(1816-1895)
ustav Freytag, one of the foremost of German novelists, was born July 13th, 1816, in Kreuzburg, Silesia, where his father was a physician. He studied alternately at Breslau and Berlin, at which latter university he was given the degree of a doctor of philosophy in 1838. In 1839 he settled as a privatdocent at the University of Breslau, where he lectured on the German language and literature until 1844, when he resigned his position to devote himself to literature. He removed to Leipzig in 1846, and the following year to Dresden, where he married. In 1848 he returned to Leipzig to edit with Julian Schmidt the weekly journal Die Grenzboten, which he conducted until 1861, and again from 1869 to 1870. In 1867 he became Liberal member for Erfurt in the North German Reichstag. In 1870, on the breaking out of the Franco-Prussian war, he was attached to the staff of the Crown Prince, later the German Emperor Frederick III., and remained in service until after the battle of Sedan. Subsequently to 1870 his journalistic work was chiefly for the newly established weekly periodical Im Neuen Reich. In 1879 he retired from public life and afterward lived in Wiesbaden, except for the summer months, which he spent on his estate Siebleben near Gotha. He died at Wiesbaden, April 30th, 1895.
All of Freytag's earliest work, with the single exception of a volume of poems published in 1845 under the title 'In Breslau,' is dramatic. His first production was a comedy, 'Die Brautfahrt' (The Wedding Journey), published in 1844, which although it was awarded a prize offered by the Royal Theatre in Berlin, found but indifferent popular favor, as did its successor, the one-act tragedy 'Die Gelehrte' (The Scholar). With his next play, 'Die Valentine' (1846), Freytag however was signally successful. This was followed the year after by 'Graf Waldemar.' He attained his highest dramatic success with the comedy 'Die Journalisten' (The Journalists), which appeared in 1853, and since its first production in 1854 has maintained its place as one of the most popular plays on the German stage. But one other play followed, the tragedy 'Die Fabier' (The Fabii), which appeared in 1859.
He had begun in the mean time his career as a novelist with his most famous novel, 'Soll und Haben' (Debit and Credit), which was published in 1855 and met with an immediate and unbounded success. The appearance of this first novel, furthermore, was most significant, for it marked at the same time an era both in German literature and in its author's own career, in that it introduced into the one in its most recent phase one of the profoundest problems of modern life in Germany, and unmistakably pointed out, in the other, the direction which he was subsequently to follow. This latter statement has a twofold bearing. It is not only that as a writer of novels Freytag did his most important and lasting work, but that the whole of this work was in a manner the development of a similar tendency. Although as different as need be in environment, all of his subsequent novels embody inherently the characteristics of 'Debit and Credit,' for like it, they are all well-defined attempts to depict the typical social conditions of the period in which they move, and their characters are the carefully considered types of their time. Freytag, with a philosophic seriousness of purpose perhaps characteristically German, is writing not only novels but the history of civilization, in his early work. Later on, the didactic purpose to a certain extent overshadows the rest; and although he never loses his power of telling a story, it is the history in the end that is paramount.
'Debit and Credit' is a novel of the century, and it takes up the great problem of the century, the position of modern industrialism in the social life of the day. Its principal centre of action is the business house of the wholesale grocer T.O. Schröter, who is an admirable embodiment of the careful, industrious, and successful merchant. In sharp contradistinction to him is the Baron von Rothsattel, the representative of earlier conditions in the organization of the State, which made the nobleman pre-eminently a social force. Freytag's polemic is not only the dignity of labor under present conditions, but the absolute effeteness of the old order of things that despised it. The real hero of the story is Anton Wohlfahrt, who begins his commercial career as a youth in the house of T.O. Schröter, and ends, after some vicissitudes, as a member of the firm. Mercantile life has nowhere been better described in its monotony, its interests, and its aspirations, as the story is developed; and although at first sight no field could be more barren in literary interest, there is in reality no lack of incident and action, whose inevitable sequence makes the plot. Anton's career in the house of Schröter is interrupted by his connection with the Baron von Rothsattel, who has, through his want of a business training and his lack of a knowledge of men, fallen into the hands of a Jew money-lender; by whom he is persuaded to mortgage his land in order to embark in a business undertaking which it is presumed will increase his fortune. His mill fails, however, and he is involved in difficulties from which he is unable to extricate himself. Anton, the intimate friend of the family, is therefore persuaded by the Baroness to undertake the management of matters, and after vainly endeavoring to induce his principal to interest himself in the affair, sacrifices his position to accompany the family to their dilapidated estate in a distant province. The Baron will tolerate no interference, however, and Anton finally returns to the house of Schröter and is reinstated in the business. Lenore, the Baron's daughter, the first cause of Anton's interest, meantime becomes engaged to the young nobleman Fink; who has been an associate of Anton's in the office of T. O. Schröter, has but recently returned from the United States, and who first advances funds for the improvement of the estate and ultimately purchases it.
Fink acts his part in the author's philosophy as a contrast to the Baron von Rothsattel. Although a nobleman, he has adapted himself to the conditions of the century, and is free from any hallucinations of his hereditary rank, even while he is perfectly awake to its traditions. He has entered upon a commercial career not from choice, but from necessity; but he has accepted his fate and has made successful use of his opportunities. Anton marries the sister of T. O. Schröter, and becomes a partner in the business. Fink is however really the one who gains the princess in this modern tale, and is plainly to have the more important share as an actual social force in the future. The old feudal nobility has played its part on the stage of the world; and being so picturesque, and full of romantic opportunity, its loss is doubtless to be regretted. The tamer realities of the modern industrial state have succeeded it. As Freytag solves the problem in 'Soll und Haben,' it is the man who works, the man of the industrial classes alone, to whom the victory belongs in the modern social struggle, be his antecedents bourgeois or aristocratic.
Freytag's second great novel, 'Die Verlorene Handschrift' (The Lost Manuscript), which appeared in 1864, concerns itself with another phase of the same problem. This time, however, instead of the merchant and man of affairs, it is the scholar about whom the action centres. Felix Werner, professor of philology, has come upon unmistakable traces of the lost books of Tacitus, whose recovery is the object of his life. In his search for the manuscript in an old house in the country he finds his future wife Ilse, one of the finest types in all German literature of the true German woman, both while at home a maid in her father's house and subsequently as the professor's wife in the university town. Werner, in his scholarly absorption, unwittingly neglects his wife, whose beauty has attracted the attention of the prince; and there is a series of intrigues which threaten seriously to involve the innocent Ilse, until the prince's evil intentions become evident even to the unsuspecting Werner. The covers of the lost manuscript are actually discovered at last, but the book itself has vanished. In this second novel Freytag displays a most genial humor, unsuspected in the author of 'Debit and Credit,' but apparent enough in 'The Journalists.' The professorial life is admirably drawn with all its lights and shadows; and its motives and ambitions, its peculiar struggles and strivings, have never been more understandingly treated. The story, however, even more than 'Debit and Credit,' displays the author's weaknesses of construction. The plot is so confused by digressions that the main thread is sometimes lost sight of, and the tendency to philosophical generalization, which as a German is to some extent the author's birthright, reaches in these pages an appalling exemplification. What had been an extraordinary novel pruned of these defects, is still not an ordinary novel with them; and as a picture of German university life from the point of view of the professor, 'The Lost Manuscript' stands unrivaled in literature. Again the thesis in this second novel is the dignity of labor, and the nobleman fares no better at the author's hands than in the mercantile environment of the first.
These two novels, which outside of Germany are Freytag's best claim to attention, were followed by the four volumes of 'Bilder aus der Deutschen Vergangenheit' (Pictures from the German Past: 1859-62), a series of studies of German life from different epochs of its history, intended to illustrate the evolution of modern conditions through their successive stages from the remote past. Freytag's early work as a university docent had particularly fitted him for this sort of writing, and some of his best is contained in these books.
More important still, however, was his next great work, the long series of historical novels 'Die Ahnen' (The Ancestors: 1872-80), an ambitious plan, born of the stirring events of the Franco-Prussian War and the resultant awakening of the new spirit of nationality, to trace the development of the German people from the earliest time down to the present day. To carry out this purpose he accordingly selects a typical German family, which he describes under the characteristic conditions of each period, with the most conscientious attention to manners and customs and social environment. The same family thus appears from generation to generation under the changing conditions of the different epochs of German history, and the whole forms together the consecutive Culturgeschichte of the nation.
This whole long series of 'The Ancestors' stands as a monument of careful research into the most minute factors of German life in their time of action. Freytag's antiquarianism is not of the dilettante kind that is content to masquerade modern motives in ancient garb and setting. He was fully conscious of all the elements of his problem, and he sought to reproduce the intellectual point of view of his actors, and to account for their motives of action, as well as to picture accurately their material environment. It is in his super-conscientiousness in these directions that the inherent weakness of the novels of this series lies. They are too palpably reconstructions with a purpose. Their didacticism is wrapped around them like a garment; and much of the time, that is all that is visible upon the surface. As the series advances this fault grows upon them. They are in reality of very unequal interest. 'Ingo' and 'Ingraban' are the sprightliest in action, and have been as a consequence the most widely read of these later works, many of which are, in part at least, far too serious of purpose to play their part conspicuously well as novels.
The novels of 'The Ancestors' are a culmination of Freytag's literary evolution. As a playwright he will no doubt be forgotten except for 'The Journalists'; in which he has, however, left an imperishable play which German critics have not hesitated to call the best comedy of the century. The two novels of modern life from his middle period form together his greatest work, although here, and particularly in 'The Lost Manuscript,' he has overweighted his material with abstract discussion, in which his perspective has sometimes all but disappeared. Subsequently, both the 'Bilder' and 'Die Ahnen' show his decided predilection for historical studies. The struggle in his own case was between the scholar and the man of letters, in which the scholar eventually won possession of the field.
Freytag's other work includes—'Die Technik des Dramas' (The Technique of the Drama: 1863), a consideration of the principles of dramatic construction; the life of his friend Karl Malthy, 1870; and 'Der Kronprinz und die Deutsche Kaiserkrone' (The Crown Prince and the German Imperial Crown: 1889), written after the death of Frederick III., with whom Freytag had had personal relations. To accompany the collected edition of his works (1887-88), he wrote a short autobiography, 'Erinnerungen aus Meinem Leben' (Recollections from My Life).
THE GERMAN PROFESSOR
From 'The Lost Manuscript'
Professors' wives also have trouble with their husbands. Sometimes when Ilse was seated in company with her intimate friends—with Madame Raschke, Madame Struvelius, or little Madame Günther—at one of those confidential coffee parties which they did not altogether despise, many things would come to light.
The conversation with these intellectual women was certainly very interesting. It is true the talk sometimes passed lightly over the heads of the servants, and sometimes housekeeping troubles ventured out of the pond of pleasant talk like croaking frogs. To Ilse's surprise, she found that even Flaminia Struvelius could discourse seriously about preserving little gherkins, and that she sought closely for the marks of youth in a plucked goose. The merry Madame Günther aroused horror and laughter in more experienced married women, when she asserted that she could not endure the crying of little children, and that from the very first she would force her child (which she had not yet got) to proper silence by chastisement. Thus conversation sometimes left greater subjects to stray into this domain. And when unimportant subjects were reviewed, it naturally came about that the men were honored by a quiet discussion. At such times it was evident that although the subject under consideration was men in general, each of the wives was thinking of her own husband, and that each silently carried about a secret bundle of cares, and justified the conclusion of her hearers that that husband too must be difficult to manage.
Madame Raschke's troubles could not be concealed; the whole town knew them. It was notorious that one market day her husband had gone to the university in his dressing-gown—in a brilliant dressing-gown, blue and orange, with a Turkish pattern. His students, who loved him dearly and were well aware of his habits, could not succeed in suppressing a loud laugh; and Raschke had calmly hung the dressing-gown over his pulpit, held his lecture in his shirt-sleeves, and returned home in one of the students' overcoats. Since that time Madame Raschke never let her husband go out without herself inspecting him. It also appeared that all these ten years he had not been able to learn his way about the town, and she dared not change her residence, because she was quite sure that her professor would never remember it, and always return to his old home. Struvelius also occasioned much anxiety. Ilse knew about the last and greatest cause; but it also came to light that he expected his wife to read Latin proof-sheets, as she knew something of that language. Besides, he was quite incapable of refusing commissions to amiable wine merchants. At her marriage Madame Struvelius had found a whole cellar full of large and small wine casks, none of which had been drawn off, while he complained bitterly that no wine was ever brought into his cellar. Even little Madame Günther related that her husband could not give up night work; and that once, when he wandered with a lamp among his books, he came too near the curtain, which caught fire. He tore it off, and in so doing burnt his hands, and burst into the bedroom with blackened fingers in great alarm, and resembling Othello more than a mineralogist....
Raschke was wandering about in the ante-room. Here too was confusion. Gabriel had not yet returned from his distant errand; the cook had left the remains of the meal standing on a side-table till his return; and Raschke had to find his greatcoat by himself. He rummaged among the clothes, and seized hold of a coat and a hat. As he was not so absent-minded as usual to-day, a glance at the despised supper reminded him just in time that he was to eat a fowl; so he seized hold of the newspaper which Gabriel had laid ready for his master, hastily took one of the chickens out of the dish, wrapped it in the journal, and thrust it in his pocket, agreeably surprised at the depth and capaciousness it revealed. Then he rushed past the astonished cook, and out of the house. When he opened the door of the étage he stumbled against something that was crouching on the threshold. He heard a horrible growling behind him, and stormed down the stairs and out of doors.
The words of the friend whom he had left now came into his mind. Werner's whole bearing was very characteristic; and there was something fine about it. It was strange that in a moment of anger Werner's face had acquired a sudden resemblance to a bull-dog's. Here the direct chain of the philosopher's contemplations was crossed by the remembrance of the conversation on animals' souls.
"It is really a pity that it is still so difficult to determine an animal's expression of soul. If we could succeed in that, science would gain. For if we could compare in all their minutiæ the expression and gestures of human beings and higher animals, we might make most interesting deductions from their common peculiarities and their particular differences. In this way the natural origin of their dramatic movements, and perhaps some new laws, would be discovered."
While the philosopher was pondering thus, he felt a continued pulling at his coat-tails. As his wife was in the habit of giving him a gentle pull when he was walking next her absorbed in thought and they met some acquaintance, he took no further notice of it, but took off his hat, and bowing politely towards the railing of the bridge, said "Good-evening."
"These common and original elements in the mimic expression of human beings and higher animals might, if rightly understood, even open out new vistas into the great mystery of life." Another pull. Raschke mechanically took off his hat. Another pull. "Thank you, dear Aurelia, I did bow." As he spoke, the thought crossed his mind that his wife would not pull at his coat so low down. It was not she, but his little daughter Bertha who was pulling; for she often walked gravely next him, and like her mother, pulled at the bell for bows. "That will do, my dear," said he, as Bertha continued to snatch and pull at his coat-tails. "Come here, you little rogue!" and he absently put his hand behind him to seize the little tease. He seized hold of something round and shaggy; he felt sharp teeth on his fingers, and turned with a start. There he saw in the lamplight a reddish monster with a big head, shaggy hair, and a little tassel that fell back into its hind legs in lieu of a tail. His wife and daughter were horribly transformed; and he gazed in surprise on this indistinct creature which seated itself before him, and glared at him in silence.
"A strange adventure!" exclaimed Raschke. "What are you, unknown creature? Presumably a dog. Away with you!" The animal retreated a few steps. Raschke continued his meditations: "If we trace back the expression and gestures of the affections to their original forms in this manner, one of the most active laws would certainly prove to be the endeavor to attract or repel the extraneous. It would be instructive to distinguish, by means of these involuntary movements of men and animals, what is essential and what conventional. Away, dog! Do me a favor and go home. What does he want with me? Evidently he belongs to Werner's domain. The poor creature will assuredly lose itself in the town under the dominion of an idée fixe."
Meantime Speihahn's attacks were becoming more violent; and now he was marching in a quite unnatural and purely conventional manner on his hind legs, while his fore paws were leaning against the professor's back, and his teeth were actually biting into the coat.
A belated shoemaker's boy stood still and beat his leathern apron. "Is not the master ashamed to let his poor apprentice push him along like that?" In truth, the dog behind the man looked like a dwarf pushing a giant along the ice.
Raschke's interest in the dog's thoughts increased. He stood still near a lantern, examined and felt his coat. This coat had developed a velvet collar and very long sleeves, advantages that the philosopher had never yet remarked in his greatcoat. Now the matter became clear to him: absorbed in thought, he had chosen a wrong coat, and the worthy dog insisted on saving his master's garment, and making the thief aware that there was something wrong. Raschke was so pleased with this sagacity that he turned round, addressed some kind words to Speihahn, and made an attempt to stroke his shaggy hair. The dog again snapped at his hand. "You are quite right to be angry with me," replied Raschke; "I will prove to you that I acknowledge my fault." He took off the coat and hung it over his arm. "Yes, it is much heavier than my own." He walked on cheerfully in his thin coat, and observed with satisfaction that the dog abandoned the attacks on his back. But instead, Speihahn sprang upon his side, and again bit at the coat and the hand, and growled unpleasantly.
The professor got angry with the dog, and when he came to a bench on the promenade he laid down the coat, intending to face the dog seriously and drive him home. In this manner he got rid of the dog, but also of the coat. For Speihahn sprang upon the bench with a mighty bound, placed himself astride the coat, and met the professor, who tried to drive him away, with hideous growling and snarling.
"It is Werner's coat," said the professor, "and it is Werner's dog: it would be wrong to beat the poor creature because it is becoming violent in its fidelity, and it would be wrong to leave the dog and the coat." So he remained standing before the dog and speaking kindly to him: but Speihahn no longer took any notice of the professor; he turned against the coat itself, which he scratched, rummaged, and bit. Raschke saw that the coat could not long endure such rage. "He is frantic or mad," said he suspiciously. "I shall have to use force against you after all, poor creature;" and he considered whether he should also jump upon the seat and push the mad creature by a violent kick into the water, or whether it would be better to open the inevitable attack from below. He resolved on the latter course, and looked round to see whether he could anywhere discover a stone or stick to throw at the raging beast. As he looked, he observed the trees and the dark sky above him, and the place seemed quite unfamiliar. "Has magic been at work here?" he exclaimed, with amusement. He turned politely to a solitary wanderer who was passing that way: "Would you kindly tell me in what part of the town we are? And could you perhaps lend me your stick for a moment?"
"Indeed," angrily replied the person addressed, "those are very suspicious questions. I want my stick myself at night. Who are you, sir?" The stranger approached the professor menacingly.
"I am peaceable," replied Raschke, "and by no means inclined to violent attacks. A quarrel has arisen between me and the animal on this seat for the possession of a coat, and I should be much obliged to you if you would drive the dog away from the coat. But I beg you not to hurt the animal any more than is absolutely necessary."
"Is that your coat there?" asked the man.
"Unfortunately I cannot give you an affirmative answer," replied Raschke conscientiously.
"There must be something wrong here," exclaimed the stranger, again eyeing the professor suspiciously.
"There is, indeed," replied Raschke. "The dog is out of his mind; the coat is exchanged, and I do not know where we are."
"Close to the valley gate, Professor Raschke," answered the voice of Gabriel, who hastily joined the group. "Excuse me, but what brings you here?"
"Capital!" exclaimed Raschke joyously. "Pray take charge of this coat and this dog."
Gabriel gazed in amazement at Speihahn, who was now lying on the coat and bending his head before his friend. Gabriel threw down the dog and seized the coat. "Why, that is our greatcoat!" exclaimed he.
"Yes, Gabriel," said the professor, "that was my mistake, and the dog has shown marvelous fidelity to the coat."
"Fidelity!" exclaimed Gabriel indignantly, as he drew a parcel out of the coat pocket. "It was greedy selfishness, sir; there must be some food in this pocket."
"Yes, true," exclaimed Raschke; "it is all the chicken's fault. Give me the parcel, Gabriel; I must eat the fowl myself; and we might bid each other good-night now with mutual satisfaction, if you would just show me my way a little among these trees."
"But you must not go home in the night air without an overcoat," said Gabriel considerately. "We are not far from our house; the best way would really be for you to come back with me, sir."
Raschke considered and laughed.
"You are right, Gabriel; my departure was awkward; and to-day an animal's soul has restored a man's soul to order."
"If you mean this dog," said Gabriel, "it would be the first time he ever did anything good. I see he must have followed you from our door; for I put little bones there for him of an evening."
"Just now he seemed not to be quite in his right mind," said the professor.
"He is cunning enough when he pleases," continued Gabriel mysteriously; "but if I were to speak of my experiences with this dog—"
"Do speak, Gabriel," eagerly exclaimed the philosopher. "There is nothing so valuable concerning animals as a truthful statement from those who have carefully observed them."
"I may say that I have done so," confirmed Gabriel, with satisfaction; "and if you want to know exactly what he is, I can assure you that he is possessed of the devil, he is a thief, he is embittered, and he hates all mankind."
"Ah, indeed!" replied the professor, somewhat disconcerted. "I see it is much more difficult to look into a dog's heart than into a professor's."
Speihahn crept along silent and suppressed, and listened to the praises that fell to his lot; while Professor Raschke, conducted by Gabriel, returned to the house by the park. Gabriel opened the sitting-room door, and announced:—
"Professor Raschke."
Ilse extended both her hands to him.
"Welcome, welcome, dear Professor Raschke!" and led him to her husband's study.
"Here I am again," said Raschke cheerfully, "after wandering as in a fairy tale. What has brought me back were two animals, who showed me the right way,—a roast fowl and an embittered dog."
Felix sprang up; the men greeted one another warmly, shaking hands, and after all misadventures, spent a happy evening.
When Raschke had gone home late, Gabriel said sadly to his mistress, "This was the new coat; the fowl and the dog have put it in a horrible plight."
FRIEDRICH FROEBEL
(1782-1852)
BY NORA ARCHIBALD SMITH
t was Froebel who said, "The clearer the thread that runs through our lives backward to our childhood, the clearer will be our onward glance to the goal;" and in the fragment of autobiography he has left us, he illustrates forcibly the truth of his own saying. The motherless baby who plays alone in the village pastor's quiet house, the dreamy child who wanders solitary in the high-walled garden; the thoughtful lad, neglected, misunderstood, who forgets the harsh realities of life in pondering the mysteries of the flowers, the contradictions of existence, and the dogmas of orthodox theology; who decides in early boyhood that the pleasures of the senses are without enduring influence and therefore on no account to be eagerly pursued;—these presentments of himself, which he summons up for us from the past, show the vividness of his early recollections and indicate the course which the stream of his life is to run.
Friedrich Froebel
The coldness and injustice of the new mother who assumed control of the household when he was four years old, his isolation from other children, the merely casual notice he received from the busy father absorbed in his parish work, all tended to turn inward the tide of his mental and spiritual life. He studied himself, not only because it was the bent of his nature, but because he lacked outside objects of interest; and to this early habit of introspection we owe many of the valuable features of his educational philosophy. Whoever has learned thoroughly to understand one child, has conquered a spot of firm ground on which to rest while he studies the world of children; and because the great teacher realized this truth, because he longed to give to others the means of development denied to himself, he turns for us the heart-leaves of his boyhood.
It would appear that Froebel's characteristics were strongly marked and unusual from the beginning. Called by every one "a moon-struck child" in Oberweissbach, the village of his birth, he was just as unanimously considered "an old fool" when, crowned with the experience of seventy years, he played with the village children on the green hills of Thuringia. The intensity of his inward life, the white heat of his convictions, his absolute blindness to any selfish idea or aim, his enthusiasm, the exaltation of his spiritual nature, all furnish so many cogent reasons why the people of any day or of any community should have failed to understand him, and scorned what they could not comprehend. It is the old story of the seers and the prophets repeated as many times as they appear; for "these colossal souls," as Emerson said, "require a long focal distance to be seen."
At ten years old the sensitive boy was fortunately removed from the uncongenial atmosphere of the parental household; and in his uncle's home he spent five free and happy years, being apprenticed at the end of this time to a forester in his native Thuringian woods. Then followed a year's course in the University of Jena, and four years spent in the study of farming, in clerical work of various kinds, and in land-surveying. All these employments, however, Froebel himself felt to be merely provisional; for like the hazel wand in the diviner's hand, his instinct was blindly seeking through these restless years the well-spring of his life.
In Frankfort, where he had gone intending to study architecture, Destiny touched him on the shoulder, and he turned and knew her. Through a curious combination of circumstances he gained employment in Herr Gruner's Model School, and it was found at once that he was what the Germans love to call "a teacher by the grace of God." The first time he met his class of boys he tells us that he felt inexpressibly happy; the hazel wand had found the waters and was fixed at last. From this time on, all the events of his life were connected with his experience as a teacher. Impelled as soon as he had begun his work by a desire for more effective methods, he visited Yverdon, then the centre of educational thought, and studied with Pestalozzi. He went again in 1808, accompanied by three pupils, and spent two years there, alternately studying and teaching.
There was a year of lectures at Göttingen after this, and one at the University of Berlin, accompanied by unceasing study and research both in literary and scientific lines; but in the fateful year 1813 this quiet student life was broken in upon, for impelled by strong moral conviction, Froebel joined Baron von Lützow's famous volunteer corps, formed to harass the French by constant skirmishes and to encourage the smaller German States to rise against Napoleon.
No thirst for glory prompted this action, but a lofty conception of the office of the educator. How could any young man capable of bearing arms, Froebel says, become a teacher of children whose Fatherland he had refused to defend? how could he in after years incite his pupils to do something noble, something calling for sacrifice and unselfishness, without exposing himself to their derision and contempt? The reasoning was perfect, and he made practice follow upon the heels of theory as closely as he had always done since he became master of his fate.
After the Peace of Paris he settled down for a time to a quiet life in the mineralogical museum at the University of Berlin, his duties being the care, arrangement, and investigation of crystals. Surrounded thus by the exquisite formations whose development according to law is so perfect, whose obedience to the promptings of an inward ideal so complete, he could not but learn from their unconscious ethics to look into the depths of his own nature, and there recognize more clearly the purpose it was intended to work out.
In 1816 he quietly gave up his position, and taking as pupils five of his nephews, three of whom were fatherless, he entered upon his life work, the first step in which was the carrying out of his plan for a "Universal German Educational Institute." He was without money, of course, as he had always been and always would be,—his hands were made for giving, not for getting; he slept in a barn on a wisp of straw while arranging for his first school at Griesheim; but outward things were so little real to him in comparison with the life of the spirit, that bodily privations seemed scarcely worth considering. The school at Keilhau, to which he soon removed, the institutions later established in Wartensee and Willisau, the orphanage in Burgdorf, all were most successful educationally, but, it is hardly necessary to say, were never a source of profit to their head and founder.
Through the twenty succeeding years, busy as he was in teaching, in lecturing, in writing, he was constantly shadowed by dissatisfaction with the foundation upon which he was building. A nebulous idea for the betterment of things was floating before him; but it was not until 1836 that it appeared to his eyes as a "definite truth." This definite truth, the discovery of his old age, was of course the kindergarten; and from this time until the end, all other work was laid aside, and his entire strength given to the consummate flower of his educational thought.
The first kindergarten was opened in 1837 at Blankenburg (where a memorial school is now conducted), and in 1850 the institution at Marienthal for the training of kindergartners was founded, Froebel remaining at its head until his death two years after.
With the exception of that remarkable book 'The Education of Man' (1826), his most important literary work was done after 1836; 'Pedagogics of the Kindergarten,' the first great European contribution to the subject of child-study, appearing from 1837 to 1840 in the form of separate essays, and the 'Mutter-und-Kose Lieder' (Mother-Play) in 1843. Many of his educational aphorisms and occasional speeches were preserved by his great disciple the Baroness von Marenholtz-Bülow in her 'Reminiscences of Froebel'; and though two most interesting volumes of his correspondence have been published, there remain a number of letters, as well as essays and educational sketches, not yet rendered into English.
Froebel's literary style is often stiff and involved, its phrases somewhat labored, and its substance exceedingly difficult to translate with spirit and fidelity; yet after all, his mannerisms are of a kind to which one easily becomes accustomed, and the kernel of his thought when reached is found well worth the trouble of removing a layer of husk. He had always an infinitude of things to say, and they were all things of purpose and of meaning; but in writing, as well as in formal speaking, the language to clothe the thought came to him slowly and with difficulty. Yet it appears that in friendly private intercourse he spoke fluently, and one of his students reports that in his classes he was often "overpowering and sublime, the stream of his words pouring forth like fiery rain."
It is probable that in daily life Froebel was not always an agreeable house-mate; for he was a genius, a reformer, and an unworldly enthusiast, believing in himself and in his mission with all the ardor of a heart centred in one fixed purpose. He was quite intolerant of those who doubted or disbelieved in his theories, as well as of those who, believing, did not carry their faith into works. The people who stood nearest him and devoted themselves to the furthering of his ideas slept on no bed of roses, certainly; but although he sometimes sacrificed their private interests to his cause, it must not be forgotten that he first laid himself and all that he had upon the same altar. His nature was one that naturally inspired reverence and loyalty, and drew from his associates the most extraordinary devotion and self-sacrifice. Then, as now, women were peculiarly attracted by his burning enthusiasm, his prophetic utterances, and his lofty views of their sex and its mission; and then, as now, the almost fanatical zeal of his followers is perhaps to be explained by the fact that he gives a new world-view to his students,—one that produces much the same effect upon the character as the spiritual exaltation called "experiencing religion."
He was twice married, in each case to a superior woman of great gifts of mind and character, and both helpmates joyfully took up a life of privation and care that they might be associated with him and with his work. Those memorable words spoken of our Washington,—"Heaven left him childless that a nation might call him father," are even more applicable to Froebel, for his wise and tender fatherhood extends to all the children of the world. When he passed through the village streets of his own country, little ones came running from every doorstep; the babies clinging to his knees and the older ones hanging about his neck and refusing to leave the dear play-master, as they called him. So the kindergartners love to think of him to-day,—the tall spare figure, the long hair, the wise, plain, strong-featured face, the shining eyes, and the little ones clustering about him as they clustered about another Teacher in Galilee, centuries ago.
Froebel's educational creed cannot here be cited at length, but some of its fundamental articles are:—
The education of the child should begin with its birth, and should be threefold, addressing the mental, spiritual, and physical natures.
It should be continued as it has begun, by appealing to the heart and the emotions as the starting-point of the human soul.
There should be sequence, orderly progression, and one continuous purpose throughout the entire scheme of education, from kindergarten to university.
Education should be conducted according to nature, and should be a free, spontaneous growth,—a development from within, never a prescription from without.
The training of the child should be conducted by means of the activities, needs, desires, and delights, which are the common heritage of childhood.
The child should be led from the beginning to feel that one life thrills through every manifestation of the universe, and that he is a part of all that is.
The object of education is the development of the human being in the totality of his powers as a child of nature, a child of man, and a child of God.
These principles of Froebel's, many of them the products of his own mind, others the pure gold of educational currency upon which he has but stamped his own image, are so true and so far-reaching that they have already begun to modify all education and are destined to work greater magic in the future. The great teacher's place in history may be determined, by-and-by, more by the wonderful uplift and impetus he gave to the whole educational world, than by the particular system of child-culture in connection with which he is best known to-day.
Judged by ordinary worldly standards, his life was an unsuccessful one, full of trials and privations, and empty of reward. His death-blow was doubtless struck by the prohibition of kindergartens in Prussia in 1851, an edict which remained nine years in force. His strength had been too sorely tried to resist this final crushing misfortune, and he passed away the following year. His body was borne to the grave through a heavy storm of wind and rain that seemed to symbolize the vicissitudes of his earthly days, while as a forecast of the future the sun shone out at the last moment, and the train of mourners looked back to see the low mound irradiated with glory.
In Thuringia, where the great child-lover was born, the kindergartens, his best memorials, cluster thickly now; and on the face of the cliffs that overhang the bridle-path across the Glockner mountain may be seen in great letters the single word Froebel, hewn deep into the solid rock.
THE RIGHT OF THE CHILD
From 'Reminiscences of Friedrich Froebel,' by Baroness B. von Marenholtz-Bülow. Copyright 1877, by Mary Mann. Reprinted by permission of Lee & Shepard, publishers, Boston.
All that does not grow out of one's inner being, all that is not one's own original feeling and thought, or that at least does not awaken that, oppresses and defaces the individuality of man instead of calling it forth, and nature becomes thereby a caricature. Shall we never cease to stamp human nature, even in childhood, like coins? to overlay it with foreign images and foreign superscriptions, instead of letting it develop itself and grow into form according to the law of life planted in it by God the Father, so that it may be able to bear the stamp of the Divine, and become an image of God?...
This theory of love is to serve as the highest goal and polestar of human education, and must be attended to in the germ of humanity, the child, and truly in his very first impulses. The conquest of self-seeking egoism is the most important task of education; for selfishness isolates the individual from all communion, and kills the life-giving principle of love. Therefore the first object of education is to teach to love, to break up the egoism of the individual, and to lead him from the first stage of communion in the family through all the following stages of social life to the love of humanity, or to the highest self-conquest by which man rises to Divine unity....
Women are to recognize that childhood and womanliness (the care of childhood and the life of women) are inseparably connected; that they form a unit; and that God and nature have placed the protection of the human plant in their hands. Hitherto the female sex could take only a more or less passive part in human history, because great battles and the political organization of nations were not suited to their powers. But at the present stage of culture, nothing is more pressingly required than the cultivation of every human power for the arts of peace and the work of higher civilization. The culture of individuals, and therefore of the whole nation, depends in great part upon the earliest care of childhood. On that account women, as one half of mankind, have to undertake the most important part of the problems of the time, problems that men are not able to solve. If but one half of the work be accomplished, then our epoch, like all others, will fail to reach the appointed goal. As educators of mankind, the women of the present time have the highest duty to perform, while hitherto they have been scarcely more than the beloved mothers of human beings....
But I will protect childhood, that it may not as in earlier generations be pinioned, as in a strait-jacket, in garments of custom and ancient prescription that have become too narrow for the new time. I shall show the way and shape the means, that every human soul may grow of itself, out of its own individuality. But where shall I find allies and helpers if not in women, who as mothers and teachers may put my idea in execution? Only intellectually active women can and will do it. But if these are to be loaded with the ballast of dead knowledge that can take no root in the unprepared ground, if the fountains of their own original life are to be choked up with it, they will not follow my direction nor understand the call of the time for the new task of their sex, but will seek satisfaction in empty superficiality.
To learn to comprehend nature in the child,—is not that to comprehend one's own nature and the nature of mankind? And in this comprehension is there not involved a certain degree of comprehension of all things else? Women cannot learn and take into themselves anything higher and more comprehensive. It should therefore at least be the beginning, and the love of childhood should be awakened in the mind (and in a wider sense, this is the love of humanity), so that a new, free generation of men can grow up by right care.
EVOLUTION
From 'The Mottoes and Commentaries of Mother-Play.' Copyright 1895, by D. Appleton & Co.
What shall we learn from our yearning look into the heart of the flower and the eye of the child? This truth: Whatever develops, be it into flower or tree or man, is from the beginning implicitly that which it has the power to become. The possibility of perfect manhood is what you read in your child's eye, just as the perfect flower is prophesied in the bud, or the giant oak in the tiny acorn. A presentiment that the ideal or generic human being slumbers, dreams, stirs in your unconscious infant—this it is, O mother, which transfigures you as you gaze upon him. Strive to define to yourself what is that generic ideal which is wrapped up in your child. Surely, as your child—or in other words, as child of man—he is destined to live in the past and future as well as in the present. His earthly being implies a past heaven; his birth makes a present heaven; in his soul he holds a future heaven. This threefold heaven, which you also bear within you, shines out on you through your child's eyes.
The beast lives only in the present. Of past and future he knows naught. But to man belong not only the present, but also the future and the past. His thought pierces the heaven of the future, and hope is born. He learns that all human life is one life; that all human joys and sorrows are his joys and sorrows, and through participation enters the present heaven—the heaven of love. He turns his mind towards the past, and out of retrospection wrests a vigorous faith. What soul could fail to conquer an invincible trust in the pure, the good, the holy, the ideally human, the truly Divine, if it would look with single eye into its own past, into the past of history? Could there be a man in whose soul such a contemplation of the past would fail to blossom into devout insight, into self-conscious and self-comprehending faith? Must not such a retrospect unveil the truth? Must not the beauty of the unveiled truth allure him to Divine doing, Divine living? All that is high and holy in human life meets in that faith which is born of the unveiling of a heaven that has always been; in that hope born of a vision of the heaven that shall be; in that love which creates a heaven in the eternal Now. These three heavens shine out upon you through your child's eye. The presentiment that he carries these three heavens within him transfigures your countenance as you gaze upon him. Cherish this premonition, for thereby you will help him to make his life a musical chord wherein are blended the three notes of faith, hope, and love. These celestial virtues will link his life with the Divine life through which all life is one—with the God who is the supernal fountain of life, light, and love....
Higher and more important than the cultivation of man's outer ear, is the culture of that inner sense of harmony whereby the soul learns to perceive sweet accord in soundless things, and to discern within itself harmonies and discords. The importance of wakening the inner ear to this music of the soul can scarcely be exaggerated. Learning to hear it within, the child will strive to give it outer form and expression; and even if in such effort he is only partially successful, he will gain thereby the power to appreciate the more successful effort of others. Thus enriching his own life by the life of others, he solves the problem of development. How else were it possible within the quickly fleeting hours of mortal life to develop our being in all directions, to fathom its depths, scale its heights, measure its boundaries? What we are, what we would be, we must learn to recognize in the mirror of all other lives. By the effort of each, and the recognition of all, the Divine man is revealed in humanity....
Against the bright light which shines on the smooth white wall is thrust a dark object, and straightway appears the form which so delights the child. This is the outward fact; what is the truth which through this fact is dimly hinted to the prophetic mind? Is it not the creative and transforming power of light, that power which brings form and color out of chaos, and makes the beauty which gladdens our hearts? Is it not more than this,—a foreshadowing, perhaps, of the spiritual fact that our darkest experiences may project themselves in forms that will delight and bless, if in our hearts shines the light of God? The sternest crags, the most forbidding chasms, are beautiful in the mellow sunshine; while the fairest landscape loses all charm, and indeed ceases to be, when the light which created it is withdrawn. Is it not thus also with our lives? Yesterday, touched by the light of enthusiastic emotion, all our relationships seemed beautiful and blessed; to-day, when the glow of enthusiasm has faded, they oppress and repulse us. Only the conviction that it is the darkness within us which makes the darkness without, can restore the lost peace of our souls. Be it therefore, O mother, your sacred duty to make your darling early feel the working both of the outer and inner light. Let him see in one the symbol of the other, and tracing light and color to their source in the sun, may he learn to trace the beauty and meaning of his life to their source in God.
Translation of Susan E. Blow.
THE LAWS OF THE MIND
From 'The Letters of Froebel'
I am firmly convinced that all the phenomena of the child-world, those which delight us as well as those which grieve us, depend upon fixed laws as definite as those of the cosmos, the planetary system, and the operations of nature; and it is therefore possible to discover them and examine them. When once we know and have assimilated these laws, we shall be able powerfully to counteract any retrograde and faulty tendencies in the children, and to encourage, at the same time, all that is good and virtuous.
FOR THE CHILDREN
From 'The Letters of Froebel'
I wish you could have been here this evening, and seen the many beautiful and varied forms and lovely patterns which freely and spontaneously developed themselves from some systematic variations of a simple ground form, in stick-playing. No one would believe, without seeing it, how the child soul, the child life, develops when treated as a whole, and in the sense of forming a part of the great connected life of the world, by some skilled kindergarten teacher—nay, even by one who is only simple-hearted, thoughtful, and attentive; nor how it blooms into delicious harmonies like a beautifully tinted flower. Oh, if I could only shout aloud with ten thousand lung-power the truth that I now tell you in silence! Then would I make the ears of a hundred thousand men ring with it! What keenness of sensation, what a soul, what a mind, what force of will and active energy, what dexterity and skill of muscular movement and of perception, and what calm and patience, will not all these things call out in the children!
How is it that parents are so blind and deaf, when they profess to be so eager to work for the welfare, the health, and peace of their children? No! I cannot understand it; and yet a whole generation has passed since this system first delivered its message, first called for educational amendment, first pointed out where the need for it lay, and showed how it could be satisfied.
If I were not afraid of being taken for an idiot or an escaped lunatic, I would run barefoot from one end of Germany to the other and cry aloud to all men:—"Set to work at once for your children's sake on some universally developing plan, aiming at unity of life purpose, and through that at joy and peace." But what good would it do? A Curtman and a Ramsauer, in their stupidity or maliciousness, make it their duty to stigmatize my work as sinful, when I am but quietly corresponding with just my own friends and sympathizers; for they say I am destroying all pleasure in life for the parents: "Who could be so silly as I,—amongst sane men who acknowledge that parents have a right to enjoy life,—I who perpetually call to these parents in tones of imperative demand, 'Come, let us live for our children!'" (Kommt, laszt uns unseren Kindern leben!)
MOTIVES
From 'The Education of Man.' By permission of Josephine Jarvis, the translator, and A. Lovell & Co., publishers
Only in the measure that we are thoroughly penetrated by the pure, spiritual, inward, human relations, and are faithful to them even in the smallest detail in life, do we attain to the complete knowledge and perception of the Divine-human relation; only in that measure do we anticipate them so deeply, vividly, and truly, that every yearning of our whole being is thereby satisfied,—at least receives its whole meaning, and is changed from a constantly unfulfilled yearning to an immediately rewarded effort....
How we degrade and lower the human nature which we should raise, how we weaken those whom we should strengthen, when we hold up to them an inducement to act virtuously, even though we place this inducement in another world! If we employ an outward incentive, though it be the most spiritual, to call forth better life, and leave undeveloped the inner, spontaneous, and independent power of representing pure humanity which rests in each man, we degrade our human nature.
But how wholly different every thing is, if man, especially in boyhood, is made to observe the reflex action of his conduct, not on his outward more or less agreeable position, but on his inner, spontaneous or fettered, clear or clouded, satisfied or dissatisfied condition of spirit and mind! The experiences which proceed from this observation will necessarily more and more awaken the inner sense of man: and then true sense, the greatest treasure of boy and man, comes into his life.
APHORISMS
I see in every child the possibility of a perfect man.
The child-soul is an ever-bubbling fountain in the world of humanity.
The plays of childhood are the heart-leaves of the whole future life.
Childish unconsciousness is rest in God.
From each object of nature and of life, there goes a path toward God.
Perfect human joy is also worship, for it is ordered by God.
The first groundwork of religious life is love—love to God and man—in the bosom of the family.
Childhood is the most important stage of the total development of man and of humanity.
Women must make of their educational calling a priestly office.
Isolation and exclusion destroy life; union and participation create life.
Without religious preparation in childhood, no true religion and no union with God is possible for men.
The tree germ bears within itself the nature of the whole tree; the human being bears in himself the nature of all humanity; and is not therefore humanity born anew in each child?
In the children lies the seed-corn of the future.
The lovingly cared for, and thereby steadily and strongly developed human life, also the cloudless child life, is of itself a Christ-like one.
In all things works one creative life, because the life of all things proceeds from one God.
Let us live with our children: so shall their lives bring peace and joy to us; so shall we begin to be and to become wise.
What boys and girls play in earliest childhood will become by-and-by a beautiful reality of serious life; for they expand into stronger and lovelier youthfulness by seeking on every side appropriate objects to verify the thoughts of their inmost souls.
This earliest age is the most important one for education, because the beginning decides the manner of progress and the end. If national order is to be recognized in later years as a benefit, childhood must first be accustomed to law and order, and therein find the means of freedom. Lawlessness and caprice must rule in no period of life, not even in that of the nursling.
The kindergarten is the free republic of childhood.
A deep feeling of the universal brotherhood of man,—what is it but a true sense of our close filial union with God?
Man must be able to fail, in order to be good and virtuous; and he must be able to become a slave in order to be truly free.
My teachers are the children themselves, with all their purity, their innocence, their unconsciousness, and their irresistible claims; and I follow them like a faithful, trustful scholar.
A story told at the right time is like a looking-glass for the mind.
I wish to cultivate men who stand rooted in nature, with their feet in God's earth, whose heads reach toward and look into the heavens; whose hearts unite the richly formed life of earth and nature, with the purity and peace of heaven,—God's earth and God's heaven.
THE MENAGERIE.
Photogravure from a Painting by T. R. Sunderland.
"What boys and girls play in earliest childhood will become by-and-by a beautiful reality of serious life; for they expand into stronger and lovelier youthfulness by seeking on every side appropriate objects to verify the thoughts of their inmost souls."—Froebel.
FROISSART
(1337-1410?)
BY GEORGE McLEAN HARPER
roissart is the artist of chivalry. On his pages are painted, with immortal brilliancy, the splendid shows, the coronations, weddings, tourneys, marches, feasts, and battles of the English and French knighthood just before the close of the Middle Ages. "I intend," he says in the Prologue of his chronicle, "to treat and record history and matter of great praise, to the end that the honorable emprises and noble adventures and deeds of arms, which have come about from the wars of France and England, may be notably enregistered and placed in perpetual memory, whereby chevaliers may take example to encourage them in well-doing."
Froissart
Chivalry, in the popular understanding, is the fine flower of feudalism, its bloom of poetic and heroic life. But in reality it was artificial, having grown from an exaggerated respect for certain human qualities, at the expense of others fully as essential and indeed no less beautiful. Courage is good; but it is not rare, and the love of fighting for fighting's sake is made possible only by disregarding large areas of life to which war brings no harvest of happiness, and over which it does not even cast the glamor of romance. The works of civilized communities—agriculture, industry, commerce, art, learning, religion—were nearly at a standstill in the middle of the fourteenth century, when Europe was turned into a playground for steel-clad barbarians.
This perversion of nature could not last. The wretched Hundred Years' War had run but half its course when the misery and disgust among the real people, who thought and wrought, drove them to such despairing efforts as the Jacquerie in France and Wat Tyler's Rebellion in England. It was the English archers, as Froissart reluctantly admits, and not the knights, who won the battle of Poitiers. Gunpowder and cannon, a few years later, doomed the man-at-arms, and the rise of strong monarchies crowded out the feudal system. The thunder of artillery which echoes faintly in the last pages of Froissart is like a parting salvo to all the pageantry the volume holds. From cannon-ball and musket-shot the glittering procession has found refuge there. Into the safe retreat of these illuminated parchments, all the banners and pennons, lances, crests, and tapestries, knights and horses under clanking mail, had time—and but just time—to withdraw. We find them there, fresh as when they hurried in, the colors bright, the trumpets blowing.
Jean Froissart was born at Valenciennes in Hainault, in 1337, the year of his birth almost coinciding with Chaucer's. He tells us in his long autobiographical poem, 'L'Espinette Amoureuse,' that he was fond of play when a boy, and delighted in dances, carols, and poems, and had a liking for all those who loved dogs and birds. In the school where he was sent, he says, there were little girls whom he tried to please by giving them rings of glass, and pins, and apples, and pears. It seemed to him a most worthy thing to acquire their favor, and he wondered when it would be his turn to fall really in love. Much of this poem, which narrates tediously the love affair that was not long in coming, is probably fictitious; but there is no doubt of the accuracy of his description of himself in the opening lines, as fond of pleasure, prone to gallantry, and susceptible to all the bright faces of romance. From love and arms, he says, we are often told that all joy and every honor flow. He informs us elsewhere that he was no sooner out of school than he began to write, putting into verse the wars of his time.
In 1361 he went to England, where Edward III was reigning with Philippa his queen, a daughter of the Count of Hainault. His passport to the favor of his great countrywoman was a book, the result of these rhymings, covering the period from the battle of Poitiers, 1356, to the time of his voyage. This volume is not known to exist, nor any copy of it. The Queen made him a clerk of her chamber. He had abundant opportunity in England to gratify his curiosity and fill his note-book, for the court was full of French noblemen, lately come over as hostages for King Jean of France, who was captured at the battle of Poitiers.
In 1365 he took letters of recommendation from the Queen to David Bruce, King of Scotland, whom he followed for three months in his progress through that realm; spending a fortnight at the castle of William Douglas and making everywhere diligent inquiry about the recent war of 1345. In his delightful little poem 'The Debate between the Horse and the Greyhound,' beginning, "Froissart from Scotland was returning," we have a lifelike figure of the inquisitive young chronicler, pushing unweariedly from inn to inn on a tired horse and leading a footsore dog.
Between his thirtieth and his thirty-fourth year he was sometimes in England and sometimes in various parts of the Continent. In August 1369, while he was abroad, his patroness Queen Philippa died. She had encouraged him to continue his researches and writings, and he had presented her with a second volume, in prose, which has come down to us as a part of the chronicle. He admits that his work was an expansion of the chronicle of Jean le Bel, Canon of Saint Lambert at Liège, for he says:—"As all great rivers are made by the gathering together of many streams and springs, so the sciences also are extracted and compiled by many clerks: what one knows, the other does not."
On hearing of the Queen's death, Froissart settled in his own country of Hainault. There he won favor from princes, as was his custom, by giving them manuscripts of his chronicle, which was growing apace. By the middle of 1373 we find him become a churchman and provided with a living, in which he remained ten years, compiling fresh history and correcting what he had already written and put in circulation. A little later, 1376 to 1383, he made a more thorough revision of his chronicle, going so far as to modify its spirit, which had been favorable to English character and policy, and make it more agreeable to partisans of France. Although Froissart was not a Frenchman, his writings are all in the French language, which was of course his native tongue.
About the beginning of 1384 he was made a canon of the Church, at Chimay, a small town near the French frontier, and in this region he observed the military movements then going on there, and recorded them immediately in Book ii. of his chronicle. Four years of quiet were however too much for his mobile and energetic spirit; and in 1388, hearing that the Count Gaston de Foix, in the Pyrenees, was a man likely to know many details of the English wars in Gascony and Guyenne, he set out to visit him, taking among other presents a book of his poetry and two couples of hounds. When he still had ten days to travel he met a gentleman of Foix, with whom he journeyed the rest of the way, beguiling the time with talk about the sieges the various towns upon their route had suffered.
"At the words which he spoke I was delighted, for they pleased me much, and right well did I retain them all; and as soon as I had dismounted at the hostelries along the road which we traveled together, I wrote them down, at evening as in the morning, to have a better record of them in times to come; for there is nothing so retentive as writing."
Count Gaston received him hospitably, and filled his three months' sojourn with stories of great events. Then Froissart visited many towns of Provence and Languedoc. These peregrinations furnished much of the material for Book iii. Little more is known of his life, except with respect to a visit to England which he made in 1394, and which enabled him to collect material for a large part of Book iv., the last in the chronicle. He is supposed to have died at Chimay, later than 1400, and perhaps, as tradition asserts, in 1410.
It is an engaging picture, this, of a genial, sharp-eyed, somewhat worldly churchman, riding his gray horse over hill and dale in quest of knowledge. We can fancy him arriving at his inn of an evening, and at once asking the obsequious host what knight or other great person dwells in the neighborhood. He loses no time before calling at the castle, and is gladly admitted when he tells his well-known name. He is ready to pay for any historical information with a story from his own collection. He is welcome everywhere, and for his part does not regret the time thus spent, nor the money,—several fortunes, by his own count,—for he has the light heart of the true traveler. It is always sunshine where he goes. The clangor of arms and the blare of trumpets hover ever above the horizon. Around the corner of every hill sits a fair castle by a shining river. From town to town, from province to province, his love of listening draws him on. To realize the charm of journeying in those days, we must remember that the local customs and qualities were almost undisturbed by communication; two French cities only a score of miles apart would often differ from each other as much as Nuremberg does from Venice.
"And I tell you for a truth," we read, "that to make these chronicles I have gone in my time much through the world, both to fulfill my pleasure by seeing the wonders of the earth, and to inquire about the arms and adventures that are written in this book."
So to horse, good Canon of Chimay! Throw aside books; there is news of fighting in the South; after the battle, soldiers will talk. There have been deeds of courage and romance. Hasten thither, while the tale of them is new!
If he were not so celebrated as a chronicler, Froissart would be known as one of the last of the wandering minstrels. He had the roving foot; he lived by charming the rich into generosity with his recitals. And he wrote much poetry, which is little read, except where it has some autobiographical interest. We possess the long poems, 'L'Espinette Amoureuse,' 'Le Buisson de Jeunesse,' 'Le Dit du Florin,' and several shorter pieces, with fragments of his once famous versified romance 'Méliador.'
His great prose work, while professing to be a history, in distinction from the chronicles of previous writers, is however not an orderly narration, nor is it a philosophical treatment of political causes and effects. It is a collection of pictures and stories, without much unity except the constant purpose of exhibiting the prowess of knighthood. There is not much indication even of partisanship or patriotic feeling. Froissart generally gives due meed of praise to the best knight in every bout, the best battalion in every encounter, regardless of sides.
The subjects treated are so numerous and disparate that no general idea of them can be given. They cover the time from 1326 to 1394, and lead us through England, Scotland, Flanders, Hainault, France, Italy, Spain, and Northern Africa. Among the most interesting passages are the story of King Edward's campaign against the Scots; his march through France; the battle of Crécy; the siege of Calais; Wat Tyler's Rebellion, which Froissart the well-fed parasite treats with an odd and inconsistent mingling of horror and contempt; the Jacquerie, which he says was the work of peasant dogs, the scum of the earth; the battle of Poitiers, with a fine description of the Black Prince waiting at table on poor captured King Jean; and the rise and fall of Philip van Artevelde.
Froissart's chronicle used to be regarded as authoritative history. But as might have been expected from his mode of inquiry, it is full of geographical, chronological, and other errors. Getting his information by ear, he wrote proper names phonetically, or turned them into something resembling French. Thus Worcester becomes "Vaucestre," Seymour "Simon," Sutherland "Surlant," Walter Tyler "Vautre Tuilier," Edinburgh "Hedaimbourch," Stirling "Eturmelin." The persons from whom he got his material were generally partisans either of France or of England, and often told him their stories years after the events; so that although he tried to be impartial himself, and to offset one witness by another, he seldom heard a judicial account of a battle or a quarrel. He seems to have consulted few written records, though he might easily have seen the State papers of England and Hainault.
It is useless to blame him, however; for the writing of mere history was not his purpose. With all his fine devotion to his life work,—a devotion which is the more admirable when we consider his pleasure-loving nature,—with all his attention to fairness, his great concern was not so much to instruct as to delight, first himself, secondly the great people of his age, and lastly posterity, on whom he ever and anon cast a shrewd and longing glance. To please his contemporaries, he several times revised his work. Posterity has nearly always preferred what might be called the first edition, which is the most unconscious and entertaining, though the least precise.
But if we must deny him much of the value as a political historian which was once attributed to him, we may still regard him as a great authority for the general aspect of life in the fourteenth century. Manners, customs, morals, as well as armor and dress, are no doubt correctly portrayed in his book. We learn from it what was deemed virtue and what vice; we learn that although religion was sincerely professed by the upper classes, it was not very successfully practiced, and had amazingly little effect upon morals. We are struck, for instance, with the absence of imagination or sympathy which permitted people to witness the horrible tortures inflicted on prisoners and criminals, although their minds were frequently filled with visions of supernatural beings. Froissart unconsciously makes himself, too, a medium for studying human character in his time, by his negative morality, his complacent recording of crimes, his unconcerned mention of horrors. Yet from his bringing up as a poet, and his scholarly associations, and his connection with the Church, it is likely he was a gentler man than nine-tenths of the knights and squires and men-at-arms about him.
There is an indifference colder even than cynicism in his failure to remark on the sufferings of the poor, which were so awful in his age. It is the result of class prejudice, and seems deliberate. The burned village, the trampled grain-field, the cowering women, the starved children, the rotting corpses, the mangled forms of living and agonizing foot-soldiers,—all these consequences of war he sees and occasionally mentions, yet they hardly touch him. But he is forever mourning the death of stricken knights as if it were a woeful loss. Yet for all his association with the governing class, we never find ourselves thinking of him as anything but a commoner raised to fortune by genius and favor. He has not the distinction of Joinville, who was a nobleman in the conventional sense and also in the truest sense.
Froissart's merit, then, is not that he is a great political historian, nor even a great historian of the culture of his time. He did not see accurately enough to be the first, nor broadly and deeply and independently enough to be the second. But kindly Nature made him something else, and enabled him to win that name "which honoreth most and most endureth." She gave him the painter's eye, the poet's fancy, and it is as the artist of chivalry he lives to-day. His chronicle may be often false to historical fact, it may not display a broad and sympathetic intelligence or a generous impatience of conventionality, but it does please, it does enthrall. It is one of those books without moral intent, like the Arabian Nights, which the boys of all ages will persist in reading, and which men delight in if they love good pictures and good story-telling. No more lasting colors have come down to us from Venetian painters than those which rush out from the words on his pages. His scenes do not take shape in our minds as etchings or engravings, but smile themselves into being, like oil-paintings. Sunlight, the glint of steel, red and yellow banners waving, white horses galloping over the sand, flashing armor, glittering spurs, the shining faces of eager men, fill with glory this great pictorial wonder-book of the Middle Ages.
THE INVASION OF FRANCE BY KING EDWARD III., AND THE BATTLE OF CRÉCY
From the 'Chronicles': Translation of John Bourchier, Lord Berners
How the King of England Rode Through Normandy
When the King of England arrived in the Hogue Saint-Vaast, the King issued out of his ship, and the first foot that he set on the ground he fell so rudely that the blood brast out of his nose. The knights that were about him took him up and said, "Sir, for God's sake enter again into your ship, and come not aland this day, for this is but an evil sign for us." Then the King answered quickly and said, "Wherefore? This is a good token for me, for the land desireth to have me." Of the which answer all his men were right joyful. So that day and night the King lodged on the sands, and in the mean time discharged the ships of their horses and other baggages; there the King made two marshals of his host, the one the Lord Godfrey of Harcourt and the other the Earl of Warwick, and the Earl of Arundel constable. And he ordained that the Earl of Huntingdon should keep the fleet of ships with a hundred men of arms and four hundred archers; and also he ordained three battles, one to go on his right hand, closing to the seaside, and the other on his left hand, and the King himself in the midst, and every night to lodge all in one field.
Thus they set forth as they were ordained, and they that went by the sea took all the ships that they found in their ways; and so long they went forth, what by sea and what by land, that they came to a good port and to a good town called Barfleur, the which incontinent was won, for they within gave up for fear of death. Howbeit, for all that, the town was robbed, and much gold and silver there found, and rich jewels; there was found so much riches, that the boys and villains of the host set nothing by good furred gowns; they made all the men of the town to issue out and to go into the ships, because they would not suffer them to be behind them for fear of rebelling again. After the town of Barfleur was thus taken and robbed without brenning, then they spread abroad in the country and did what they list, for there was not to resist them. At last they came to a great and a rich town called Cherbourg; the town they won and robbed it, and brent part thereof, but into the castle they could not come, it was so strong and well furnished with men of war.
Of the Great Assembly that the French King Made to Resist the King of England
Thus by the Englishmen was brent, exiled, robbed, wasted, and pilled the good plentiful country of Normandy. Then the French King sent for the Lord John of Hainault, who came to him with a great number; also the King sent for other men of arms, dukes, earls, barons, knights, and squires, and assembled together the greatest number of people that had been seen in France a hundred year before. He sent for men into so far countries, that it was long or they came together, wherefore the King of England did what him list in the mean season. The French King heard well what he did, and sware and said how they should never return again unfought withal, and that such hurts and damages as they had done should be dearly revenged; wherefore he had sent letters to his friends in the Empire, to such as were farthest off, and also to the gentle King of Bohemia and to the Lord Charles his son, who from thenceforth was called King of Almaine; he was made King by the aid of his father and the French King, and had taken on him the arms of the Empire: the French King desired them to come to him with all their powers, to the intent to fight with the King of England, who brent and wasted his country. These Princes and Lords made them ready with great number of men of arms, of Almains, Bohemians, and Luxemburgers, and so came to the French King. Also King Philip sent to the Duke of Lorraine, who came to serve him with three hundred spears; also there came the Earl [of] Salm in Saumois, the Earl of Sarrebruck, the Earl of Flanders, the Earl William of Namur, every man with a fair company.
Ye have heard herebefore of the order of the Englishmen; how they went in three battles, the marshals on the right hand and on the left, the King and the Prince of Wales his son in the midst. They rode but small journeys, and every day took their lodgings between noon and three of the clock, and found the country so fruitful that they needed not to make no provision for their host, but all only for wine; and yet they found reasonably sufficient thereof. It was no marvel, though, they of the country were afraid; for before that time they had never seen men of war, nor they wist not what war or battle meant. They fled away as far as they might hear speaking of the Englishmen, and left their houses well stuffed, and granges full of corn; they wist not how to save and keep it. The King of England and the Prince had in their battle a three thousand men of arms and six thousand archers, and a ten thousand men afoot, beside them that rode with the marshals....
Then the King went toward Caen, the which was a greater town and full of drapery and other merchandise, and rich burgesses, noble ladies and damosels, and fair churches, and specially two great and rich abbeys, one of the Trinity, another of Saint Stephen; and on the one side of the town one of the fairest castles of all Normandy, and captain therein was Robert of Wargny, with three hundred Genoways, and in the town was the Earl of Eu and of Guines, Constable of France, and the Earl of Tancarville, with a good number of men of war. The King of England rode that day in good order and lodged all his battles together that night, a two leagues from Caen, in a town with a little haven called Austrehem, and thither came also all his navy of ships with the Earl of Huntingdon, who was governour of them.
The constable and other lords of France that night watched well the town of Caen, and in the morning armed them with all them of the town: then the constable ordained that none should issue out, but keep their defenses on the walls, gate, bridge, and river; and left the suburbs void, because they were not closed; for they thought they should have enough to do to defend the town, because it was not closed but with the river. They of the town said how they would issue out, for they were strong enough to fight with the King of England. When the constable saw their good wills, he said, "In the name of God be it, ye shall not fight without me." Then they issued out in good order, and made good face to fight and to defend them and to put their lives in adventure.
Of the Battle of Caen, and How the Englishmen Took the Town
The same day the Englishmen rose early and appareled them ready to go to Caen.[A] The King heard mass before the sun-rising, and then took his horse, and the Prince his son, with Sir Godfrey of Harcourt, marshal and leader of the host, whose counsel the King much followed. Then they drew toward Caen with their battles in good array, and so approached the good town of Caen. When they of the town, who were ready in the field, saw these three battles coming in good order, with their banners and standards waving in the wind, and the archers, the which they had not been accustomed to see, they were sore afraid and fled away toward the town without any order or good array, for all that the constable could do; then the Englishmen pursued them eagerly. When the constable and the Earl Tancarville saw that, they took a gate at the entry and saved themselves and certain with them, for the Englishmen were entered into the town. Some of the knights and squires of France, such as knew the way to the castle, went thither, and the captain there received them all, for the castle was large. The Englishmen in the chase slew many, for they took none to mercy.
Then the constable and the Earl of Tancarville, being in the little tower at the bridge foot, looked along the street and saw their men slain without mercy; they doubted to fall in their hands. At last they saw an English knight with one eye, called Sir Thomas Holland, and a five or six other knights with him; they knew them, for they had seen them before in Pruce, in Granade, and in other viages. Then they called to Sir Thomas and said how they would yield themselves prisoners. Then Sir Thomas came thither with his company and mounted up into the gate, and there found the said lords with twenty-five knights with them, who yielded them to Sir Thomas; and he took them for his prisoners and left company to keep them, and then mounted again on his horse and rode into the streets, and saved many lives of ladies, damosels, and cloisterers from defoiling,—for the soldiers were without mercy. It fell so well the same season for the Englishmen, that the river, which was able to bear ships, at that time was so low that men went in and out beside the bridge. They of the town were entered into their houses, and cast down into the street stones, timber, and iron, and slew and hurt more than five hundred Englishmen; wherewith the King was sore displeased. At night when he heard thereof, he commanded that the next day all should be put to the sword and the town brent; but then Sir Godfrey of Harcourt said:—"Dear sir, for God's sake assuage somewhat your courage, and let it suffice you that ye have done. Ye have yet a great voyage to do or ye come before Calais, whither ye purpose to go: and sir, in this town there is much people who will defend their houses, and it will cost many of your men their lives, or ye have all at your will; whereby peradventure ye shall not keep your purpose to Calais, the which should redound to your rack. Sir, save your people, for ye shall have need of them or this month pass; for I think verily your adversary King Philip will meet with you to fight, and ye shall find many strait passages and rencounters; wherefore your men, an ye had more, shall stand you in good stead: and sir, without any further slaying ye shall be lord of this town; men and women will put all that they have to your pleasure." Then the King said, "Sir Godfrey, you are our marshal; ordain everything as ye will." Then Sir Godfrey with his banner rode from street to street, and commanded in the King's name none to be so hardy to put fire in any house, to slay any person, nor to violate any woman. When they of the town heard that cry, they received the Englishmen into their houses and made them good cheer, and some opened their coffers and bade them take what them list, so they might be assured of their lives; howbeit there were done in the town many evil deeds, murders, and robberies. Thus the Englishmen were lords of the town three days and won great riches, the which they sent by barks and barges to Saint-Saviour by the river of Austrehem, a two leagues thence, whereas all their navy lay. Then the King sent the Earl of Huntingdon with two hundred men of arms and four hundred archers, with his navy and prisoners and riches that they had got, back again into England. And the King bought of Sir Thomas Holland the Constable of France and the Earl of Tancarville, and paid for them twenty thousand nobles....
The next day the King departed, brenning and wasting all before him, and at night lodged in a good village called Grandvilliers. The next day the King passed by Dargies; there was none to defend the castle, wherefore it was soon taken and brent. Then they went forth destroying the country all about, and so came to the castle of Poix, where there was a good town and two castles. There was nobody in them but two fair damosels, daughters to the Lord of Poix; they were soon taken, and had been violated, an two English knights had not been, Sir John Chandos and Sir Basset; they defended them and brought them to the King, who for his honor made them good cheer and demanded of them whither they would fainest go. They said, "To Corbie," and the King caused them to be brought thither without peril. That night the King lodged in the town of Poix. They of the town and of the castles spake that night with the marshals of the host, to save them and their town from brenning, and they to pay a certain sum of florins the next day as soon as the host was departed. This was granted them, and in the morning the King departed with all his host, except a certain that were left there to receive the money that they of the town had promised to pay. When they of the town saw the host depart and but a few left behind, then they said they would pay never a penny, and so ran out and set on the Englishmen, who defended themselves as well as they might and sent after the host for succor. When Sir Raynold Cobham and Sir Thomas Holland, who had the rule of the rear guard, heard thereof, they returned and cried, "Treason, treason!" and so came again to Poix-ward and found their companions still fighting with them of the town. Then anon they of the town were nigh all slain, and the town brent, and the two castles beaten down. Then they returned to the King's host, who was as then at Airaines and there lodged, and had commanded all manner of men on pain of death to do no hurt to no town of Arsyn,[B] for there the King was minded to lie a day or two to take advice how he might pass the river of Somme; for it was necessary for him to pass the river, as ye shall hear after.
How the French King Followed the King of England in Beauvoisinois
Now let us speak of King Philip, who was at Saint-Denis and his people about him, and daily increased. Then on a day he departed and rode so long that he came to Coppegueule, a three leagues from Amiens, and there he tarried. The King of England, being at Airaines, wist not where for to pass the river of Somme, the which was large and deep, and all bridges were broken and the passages well kept. Then at the King's commandment his two marshals with a thousand men of arms and two thousand archers went along the river to find some passage, and passed by Longpré, and came to the bridge of Remy, the which was well kept with a great number of knights and squires and men of the country. The Englishmen alighted afoot and assailed the Frenchmen from the morning till it was noon; but the bridge was so well fortified and defended that the Englishmen departed without winning of anything. Then they went to a great town called Fountains, on the river of Somme, the which was clean robbed and brent, for it was not closed. Then they went to another town called Long-en-Ponthieu; they could not win the bridge, it was so well kept and defended. Then they departed and went to Picquigny, and found the town, the bridge, and the castle so well fortified that it was not likely to pass there; the French King had so well defended the passages, to the intent that the King of England should not pass the river of Somme, to fight with him at his advantage or else to famish him there.
When these two marshals had assayed in all places to find passage and could find none, they returned again to the King, and shewed how they could find no passage in no place. The same night the French King came to Amiens with more than a hundred thousand men. The King of England was right pensive, and the next morning heard mass before the sun-rising and then dislodged; and every man followed the marshals' banners, and so rode in the country of Vimeu approaching to the good town of Abbeville, and found a town thereby, whereunto was come much people of the country in trust of a little defense that was there; but the Englishmen anon won it, and all they that were within slain, and many taken of the town and of the country. The King took his lodging in a great hospital[C] that was there. The same day the French King departed from Amiens and came to Airaines about noon; and the Englishmen were departed thence in the morning. The Frenchmen found there great provision that the Englishmen had left behind them, because they departed in haste. There they found flesh ready on the broaches, bread and pasties in the ovens, wine in tuns and barrels, and the tables ready laid. There the French King lodged and tarried for his lords.
That night the King of England was lodged at Oisemont. At night when the two marshals were returned, who had that day overrun the country to the gates of Abbeville and to Saint-Valery and made a great skirmish there, then the King assembled together his council and made to be brought before him certain prisoners of the country of Ponthieu and of Vimeu. The King right courteously demanded of them if there were any among them that knew any passage beneath Abbeville, that he and his host might pass over the river of Somme: if he would shew him thereof, he should be quit of his ransom, and twenty of his company for his love. There was a varlet called Gobin Agace, who stepped forth and said to the King:—"Sir, I promise you on the jeopardy of my head I shall bring you to such a place, whereas ye and all your host shall pass the river of Somme without peril. There be certain places in the passage that ye shall pass twelve men afront two times between day and night; ye shall not go in the water to the knees. But when the flood cometh, the river then waxeth so great that no man can pass; but when the flood is gone, the which is two times between day and night, then the river is so low that it may be passed without danger both a-horseback and afoot. The passage is hard in the bottom, with white stones, so that all your carriage may go surely; therefore the passage is called Blanche-Taque. An ye make ready to depart betimes, ye may be there by the sun-rising." The King said, "If this be true that ye say, I quit thee thy ransom and all thy company, and moreover shall give thee a hundred nobles." Then the King commanded every man to be ready at the sound of the trumpet to depart.
Of the Battle of Blanche-Taque
The King of England slept not much that night, for at midnight he arose and sowned his trumpet; then incontinent they made ready carriages and all things, and at the breaking of the day they departed from the town of Oisemont and rode after the guiding of Gobin Agace, so that they came by the sun-rising to Blanche-Taque: but as then the flood was up, so that they might not pass, so the King tarried there till it was prime; then the ebb came.
The French King had his currours in the country, who brought him word of the demeanor of the Englishmen. Then he thought to close the King of England between Abbeville and the river of Somme, and so to fight with him at his pleasure. And when he was at Amiens he had ordained a great baron of Normandy, called Sir Godemar du Fay, to go and keep the passage of Blanche-Taque, where the Englishmen must pass or else in none other place. He had with him a thousand men of arms and six thousand afoot, with the Genoways; so they went by Saint-Riquier in Ponthieu and from thence to Crotoy, whereas the passage lay: and also he had with him a great number of men of the country, and also a great number of them of Montreuil, so that they were a twelve thousand men one and other.
When the English host was come thither, Sir Godemar du Fay arranged all his company to defend the passage. The King of England let not for all that; but when the flood was gone, he commanded his marshals to enter into the water in the name of God and St. George. Then they that were hardy and courageous entered on both parties, and many a man reversed. There were some of the Frenchmen of Artois and Picardy that were as glad to joust in the water as on the dry land.
The Frenchmen defended so well the passage at the issuing out of the water, that they had much to do. The Genoways did them great trouble with their cross-bows; on the other side the archers of England shot so wholly together, that the Frenchmen were fain to give place to the Englishmen. There was a sore battle, and many a noble feat of arms done on both sides. Finally the Englishmen passed over and assembled together in the field. The King and the Prince passed, and all the lords; then the Frenchmen kept none array, but departed, he that might best. When Sir Godemar saw that discomfiture, he fled and saved himself; some fled to Abbeville and some to Saint-Riquiers. They that were there afoot could not flee, so that there were slain a great number of them of Abbeville, Montreuil, Rue, and of Saint-Riquiers; the chase endured more than a great league. And as yet all the Englishmen were not passed the river, and certain currours of the King of Bohemia and of Sir John of Hainault came on them that were behind, and took certain horses and carriages and slew divers, or they could take the passage.
The French King the same morning was departed from Airaines, trusting to have found the Englishmen between him and the river of Somme; but when he heard how that Sir Godemar du Fay and his company were discomfited, he tarried in the field and demanded of his marshals what was best to do. They said, "Sir, ye cannot pass the river but at the bridge of Abbeville, for the flood is come in at Blanche-Taque;" then he returned and lodged at Abbeville.
The King of England, when he was past the river, he thanked God, and so rode forth in like manner as he did before. Then he called Gobin Agace and did quit him his ransom and all his company, and gave him a hundred nobles and a good horse. And so the King rode forth fair and easily, and thought to have lodged in a great town called Noyelles; but when he knew that the town pertained to the Countess d'Aumale, sister to the Lord Robert of Artois,[D] the King assured the town and country as much as pertained to her, and so went forth: and his marshals rode to Crotoy on the seaside and brent the town, and found in the haven many ships and barks charged with wines of Poitou, pertaining to the merchants of Saintonge and of Rochelle; they brought the best thereof to the King's host. Then one of the marshals rode to the gates of Abbeville and from thence to Saint-Riquiers, and after to the town of Rue-Saint-Esprit. This was on a Friday, and both battles of the marshals returned to the King's host about noon and so lodged all together near to Cressy in Ponthieu.
The King of England was well informed how the French King followed after him to fight. Then he said to his company, "Let us take here some plot of ground, for we will go no farther till we have seen our enemies. I have good cause here to abide them, for I am on the right heritage of the Queen my mother, the which land was given at her marriage: I will challenge it of mine adversary Philip of Valois." And because that he had not the eighth part in number of men as the French King had, therefore he commanded his marshals to chose a plot of ground somewhat for his advantage; and so they did, and thither the King and his host went. Then he sent his currours to Abbeville, to see if the French King drew that day into the field or not. They went forth and returned again, and said how they could see none appearance of his coming; then every man took their lodging for that day, and to be ready in the morning at the sound of the trumpet in the same place. This Friday the French King tarried still in Abbeville abiding for his company, and sent his two marshals to ride out to see the dealing of the Englishmen; and at night they returned, and said how the Englishmen were lodged in the fields. That night the French King made a supper to all the chief lords that were there with him, and after supper the King desired them to be friends each to other. The King looked for the Earl of Savoy, who should come to him with a thousand spears, for he had received wages for a three months of them at Troyes in Champagne.
Of the Order of the Englishmen at Cressy
On the Friday, as I said before, the King of England lay in the fields, for the country was plentiful of wines and other victual, and if need had been, they had provision following in carts and other carriages. That night the King made a supper to all his chief lords of his host and made them good cheer; and when they were all departed to take their rest, then the King entered into his oratory and kneeled down before the altar, praying God devoutly that if he fought the next day, that he might achieve the journey to His honor; then about midnight he laid him down to rest, and in the morning he rose betimes and heard mass, and the Prince his son with him, and the most part of his company, were confessed and houseled; and after the mass said, he commanded every man to be armed and to draw to the field to the same place before appointed. Then the King caused a park to be made by the wood-side behind his host, and there was set all carts and carriages, and within the park were all their horses, for every man was afoot; and into this park there was but one entry. Then he ordained three battles: In the first was the young Prince of Wales, with him the Earl of Warwick and Oxford, the Lord Godfrey of Harcourt, Sir Raynold Cobham, Sir Thomas Holland, the Lord Stafford, the Lord of Mohun, the Lord Delaware, Sir John Chandos, Sir Bartholomew de Burghersh, Sir Robert Nevill, the Lord Thomas Clifford, the Lord Bourchier, the Lord de Latimer, and divers other knights and squires that I cannot name; they were an eight hundred men of arms and two thousand archers, and a thousand of other with the Welshmen; every lord drew to the field appointed under his own banner and pennon. In the second battle was the Earl of Northampton, the Earl of Arundel, the Lord Ros, the Lord Lucy, the Lord Willoughby, the Lord Basset, the Lord of Saint-Aubin, Sir Louis Tufton, the Lord of Multon, the Lord Lascelles and divers other, about an eight hundred men of arms and twelve hundred archers. The third battle had the King; he had seven hundred men of arms and two thousand archers. Then the King leapt on a hobby, with a white rod in his hand, one of his marshals on the one hand and the other on the other hand: he rode from rank to rank desiring every man to take heed that day to his right and honor. He spake it so sweetly and with so good countenance and merry cheer, that all such as were discomfited took courage in the seeing and hearing of him. And when he had thus visited all his battles, it was then nine of the day; then he caused every man to eat and drink a little, and so they did at their leisure. And afterward they ordered again their battles; then every man lay down on the earth and by him his salet and bow, to be the more fresher when their enemies should come.
The Order of the Frenchmen at Cressy, and How they Beheld the Demeanor of the Englishmen
This Saturday the French King rose betimes and heard mass in Abbeville in his lodging in the abbey of St. Peter, and he departed after the sun-rising. When he was out of the town two leagues, approaching towards his enemies, some of his lords said to him, "Sir, it were good that ye ordered your battles, and let all your footmen pass somewhat on before, that they be not troubled with the horsemen." Then the King sent four knights, the Moine [of] Bazeilles, the Lord of Noyers, the Lord of Beaujeu, and the Lord d'Aubigny, to ride to aview the English host; and so they rode so near that they might well see part of their dealing. The Englishmen saw them well and knew well how they were come thither to aview them; they let them alone and made no countenance toward them, and let them return as they came. And when the French King saw these four knights return again, he tarried till they came to him and said, "Sirs, what tidings?" These four knights each of them looked on other, for there was none would speak before his companion; finally the King said to [the] Moine, who pertained to the King of Bohemia and had done in his days so much that he was reputed for one of the valiantest knights of the world, "Sir, speak you." Then he said:—"Sir, I shall speak, sith it pleaseth you, under the correction of my fellows. Sir, we have ridden and seen the behaving of your enemies: know ye for truth they are rested in three battles abiding for you. Sir, I will counsel you as for my part, saving your displeasure, that you and all your company rest here and lodge for this night; for or they that be behind of your company be come hither, and or your battles be set in good order, it will be very late, and your people be weary and out of array, and ye shall find your enemies fresh and ready to receive you. Early in the morning ye may order your battles at more leisure and advise your enemies at more deliberation, and to regard well what way ye will assail them; for, sir, surely they will abide you."
Then the King commanded that it should be so done. Then his two marshals one rode before, another behind, saying to every banner, "Tarry and abide here in the name of God and St. Denis." They that were foremost tarried, but they that were behind would not tarry, but rode forth, and said how they would in no wise abide till they were as far forward as the foremost; and when they before saw them come on behind, then they rode forward again, so that the King nor his marshals could not rule them. So they rode without order or good array, till they came in sight of their enemies; and as soon as the foremost saw them they reculed then aback without good array, whereof they behind had marvel and were abashed, and thought that the foremost company had been fighting. Then they might have had leisure and room to have gone forward, if they had list; some went forth, and some abode still. The commons, of whom all the ways between Abbeville and Cressy were full, when they saw that they were near to their enemies, they took their swords and cried, "Down with them! let us slay them all." There is no man, though he were present at the journey, that could imagine or shew the truth of the evil order that was among the French party, and yet they were a marvelous great number. That I write in this book I learned it specially of the Englishmen, who well beheld their dealing; and also certain knights of Sir John of Hainault's, who was always about King Philip, shewed me as they knew.
Of the Battle of Cressy, August 26th, 1346
The Englishmen, who were in three battles lying on the ground to rest them, as soon as they saw the Frenchmen approach, they rose upon their feet fair and easily without any haste, and arranged their battles. The first, which was the Prince's battle, the archers there stood in manner of a herse and the men of arms in the bottom of the battle. The Earl of Northampton and the Earl of Arundel with the second battle were on a wing in good order, ready to comfort the Prince's battle, if need were.
The lords and knights of France came not to the assembly together in good order, for some came before and some came after, in such haste and evil order that one of them did trouble another. When the French King saw the Englishmen his blood changed, and said to his marshals, "Make the Genoways go on before, and begin the battle, in the name of God and St. Denis." There were of the Genoways' cross-bows about a fifteen thousand, but they were so weary of going afoot that day a six leagues armed with their cross-bows, that they said to their constables, "We be not well ordered to fight this day, for we be not in the case to do any great deed of arms: we have more need of rest." These words came to the Earl of Alençon, who said, "A man is well at ease to be charged with such a sort of rascals, to be faint and fail now at most need." Also the same season there fell a great rain and a clipse with a terrible thunder, and before the rain there came flying over both battles a great number of crows for fear of the tempest coming. Then anon the air began to wax clear, and the sun to shine fair and bright, the which was right in the Frenchmen's eyen and on the Englishmen's backs. When the Genoways were assembled together and began to approach, they made a great leap and cry to abash the Englishmen, but they stood still and stirred not for all that; then the Genoways again the second time made another leap and a fell cry, and stept forward a little, and the Englishmen removed not one foot; thirdly, again they leapt and cried, and went forth till they came within shot; then they shot fiercely with their cross-bows. Then the English archers stept forth one pace and let fly their arrows so wholly [together] and so thick, that it seemed snow. When the Genoways felt the arrows piercing through heads, arms, and breasts, many of them cast down their cross-bows, and did cut their strings and returned discomfited. When the French King saw them fly away, he said, "Slay these rascals, for they shall let and trouble us without reason." Then ye should have seen the men of arms dash in among them and killed a great number of them; and ever still the Englishmen shot whereas they saw thickest press: the sharp arrows ran into the men of arms and into their horses, and many fell, horse and men, among the Genoways, and when they were down, they could not relieve again; the press was so thick that one overthrew another. And also among the Englishmen there were certain rascals that went afoot with great knives, and they went in among the men of arms and slew and murdered many as they lay on the ground, both earls, barons, knights, and squires; whereof the King of England was after displeased, for he had rather they had been taken prisoners.
The valiant King of Bohemia called Charles of Luxembourg, son to the noble Emperor Henry of Luxembourg, for all that he was nigh blind, when he understood the order of the battle, he said to them about him, "Where is the Lord Charles my son?" His men said, "Sir, we cannot tell; we think he be fighting." Then he said, "Sirs, ye are my men, my companions and friends in this journey: I require you bring me so far forward that I may strike one stroke with my sword." They said they would do his commandment, and to the intent that they should not lose him in the press, they tied all their reins of their bridles each to other and set the King before to accomplish his desire, and so they went on their enemies. The Lord Charles of Bohemia his son, who wrote himself King of Almaine and bare the arms, he came in good order to the battle; but when he saw that the matter went awry on their party, he departed, I cannot tell you which way. The King his father was so far forward that he strake a stroke with his sword, yea, and more than four, and fought valiantly, and so did his company; and they adventured themselves so forward that they were there all slain, and the next day they were found in the place about the King, and all their horses tied each to other.
The Earl of Alençon came to the battle right ordinately and fought with the Englishmen, and the Earl of Flanders also on his part. These two lords with their companies coasted the English archers and came to the Prince's battle, and there fought valiantly long. The French King would fain have come thither, when he saw their banners, but there was a great hedge of archers before him. The same day the French King had given a great black courser to Sir John of Hainault, and he made the Lord Thierry of Senzeille to ride on him and to bear his banner. The same horse took the bridle in the teeth and brought him through all the currours of the Englishmen, and as he would have returned again, he fell in a great dike and was sore hurt, and had been there dead, an his page had not been, who followed him through all the battles and saw where his master lay in the dike, and had none other let but for his horse; for the Englishmen would not issue out of their battle for taking of any prisoner. Then the page alighted and relieved his master: then he went not back again the same way that they came; there was too many in his way.
This battle between Broye and Cressy this Saturday was right cruel and fell, and many a feat of arms done that came not to my knowledge. In the night divers knights and squires lost their masters, and sometime came on the Englishmen, who received them in such wise that they were ever nigh slain; for there was none taken to mercy nor to ransom, for so the Englishmen were determined.
In the morning the day of the battle certain Frenchmen and Almains perforce opened the archers of the Prince's battle, and came and fought with the men of arms hand to hand. Then the second battle of the Englishmen came to succor the Prince's battle, the which was time, for they had as then much ado; and they with the Prince sent a messenger to the King, who was on a little windmill hill. Then the knight said to the King, "Sir, the Earl of Warwick and the Earl of Oxford, Sir Raynold Cobham and other, such as be about the Prince your son, are fiercely fought withal and are sore handled; wherefore they desire you that you and your battle will come and aid them; for if the Frenchmen increase, as they doubt they will, your son and they shall have much ado." Then the King said, "Is my son dead, or hurt, or on the earth felled?" "No, sir," quoth the knight, "but he is hardly matched; wherefore he hath need of your aid." "Well," said the King, "return to him and to them that sent you hither, and say to them that they send no more to me for any adventure that falleth, as long as my son is alive: and also say to them that they suffer him this day to win his spurs; for if God be pleased, I will this journey be his and the honor thereof, and to them that be about him." Then the knight returned again to them and shewed the King's words, the which greatly encouraged them, and repoined in that they had sent to the King as they did.
Sir Godfrey of Harcourt would gladly that the Earl of Harcourt, his brother, might have been saved; for he heard say by them that saw his banner how that he was there in the field on the French party: but Sir Godfrey could not come to him betimes, for he was slain or he could come at him, and so was also the Earl of Aumale his nephew. In another place the Earl of Alençon and the Earl of Flanders fought valiantly, every lord under his own banner; but finally they could not resist against the puissance of the Englishmen, and so there they were also slain, and divers other knights and squires. Also the Earl Louis of Blois, nephew to the French King, and the Duke of Lorraine, fought under their banners; but at last they were closed in among a company of Englishmen and Welshmen, and there were slain for all their prowess. Also there was slain the Earl of Auxerre, the Earl of Saint-Pol, and many other.
In the evening the French King, who had left about him no more than a threescore persons, one and other, whereof Sir John of Hainault was one, who had remounted once the King, for his horse was slain with an arrow, then he said to the King, "Sir, depart hence, for it is time; lose not yourself willfully: if ye have loss at this time, ye shall recover it again another season." And so he took the King's horse by the bridle and led him away in a manner perforce. Then the King rode till he came to the castle of Broye. The gate was closed, because it was by that time dark: then the King called the captain, who came to the walls and said, "Who is that calleth there this time of night?" Then the King said, "Open your gate quickly, for this is the fortune of France." The captain knew then it was the King, and opened the gate and let down the bridge. Then the King entered, and he had with him but five barons, Sir John of Hainault, Sir Charles of Montmorency, the Lord of Beaujeu, the Lord d'Aubigny, and the Lord of Montsault. The King would not tarry there, but drank and departed thence about midnight, and so rode by such guides as knew the country till he came in the morning to Amiens, and there he rested.
This Saturday the Englishmen never departed from their battles for chasing of any man, but kept still their field, and ever defended themselves against all such as came to assail them. This battle ended about evensong time.
[A] This was 26th July, 1346. Edward arrived at Poissy on 12th August; Philip of Valois left Paris on the 14th; the English crossed the Seine at Poissy on the 16th, and the Somme at Blanche-taque on the 24th.
[B] Probably a misunderstanding by Froissart of the English word "arson": the king's command being not to burn the towns on the Somme, as he wanted them for shelter.
[C] That is, a house of the Knights of St. John.
[D] She was in fact his daughter.
JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE
(1818-1894)
BY CHARLES FREDERICK JOHNSON
ames Anthony Froude, English historian and essayist, was born April 23d, 1818, and died October 20th, 1894. His father was a clergyman, and the son was sent to Westminster School and to Oriel College, Oxford. In 1842 he became a fellow of Exeter, and two years later he was ordained a deacon; an office which he did not formally lay down until many years later, although his earliest publications, 'Shadows of the Clouds' and 'Nemesis of Faith,' showed that he had come to hold—and what perhaps is more to the point, dared to express,—views hardly compatible with the character of a docile and unreasoning neophyte.
J. A. Froude
These books were severely censured by the authorities, and cost him—to the great benefit of the world—an appointment he had received of teacher in Tasmania. He resigned his fellowship and took up the profession of letters, writing much for Fraser and the Westminster, and becoming for a short period the editor of the former. His magnum opus is his 'History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat of the Spanish Armada,' in twelve volumes, from 1856 to 1870. His other principal publications are—'The English in Ireland in the Eighteenth Century' (1874); 'Cæsar' (1879); 'Bunyan' (1880); 'Thomas Carlyle (first forty years of his life)' (1882); 'Life in London' (1884); 'Short Studies on Great Subjects' (1882, four series); 'The Two Chiefs of Dunboy' (1889); 'The English in the West Indies' (1889); 'The Divorce of Catharine of Aragon' (1892); 'The Life and Letters of Erasmus' (1892); 'English Seamen in the Sixteenth Century' (1892); and 'The Council of Trent.' 'Shadows of the Clouds,' 'The Nemesis of Faith,' and 'The Two Chiefs of Dunboy' are in the form of fiction; and though they—especially the last—contain some charming descriptive passages, and evince some of Froude's power of character sketching, they serve on the whole to prove that he was not a novelist. The fortunes of his group of people are of less absorbing interest to him than questions of social and racial ethics. There is nothing more annoying than to have an essayist stand behind a story-teller and interrupt him from time to time with acute philosophical comments on ultimate causes. The characters of Morty and Sylvester Sullivan are admirably contrasted Celtic types, but both they and the English Colonel Goring are a trifle stagy and stiff in their joints. The murders of the two chiefs, Morty Sullivan and Colonel Goring, are dramatically told; but Froude's deficient sense of humor, at least of that quality of humor which gives a subtle sense of congruity, results in an attempt to combine the elements of the tale and the didactic society in impossible proportions. He is an essayist and historian, not a novel-writer.
Froude stands before the English-reading public prominent in three characteristics: First, as a technical prose artist, in which regard he is entitled to be classed with Ruskin, Newman, and Pater; less enthusiastic and elaborately ornamental than the first, less musically and delicately fallacious than the second, and less self-conscious and phrase-caressing than the third, but carrying a solider burden of thought than all three. Second, as a historian of the modern school, which aims by reading the original records to produce an independent view of historical periods. Third, as the most clear-sighted and broad-minded of those whose position near the centre of the Oxford movement and intimacy with the principal actors gave them an insight into its inner nature.
There can be but one opinion of Froude as a master of English. In some of his early work there are traces of the manner of Macaulay in the succession of short assertive sentences, most of which an ordinary writer would group as limiting clauses about the main assertion. This method gives a false appearance of vigor and definiteness; it makes easy reading by relieving the mind from the necessity of weighing the modifying propositions: but it is entirely unadapted to nice modulations of thought. Froude very soon avoided the vices of Macaulayism, and attained a narrative style which must be regarded as the best in an age which has paid more attention than any other to the art of telling a story. In descriptive historical narrative he is unrivaled, because he is profoundly impressed not only with the dramatic qualities but with the real significance of a scene; unlike Macaulay, to whom the superficial theatrical elements appeal. A reading of Macaulay's description of the trial of Warren Hastings, and Froude's narrative of the killing of Thomas Becket or of the execution of Mary Queen of Scots, will bring out at once Froude's radical superiority in both conception and execution.
This is not the place to debate the question of Froude's historical accuracy, further than to remark that he was an industrious reader of historical documents, and by nature a seeker after the truth. If a profound conviction of the harmfulness of ecclesiasticism colored the light with which he illuminated the records of the past, we must remember that history is at best largely the impressions of historians; and that if it be true that Froude does present one side, it is the side on which the warnings to posterity are most distinctly inscribed. A reading of the controversy between Froude and Freeman in the calmer light of the present leads to the conclusion that the suppressio veri with which Froude was charged is not a suggestio falsi, but an artistic selection of the characteristic. He felt a certain contempt for the minute and meaningless fidelity to the record, which is not writing history but editing documents. He possessed, too, among his other literary powers, the rare one of being able to individualize the man whose life he studies and of presenting the character so as to be consistent and human. This power fills his history and sketch with rare personalities. Thomas Becket, Henry III., Henry VIII., Queen Catharine, Mary Queen of Scots, and Elizabeth, are more than historical portraits in the ordinary sense: they are conceptions of individuals, vivified by the artistic sense. Whether or not they are true to the originals as reflected in the contemporary documents, they are at least human possibilities, and therefore truer than the distorted automata that lie in state on the pages of some historians. A human character is so exceedingly complex and so delicately balanced with contradictory elements, that it is probable that no two persons ever estimate it exactly alike. Besides, prominent historical personages become in the popular imagination invested with exaggerated attributes, and it is not likely that men will ever agree even as to which of them was the hero and which the villain of the drama. It was to be expected that Froude should be violently assailed by those who accepted a traditional view of Henry VIII. and of Mary. It was inevitable that he should differ from them, because he had more than a view: he had a conception. His historical personages are certainly possibilities, because they are human, and the traditional figures are either monsters or saints; and humanity—at least Teutonic humanity—does not produce unadulterated saints nor unrelieved monsters.
While Froude's historical work has been criticized for lack of minute accuracy in details, his books on Carlyle have been criticized for the opposite fault of quoting too fully and literally; from letters and journals, matter never intended for the public, and of a nature not only to wound living persons but to create an erroneous impression of the writer. The habit of expressing himself in pithy and pungent personalities seems to have been with Carlyle a sort of intellectual exercise, and should not necessarily be taken as an index of morose ill-temper. A very delicate literary tact was necessary to his literary executor, in selecting from the matter put in his hands that which would combine to make a true picture of a crude and powerful genius without making him appear to the ordinary reader a selfish, willful man. Froude's idea of the duty of an editor of contemporary biography seems to have been that it was limited to careful publication of all the available material as mémoires pour servir. Such miscellaneous printing may in the end serve truth, but at the time it arouses resentment. It resulted, however, in the production of a book far preferable to the non-committal, evasive, destructively laudatory biography of a public man, of which every year brings a new specimen. It is at least honest, if not tactful.
Froude's early connection with the Oxford movement and his work on the Lives of the Saints first called his attention to the study of historical documents, and to the large amount of fiction with which truth is diluted in them. His further researches among the authorities recently made accessible, for the history of the destruction of the monasteries, impressed on him the fact that an assumption of spiritual authority is as dangerous to those who assume it as to those over whom it is assumed, exactly as physical slavery is in the end as harmful to the masters as it is to the slaves. He saw that ecclesiasticism had been profoundly hostile to morals, and he judged the present by the past till he really believed that the precious fruits of the Reformation would be lost if the ritualists obtained control of the Church. He persuaded himself that under such influence—
"Civilization would ebb, the great moral lights be extinguished,
Over the world would creep an unintelligent darkness
Under which men would be portioned anew 'twixt the priest and the soldier."
It is perhaps too much to expect of a man of the imaginative temperament of Froude, to whom the abominations of the Church from the twelfth to the sixteenth century were as real as if he had witnessed them, to retain judicial calmness under the vituperation with which he was assailed; but his profound distrust of the mediæval Church certainly does give an air of partisanship to his strictures on its modern ineffectual revival. He forgot that great principles of justice and toleration are now so embodied in law and fixed in the hearts of the English-speaking people that society is protected, and the evils of spiritual tyranny are restricted to the few who are willing to abase their intellects to it; that the corroding evil of conventual life is minimized by healthy outside influences; and that the most advanced modern ritualist would prove too good a Christian to light an auto da fé. It was but natural that he should forget this, for he was a strong man in the centre of the conflict, and independence was the core of his being.
This strength of independence is shown by the fact that though young, and profoundly sensitive to the attraction of a character like Newman's, he was from the first able to resist the fascination which that remarkable man exerted over all with whom he came in contact. The pure spiritual nature possesses a mysterious power over young men, so great that they often yield to its counterfeit. Newman was the true priest, and Froude recognized his genius and that his soul was "an adumbration of the Divine." But he felt instinctively the radical unsoundness of Newman's thought, and "would not follow, though an angel led." Others fell off for prudential reasons; but Froude was indifferent to these, and obedient to a conviction the strength of which must be estimated by the depth of his feeling for character.
Froude was sometimes criticized for writing history under the influence of personal feeling. It is difficult to see how a readable history can be written except by one who at least takes an interest in the story; but whether capacity for feeling makes a man a less trustworthy historian, depends upon how far this emotional susceptibility is controlled by intellectual insight and just views of the laws under which society develops. That Froude was an absolutely perfect historian, no one would claim: he was too intensely human to be perfect. It is safe to say that the perfect historian will not exist until Shakespeare and Bacon reappear combined in one man. For the great historian must be both scholar and artist. As scholar he must possess, too, both the acquisitive and the organizing intellect. He must both gather facts and interpret them. He must have the artistic sense which selects from the vast mass of fact that which is significant. This power of artistic selection is of course influenced by his unconscious ideals, by his conception of the relative importance of the forces which move mankind, and of the ultimate goal of progress. His philosophy directs his art, and his art interprets in the light of his philosophy.
It may be admitted that Froude possesses a larger share of the artistic than of the philosophic qualities necessary to the great historian. At times his hatred of ecclesiasticism becomes almost a prejudice. In his writings on Irish and colonial questions he evinces the Englishman's love of the right, but sometimes, unfortunately, the Englishman's inability to do justice to other races in points which distinguish them from his own. In some expressions he seems to distrust democracy in much the same unreasoning way in which Mr. Ruskin distrusts machinery. He had imbibed something of Mr. Carlyle's belief in the "strong man"; though he, no more than Carlyle, can show how the strong, just ruler can be produced or selected. But a more serious deficiency in Froude's philosophy arises from his imperfect conception of the method of evolution which governs all organizations, civil and religious, so that they continually throw off short-lived varieties and history becomes a continual giving way of the old order to the new. To fear, as Froude seems to, lest a survival may become a governing type, is as unreasonable as to fear that old men will live forever. Certainly he would have taken a juster, saner view of the English Reformation, had he been convinced that all the collisions between the moral laws and the rebellious wills of men, which are the burden of the years, are in the end obliterated in the slow onward movement of the race; but then perhaps his history would have lost in interest what it might have gained in philosophic breadth and balance. For it cannot be denied that feeling has given his narrative that most valuable quality—life.
The general recognition of Froude's power, and the growing conviction that he was far nearer right than the theological school he so cordially detested, was vindicated by his appointment as Professor of History at Oxford to succeed Freeman, one of the severest critics of his historical fairness. He lived to deliver but three courses of lectures, one of which has been published in that delightful volume 'The Life and Letters of Erasmus.' The others, 'English Seamen of the XVIth Century,' 'Lectures on the Council of Trent,' and the very able paper on Job in 'Short Studies on Great Subjects,' even if taken by themselves, would cause us to form a high opinion of the scope and range of Froude's powers. Those to whom brilliancy is synonymous with unsoundness may perhaps continue to call him merely a "brilliant writer"; but the general verdict will be that his brilliancy is the structural adornment of a well-fitted framework of thought.
THE GROWTH OF ENGLAND'S NAVY
From 'English Seamen in the Sixteenth Century'
Jean Paul the German poet said that God had given to France the empire of the land, to England the empire of the sea, and to his own country the empire of the air. The world has changed since Jean Paul's days. The wings of France have been clipped: the German Empire has become a solid thing: but England still holds her watery dominion; Britannia does still rule the waves, and in this proud position she has spread the English race over the globe; she is peopling new Englands at the Antipodes; she has made her Queen Empress of India; and is in fact the very considerable phenomenon in the social and political world which all acknowledge her to be. And all this she has achieved in the course of three centuries, entirely in consequence of her predominance as an ocean power. Take away her merchant fleets, take away the navy that guards them,—her empire will come to an end, her colonies will fall off like leaves from a withered tree, and Britain will become once more an insignificant island in the North Sea, for the future students in Australian and New Zealand universities to discuss the fate of in their debating societies.
How the English navy came to hold so extraordinary a position is worth reflecting on. Much has been written on it, but little, as it seems to me, which touches the heart of the matter. We are shown the power of our country growing and expanding. But how it grew; why, after a sleep of so many hundred years, the genius of our Scandinavian forefathers suddenly sprang again into life,—of this we are left without explanation.
The beginning was undoubtedly the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588. Down to that time the sea sovereignty belonged to the Spaniards, and had been fairly won by them. The conquest of Granada had stimulated and elevated the Spanish character. The subjects of Ferdinand and Isabella, of Charles V., and Philip II., were extraordinary men and accomplished extraordinary things. They stretched the limits of the known world; they conquered Mexico and Peru; they planted their colonies over the South-American continent; they took possession of the great West-Indian islands, and with so firm a grasp that Cuba at least will never lose the mark of the hand which seized it. They built their cities as if for eternity. They spread to the Indian Ocean, and gave their monarch's name to the Philippines. All this they accomplished in half a century, and as it were, they did it with a single hand; with the other they were fighting Moors and Turks, and protecting the coasts of the Mediterranean from the corsairs of Tunis and Constantinople.
They had risen on the crest of the wave, and with their proud Non Sufficit Orbis were looking for new worlds to conquer, at a time when the bark of the English water-dogs had scarcely been heard beyond their own fishing grounds, and the largest merchant vessel sailing from the port of London was scarce bigger than a modern coasting collier. And yet within the space of a single ordinary life these insignificant islanders had struck the sceptre from the Spaniards' grasp and placed the ocean crown on the brow of their own sovereign. How did it come about? What Cadmus had sown dragons' teeth in the furrows of the sea, for the race to spring from who manned the ships of Queen Elizabeth, who carried the flag of their own country round the globe, and challenged and fought the Spaniards on their own coasts and in their own harbors?
The English sea power was the legitimate child of the Reformation. It grew, as I shall show you, directly out of the new despised Protestantism. Matthew Parker and Bishop Jewell, the judicious Hooker himself, excellent men as they were, would have written and preached to small purpose without Sir Francis Drake's cannon to play an accompaniment to their teaching. And again, Drake's cannon would not have roared so loudly and so widely, without seamen already trained in heart and hand to work his ships and level his artillery. It was to the superior seamanship, the superior quality of English ships and crews, that the Spaniards attributed their defeat. Where did these ships come from? Where and how did these mariners learn their trade? Historians talk enthusiastically of the national spirit of a people rising with a united heart to repel the invader, and so on. But national spirit could not extemporize a fleet, or produce trained officers and sailors to match the conquerors of Lepanto. One slight observation I must make here at starting, and certainly with no invidious purpose. It has been said confidently,—it has been repeated, I believe, by all modern writers,—that the Spanish invasion suspended in England the quarrels of creed, and united Protestants and Roman Catholics in defense of their Queen and country. They remind us especially that Lord Howard of Effingham, who was Elizabeth's admiral, was himself a Roman Catholic. But was it so? The Earl of Arundel, the head of the House of Howard, was a Roman Catholic, and he was in the Tower praying for the success of Medina Sidonia. Lord Howard of Effingham was no more a Roman Catholic than—I hope I am not taking away their character—than the present Archbishop of Canterbury or the Bishop of London. He was a Catholic, but an English Catholic, as those reverend prelates are. Roman Catholic he could not possibly have been, nor any one who on that great occasion was found on the side of Elizabeth. A Roman Catholic is one who acknowledges the Roman Bishop's authority. The Pope had excommunicated Elizabeth, had pronounced her deposed, had absolved her subjects from their allegiance and forbidden them to fight for her. No Englishman who fought on that great occasion for English liberty was, or could have been, in communion with Rome. Loose statements of this kind, lightly made, fall in with the modern humor. They are caught up, applauded, repeated, and pass unquestioned into history. It is time to correct them a little.
THE DEATH OF COLONEL GORING
From 'Two Chiefs of Dunboy'
Fatally mistaking what was intended for a friendly warning, the colonel conceived that there was some one in the forge whom the smith wanted to conceal.
"I may return or not," he said; "but I must first have a word with these strangers of yours. We can meet as friends for once, with nothing to dispute over."
Minahan made no further attempt to prevent him from going in. If gentlemen chose to have their quarrels, he muttered between his teeth, it was no business of his.
Goring pushed open the door and entered. By the dim light—for the shutter that had been thrown back had been closed again, and the only light came from a window in the roof—he made out three figures standing together at the further end of the forge, in one of whom, though he tried to conceal himself, he instantly recognized his visitor of the previous evening.
"You here, my man?" he said. "You left my house two hours ago. Why are you not on your way home?"
Sylvester, seeing he was discovered, turned his face full round, and in a voice quietly insolent, replied, "I fell in with some friends of mine on the road. We had a little business together, and it is good luck that has brought your honor to us while we are talking, for the jintlemen here have a word or two they would like to be saying to ye, colonel, before ye leave them."
"To me!" said Goring, turning from Sylvester to the two figures, whose faces were still covered by their cloaks. "If these gentlemen are what I suppose them to be, I am glad to meet them, and will hear willingly what they may have to say."
"Perhaps less willingly than you think, Colonel Goring," said the taller of the two, who rose and stepped behind him to the door, which he closed and barred. Goring, looking at him with some surprise, saw that he was the person whom he had met on the mountains, and had afterwards seen at the funeral at Derreen. The third man rose from a bench on which he had been leaning, lifted his cap, and said:—
"There is an old proverb, sir, that short accounts make long friends. There can be no friendship between you and me, but the account between us is of very old standing. I have returned to Ireland, only for a short stay; I am about to leave it, never to come back. A gentleman and a soldier, like yourself, cannot wish that I should go while that account is still unsettled. Our fortunate meeting here this morning provides us with an opportunity."
It was Morty's voice that he heard, and Morty's face that he saw as he became accustomed to the gloom. He looked again at the pretended messenger from the carded curate, and he then remembered the old Sylvester who had brought the note from Lord Fitzmaurice to the agent from Kenmare. In an instant the meaning of the whole situation flashed across him. It was no casual re-encounter. He had been enticed into the place where he found himself, with some sinister and perhaps deadly purpose. A strange fatality had forced him again and again into collision with the man of whose ancestral lands he had come into possession. Once more, by a deliberate and treacherous contrivance, he and the chief of the O'Sullivans had been brought face to face together, and he was alone, without a friend within call of him; unless his tenant, who as he could now see had intended to give him warning, would interfere further in his defense. And of this he knew Ireland well enough to be aware that there was little hope.
He supposed that they intended to murder him. The door, at which he involuntarily glanced, was fastened by this time with iron bolts. He was a man of great personal strength and activity, but in such a situation neither would be likely to avail him. Long inured to danger, and ready at all moments to meet whatever peril might threaten him, he calmly faced his adversary and said:—
"This meeting is not accidental, as you would have me believe. You have contrived it. Explain yourself further."
"Colonel Goring," said Morty Sullivan, "you will recall the circumstances under which we last parted. Enemy as you are and always have been to me and mine, I will do you the justice to say that on that occasion you behaved like a gentleman and a man of courage. But our quarrel was not fought out. Persons present interfered between us. We are now alone, and can complete what was then left unfinished."
"Whether I did well or ill, sir," the colonel answered, "in giving you the satisfaction which you demanded of me at the time you speak of, I will not now say. But I tell you that the only relations which can exist between us at present are those between a magistrate and a criminal who has forfeited his life. If you mean to murder me, you can do it; you have me at advantage. You can thus add one more to the list of villainies with which you have stained an honorable name. If you mean that I owe you a reparation for personal injuries, such as the customs of Ireland allow one gentleman to require from another, this, as you well know, is not the way to ask for it. But I acknowledge no such right. When I last encountered you I but partly knew you. I now know you altogether. You have been a pirate on the high seas. Your letters of marque do not cover you, for you are a subject of the King, and have broken your allegiance. Such as you are, you stand outside the pale of honorable men, and I should degrade the uniform I wear if I were to stoop to measure arms with you."
The sallow olive of Morty's cheek turned livid. He clutched the bench before him, till the muscles of his hands stood out like knots of rope.
"You are in my power, colonel," he said: "do not tempt me too far. If my sins have been many, my wrongs are more. It must be this or worse. One word from me, and you are a dead man."
He laid four pistols on the smith's tool-chest. "Take a pair of them," he said. "They are loaded alike. Take which you please. Let us stand on the opposite sides of this hovel, and so make an end. If I fall, I swear on my soul you shall have no hurt from any of my people. My friend Connell is an officer of mine, but he holds a commission besides in the Irish Brigade. There is no better-born gentleman in Kerry. His presence here is your sufficient security. You shall return to Dunboy as safe from harm as if you had the Viceroy's body-guard about you, or your own boat's crew that shot down my poor fellows at Glengariff. To this I pledge you my honor."
"Your honor!" said Goring; "your honor! And you tempted me here by a lying tale, sent by the lips of yonder skulking rascal. That alone, sir, were there nothing else, would have sufficed to show what you are."
A significant click caught the ear of both the speakers. Looking round, they saw Sylvester had cocked a pistol.
"Drop that," said Morty, "or by God! kinsman of mine though you be, I will drive a bullet through the brain of you. Enough of this, sir," he said, turning to Goring. "Time passes, and this scene must end. I would have arranged it otherwise, but you yourself know that by this way alone I could have brought you to the meeting. Take the pistols, I say, or by the bones of my ancestors that lie buried under Dunboy Castle yonder, I will call in my men from outside, and they shall strip you bare, and score such marks on you as the quartermaster leaves on the slaves that you hire to fight your battles. Prince Charles will laugh when I tell him in Paris how I served one at least of the hounds that chased him at Culloden."
The forge in which this scene was going on was perfectly familiar to Goring, for he had himself designed it and built it. There was the ordinary broad open front to the road, constructed of timber, which was completely shut. The rest of the building was of stone, and in the wall at the back there was a small door leading into a field, and thence into the country. Could this door be opened, there was a chance, though but a faint one, of escape. A bar lay across, but of no great thickness. The staple into which it ran was slight. A vigorous blow might shatter both.
Sylvester caught the direction of Goring's eye, caught its meaning, and threw himself in the way. The colonel snatched a heavy hammer which stood against the wall. With the suddenness of an electric flash he struck Sylvester on the shoulder, broke his collar-bone, and hurled him back senseless, doubled over the anvil. A second stroke, catching the bar in the middle, shattered it in two, and the door hung upon the latch. Morty and Connell, neither of whom had intended foul play, hesitated, and in another moment Goring would have been free and away. Connell, recovering himself, sprang forward and closed with him. The colonel, who had been the most accomplished wrestler of his regiment, whirled him round, flung him with a heavy fall on the floor, and had his hand on the latch when, half stunned as he was, Connell recovered his feet, drew a skene, and rushed at Colonel Goring again. So sudden it all was, so swift the struggle, and so dim the light, that from the other end it was hard to see what was happening. Wrenching the skene out of Connell's hands, and with the hot spirit of battle in him, Colonel Goring was on the point of driving it into his assailant's side.
"Shoot, Morty! shoot, or I am a dead man!" Connell cried.
Morty, startled and uncertain what to do, had mechanically snatched up a pistol when Sylvester was struck down. He raised his hand at Connell's cry. It shook from excitement, and locked together as the two figures were, he was as likely to hit friend as foe. Again Connell called, and Morty fired and missed; and the mark of the bullet is still shown in the wall of the smithy as a sacred reminiscence of a fight for Irish liberty. The second shot went true to its mark. Connell had been beaten down, though unwounded, and Goring's tall form stood out above him in clear view. This time Morty's hand did not fail him. A shiver passed through Goring's limbs. His arms dropped. He staggered back against the door, and the door yielded, and he fell upon the ground outside. But it was not to rise and fly. The ball had struck him clean above the ear, and buried itself in the brain. He was dead.
SCIENTIFIC METHOD APPLIED TO HISTORY
From 'Short Studies on Great Subjects'
Historical facts can only be verified by the skeptical and the inquiring, and skepticism and inquiry nip like a black frost the eager credulity in which legendary biographies took their rise. You can watch such stories as they grew in the congenial soil of belief. The great saints of the fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries, who converted Europe to Christianity, were as modest and unpretending as true, genuine men always are. They claimed no miraculous powers for themselves. Miracles might have been worked in the days of their fathers. They for their own parts relied on nothing but the natural powers of persuasion and example. Their companions, who knew them personally in life, were only a little more extravagant. Miracles and portents vary in an inverse ratio with the distance of time. St. Patrick is absolutely silent about his own conjuring performances. He told his followers, perhaps, that he had been moved by his good angel to devote himself to the conversion of Ireland. The angel of metaphor becomes in the next generation an actual seraph. On a rock in the county of Down there is, or was, a singular mark, representing rudely the outline of a foot. From that rock, where the young Patrick was feeding his master's sheep, a writer of the sixth century tells us that the angel Victor sprang back to heaven after delivering his message, and left behind him the imprinted witness of his august visit. Another hundred years pass, and legends from Hegesippus are imported into the life of the Irish apostle. St. Patrick and the Druid enchanter contend before King Leogaire on Tara Hill, as Simon Magus and St. Peter contended before the Emperor Nero. Again a century, and we are in a world of wonders where every human lineament is lost. St. Patrick, when a boy of twelve, lights a fire with icicles; when he comes to Ireland he floats thither upon an altar-stone which Pope Celestine had blessed for him. He conjures a Welsh marauder into a wolf, makes a goat cry out in the stomach of a thief who had stolen him, and restores dead men to life, not once or twice but twenty times. The wonders with which the atmosphere is charged gravitate towards the largest concrete figure which is moving in the middle of them, till at last, as Gibbon says, the sixty-six lives of St. Patrick which were extant in the twelfth century must have contained at least as many thousand lies. And yet of conscious lying there was very little; perhaps nothing at all. The biographers wrote in good faith and were industrious collectors of material, only their notions of probability were radically different from ours. The more marvelous a story, the less credit we give to it; warned by experience of carelessness, credulity, and fraud, we disbelieve everything for which we cannot find contemporary evidence, and from the value of that evidence we subtract whatever may be due to prevalent opinion or superstition. To the mediæval writer, the more stupendous the miracle the more likely it was to be true; he believed everything which he could not prove to be false, and proof was not external testimony, but inherent fitness.
So much for the second period of what is called human history. In the first or mythological there is no historical groundwork at all. In the next or heroic we have accounts of real persons, but handed down to us by writers to whom the past was a world of marvels, whose delight was to dwell upon the mighty works which had been done in the old times, whose object was to elevate into superhuman proportions the figures of the illustrious men who had distinguished themselves as apostles or warriors. They thus appear to us like their portraits in stained-glass windows, represented rather in a transcendental condition of beatitude than in the modest and checkered colors of real life. We see them not as they were, but as they appeared to an adoring imagination, and in a costume of which we can only affirm with certainty that it was never worn by any child of Adam on this plain, prosaic earth. For facts as facts there is as yet no appreciation; they are shifted to and fro, dropped out of sight, or magnified, or transferred from owner to owner,—manipulated to suit or decorate a preconceived and brilliant idea. We are still in the domain of poetry, where the canons of the art require fidelity to general principles, and allow free play to fancy in details. The Virgins of Raphael are no less beautiful as paintings, no less masterpieces of workmanship, though in no single feature either of face or form or costume they resemble the historical mother of Christ, or even resemble one another.
At the next stage we pass with the chroniclers into history proper. The chronicler is not a poet like his predecessor. He does not shape out consistent pictures with a beginning, a middle, and an end. He is a narrator of events, and he connects them together on a chronological string. He professes to be relating facts. He is not idealizing, he is not singing the praises of the heroes of the sword or the crosier; he means to be true in the literal and commonplace sense of that ambiguous word. And yet in his earlier phases, take him in what part of the world we please,—take him in ancient Egypt or Assyria, in Greece or in Rome, or in modern Europe,—he is but a step in advance of his predecessor. He is excellent company. He never moralizes, never bores you with philosophy of history or political economy. He never speculates about causes. But on the other hand, he is uncritical. He takes unsuspectingly the materials which he finds ready to his hand,—the national ballads, the romances, and the biographies. He transfers to his pages whatever catches his fancy. The more picturesque an anecdote, the more unhesitatingly he writes it down, though in the same proportion it is the less likely to be authentic. Romulus and Remus suckled by the wolf; Curtius jumping into the gulf; our English Alfred spoiling the cakes; or Bruce watching the leap of the spider,—stories of this kind he relates with the same simplicity with which he records the birth in his own day, in some outlandish village, of a child with two heads, or the appearance of the sea-serpent or the flying dragon. Thus the chronicle, however charming, is often nothing but poetry taken literally and translated into prose. It grows, however, and improves insensibly with the growth of the nation. Like the drama, it develops from poor beginnings into the loftiest art, and becomes at last perhaps the very best kind of historical writing which has yet been produced. Herodotus and Livy, Froissart and Hall and Holinshed, are as great in their own departments as Sophocles or Terence or Shakespeare. We are not yet entirely clear of portents and prodigies. Superstition clings to us as our shadow, and is to be found in the wisest as well as the weakest. The Romans, the most practical people that ever lived,—a people so pre-eminently effective that they have printed their character indelibly into the constitution of Europe,—these Romans, at the very time they were making themselves the world's masters, allowed themselves to be influenced in the most important affairs of State by a want of appetite in the sacred chickens, or the color of the entrails of a calf. Take him at his best, man is a great fool. It is likely enough that we ourselves habitually say and practice things which a thousand years hence will seem not a jot less absurd. Cato tells us that the Roman augurs could not look one another in the face without laughing; and I have heard that bishops in some parts of the world betray sometimes analogous misgivings.
In able and candid minds, however, stuff of this kind is tolerably harmless, and was never more innocent than in the case of the first great historian of Greece. Herodotus was a man of vast natural powers. Inspired by a splendid subject, and born at the most favorable time, he grew to manhood surrounded by the heroes of Marathon and Salamis and Platæa. The wonders of Egypt and Assyria were for the first time thrown open to the inspection of strangers. The gloss of novelty was not yet worn off, and the impressions falling fresh on an eager, cultivated, but essentially simple and healthy mind, there were qualities and conditions combined which produced one of the most delightful books which was ever written. He was an intense patriot; and he was unvexed with theories, political or moral. His philosophy was like Shakespeare's,—a calm, intelligent insight into human things. He had no views of his own, which the fortunes of Greece or other countries were to be manipulated to illustrate. The world as he saw it was a well-made, altogether promising and interesting world; and his object was to relate what he had seen and what he had heard and learnt, faithfully and accurately. His temperament was rather believing than skeptical; but he was not idly credulous. He can be critical when occasion requires. He distinguishes always between what he had seen with his own eyes and what others told him. He uses his judgment freely, and sets his readers on their guard against uncertain evidence. And there is not a book existing which contains in the same space so much important truth,—truth which survives the sharpest test that modern discoveries can apply to it.
The same may be said in a slightly less degree of Livy and of the best of the late European chroniclers: you have the same freshness, the same vivid perception of external life, the same absence of what philosophers call subjectivity,—the projection into the narrative of the writer's own personality, his opinions, thoughts, and theories. Still, in all of them, however vivid, however vigorous the representation, there is a vein of fiction largely and perhaps consciously intermingled. In a modern work of history, when a statesman is introduced as making a speech, the writer at any rate supposes that such a speech was actually made. He has found an account of it somewhere either in detail or at least in outline or epitome. The boldest fabricator would not venture to introduce an entire and complete invention. This was not the case with the older authors. Thucydides tells us frankly that the speeches which he interweaves with his narrative were his own composition. They were intended as dramatic representations of the opinions of the factions and parties with which Greece was divided, and they were assigned to this person or to that, as he supposed them to be internally suitable. Herodotus had set Thucydides the example, and it was universally followed. No speech given by any old historian can be accepted as literally true unless there is a specific intimation to that effect. Deception was neither practiced nor pretended. It was a convenient method of exhibiting characters and situations, and it was therefore adopted without hesitation or reserve.
THE DEATH OF THOMAS BECKET
From 'Short Studies on Great Subjects'
The knights were introduced. They advanced. The archbishop neither spoke nor looked at them, but continued talking to a monk who was next him. He himself was sitting on a bed. The rest of the party present were on the floor. The knights seated themselves in the same manner, and for a few moments there was silence. Then Becket's black, restless eye glanced from one to the other. He slightly noticed Tracy; and Fitzurse said a few unrecorded sentences to him, which ended with "God help you!" To Becket's friends the words sounded like insolence. They may have meant no more than pity for the deliberate fool who was forcing destruction upon himself.
Becket's face flushed. Fitzurse went on, "We bring you the commands of the King beyond the sea; will you hear us in public or in private?" Becket said he cared not. "In private, then," said Fitzurse. The monks thought afterwards that Fitzurse had meant to kill the archbishop where he sat. If the knights had entered the palace, thronged as it was with men, with any such intention, they would scarcely have left their swords behind them. The room was cleared, and a short altercation followed, of which nothing is known save that it ended speedily in high words on both sides. Becket called in his clergy again, his lay servants being excluded, and bade Fitzurse go on. "Be it so," Sir Reginald said. "Listen, then, to what the King says. When the peace was made, he put aside all his complaints against you. He allowed you to return, as you desired, free to your see. You have now added contempt to your other offenses. You have broken the treaty. You have allowed your pride to tempt you to defy your lord and master to your own sorrow. You have censured the bishops by whose administration the Prince was crowned. You have pronounced an anathema against the King's ministers, by whose advice he is guided in the management of the empire. You have made it plain that if you could you would take the Prince's crown from him. Your plots and contrivances to attain your ends are notorious to all men. Say, then, will you attend us to the King's presence, and there answer for yourself? For this we are sent."
The archbishop declared that he had never wished any hurt to the Prince. The King had no occasion to be displeased if crowds came about him in the towns and cities, after having been so long deprived of his presence. If he had done any wrong he would make satisfaction, but he protested against being suspected of intentions which had never entered his mind.
Fitzurse did not enter into an altercation with him, but continued:—"The King commands further that you and your clerks repair without delay to the young King's presence, and swear allegiance, and promise to amend your faults."
The archbishop's temper was fast rising. "I will do whatever may be reasonable," he said, "but I tell you plainly, the King shall have no oaths from me, nor from any one of my clergy. There has been too much perjury already. I have absolved many, with God's help, who had perjured themselves. I will absolve the rest when he permits."
"I understand you to say that you will not obey," said Fitzurse, and went on in the same tone:—"The King commands you to absolve the bishops whom you have excommunicated without his permission" (absque licentiâ suâ).
"The Pope sentenced the bishops," the archbishop said. "If you are not pleased, you must go to him. The affair is none of mine."
Fitzurse said it had been done at his instigation, which he did not deny; but he proceeded to reassert that the King had given his permission. He had complained at the time of the peace of the injury which he had suffered in the coronation, and the King had told him that he might obtain from the Pope any satisfaction for which he liked to ask.
If this was all the consent which the King had given, the pretense of his authority was inexcusable. Fitzurse could scarce hear the archbishop out with patience. "Ay, ay!" said he; "will you make the King out to be a traitor, then? The King gave you leave to excommunicate the bishops when they were acting by his own order! It is more than we can bear to listen to such monstrous accusations."
John of Salisbury tried to check the archbishop's imprudent tongue, and whispered to him to speak to the knights in private; but when the passion was on him, no mule was more ungovernable than Becket. Drawing to a conclusion, Fitzurse said to him:—"Since you refuse to do any one of those things which the King requires of you, his final commands are that you and your clergy shall forthwith depart out of this realm and out of his dominions, never more to return. You have broken the peace, and the King cannot trust you again."
Becket answered wildly that he would not go—never again would he leave England. Nothing but death should now part him from his church. Stung by the reproach of ill-faith, he poured out the catalogue of his own injuries. He had been promised restoration, and instead of restoration he had been robbed and insulted. Ranulf de Broc had laid an embargo on his wine. Robert de Broc had cut off his mule's tail; and now the knights had come to menace him.
De Morville said that if he had suffered any wrong he had only to appeal to the Council, and justice would be done.
Becket did not wish for the Council's justice. "I have complained enough," he said; "so many wrongs are daily heaped upon me that I could not find messengers to carry the tale of them. I am refused access to the court. Neither one king nor the other will do me right. I will endure it no more. I will use my own powers as archbishop, and no child of man shall prevent me."
"You will lay the realm under interdict, then, and excommunicate the whole of us?" said Fitzurse.
"So God help me," said one of the others, "he shall not do that. He has excommunicated over-many already. We have borne too long with him."
The knights sprang to their feet, twisting their gloves and swinging their arms. The archbishop rose. In the general noise words could no longer be accurately heard. At length the knights moved to leave the room, and addressing the archbishop's attendants, said, "In the King's name we command you to see that this man does not escape."
"Do you think I shall fly, then?" cried the archbishop. "Neither for the King nor for any living man will I fly. You cannot be more ready to kill me than I am to die.... Here you will find me," he shouted, following them to the door as they went out, and calling after them. Some of his friends thought that he had asked De Morville to come back and speak quietly with him, but it was not so. He returned to his seat, still excited and complaining.
"My lord," said John of Salisbury to him, "it is strange that you will never be advised. What occasion was there for you to go after these men and exasperate them with your bitter speeches? You would have done better, surely, by being quiet and giving them a milder answer. They mean no good, and you only commit yourself."
The archbishop sighed, and said, "I have done with advice. I know what I have before me."
It was four o'clock when the knights entered. It was now nearly five; and unless there were lights the room must have been almost dark. Beyond the archbishop's chamber was an ante-room, beyond the ante-room the hall. The knights, passing through the hall into the quadrangle, and thence to the lodge, called their men to arms. The great gate was closed. A mounted guard was stationed outside, with orders to allow no one to go out or in. The knights threw off their cloaks and buckled on their swords. This was the work of a few minutes. From the cathedral tower the vesper bell was beginning to sound. The archbishop had seated himself to recover from the agitation of the preceding scene, when a breathless monk rushed in to say that the knights were arming. "Who cares? Let them arm," was all that the archbishop said. His clergy was less indifferent. If the archbishop was ready for death, they were not. The door from the hall into the court was closed and barred, and a short respite was thus secured. The intention of the knights, it may be presumed, was to seize the archbishop and carry him off to Saltwood or to De Morville's castle at Knaresborough, or perhaps to Normandy. Coming back to execute their purpose, they found themselves stopped by the hall door. To burst it open would require time; the ante-room between the hall and the archbishop's apartments opened by an oriel window and an outside stair into a garden. Robert de Broc, who knew the house well, led the way to it in the dark. The steps were broken, but a ladder was standing against the window, by which the knights mounted, and the crash of the falling casement told the fluttered group about the archbishop that their enemies were upon them. There was still a moment. The party who entered by the window, instead of turning into the archbishop's room, first went into the hall to open the door and admit their comrades. From the archbishop's room a second passage, little used, opened into the northwest corner of the cloister, and from the cloister there was a way into the north transept of the cathedral. The cry was "To the church! To the church!" There at least there would be immediate safety.
The archbishop had told the knights that they would find him where they left him. He did not choose to show fear; or he was afraid, as some thought, of losing his martyrdom. He would not move. The bell had ceased. They reminded him that vespers had begun, and that he ought to be in the cathedral. Half yielding, half resisting, his friends swept him down the passage into the cloister. His cross had been forgotten in the haste. He refused to stir till it was fetched and carried before him as usual. Then only, himself incapable of fear, and rebuking the terror of the rest, he advanced deliberately to the door into the south transept. His train was scattered behind him, all along the cloister from the passage leading out of the palace. As he entered the church, cries were heard, from which it became plain that the knights had broken into the archbishop's room, had found the passage, and were following him. Almost immediately Fitzurse, Tracy, De Morville, and Le Breton were discerned in the dim light, coming through the cloister in their armor, with drawn swords, and axes in their left hands. A company of men-at-arms was behind them. In front they were driving before them a frightened flock of monks.
From the middle of the transept in which the archbishop was standing, a single pillar rose into the roof. On the eastern side of it opened a chapel of St. Benedict, in which were the tombs of several of the old primates. On the west, running of course parallel to the nave, was a Lady chapel. Behind the pillar, steps led up into the choir, where voices were already singing vespers. A faint light may have been reflected into the transept from the choir tapers, and candles may perhaps have been burning before the altars in the two chapels; of light from without through the windows at that hour there could have been none. Seeing the knights coming on, the clergy who had entered with the archbishop closed the door and barred it. "What do you fear?" he cried in a clear, loud voice. "Out of the way, you coward! the Church of God must not be made a fortress." He stepped back and reopened the door with his own hands, to let in the trembling wretches who had been shut out among the wolves. They rushed past him, and scattered in the hiding-places of the vast sanctuary, in the crypt, in the galleries, or behind the tombs. All, or almost all, even of his closest friends,—William of Canterbury, Benedict, John of Salisbury himself,—forsook him to shift for themselves, admitting frankly that they were unworthy of martyrdom. The archbishop was left alone with his chaplain Fitzstephen, Robert of Merton his old master, and Edward Grim, the stranger from Cambridge,—or perhaps with Grim only, who says that he was the only one who stayed, and was the only one certainly who showed any sign of courage. A cry had been raised in the choir that armed men were breaking into the cathedral. The vespers ceased; the few monks assembled left their seats and rushed to the edge of the transept, looking wildly into the darkness.
The archbishop was on the fourth step beyond the central pillar ascending into the choir, when the knights came in. The outline of his figure may have been just visible to them, if light fell upon it from candles in the Lady chapel. Fitzurse passed to the right of the pillar, De Morville, Tracy, and Le Breton to the left. Robert de Broc, and Hugh Mauclerc, another apostate priest, remained at the door by which they entered. A voice cried, "Where is the traitor? Where is Thomas Becket?" There was silence; such a name could not be acknowledged. "Where is the archbishop?" Fitzurse shouted. "I am here," the archbishop replied, descending the steps, and meeting the knights full in the face. "What do you want with me? I am not afraid of your swords. I will not do what is unjust." The knights closed round him. "Absolve the persons whom you have excommunicated," they said, "and take off the suspensions." "They have made no satisfaction," he answered; "I will not." "Then you shall die as you have deserved," they said.
They had not meant to kill him—certainly not at that time and in that place. One of them touched him on the shoulder with the flat of his sword, and hissed in his ears, "Fly, or you are a dead man." There was still time; with a few steps he would have been lost in the gloom of the cathedral, and could have concealed him in any one of a hundred hiding-places. But he was careless of life, and he felt that his time was come. "I am ready to die," he said. "May the Church through my blood obtain peace and liberty! I charge you in the name of God that you hurt no one here but me."
The people from the town were now pouring into the cathedral; De Morville was keeping them back with difficulty at the head of the steps from the choir, and there was danger of a rescue. Fitzurse seized him, meaning to drag him off as a prisoner. He had been calm so far; his pride rose at the indignity of an arrest. "Touch me not, thou abominable wretch!" he said, wrenching his cloak out of Fitzurse's grasp. "Off, thou pander, thou!" Le Breton and Fitzurse grasped him again, and tried to force him upon Tracy's back. He grappled with Tracy and flung him to the ground, and then stood with his back against the pillar, Edward Grim supporting him. Fitzurse, stung by the foul epithet which Becket had thrown at him, swept his sword over him and dashed off his cap. Tracy, rising from the pavement, struck direct at his head. Grim raised his arm and caught the blow. The arm fell broken, and the one friend found faithful sank back disabled against the wall. The sword with its remaining force wounded the archbishop above the forehead, and the blood trickled down his face. Standing firmly, with his hands clasped, he bent his neck for the death-stroke, saying in a low voice, "I am prepared to die for Christ and for his Church." These were his last words. Tracy again struck him. He fell forward upon his knees and hands. In that position Le Breton dealt him a blow which severed the scalp from the head and broke the sword against the stone, saying, "Take that for my Lord William." De Broc or Mauclerc—the needless ferocity was attributed to both of them—strode forward from the cloister door, set his foot on the neck of the dead lion, and spread the brains upon the pavement with his sword's point. "We may go," he said; "the traitor is dead, and will trouble us no more."
Such was the murder of Becket, the echoes of which are still heard across seven centuries of time, and which, be the final judgment upon it what it may, has its place among the most enduring incidents of English history. Was Becket a martyr, or was he justly executed as a traitor to his sovereign? Even in that supreme moment of terror and wonder, opinions were divided among his own monks. That very night Grim heard one of them say, "He is no martyr, he is justly served." Another said—scarcely feeling, perhaps, the meaning of the words,—"He wished to be king and more than king. Let him be king, let him be king." Whether the cause for which he died was to prevail, or whether the sacrifice had been in vain, hung on the answer which would be given to this momentous question. In a few days or weeks an answer came in a form to which in that age no rejoinder was possible; and the only uncertainty which remained at Canterbury was whether it was lawful to use the ordinary prayers for the repose of the dead man's soul, or whether, in consequence of the astounding miracles which were instantly worked by his remains, the Pope's judgment ought not to be anticipated, and the archbishop ought not to be at once adored as a saint in heaven.
CHARACTER OF HENRY VIII.
From the 'History of England'
Protestants and Catholics united to condemn a government under which both had suffered; and a point on which enemies were agreed was assumed to be proved. When I commenced the examination of the records, I brought with me the inherited impression, from which I had neither any thought nor any expectation that I should be disabused. I found that it melted between my hands, and with it disappeared that other fact, so difficult to credit, yet as it had appeared so impossible to deny, that English Parliaments, English judges, English clergy, statesmen whose beneficent legislature survives among the most valued of our institutions, prelates who were the founders and martyrs of the English Church, were the cowardly accomplices of abominable atrocities, and had disgraced themselves with a sycophancy which the Roman Senate imperfectly approached when it fawned on Nero.
Henry had many faults. They have been exhibited in the progress of the narrative: I need not return to them. But his position was one of unexampled difficulty; and by the work which he accomplished, and the conditions, internal and external, under which his task was allotted to him, he, like every other man, ought to be judged. He was inconsistent: he can bear the reproach of it. He ended by accepting and approving what he had commenced with persecuting; yet it was with the honest inconsistency which distinguishes the conduct of most men of practical ability in times of change, and even by virtue of which they obtain their success. If at the commencement of the movement he had regarded the eucharist as a "remembrance," he must either have concealed his convictions or he would have forfeited his throne; if he had been a stationary bigot, the Reformation might have waited for a century, and would have been conquered only by an internecine war.
But as the nation moved the King moved, leading it, but not outrunning it; checking those who went too fast, dragging forward those who lagged behind. The conservatives, all that was sound and good among them, trusted him because he so long continued to share their conservatism; when he threw it aside he was not reproached with breach of confidence, because his own advance had accompanied theirs.
Protestants have exclaimed against the Six Articles Bill; Romanists against the Act of Supremacy. Philosophers complain that the prejudices of the people were needlessly violated, that opinions should have been allowed to be free, and the reform of religion have been left to be accomplished by reason. Yet, however cruel was the Six Articles Bill, the governing classes even among the laity were unanimous in its favor. The King was not converted by a sudden miracle; he believed the traditions in which he had been trained; his eyes, like the eyes of others, opened but slowly; and unquestionably, had he conquered for himself in their fullness the modern principles of toleration, he could not have governed by them a nation which was itself intolerant. Perhaps, of all living Englishmen who shared Henry's faith, there was not one so little desirous in himself of enforcing it by violence. His personal exertions were ever to mitigate the action of the law, while its letter was sustained; and England at its worst was a harbor of refuge to the Protestants, compared to the Netherlands, to France, to Spain, or even to Scotland.
That the Romanists should have regarded him as a tyrant is natural; and were it true that English subjects owed fealty to the Pope, their feeling was just. But however desirable it may be to leave religious opinion unfettered, it is certain that if England was legitimately free, she could tolerate no difference of opinion on a question of allegiance, so long as Europe was conspiring to bring her back into slavery. So long as the English Romanists refused to admit without mental reservation that, if foreign enemies invaded this country in the Pope's name, their place must be at the side of their own sovereign, "religion" might palliate the moral guilt of their treason, but it could not exempt them from its punishment.
But these matters have been discussed in the details of this history, where alone they can be understood.
Beyond and besides the Reformation, the constitution of these islands now rests in large measure on foundations laid in this reign. Henry brought Ireland within the reach of English civilization. He absorbed Wales and the Palatinates into the general English system. He it was who raised the House of Commons from the narrow duty of voting supplies, and of passing without discussion the measures of the Privy Council, and converted them into the first power in the State under the Crown. When he ascended the throne, so little did the Commons care for their privileges that their attendance at the sessions of Parliament was enforced by a law. They woke into life in 1529, and they became the right hand of the King to subdue the resistance of the House of Lords, and to force upon them a course of legislation which from their hearts they detested. Other kings in times of difficulty summoned their "great councils," composed of peers, or prelates, or municipal officials, or any persons whom they pleased to nominate. Henry VIII. broke through the ancient practice, and ever threw himself on the representatives of the people. By the Reformation and by the power which he forced upon them, he had so interwoven the House of Commons with the highest business of the State that the peers thenceforward sunk to be their shadow.
Something, too, ought to be said of his individual exertions in the details of State administration. In his earlier life, though active and assiduous, he found leisure for elegant accomplishments, for splendid amusements, for relaxations careless, extravagant, sometimes questionable. As his life drew onwards, his lighter tastes disappeared, and the whole energy of his intellect was pressed into the business of the commonwealth. Those who have examined the printed State papers may form some impression of his industry from the documents which are his own composition, and the letters which he wrote and received: but only persons who have seen the original manuscripts, who have observed the traces of his pen in side-notes and corrections, and the handwritings of his secretaries in diplomatic commissions, in drafts of Acts of Parliament, in expositions and formularies, in articles of faith, in proclamations, in the countless multitude of documents of all sorts, secular or ecclesiastical, which contain the real history of this extraordinary reign,—only they can realize the extent of labor to which he sacrificed himself, and which brought his life to a premature close. His personal faults were great, and he shared, besides them, in the errors of his age; but far deeper blemishes would be but as scars upon the features of a sovereign who in trying times sustained nobly the honor of the English name, and carried the commonwealth securely through the hardest crisis in its history.
ON A SIDING AT A RAILWAY STATION
From 'Short Studies on Great Subjects'
Some years ago I was traveling by railway, no matter whence or whither. I was in a second-class carriage. We had been long on the road, and had still some distance before us, when one evening our journey was brought unexpectedly to an end by the train running into a siding. The guards opened the doors, we were told that we could proceed no further, and were required to alight. The passengers were numerous, and of all ranks and sorts. There were third class, second, first, with saloon carriages for several great persons of high distinction. We had ministers of State, judges on circuit, directors, leading men of business, idle young men of family who were out amusing themselves, an archbishop, several ladies, and a duke and duchess with their suite. These favored travelers had Pullman cars to themselves, and occupied as much room as was allotted to scores of plebeians. I had amused myself for several days in observing the luxurious appurtenances by which they were protected against discomfort,—the piles of cushions and cloaks, the baskets of dainties, the novels and magazines to pass away the time, and the profound attention which they met with from the conductors and station-masters on the line. The rest of us were a miscellaneous crowd,—commercial people, lawyers, artists, men of letters, tourists moving about for pleasure or because they had nothing to do; and in third-class carriages, artisans and laborers in search of work, women looking for husbands or for service, or beggars flying from starvation in one part of the world to find it follow them like their shadows, let them go where they pleased. All these were huddled together, feeding hardly on such poor provisions as they carried with them or could pick up at the stopping-places. No more consideration was shown them than if they had been so many cattle. But they were merry enough: songs and sounds of laughter came from their windows, and notwithstanding all their conveniences, the languid-looking fine people in the large compartments seemed to me to get through their journey with less enjoyment after all than their poor fellow travelers. These last appeared to be of tougher texture, to care less for being jolted and shaken, to be better humored and kinder to one another. They had found life go hard with them wherever they had been, and not being accustomed to have everything which they wished for, they were less selfish and more considerate.
The intimation that our journey was for the present at an end came on most of us as an unpleasant surprise. The grandees got out in a high state of indignation. They called for their servants, but their servants did not hear them, or laughed and passed on. The conductors had forgotten to be obsequious. All classes on the platform were suddenly on a level. A beggar woman hustled the duchess, as she was standing astonished because her maid had left her to carry her own bag. The patricians were pushed about among the crowd with no more concern than if they had been common mortals. They demanded loudly to see the station-master. The minister complained angrily of the delay; an important negotiation would be imperiled by his detention, and he threatened the company with the displeasure of his department. A consequential youth who had just heard of the death of his elder brother was flying home to take his inheritance. A great lady had secured, as she had hoped, a brilliant match for her daughter; her work over, she had been at the baths to recover from the dissipation of the season; difficulty had arisen unlooked for, and unless she was at hand to remove it the worst consequences might be feared. A banker declared that the credit of a leading commercial house might fail, unless he could be at home on the day fixed for his return; he alone could save it. A solicitor had the evidence in his portmanteau which would determine the succession to the lands and title of an ancient family. An elderly gentleman was in despair about his young wife, whom he had left at home; he had made a will by which she was to lose his fortune if she married again after his death, but the will was lying in his desk unsigned. The archbishop was on his way to a synod, where the great question was to be discussed whether gas might be used at the altar instead of candles. The altar candles were blessed before they were used, and the doubt was whether gas could be blessed. The right reverend prelate conceived that if the gas tubes were made in the shape of candles the difficulty could be got over, but he feared that without his moderating influence the majority might come to a rash decision.
All these persons were clamoring over their various anxieties with the most naïve frankness, the truth coming freely out, whatever it might be. One distinguished-looking lady in deep mourning, with a sad, gentle face, alone was resigned and hopeful. It seemed that her husband had been stopped not long before at the same station. She thought it possible that she might meet him again.
The station-master listened to the complaints with composed indifference. He told the loudest that they need not alarm themselves. The State would survive the absence of the minister. The minister, in fact, was not thinking of the State at all, but of the party triumph which he expected; and the peerage which was to be his reward, the station-master said, would now be of no use to him. The youth had a second brother who would succeed instead of him, and the tenants would not be inconvenienced by the change. The fine lady's daughter would marry to her own liking instead of her mother's, and would be all the happier for it. The commercial house was already insolvent, and the longer it lasted the more innocent people would be ruined by it. The boy whom the lawyer intended to make into a rich baronet was now working industriously at school, and would grow up a useful man. If a great estate fell in to him he would be idle and dissolute. The old man might congratulate himself that he had escaped so soon from the scrape into which he had fallen. His wife would marry an adventurer, and would suffer worse from inheriting his fortune. The archbishop was commended for his anxiety. His solution of the candle problem was no doubt an excellent one; but his clergy were now provided with a harmless subject to quarrel over, and if it was adopted they might fall out over something else which might be seriously mischievous.
"Do you mean, then, that you are not going to send us forward at all?" the minister inquired sternly.
"You will see," the station-master answered with a curious short laugh. I observed that he looked more gently at the lady in mourning. She had said nothing, but he knew what was in her mind, and though he held out no hope in words that her wish would be gratified, he smiled sadly, and the irony passed out of his face.
The crowd meanwhile were standing about the platform, whistling tunes or amusing themselves, not ill-naturedly at the distress of their grand companions. Something considerable was happening. But they had so long experienced the ups and downs of things that they were prepared for what fortune might send. They had not expected to find a Paradise where they were going, and one place might be as good as another. They had nothing belonging to them except the clothes they stood in and their bits of skill in their different trades. Wherever men were, there would be need of cobblers, and tailors, and smiths, and carpenters. If not, they might fall on their feet somehow, if there was work to be done of any sort.
Presently a bell rang, a door was flung open, and we were ordered into a waiting-room, where we were told that our luggage was to be examined. It was a large, barely furnished apartment, like the salle d'attente at the Northern Railway Station at Paris. A rail ran across, behind which we were all penned; opposite to us was the usual long table, on which were piled boxes, bags, and portmanteaus, and behind them stood a row of officials, in a plain uniform with gold bands round their caps, and the dry peremptory manner which passengers accustomed to deference so particularly dislike. At their backs was a screen extending across the room, reaching half-way to the ceiling; in the rear of it there was apparently an office.
We each looked to see that our particular belongings were safe, but we were surprised to find that we could recognize none of them. Packages there were in plenty, alleged to be the property of the passengers who had come in by the train. They were arranged in the three classes,—first, second, and third,—but the proportions were inverted: most of it was labeled as the luggage of the travelers in fustian, who had brought nothing with them but what they carried in their hands; a moderate heap stood where the second-class luggage should have been, and some of superior quality; but none of us could make out the shapes of our own trunks. As to the grand ladies and gentlemen, the innumerable articles which I had seen put as theirs into the van were nowhere to be found. A few shawls and cloaks lay upon the planks, and that was all. There was a loud outcry; but the officials were accustomed to it, and took no notice. The station-master, who was still in charge of us, said briefly that the saloon luggage would be sent forward in the next train. The late owners would have no more use for it, and it would be delivered to their friends.
The late owners! Were we no longer actual owners, then? My individual loss was not great, and besides, it might be made up to me; for I saw my name on a strange box on the table, and being of curious disposition, the singularity of the adventure made it interesting to me. The consternation of the rest was indescribable. The minister supposed that he had fallen among communists, who disbelieved in property, and was beginning a speech on the elementary conditions of society; when silence was called, and the third-class passengers were ordered to advance, that their boxes might be opened. Each man had his own carefully docketed. The lids flew off, and within, instead of clothes, and shoes, and dressing apparatus, and money, and jewels, and such-like, were simply samples of the work which he had done in his life. There was an account-book also, in which were entered the number of days which he had worked, the number and size of the fields, etc., which he had drained and inclosed and plowed, the crops which he had reaped, the walls which he had built, the metal which he had dug out and smelted and fashioned into articles of use to mankind, the leather which he had tanned, the clothes which he had woven,—all entered with punctual exactness; and on the opposite page, the wages which he had received, and the share which had been allotted to him of the good things which he had helped to create.
Besides his work, so specifically called, there were his actions,—his affection for his parents or his wife and children, his self-denials, his charities, his purity, his truth, his honesty; or it might be ugly catalogues of sins and oaths and drunkenness and brutality. But inquiry into action was reserved for a second investigation before a higher commissioner. The first examination was confined to the literal work done by each man for the general good,—how much he had contributed, and how much society had done for him in return; and no one, it seemed, could be allowed to go any further without a certificate of having passed this test satisfactorily. With the workmen, the balance in most instances was found enormously in their favor. The state of the case was so clear that the scrutiny was rapidly got over, and they and their luggage were passed in to the higher court. A few were found whose boxes were empty, who had done nothing useful all their lives, and had subsisted by begging and stealing. These were ordered to stand aside till the rest of us had been disposed of.
The saloon passengers were taken next. Most of them, who had nothing at all to show, were called up together and were asked what they had to say for themselves. A well-dressed gentleman, who spoke for the rest, said that the whole investigation was a mystery to him. He and his friends had been born to good fortunes, and had found themselves, on entering upon life, amply provided for. They had never been told that work was required of them, either work with their hands or work with their heads,—in fact, work of any kind. It was right of course for the poor to work, because they could not honestly live otherwise. For themselves, they had spent their time in amusements, generally innocent. They had paid for everything which they had consumed. They had stolen nothing, taken nothing from any man by violence or fraud. They had kept the Commandments, all ten of them, from the time when they were old enough to understand them. The speaker, at least, declared that he had no breach of any Commandment on his own conscience, and he believed that he might say as much of his companions. They were superior people, who had been always looked up to and well spoken of; and to call upon them to show what they had done was against reason and equity.
"Gentlemen," said the chief official, "we have heard this many times; yet as often as it is repeated we feel fresh astonishment. You have been in a world where work is the condition of life. Not a meal can be had by any man that some one has not worked to produce. Those who work deserve to eat; those who do not work deserve to starve. There are but three ways of living: by working, by stealing, or by begging. Those who have not lived by the first have lived by one of the other two. And no matter how superior you think yourselves, you will not pass here till you have something of your own to produce. You have had your wages beforehand—ample wages, as you acknowledge yourselves. What have you to show?"
"Wages!" the speaker said: "we are not hired servants; we received no wages. What we spent was our own. All the orders we received were that we were not to do wrong. We have done no wrong. I appeal to the higher court."
But the appeal could not be received. To all who presented themselves with empty boxes, no matter who they were, or how excellent their characters appeared to one another, there was the irrevocable answer—"No admittance, till you come better furnished." All who were in this condition, the duke and duchess among them, were ordered to stand aside with the thieves. The duchess declared that she had given the finest parties in the season, and as it was universally agreed that they had been the most tedious, and that no one had found any pleasure there, a momentary doubt rose whether they might not have answered some useful purpose in disgusting people with such modes of entertainment; but no evidence of this was forthcoming: the world had attended them because the world had nothing else to do, and she and her guests had been alike unprofitable. Thus the large majority of the saloon passengers was disposed of. The minister, the archbishop, the lawyer, the banker, and others who although they had no material work credited to them had yet been active and laborious in their different callings, were passed to the superior judges.
Our turn came next,—ours of the second class,—and a motley gathering we were. Busy we must all have been, from the multitude of articles which we found assigned to us: manufacturers with their wares, solicitors with their law-suits, doctors and clergymen with the bodies and souls which they had saved or lost, authors with their books, painters and sculptors with their pictures and statues. But the hard test was applied to all that we had produced,—the wages which we had received on one side, and the value of our exertions to mankind on the other,—and imposing as our performances looked when laid out to be examined, we had been paid, most of us, out of all proportion to what we were found to have deserved. I was reminded of a large compartment in the Paris Exhibition, where an active gentleman, wishing to show the state of English literature, had collected copies of every book, review, pamphlet, or newspaper which had been published in a single year. The bulk was overwhelming, but the figures were only decimal points, and the worth of the whole was a fraction above zero. A few of us were turned back summarily among the thieves and the fine gentlemen and ladies: speculators who had done nothing but handle money which had clung to their fingers in passing through them, divines who had preached a morality which they did not practice, and fluent orators who had made speeches which they knew to be nonsense; philosophers who had spun out of moonshine systems of the universe, distinguished pleaders who had defeated justice while they established points of law, writers of books upon subjects of which they knew enough to mislead their readers, purveyors of luxuries which had added nothing to human health or strength, physicians and apothecaries who had pretended to knowledge which they knew that they did not possess,—these all, as the contents of their boxes bore witness against them, were thrust back into the rejected herd.
There were some whose account stood better, as having at least produced something of real merit, but they were cast on the point of wages: modest excellence had come badly off; the plausible and unscrupulous had thriven and grown rich. It was tragical, and evidently a surprise to most of us, to see how mendacious we had been: how we had sanded our sugar, watered our milk, scamped our carpentering and mason's work, literally and metaphorically; how in all things we had been thinking less of producing good work than of the profit which we could make out of it; how we had sold ourselves to tell lies and act them, because the public found lies pleasant and truth expensive and troublesome. Some of us were manifest rogues, who had bought cheap and sold dear, had used false measures and weights, had made cotton pass for wool, and hemp for silk, and tin for silver. The American peddler happened to be in the party, who had put a rind upon a grindstone and had sold it as a cheese. These were promptly sifted out and placed with their fellows; only persons whose services were on the whole greater than the pay which they had received were allowed their certificates. When my own box was opened, I perceived that though the wages had been small, the work done seemed smaller still; and I was surprised to find myself among those who had passed.
The whistle of a train was heard at this moment, coming in upon the main line. It was to go in half an hour, and those who had been turned back were told that they were to proceed by it to the place where they had been originally going. They looked infinitely relieved at the news; but before they started, a few questions had to be put to them, and a few alterations made which were to affect their future. They were asked to explain how they had come to be such worthless creatures. They gave many answers, which came mainly to the same thing. Circumstances had been against them. It was all owing to circumstances. They had been badly brought up. They had been placed in situations where it had been impossible for them to do better. The rich people repeated that they had never been informed that any work was expected of them. Their wants had all been provided for, and it was unfair to expect that they should have exerted themselves of their own accord when they had no motive for working. If they had only been born poor, all would have gone well with them. The cheating tradesman declared that the first duty of a shopkeeper, according to all received principles, was to make money and better his condition. It was the buyer's business to see to the quality of the articles which he purchased; the shopkeeper was entitled to sell his wares at the highest price which he could get for them. So, at least, it was believed and taught by the recognized authorities on the subject. The orators, preachers, newspaper writers, novel-writers, etc., etc., of whom there were a great many, appealed to the crowds who came to listen to them, or bought and read their productions. Tout le monde, it was said, was wiser than the wisest single sage. They had given the world what the world wished for and approved; they had worked at supplying it with all their might, and it was extremely hard to blame them for guiding themselves by the world's judgment. The thieves and vagabonds argued that they had been brought into existence without their consent being asked: they had not wished for it; although they had not been without their pleasures, they regarded existence on the whole as a nuisance which they would gladly have been spared. Being alive, however, they had to keep alive; and for all that they could see, they had as full a right to the good things which the world contained as anybody else, provided they could get them. They were called thieves. Law and language were made by the property-owners, who were their natural enemies. If society had given them the means of living honestly they would have found it easy to be honest. Society had done nothing for them—why should they do anything for society?
So, in their various ways, those who had been "plucked" defended themselves. They were all delighted to hear that they were to have another chance; and I was amused to observe that though some of them had pretended that they had not wished to be born, and had rather not have been born, not one of them protested against being sent back. All they asked was that they should be put in a new position, and that the adverse influences should be taken off. I expected that among these adverse influences they would have mentioned the faults of their own dispositions. My own opinion had been that half the misdoings of men came from congenital defects of character which they had brought with them into the world, and that constitutional courage, right-mindedness, and practical ability were as much gifts of nature or circumstance as the accidents of fortune. A change in this respect was of more consequence than in any other. But with themselves they were all apparently satisfied, and they required only an improvement in their surroundings. The alterations were rapidly made. The duchess was sent to begin her life again in a laborer's cottage. She was to attend the village school and rise thence into a housemaid. The fine gentleman was made a plowboy. The authors and preachers were to become mechanics, and bound apprentices to carpenters and blacksmiths. A philosopher who, having had a good fortune and unbroken health, had insisted that the world was as good as it could be made, was to be born blind and paralytic, and to find his way through life under the new conditions. The thieves and cheats, who pretended that their misdemeanors were due to poverty, were to find themselves, when they arrived in the world again, in palaces surrounded with luxury. The cup of Lethe was sent round. The past became a blank. They were hurried into the train; the engine screamed and flew away with them.
"They will be all here again in a few years," the station-master said, "and it will be the same story over again. I have had these very people in my hands a dozen times. They have been tried in all positions, and there is still nothing to show, and nothing but complaints of circumstances. For my part, I would put them out altogether." "How long is it to last?" I asked. "Well," he said, "it does not depend on me. No one passes here who cannot prove that he has lived to some purpose. Some of the worst I have known made at last into pigs and geese, to be fatted up and eaten, and made of use that way. Others have become asses, condemned to carry burdens, to be beaten with sticks, and to breed asses like themselves for a hundred generations. All animated creatures tend to take the shape at last which suits their character."
The train was scarcely out of sight when again the bell rang. The scene changed as at a theatre. The screen was rolled back, and we who were left found ourselves in the presence of four grave-looking persons, like the board of examiners whom we remembered at college. We were called up one by one. The work which had passed the first ordeal was again looked into, and the quality of it compared with the talent or faculty of the producer, to see how far he had done his best,—whether anywhere he had done worse than he might have done and knew how to have done; while besides, in a separate collection, were the vices, the sins, the selfishnesses and ill-humors, with—in the other scale—the acts of personal duty, of love and kindness and charity, which had increased the happiness or lightened the sorrows of those connected with him. These last, I observed, had generally been forgotten by the owner, who saw them appear with surprise, and even repudiated them with protest. In the work, of course, both material and moral, there was every gradation both of kind and merit. But while nothing was absolutely worthless, everything, even the highest achievements of the greatest artist or the greatest saint, fell short of absolute perfection. Each of us saw our own performances, from our first ignorant beginnings to what we regarded as our greatest triumph; and it was easy to trace how much of our faults were due to natural deficiencies and the necessary failures of inexperience, and how much to self-will or vanity or idleness. Some taint of mean motives, too,—some desire of reward, desire of praise or honor or wealth, some foolish self-satisfaction, when satisfaction ought not to have been felt,—was to be seen infecting everything, even the very best which was presented for scrutiny.
So plain was this that one of us, an earnest, impressive-looking person, whose own work bore inspection better than that of most of us, exclaimed passionately that so far as he was concerned the examiners might spare their labor. From his earliest years he had known what he ought to do, and in no instance had he ever completely done it. He had struggled; he had conquered his grosser faults: but the farther he had gone, and the better he had been able to do, his knowledge had still grown faster than his power of acting upon it; and every additional day that he had lived, his shortcomings had become more miserably plain to him. Even if he could have reached perfection at last, he could not undo the past, and the faults of his youth would bear witness against him and call for his condemnation. Therefore, he said, he abhorred himself. He had no merit which could entitle him to look for favor. He had labored on to the end, but he had labored with a full knowledge that the best which he could offer would be unworthy of acceptance. He had been told, and he believed, that a high Spirit not subject to infirmity had done his work for him, and done it perfectly, and that if he abandoned all claim on his own account, he might be accepted for the sake of what another had done. This, he trusted, was true, and it was his sole dependence. In the so-called good actions with which he seemed to be credited, there was nothing that was really good; there was not one which was altogether what it ought to have been.
He was evidently sincere, and what he said was undoubtedly true—true of him and true of every one. Even in the vehemence of his self-abandonment a trace lingered of the taint which he was confessing, for he was a polemical divine; he had spent his life and gained a reputation in maintaining this particular doctrine. He believed it, but he had not forgotten that he had been himself its champion.
The examiner looked kindly at him, but answered:—
"We do not expect impossibilities; and we do not blame you when you have not accomplished what is beyond your strength. Only those who are themselves perfect can do anything perfectly. Human beings are born ignorant and helpless. They bring into the world with them a disposition to seek what is pleasant to themselves, and what is pleasant is not always right. They learn to live as they learn everything else. At first they cannot do rightly at all. They improve under teaching and practice. The best only arrive at excellence. We do not find fault with the painter on account of his first bad copies, if they were as good as could be looked for at his age. Every craftsman acquires his art by degrees. He begins badly; he cannot help it; and it is the same with life. You learn to walk by falling down. You learn to live by going wrong and experiencing the consequences of it. We do not record against a man 'the sins of his youth' if he has been honestly trying to improve himself. We do not require the same self-control in a child as in a man. We do not require the same attainments from all. Some are well taught, some are ill taught, some are not taught at all. Some have naturally good dispositions, some have naturally bad dispositions. Not one has had power 'to fulfill the law,' as you call it, completely. Therefore it is no crime in him if he fails. We reckon as faults those only which arise from idleness, willfulness, selfishness, and deliberate preference of evil to good. Each is judged according to what he has received."
I was amused to observe how pleased the archbishop looked while the examiner was speaking. He had himself been engaged in controversy with this gentleman on the share of "good works" in justifying a man; and if the examiner had not taken his side in the discussion, he had at least demolished his adversary. The archbishop had been the more disinterested in the line which he had taken, as his own "works," though in several large folios, weighed extremely little; and indeed, had it not been for passages in his early life,—he had starved himself at college that he might not be a burden upon his widowed mother,—I do not know but that he might have been sent back into the world to serve as a parish clerk.
For myself, there were questions which I was longing to ask, and I was trying to collect my courage to speak. I wanted chiefly to know what the examiner meant by "natural disposition." Was it that a man might be born with a natural capacity for becoming a saint, as another man with a capacity to become a great artist or musician, and that each of us could only grow to the limits of his natural powers? And again, were idleness, willfulness, selfishness, etc., etc., natural dispositions? for in that case—
But at the moment the bell rang again, and my own name was called. There was no occasion to ask who I was. In every instance the identity of the person, his history, small or large, and all that he had said or done, was placed before the court so clearly that there was no need for extorting a confession. There stood the catalogue inexorably impartial, the bad actions in a schedule painfully large, the few good actions veined with personal motives which spoilt the best of them. In the way of work there was nothing to be shown but certain books and other writings, and these were spread out to be tested. A fluid was poured on the pages, the effect of which was to obliterate entirely every untrue proposition, and to make every partially true proposition grow faint in proportion to the false element which entered into it. Alas! chapter after chapter vanished away, leaving the paper clean, as if no compositor had ever labored in setting type for it. Pale and illegible became the fine-sounding paragraphs on which I had secretly prided myself. A few passages, however, survived here and there at long intervals. They were those on which I had labored least, and had almost forgotten; or those, as I observed in one or two instances, which had been selected for special reprobation in the weekly journals. Something stood to my credit, and the worst charge, of willfully and intentionally setting down what I did not believe to be true, was not alleged against me. Ignorance, prejudice, carelessness; sins of infirmity,—culpable indeed, but not culpable in the last degree; the water in the ink, the commonplaces, the ineffectual sentiments—these, to my unspeakable comfort, I perceived were my heaviest crimes. Had I been accused of absolute worthlessness, I should have pleaded guilty in the state of humiliation to which I was reduced; but things were better than they might have been. I was flattering myself that when it came to the wages question, the balance would be in my favor: so many years of labor—such and such cheques received from my publisher. Here at least I held myself safe, and I was in good hope that I might scrape through.
The examiner was good-natured in his manner. A reviewer who had been listening for my condemnation was beginning to look disgusted, when suddenly one of the walls of the court became transparent, and there appeared an interminable vista of creatures—creatures of all kinds from land and water, reaching away into the extreme distance. They were those which in the course of my life I had devoured, either in part or whole, to sustain my unconscionable carcass. There they stood in lines with solemn and reproachful faces,—oxen and calves, sheep and lambs, deer, hares, rabbits, turkeys, ducks, chickens, pheasants, grouse, and partridges, down to the larks and sparrows and blackbirds which I had shot when a boy and made into puddings. Every one of them had come up to bear witness against their murderer; out of sea and river had come the trout and salmon, the soles and turbots, the ling and cod, the whiting and mackerel, the smelts and whitebait, the oysters, the crabs, the lobsters, the shrimps. They seemed literally to be in millions, and I had eaten them all. I talked of wages. These had been my wages. At this enormous cost had my existence been maintained. A stag spoke for the rest: "We all," he said, "were sacrificed to keep this cormorant in being, and to enable him to produce the miserable bits of printed paper which are all that he has to show for himself. Our lives were dear to us. In meadow and wood, in air and water, we wandered harmless and innocent, enjoying the pleasant sunlight, the light of heaven and the sparkling waves. We were not worth much; we have no pretensions to high qualities. If the person who stands here to answer for himself can affirm that his value in the universe was equivalent to the value of all of us who were sacrificed to feed him, we have no more to say. Let it be so pronounced. We shall look at our numbers, and we shall wonder at the judgment, though we shall withdraw our complaint. But for ourselves we say freely that we have long watched him,—him and his fellows,—and we have failed to see in what the superiority of the human creature lies. We know him only as the most cunning, the most destructive, and unhappily the longest lived of all carnivorous beasts. His delight is in killing. Even when his hunger is satisfied, he kills us for his mere amusement."
The oxen lowed approval, the sheep bleated, the birds screamed, the fishes flapped their tails. I, for myself, stood mute and self-condemned. What answer but one was possible? Had I been myself on the bench I could not have hesitated. The fatal sentence of condemnation was evidently about to be uttered, when the scene became indistinct, there was a confused noise, a change of condition, a sound of running feet and of many voices. I awoke. I was again in the railway carriage; the door was thrown open; porters entered to take our things. We stepped out upon the platform. We were at the terminus for which we had been originally destined. Carriages and cabs were waiting; tall powdered footmen flew to the assistance of the duke and duchess. The station-master was standing hat in hand, and obsequiously bowing; the minister's private secretary had come to meet his right honorable chief with the red dispatch box, knowing the impatience with which it was waited for. The duke shook hands with the archbishop before he drove away. "Dine with us to-morrow?" he said. "I have had a very singular dream. You shall be my Daniel and interpret it for me." The archbishop regretted infinitely that he must deny himself the honor; his presence was required at the Conference. "I too have dreamt," he said; "but with your Grace and me the realities of this world are too serious to leave us leisure for the freaks of imagination."