Ane weel great while there dwellit he:
All men loved him for his bountie;
For he was of full fair effere,
Wise, courteous, and debonair;
Large and lovand also was he,
And ower all thing loved loyauty.
Loyautie to love is gretumly;
Through loyautie men lives richtwisely;
With a virtue of loyautie
Ane man may yet sufficiand be;
And, but loyautie, may nane have prize,
Whether he be wicht or be he wise;
For, where it failis, nae virtue
May be of prize, ne of value
To mak ane man sae good that he
May simply callit good man be.
He was in all his deedès leal;
For him dedeignit not to deal
With treachery ne with falsét.
His heart on high honóur was set,
And him contened in sic manére
That all him loved that war him near.
But he was not sae fair that we
Suld speak greatly of his beautíe.
In visage was he somedeal grey,
And had black hair, as I heard say;
But of his limbs he was well made,
With banès great and shoulders braid;
His body was well made leanlie,
As they that saw him said to me.
When he was blythe, he was lovely
And meek and sweet in company;
But wha in battle micht him see
All other countenance had he.
And in speech lispit he somedeal;
But that set him richt wonder weel.
To Good Hector of Troy micht he
In mony thingès likenit be.
Hector had black hair as he had,
And stark limbès and richt weel made,
And lispit also as did he,
And was fulfillit of loyautie,
And was courteous, and wise, and wicht.
My purpose in quoting these passages from Chaucer and Barbour will have been anticipated. Let me, however, state it in brief. We hear sometimes in these days of a certain science, or rather portion of a more general science, which takes to itself the name of Social Statics, and professes, under that name, to have for its business—I give the very phrase of those who define it—the investigation of “possible social simultaneities.” That is to say, there may be a science of what can possibly go along with what in any social state or stage; or, to put it otherwise, any one fact or condition of a state of society being given, there may be inferred from that fact or condition some of the other facts and conditions that must necessarily have co-existed with it. Thus at length perhaps, by continued inference, the whole state of an old society might be imaged out, just as Cuvier, from the sight of one bone, could infer with tolerable accuracy the general structure of the animal. Well, will Social Statics be so good as to take the foregoing passages, and whirr out of them their “possible social simultaneities”? Were this done, I should be surprised if the England and Scotland of the fourteenth century were to turn out so very unlovely, so atrociously barbarian, after all. These passages are actual transmitted bits of the English and Scottish mind of that age, and surely the substance from which they are extracts cannot have been so very coarse or bad. Where such sentiments existed and were expressed, where the men that could express them lived and were appreciated, the surrounding medium of thought, of institutions, and of customs, must have been to correspond. There must have been truth, and honour, and courtesy, and culture, round those men; there must have been high heart, shrewd sense, delicate art, gentle behaviour, and, in one part of the island at least, a luxuriant complexity of most subtle and exquisite circumstance.
The conclusion which we have thus reached vindicates that mood of mind towards the whole historical past which we find to have been actually the mood of all the great masters of literature whenever they have ranged back in the past for their themes. When Shakespeare writes of Richard II., who lived two hundred years before his own time, does he not overleap those two hundred years as a mere nothing, plunge in among Richard’s Englishmen as intrinsically not different from so many great Elizabethans, make them talk and act as co-equals in whom Elizabethans could take an interest, and even fill the mouth of the weak monarch himself with soliloquies of philosophic melancholy and the kingliest verbal splendours? And so when the same poet goes back into a still remoter antique, as in the council of the Greek chiefs in his Troilus and Cressida. We speak of Shakespeare’s anachronisms in such cases. There they are certainly for the critic to note; but they only serve to bring out more clearly his main principle in his art—his sense or instinct, for all historic time, of a grand over-matching synchronism. And, indeed, without something of this instinct—this sense of an intrinsic traditional humanity persisting through particular progressive variations, this belief in a co-equality of at least some minds through all the succession of human ages in what we call the historic period—what were the past of mankind to us much more than a history of dogs or ruminants? Nay, and with that measure with which we mete out to others, with the same measure shall it not be meted out to ourselves? If to be dead is to be inferior, and if to be long dead is to be despicable, to the generation in possession, shall not we who are in possession now have passed into the state of inferiority to-morrow, with all the other defunct beyond us, and will not a time come when some far future generation will lord it on the earth, and we shall lie deep, deep down, among the strata of the despicable?
THE END.
LONDON; R. CLAY, SONS, AND TAYLOR, PRINTERS.
Footnotes:
[1] Fraser’s Magazine, Dec. 1844.
[2] British Quarterly Review, November, 1852.—1. “Shakspeare and His Times.” By M. Guizot. 1852.—2. “Shakspeare’s Dramatic Art; and his Relation to Calderon and Goethe.” Translated from the German of Dr. Hermann Ulrici. 1846.—3. “Conversations of Goethe with Eckermann and Soret.” Translated from the German by John Oxenford. 2 vols. 1850.