It is impossible not to pity Mr Freeman's would-be champion. Scorning, at the outset, the thought that his hero could err 'in the most carefully elaborated passage of his whole history',[151] his attitude of bold defiance was a joy to Mr Freeman's friends.[152]
ἀμφὶ δ᾽ ἄρ᾽ αὐτῷ βαῖνε λέων ὥς ἀλκὶ πεποιθώς,
πρόσθε δέ οἱ δύρυ τ᾽ ἔσχε καὶ ἀσπίδα πάντος ἐίσην,
τὸν κτάμεναι μεμαὼς ὄς τις τοῦ γ᾽ ἀντίος ἔλθοι,
σμερδαλέα ἰάχων.
But his wildly brandished weapon proved more deadly to friend than foe: he discovered, as I knew, he could only oppose me by making jettison of Mr Freeman's views. Of this we have seen above examples striking enough; but the climax was reached in his chief contention, namely, that the lines in the Roman de Rou, which describe, Mr Freeman asserted, 'the array of the shield-wall',[153] cannot, on many grounds, be 'referred to a shield-wall'.[154] No contradiction could be more complete. So he now finds himself forced to write:
I do not say—I have never said—that I agree with every word that Mr Freeman has written about the great battle; but I do regard his account of Hastings as the noblest battle-piece in our historical literature—perhaps in that of the world.[155]
'O most lame and impotent conclusion!' We are discussing whether that account is 'right', not whether it is 'noble'. To the splendour of that narrative I have borne no sparing witness. I have spoken of its 'superb vividness', I have praised its 'epic grandeur', I have dwelt on the writer's 'Homeric power of making the actors in his drama live and move before us', and have compared his tale with the 'glorious description' in the saga of Stamfordbridge. But the nearer it approaches to the epic and the saga, the less likely is that stirring tale to be rigidly confined to fact.
I will not say of Mr Archer, 'his attack must be held to have failed', for that would imperfectly express its utter and absolute collapse. The whole of my original argument as to the narrative of the battle remains not merely unshaken, but, it will be seen, untouched. Mr Archer himself has now pleaded that 'the only' point he 'took up directly' was that of the disputed passage in Wace;[156] and here he could only make even the semblance of a case by deliberately ignoring and suppressing Mr Freeman's own verdict (iii. 763-4), to which, from the very first, I have persistently referred. In his latest, as in his earliest article, he adheres to this deliberate suppression, and falsely represents 'Mr Freeman's interpretation' as 'a palisade or barricade' alone.[157]
Those who may object to plain speaking should rather denounce the tactics that make such speaking necessary. When my adversary claims that his case is proved, if the disputed passage does not describe a shield-wall, he is perfectly aware that Mr Freeman distinctly asserted that it did. To suppress that fact, as Mr Archer does,[158] can only be described as dishonest.