at its original height. Dr. Borlase relates that in his time the monument was high enough for a man to sit on horseback under it. At present such a feat would be impossible, the cover-stone being only about five feet from the ground. These cromlechs, though very surprising when seen for the first time, represent in reality one of the simplest achievements of primitive architecture. It is far easier to balance a heavy weight on three uneven props than to rest it level on two or four even supporters. There are, however, cromlechs resting on four or more stones, these stones forming a kind of chamber, or a kist-vaen, which is supposed to have served originally as a sepulchre. These structures presuppose a larger amount of architectural skill; still more so the gigantic portals of Stonehenge, which are formed by two pillars of equal height, joined by a superincumbent stone. Here weight alone was no longer considered sufficient for imparting strength and safety, but holes were worked in the upper stones, and the pointed tops of the pillars were fitted into them. In the slabs that form the cromlechs we find no such traces of careful workmanship; and this, as well as other considerations, would support the opinion, that in Stonehenge we have one of the latest specimens of Celtic architecture. Marvelous as are the remains of that primitive style of architectural art, the only real problem they offer is, how such large stones could have been brought together from a distance, and how such enormous weights could have been lifted up. The first question is answered by ropes [pg 266] and rollers; and the mural sculptures of Nineveh show us what can be done by such simple machinery. We there see the whole picture of how these colossal blocks of stone were moved from the quarry on to the place where they were wanted. Given plenty of time, and plenty of men and oxen, and there is no block that could not be brought to its right place by means of ropes and rollers. And that our forefathers did not stint themselves either in time, or in men, or other cattle, when engaged in erecting such monuments, we know even from comparatively modern times. Under Harold Harfagr, two kings spent three whole years in erecting one single tumulus; and Harold Blatand is said to have employed the whole of his army and a vast number of oxen in transporting a large stone which he wished to place on his mother's tomb. As to the second question, we can readily understand how, after the supporters had once been fixed in the ground, an artificial mound might be raised, which, when the heavy slab had been rolled up on an inclined plane, might be removed again, and thus leave the heavy stone poised in its startling elevation.
As skeletons have been found under some of the cromlechs, there can be little doubt that the chambers inclosed by them, the so-called kist-vaens, were intended to receive the remains of the dead, and to perpetuate their memory. And as these sepulchral monuments are most frequent in those parts of the British Isles which from the earliest to the latest times were inhabited by Celtic people, they may be considered as representative of the Celtic style of public [pg 267] sepulture. Kist-vaen, or cist-vaen, means a stone-chamber, from cista, a chest, and vaen, the modified form of maen or mên, stone. Their size is, with few exceptions, not less than the size of a human body. But although these monuments were originally sepulchral, we may well understand that the burying-places of great men, of kings, or priests, or generals, were likewise used for the celebration of other religious rites. Thus we read in the Book of Lecan, “that Amhalgaith built a cairn, for the purpose of holding a meeting of the Hy-Amhalgaith every year, and to view his ships and fleet going and coming, and as a place of interment for himself.”[55] Nor does it follow, as some antiquarians maintain, that every structure in the style of a cromlech, even in England, is exclusively Celtic. We imitate pyramids and obelisks: why should not the Saxons have built the Kitts Cotty House, which is found in a thoroughly Saxon neighborhood, after Celtic models and with the aid of Celtic captives? This cromlech stands in Kent, on the brow of a hill about a mile and a half from Aylesford, to the right of the great road from Rochester to Maidstone. Near it, across the Medway, are the stone circles of Addington. The stone on the south side is 8 ft. high by 7-½ broad, and 2 ft. thick; weight, about 8 tons. That on the north is 8 ft. by 8, and 2 thick; weight, 8 tons 10 cwt. The end stone, 5 ft. 6 in. high by 5 ft. broad; thickness, 14 in.; weight, 2 tons 8-¼ cwt. The impost is 11 ft. long by 8 ft. broad, and 2 ft. thick; weight, 10 tons 7 cwt. It is higher, therefore, than the Cornish cromlechs, but in other respects it is a true specimen of that class of Celtic monuments. The cover-stone of the cromlech at Molfra is 9 ft. 8 in. by 14 ft. 3 in.; its supporters [pg 268] are 5 ft. high. The cover-stone of the Chûn cromlech measures 12-½ ft. in length and 11 ft. in width. The largest slab is that at Lanyon, which measures 18-½ ft. in length and 9 ft. at the broadest part.
The cromlechs are no doubt the most characteristic and most striking among the monuments of Cornwall. Though historians have differed as to their exact purpose, not even the most careless traveller could pass them by without seeing that they do not stand there without a purpose. They speak for themselves, and they certainly speak in a language that is neither Roman, Saxon, Danish, nor Norman. Hence in England they may, by a kind of exhaustive process of reasoning, be claimed as relics of Celtic civilization. The same argument applies to the cromlechs and stone avenues of Carnac, in Brittany. Here, too, language and history attest the former presence of Celtic people; nor could any other race, that influenced the historical destinies of the North of Gaul, claim such structures as their own. Even in still more distant places, in the South of France, in Scandinavia, or Germany, where similar monuments have been discovered, they may, though more hesitatingly, be classed as Celtic, particularly if they are found near the natural high roads on which we know that the Celts in their westward migrations preceded the Teutonic and Slavonic Aryans. But the case is totally different when we hear of cromlechs, cairns, and kist-vaens in the North of Africa, in Upper Egypt, on the Lebanon, near the Jordan, in Circassia, or in the South of India. Here, and more particularly in the South of India, we have no indications whatever of Celtic Aryans; on the contrary, if that name is taken in its strict scientific meaning, it would be impossible to account for the presence [pg 269] of Celtic Aryans in those southern latitudes at any time after the original dispersion of the Aryan family. It is very natural that English officers living in India should be surprised at monuments which cannot but remind them of what they had seen at home, whether in Cornwall, Ireland, or Scotland. A description of some of these monuments, the so-called Pandoo Coolies in Malabar, was given by Mr. J. Babington, in 1820, and published in the third volume of the “Transactions of the Literary Society of Bombay,” in 1823. Captain Congreve called attention to what he considered Scythic Druidical remains in the Nilghiri hills, in a paper published in 1847, in the “Madras Journal of Literature and Science,” and the same subject was treated in the same journal by the Rev. W. Taylor. A most careful and interesting description of similar monuments has lately been published in the “Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy,” by Captain Meadows Taylor, under the title of “Description of Cairns, Cromlechs, Kist-vaens, and other Celtic, Druidical, or Scythian Monuments in the Dekhan.” Captain Taylor found these monuments near the village of Rajunkolloor, in the principality of Shorapoor, an independent native state, situated between the Bheema and Krishna rivers, immediately above their junction. Others were discovered near Huggeritgi, others on the hill of Yemmee Gooda, others again near Shapoor, Hyderabad, and other places. All these monuments in the South of India are no doubt extremely interesting; but to call them Celtic, Druidical, or Scythic, is unscientific, or, at all events, exceedingly premature. There is in all architectural monuments a natural or rational, and a conventional, or, it may be, irrational element. A striking agreement in purely conventional [pg 270] features may justify the assumption that monuments so far distant from each others as the cromlechs of Anglesea and the “Mori-Munni” of Shorapoor owe their origin to the same architects, or to the same races. But an agreement in purely natural contrivances goes for nothing, or, at least, for very little. Now there is very little that can be called conventional in a mere stone pillar, or in a cairn, that is, an artificial heap of stones. Even the erection of a cromlech can hardly be claimed as a separate style of architecture. Children, all over the world, if building houses with cards, will build cromlechs; and people, all over the world, if the neighborhood supplies large slabs of stone, will put three stones together to keep out the sun or the wind, and put a fourth stone on the top to keep out the rain. Before monuments like those described by Captain Meadows Taylor can be classed as Celtic or Druidical, a possibility, at all events, must be shown that Celts, in the true sense of the word, could ever have inhabited the Dekhan. Till that is done, it is better to leave them anonymous, or to call them by their native names, than to give to them a name which is apt to mislead the public at large, and to encourage theories which exceed the limits of legitimate speculation.
Returning to Cornwall, we find there, besides the cromlechs, pillars, holed stones, and stone circles, all of which may be classed as public monuments. They all bear witness to a kind of public spirit, and to a certain advance in social and political life, at the time of their erection. They were meant for people living at the time, who understood their meaning, if not as messages to posterity, and, if so, as truly historical monuments; for history begins when the living begin [pg 271] to care about a good opinion of those who come after them. Some of the single Cornish pillars tell us little indeed; nothing, in reality, beyond the fact that they were erected by human skill, and with some human purpose. Some of these monoliths seem to have been of a considerable size. In a village called Mên Perhen, in Constantine parish, there stood, “about five years ago,”—so Dr. Borlase relates in the year 1769,—a large pyramidal stone, twenty feet above the ground, and four feet in the ground; it made above twenty stone posts for gates when it was clove up by the farmer who gave the account to the Doctor.[56] Other stones, like the Mên Scrifa, have inscriptions, but these inscriptions are Roman, and of comparatively late date. There are some pillars, like the Pipers at Bolleit, which are clearly connected with the stone circles close by, remnants, it may be, of old stone avenues, or beacons, from which signals might be sent to other distant settlements. The holed stones, too, are generally found in close proximity to other large stone monuments. They are called mên-an-tol, hole-stones, in Cornwall; and the name of tol-men, or dol-men, which is somewhat promiscuously used by Celtic antiquarians, should be restricted to monuments of this class, toll being the Cornish word for hole, mên for stone, and an the article. French antiquarians, taking dol or tôl as a corruption of tabula, use dolman in the sense of table-stones, and as synonymous with cromlech, while they frequently use cromlech in the sense of stone circles. This can hardly be justified, and leads at all events to much confusion.
The stone circles, whether used for religious or judicial purposes,—and there was in ancient times very little [pg 272] difference between the two,—were clearly intended for solemn meetings. There is a very perfect circle at Boscawen-ûn, which consisted originally of nineteen stones. Dr. Borlase, whose work on the Antiquities of the County of Cornwall contains the most trustworthy information as to the state of Cornish antiquities about a hundred years ago, mentions three other circles which had the same number of stones, while others vary from twelve to seventy-two.
“The figure of these monuments,” he says, “is either simple, or compounded. Of the first kind are exact circles; elliptical or semicircular. The construction of these is not always the same, some having their circumference marked with large separate stones only; others having ridges of small stones intermixed, and sometimes walls and seats, serving to render the inclosure more complete. Other circular monuments have their figure more complex and varied, consisting, not only of a circle, but of some other distinguishing properties. In or near the centre of some stands a stone taller than the rest, as at Boscawen-ûn; in the middle of others, a kist-vaen. A cromlêh distinguishes the centre of some circles, and one remarkable rock that of others; some have only one line of stones in their circumference, and some have two; some circles are adjacent, some contiguous, and some include, and some intersect each other. Sometimes urns are found in or near them. Some are curiously erected on geometrical plans, the chief entrance facing the cardinal points of the heavens; some have avenues leading to them, placed exactly north and south, with detached stones, sometimes in straight lines to the east and west, sometimes triangular. These monuments are found in many foreign countries, in Iceland, Sweden, Denmark, and Germany, as well as in all the isles dependent upon Britain (the Orkneys, Western Isles, Jersey, Ireland, and the Isle of Man), and in most parts of Britain itself.”
Modern traditions have everywhere clustered round these curious stone circles. Being placed in a circular order, so as to make an area for dancing, they were naturally called Dawns-mên, i.e. dancing stones. [pg 273] This name was soon corrupted into dancemen, and a legend sprang up at once to account for the name, namely, that these men had danced on a Sunday and been changed into stones. Another corruption of the same name into Danis-mên led to the tradition that these circles were built by the Danes. A still more curious name for these circles is that of “Nine Maidens,” which occurs at Boscawen-ûn, and in several other places in Cornwall. Now the Boscawen-ûn circle consists of nineteen stones, and there are very few “Nine Maidens” that consist of nine stones only. Yet the name prevails, and is likewise supported by local legends of nine maidens having been changed into stones for dancing on a Sunday, or some other misdeed. One part of the legend may perhaps be explained by the fact that mêdn would be a common corruption in modern Cornish for mên, stone, as pen becomes pedn, and gwyn, gwydn, etc., and that the Saxons mistook Cornish mêdn for their own maiden. But even without this, legends of a similar character would spring up wherever the popular mind is startled by strange monuments, the history and purpose of which has been forgotten. Thus Captain Meadows Taylor tells us that at Vibat-Hullie the people told him “that the stones were men who, as they stood marking out the places for the elephants of the king of the dwarfs, were turned into stone by him, because they would not keep quiet.” And M. de Cambry, as quoted by him, says in regard to Carnac, “that the rocks were believed to be an army turned into stone, or the work of the Croins,—men or demons, two or three feet high, who carried these rocks in their hands, and placed them there.”
A second class of Cornish antiquities comprises private buildings, whether castles or huts or caves. [pg 274] What are called castles in Cornwall are simple intrenchments, consisting of large and small stones piled up about ten or twelve feet high, and held together by their own weight, without any cement. There are everywhere traces of a ditch, then of a wall; sometimes, as at Chûn Castle, of another ditch and another wall; and there is generally some contrivance for protecting the principal entrance by walls overlapping the ditches. Near these castles barrows are found, and in several cases there are clear traces of a communication between them and some ancient Celtic villages and caves, which seem to have been placed under the protection of these primitive strongholds. Many of the cliffs in Cornwall are fortified towards the land by walls and ditches, thus cutting off these extreme promontories from communication with the land, as they are by nature inaccessible from the sea. Some antiquarians ascribed these castles to the Danes, the very last people, one would think, to shut themselves up in such hopeless retreats. Here, too, as in other cases, a popular etymology may have taken the place of an historical authority, and the Cornish word for castle being Dinas as in Castle-an-Dinas, Pendennis, etc., the later Saxon-speaking population may have been reminded by Dinas of the Danes, and on the strength of this vague similarity have ascribed to these pirates the erection of the Cornish castles.
It is indeed difficult, with regard to these castles, to be positive as to the people by whom they were constructed. Tradition and history point to Romans and Saxons, as well as to Celts; nor is it at all unlikely that many of these half-natural, half-artificial strongholds, though originally planned by the Celtic inhabitants, were afterwards taken possession of and strengthened by Romans or Saxons.
But no such doubts are allowed with regard to Cornish huts, of which some striking remains have been preserved in Cornwall and other parts of England, particularly in those which, to the very last, remained the true home of the Celtic inhabitants of Britain. The houses and huts of the Romans were rectangular, nor is there any evidence to show that the Saxon ever approved of the circular style in domestic architecture.
If, then, we find these so-called bee-hive huts in places peculiarly Celtic, and if we remember that so early a writer as Strabo[57] was struck with the same strange style of Celtic architecture, we can hardly be suspected of Celtomania, if we claim them as Celtic workmanship, and dwell with a more than ordinary interest on these ancient chambers, now long deserted and nearly smothered with ferns and weeds, but in their general planning, as well as in their masonry, clearly exhibiting before us something of the arts and the life of the earliest inhabitants of these isles. Let anybody who has a sense of antiquity, and who can feel the spark which is sent on to us through an unbroken chain of history, when we stand on the Acropolis or on the Capitol, or when we read a ballad of Homer or a hymn of the Veda,—nay, if we but read in a proper spirit a chapter of the Old Testament too,—let such a man look at the Celtic huts at Bosprennis or Chysauster, and discover for himself, through the ferns and brambles, the old gray walls, slightly sloping inward, and arranged according to a design that cannot be mistaken; and miserable as these shapeless clumps may appear to the thoughtless traveller, they will convey to the true historian a lesson which he could hardly learn anywhere else. The [pg 276] ancient Britons will no longer be a mere name to him, no mere Pelasgians or Tyrrhenians. He has seen their homes and their handiwork; he has stood behind the walls which protected their lives and property; he has touched the stones which their hands piled up rudely, yet thoughtfully. And if that small spark of sympathy for those who gave the honored name of Britain to these islands has once been kindled among a few who have the power of influencing public opinion in England, we feel certain that something will be done to preserve what can still be preserved of Celtic remains from further destruction. It does honor to the British Parliament that large sums are granted, when it is necessary, to bring to these safe shores whatever can still be rescued from the ruins of Greece and Italy, of Lycia, Pergamos, Palestine, Egypt, Babylon, or Nineveh. But while explorers and excavators are sent to those distant countries, and the statues of Greece, the coffins of Egypt, and the winged monsters of Nineveh, are brought home in triumph to the portals of the British Museum, it is painful to see the splendid granite slabs of British cromlechs thrown down and carted away, stone circles destroyed to make way for farming improvements, and ancient huts and caves broken up to build new houses and stables, with the stones thus ready to hand. It is high time, indeed, that something should be done; and nothing will avail but to place every truly historical monument under national protection. Individual efforts may answer here and there, and a right spirit may be awakened from time to time by local societies; but during intervals of apathy mischief is done that can never be mended; and unless the damaging of national monuments, even though they should stand [pg 277] on private ground, is made a misdemeanor, we doubt whether, two hundred years hence, any enterprising explorer would be as fortunate as Mr. Layard and Sir H. Rawlinson have been in Babylon and Nineveh, and whether one single cromlech would be left for him to carry away to the National Museum of the Maoris. It is curious that the willful damage done to Logan Stones, once in the time of Cromwell by Shrubsall, and more recently by Lieutenant Goldsmith, should have raised such indignation, while acts of Vandalism, committed against real antiquities, are allowed to pass unnoticed. Mr. Scawen, in speaking of the mischief done by strangers in Cornwall, says:—
“Here, too, we may add, what wrong another sort of strangers has done to us, especially in the civil wars, and in particular by destroying of Mincamber, a famous monument, being a rock of infinite weight, which, as a burden, was laid upon other great stones, and yet so equally thereon poised up by Nature only, as a little child could instantly move it, but no one man or many remove it. This natural monument all travellers that came that way desired to behold; but in the time of Oliver's usurpation, when all monumental things became despicable, one Shrubsall, one of Oliver's heroes, then Governor of Pendennis, by labor and much ado, caused to be undermined and thrown down, to the great grief of the country; but to his own great glory, as he thought, doing it, as he said, with a small cane in his hand. I myself have heard him to boast of this act, being a prisoner then under him.”
Mr. Scawen, however, does not tell us that this Shrubsall, in throwing down the Mincamber, i.e. the Mênamber, acted very like the old missionaries in felling the sacred oaks in Germany. Merlin, it was believed, had proclaimed that this stone should stand until England had no king; and as Cornwall was a stronghold of the Stuarts, the destruction of this loyal stone may have seemed a matter of wise policy.
Even the foolish exploit of Lieutenant Goldsmith, in 1824, would seem to have had some kind of excuse. Dr. Borlase had asserted “that it was morally impossible that any lever, or indeed force, however applied in a mechanical way, could remove the famous Logan rock at Trereen Dinas from its present position.” Ptolemy, the son of Hephæstion, had made a similar remark about the Gigoman rock,[58] stating that it might be stirred with the stalk of an asphodel, but could not be removed by any force. Lieutenant Goldsmith, living in an age of experimental philosophy, undertook the experiment, in order to show that it was physically possible to overthrow the Logan; and he did it. He was, however, very properly punished for this unscientific experiment, and he had to replace the stone at his own expense.
As this matter is really serious, we have drawn up a short list of acts of Vandalism committed in Cornwall within the memory of living man. That list could easily be increased, but even as it is, we hope it may rouse the attention of the public:—
Between St. Ives and Zennor, on the lower road over Tregarthen Downs, stood a Logan rock. An old man, perhaps ninety years of age, told Mr. Hunt, who mentions this and other cases in the preface to his charming collection of Cornish tales and legends, that he had often logged it, and that it would make a noise which could be heard for miles.
At Balnoon, between Nancledrea and Knill's Steeple, some miners came upon “two slabs of granite cemented together,” which covered a walled grave three feet square, an ancient kist-vaen. In it they found an [pg 279] earthenware vessel, containing some black earth and a leaden spoon. The spoon was given to Mr. Praed, of Trevethow; the kist-vaen was utterly destroyed.
In Bosprennis Cross there was a very large coit or cromlech. It is said to have been fifteen feet square, and not more than one foot thick in any part. This was broken in two parts some years since, and taken to Penzance to form the beds of two ovens.
The curious caves and passages at Chysauster have been destroyed for building purposes within living memory.
Another Cornishman, Mr. Bellows, reports as follows:—
“In a field between the recently discovered Beehive hut and the Boscawen-ûn circle, out of the public road, we discovered part of a ‘Nine Maidens,’ perhaps the third of the circle, the rest of the stones being dragged out and placed against the hedge, to make room for the plough.”
The same intelligent antiquarian remarks:—
“The Boscawen-ûn circle seems to have consisted originally of twenty stones. Seventeen of them are upright, two are down, and a gap exists of exactly the double space for the twentieth. We found the missing stone not twenty yards off. A farmer had removed it, and made it into a gate-post. He had cut a road through the circle, and in such a manner that he was obliged to remove the offending stone to keep it straight. Fortunately the present proprietress is a lady of taste, and has surrounded the circle with a good hedge to prevent further Vandalism.”
Of the Mên-an-tol, at Boleit, we have received the following description from Mr. Botterell, who supplied Mr. Hunt with so many of his Cornish tales:—
“These stones are from twenty to twenty-five feet above the surface, and we were told by some folks of Boleit that more than ten feet had been sunk near, without finding the base. The Mên-an-tol have both been displaced, and removed a considerable [pg 280] distance from their original site. They are now placed in a hedge, to form the side of a gateway. The upper portion of one is so much broken that one cannot determine the angle, yet that it worked to an angle is quite apparent. The other is turned downward, and serves as the hanging-post of a gate. From the head being buried so deep in the ground, only part of the hole (which is in both stones about six inches diameter) could be seen; though the hole is too small to pop the smallest, or all but the smallest, baby through, the people call them crick-stones, and maintain they were so called before they were born. Crick-stones were used for dragging people through, to cure them of various diseases.”
The same gentleman, writing to one of the Cornish papers, informs the public that a few years ago a rock known by the name of Garrack-zans might be seen in the town-place of Sawah, in the parish of St. Levan; another in Roskestal, in the same parish. One is also said to have been removed from near the centre of Trereen, by the family of Jans, to make a grander approach to their mansion. The ruins, which still remain, are known by the name of the Jans House, although the family became extinct soon after perpetrating what was regarded by the old inhabitants as a sacrilegious act. The Garrack-zans may still be remaining in Roskestal and Sawah, but, as much alteration has recently taken place in these villages, in consequence of building new farm-houses, making new roads, etc., it is a great chance if they have not been either removed or destroyed.
Mr. J. T. Blight, the author of one of the most useful little guide-books of Cornwall, “A Week at the Land's End,” states that some eight or ten years ago the ruins of the ancient Chapel of St. Eloy, in St. Burian, were thrown over the cliff by the tenant of the estate, without the knowledge or permission of the owner of the property. Chûn Castle, he says, one of [pg 281] the finest examples of early military architecture in this kingdom, has for many years been resorted to as a sort of quarry. The same applies to Castle-an-Dinas.
From an interesting paper on Castallack Round by the same antiquarian, we quote the following passages, showing the constant mischief that is going on, whether due to downright Vandalism or to ignorance and indifference:—
“From a description of Castallack Round, in the parish of St. Paul, written by Mr. Crozier, perhaps fourteen or fifteen years ago, it appears that there was a massive outer wall, with an entrance on the south; from which a colonnade of stones led to an inner inclosure, also formed with stones, and nine feet in diameter. Mr. Haliwell, so recently as 1861, refers to the avenue of upright stones leading from the outer to the inner inclosure.
“On visiting the spot a few days ago (in 1865), I was surprised to find that not only were there no remains of an avenue of stones, but that the existence of an inner inclosure could scarcely be traced. It was, in fact, evident that some modern Vandal had here been at work. A laborer, employed in the field close by, with a complaisant smile, informed me that the old Round had been dug into last year, for the sake of the stones. I found, however, enough of the work left to be worthy of a few notes, sufficient to show that it was a kindred structure to that at Kerris, known as the Roundago, and described and figured in Borlase's ‘Antiquities of Cornwall.’ ... Mr. Crozier also refers to a stone, five feet high, which stood within a hundred yards of the Castallack Round, and from which the Pipers at Boleit could be seen.
“The attention of the Royal Institution of Cornwall has been repeatedly called to the destruction of Cornish antiquities, and the interference of landed proprietors has been frequently invoked in aid of their preservation; but it unfortunately happens, in most cases, that important remains are demolished by the tenants without the knowledge or consent of the landlords. On comparing the present condition of the Castallack Round with a description of its appearance so recently as in 1861, I find that the greater and more interesting part has been barbarously and irreparably destroyed; and I regret to say, I could draw up a [pg 282] long list of ancient remains in Cornwall, partially or totally demolished within the last few years.”
We can hardly hope that the wholesome superstition which prevented people in former days from desecrating their ancient monuments will be any protection to them much longer, though the following story shows that some grains of the old leaven are still left in the Cornish mind. Near Carleen, in Breage, an old cross has been removed from its place, and now does duty as a gate-post. The farmer occupying the farm where the cross stood, set his laborer to sink a pit in the required spot for the gate-post, but when it was intimated that the cross standing at a little distance off was to be erected therein, the man absolutely refused to have any hand in the matter, not on account of the beautiful or the antique, but for fear of the old people. Another farmer related that he had a neighbor who “haeled down a lot of stoans called the Roundago, and sold 'em for building the docks at Penzance. But not a penny of the money he got for 'em ever prospered, and there wasn't wan of the hosses that haeld 'em that lived out the twelvemonth; and they do say that some of the stoans do weep blood, but I don't believe that.”
There are many antiquarians who affect to despise the rude architecture of the Celts, nay, who would think the name of architecture disgraced if applied to cromlechs and bee-hive huts. But even these will perhaps be more willing to lend a helping hand in protecting the antiquities of Cornwall when they hear that even ancient Norman masonry is no longer safe in that country. An antiquarian writes to us from Cornwall: “I heard of some farmers in Meneage (the Lizard district) who dragged down an ancient well and rebuilt it. When called to task for it, they said, ‘The [pg 283] ould thing was so shaky that a wasn't fit to be seen, so we thought we'd putten to rights and build'un up fitty.’ ”
Such things, we feel sure, should not be, and would not be, allowed any longer, if public opinion, or the public conscience, was once roused. Let people laugh at Celtic monuments as much as they like, if they will only help to preserve their laughing-stocks from destruction. Let antiquarians be as skeptical as they like, if they will only prevent the dishonest withdrawal of the evidence against which their skepticism is directed. Are lake-dwellings in Switzerland, are flint-deposits in France, is kitchen-rubbish in Denmark, so very precious, and are the magnificent cromlechs, the curious holed stones, and even the rock-basins of Cornwall, so contemptible? There is a fashion even in scientific tastes. For thirty years M. Boucher de Perthes could hardly get a hearing for his flint-heads, and now he has become the centre of interest for geologists, anthropologists, and physiologists. There is every reason to expect that the interest, once awakened in the early history of our own race, will go on increasing; and two hundred years hence the antiquarians and anthropologists of the future will call us hard names if they find out how we allowed these relics of the earliest civilization of England to be destroyed. It is easy to say, What is there in a holed stone? It is a stone with a hole in it, and that is all. We do not wish to propound new theories; but in order to show how full of interest even a stone with a hole in it may become, we will just mention that the Mên-an-tol, or the holed stone which stands in one of the fields near Lanyon, is flanked by two other stones standing erect on each side. Let any one go there to watch a sunset about the time of the [pg 284] autumnal equinox, and he will see that the shadow thrown by the erect stone would fall straight through the hole of the Mên-an-tol. We know that the great festivals of the ancient world were regulated by the sun, and that some of these festive seasons—the winter solstice about Yule-tide or Christmas, the vernal equinox about Easter, the summer solstice on Midsummer-eve, about St. John Baptist's day, and the autumnal equinox about Michaelmas—are still kept, under changed names and with new objects, in our own time. This Mên-an-tol may be an old dial erected originally to fix the proper time for the celebration of the autumnal equinox; and though it may have been applied to other purposes likewise, such as the curing of children by dragging them several times through the hole, still its original intention may have been astronomical. It is easy to test this observation, and to find out whether the same remark does not hold good of other stones in Cornwall, as, for instance, the Two Pipers. We do not wish to attribute to this guess as to the original intention of the Mên-an-tol more importance than it deserves, nor would we in any way countenance the opinion of those who, beginning with Cæsar, ascribe to the Celts and their Druids every kind of mysterious wisdom. A mere shepherd, though he had never heard the name of the equinox, might have erected such a stone for his own convenience, in order to know the time when he might safely bring his flocks out, or take them back to their safer stables. But this would in no way diminish the interest of the Mên-an-tol. It would still remain one of the few relics of the childhood of our race; one of the witnesses of the earliest workings of the human mind in its struggle against, and in its alliance with, the powers of nature; one of [pg 285] the vestiges of the first civilization of the British Isles. Even the Romans, who carried their Roman roads in a straight line through the countries they had conquered, undeterred by any obstacles, unawed by any sanctuaries, respected, as can hardly be doubted, Silbury Hill, and made the road from Bath to London diverge from the usual straight line, instead of cutting through that time-honored mound. Would the engineers of our railways show a similar regard for any national monument, whether Celtic, Roman, or Saxon? When Charles II., in 1663, went to see the Celtic remains of Abury, sixty-three stones were still standing within the intrenched inclosure. Not quite a hundred years later they had dwindled down to forty-four, the rest having been used for building purposes. Dr. Stukeley, who published a description of Abury in 1743, tells us that he himself saw the upper stone of the great cromlech there broken and carried away, the fragments of it making no less than twenty cart-loads. After another century had passed, seventeen stones only remained within the great inclosure, and these, too, are being gradually broken up and carted away. Surely such things ought not to be. Let those whom it concerns look to it before it is too late. These Celtic monuments are public property as much as London Stone, Coronation Stone, or Westminster Abbey, and posterity will hold the present generation responsible for the safe keeping of the national heirlooms of England.[59]